Did it ever occur to you that laws might be passed despite those same laws not being beneficial? In your model of the world, where legal actions are all, by definition, good, how would legislators decide whether or not to enact a prospective law? If we repealed all our antitrust legislation, can I assume you would agree that employer collusion to hold down wages used to be bad, but was now good?
> no, unions are not a conspiracy. A conspiracy is pretty much defined as such when everyone involved constantly tells each other "don't tell anyone"
I have to agree with the bare semantics here, but... who's alleging that the harm from a bunch of companies secretly agreeing to hold down wages comes, entirely and only, from the fact that the agreement is secret? They do it in secret because it's illegal, and your parent is wondering why employees are legally allowed to do openly what employers must do in secret. Why is there supposed to be a difference? Is there a justification for punishing the companies, other than the fact that their conduct is illegal?
Nothing can be bad because it's illegal; belief following that reasoning is religious, not valid.
Oooh boy, I get to PG you and point you at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man as my answer for your first comment. Breaks down like this: I said this law is right. You then say I'm saying all laws are by definition good and then attack that restatement of my position, which isn't what I said.
Your disagreement on semantics is just plain wrong. If the law they broke is a "conspiracy" law, then the fundamental difference between what these companies did and what a union does is the "secret" part of a conspiracy. It's not a conspiracy if everyone knows about it. In addition, them going around warning each other to keep it secret is a direct admission of guilt that they knew it was illegal. Some of the emails even say it's illegal, so they knew it was illegal and conspired to do it anyway. Get it? That's a conspiracy.
If Wikipedia is to be believed, a conspiracy doesn't require secrecy: "Conspiracy has been defined in the US as an agreement of two or more people to commit a crime... A conspiracy does not need to have been planned in secret to meet the definition of the crime." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28crime%29#United_...)
I honestly don't know how to respond to this. Here are some of my thoughts.
> I said this law is right.
Here are your words: "Collusion is [...] not bad unless it's illegal, and what we've decided in the US is [...]". Looking at this, and the rest of the comment, I can see that:
1. You can imagine US collusion law being in a state other than what it is ("what we've decided in the US is [...]").
2. The only argument you present is that the conduct described is illegal.
3. You specifically acknowledge that in some sense, the fact that the conduct described is illegal is a coincidence (in modal logic, it is not a necessary truth); it's how the US decided to handle the law.
As the existence of the law is the only argument you presented for the badness of the conduct, I conclude that you are arguing that the conduct is bad because the law prohibits it.
The alternative, that you are asserting with no justification that the conduct is bad, and also remarking, apropos of nothing, that the law prohibits it, violates Grice's maxim of relevance. It also violates the structure of what you said, which was a quite clear statement that if the law does not prohibit collusion, that collusion cannot be bad.
I will happily license you to restrict my comment to the domain of collusion; I'm willing to believe that you did not intend your audience to infer "assassination is not bad unless it's illegal" from "collusion is not bad unless it's illegal". But we are discussing collusion, and everything I said applies there. The example I picked, antitrust law, is specifically related to it, and is even specifically the main topic of the post. So: if the US repealed all its antitrust laws, can I assume you would agree that any collusion formerly prohibited by them was now unobjectionable? If not, would you like to revise your comment?
Finally:
> Your disagreement on semantics is just plain wrong.
Compare to my comment, "I have to agree with the bare semantics here".
> If the law they broke is a "conspiracy" law, then the fundamental difference between what these companies did and what a union does is the "secret" part of a conspiracy.
There is no blanket "conspiracy" law in the US; it would violate the freedom of assembly. For conspiracy to be criminal conduct, the object of the conspiracy needs to be illegal. Therefore, the fundamental difference, as I pointed out before, is not that the companies acted secretly and unions act in the open. If the companies acted in the open, that would still be illegal. The question you're dismissing is, why?
laws are ostensibly enacted to the benefit of the majority (tho of late, i m not sure if that's true anymore). Therefore, anything "illegal" is bad under the above assumption.
Also, you made the implicit assumption that a corporation is like a human. It isn't, and you should not be using values of a human but apply it to a corporation.
A corp should be treated with more strict rules, to prevent it from becoming too powerful, because the collective mandate of a corporation is profit, and if it were to be judged as a human, would look like a high functioning sociopath hell bent on doing anything possible to make a buck. Therefore, it should not deserve the same rights as actual humans.
He's making the implicit assumption that two corporate forms (you know unions are corporations, right?) are equivalent. A for-profit corporation has a collective mandate to make a profit for shareholders and a union has a mandate to make a profit for union members.
More precisely, he's asking what moral/political philosophy principle he can use to distinguish between corporations selling labor and corporations buying labor. Zedshaw suggested "the law says X" as the underlying principle which is a bit unsatisfying.
(It's unsatisfying because it implies that, e.g., Rosa Parks and similar individuals were in the wrong when they broke the law.)
> Collusion is also not bad unless it's illegal
Did it ever occur to you that laws might be passed despite those same laws not being beneficial? In your model of the world, where legal actions are all, by definition, good, how would legislators decide whether or not to enact a prospective law? If we repealed all our antitrust legislation, can I assume you would agree that employer collusion to hold down wages used to be bad, but was now good?
> no, unions are not a conspiracy. A conspiracy is pretty much defined as such when everyone involved constantly tells each other "don't tell anyone"
I have to agree with the bare semantics here, but... who's alleging that the harm from a bunch of companies secretly agreeing to hold down wages comes, entirely and only, from the fact that the agreement is secret? They do it in secret because it's illegal, and your parent is wondering why employees are legally allowed to do openly what employers must do in secret. Why is there supposed to be a difference? Is there a justification for punishing the companies, other than the fact that their conduct is illegal?
Nothing can be bad because it's illegal; belief following that reasoning is religious, not valid.