Spotting an apparent contradiction in my writings today, I figured I should say something about it.
How can I advocate "choice" in one place (the pricepoint) and rail against it in another (ubiquitous agency)?
I think it is because my definition of freedom (towards a definition of freedom) is simply one of reduction-to-consequences. Every action has its consequences. There is no "freedom" to be found if you look closely.
Nevertheless, it is established that we feel like we have a choice. Actually, I think what is going on here is that we feel the sum of our past motivations bearing upon us. Either there is a choice or there isn't; and we've already ruled out the possibility that there is a choice.
There is the sum (or perhaps, integral) of past motivations. And there is the interesting possibility of communication in the present time. I.e., changing the inputs to one's own or someone else's perceptual field. Nothing more than Turing's tape projected into three dimensions there. This is physics, not philosophy.
When the "agent" (who has no choice to do otherwise) acts upon another agent (who, similarly, is just some machine), the latter can change state.
Yet, the abstraction of "agent" is hardly necessariy for this dynamics. In Newtonian physics, we might call a mass with some momentum a "particle", but we would be foolish to attribute a will to this ordered pair! We don't say "the particle wants to fall", we say "the particle is being acted upon by the force of gravity". Or whatever.
Point is, "agent" seems to have potential to be a misleading term, since it takes a quantity of motivational qualities and ascribes an extra-physical will to their conglomeration. Obviously a mistake.
To sum up. "Freedom" means "consequences", and "choice" means roughly the same thing. In particular, it means precisely the opposite of what "choice" would naively be thought to mean. You have a "choice" only when you have no choice at all. Perhaps choice means "internal computation to weigh given alternatives." But this is all pre-programmed (or, if you don't accept that, at least pre-meta-programmed, which comes to the same thing in the end).
Ain' it a lovely world we're living in?
Notice that while freedom may not exist, due to the physics of the situation, force does exist. Conditions appear right and left.
Accordingly, I don't think I can argue against force in the same categorical way I argued against freedom above. But I can point out that force itself has consequences.
For example, in the discussion of PM Licenses, I mentioned that copyleft is used in situations in which there is no way to ensure the various desiderata of the copyright owners will be met by non-owners if no license is used. I contrasted this with the public domain case, in which no particular desiderata are imposed on non-owners. (Indeed, in the PD case, everyone is a non-owner.)
The consequences of using the "forceful" copyleft license may include non-uptake by persons who can not abide by its terms. This consequence may be perfectly acceptable to the copyright owner (indeed, more likely, the consequence is actively desired).
But it would be ridiculous to impose the "forceful" terms of use on someone if one in fact did not desire (or at least accept) the consequence mentioned above (together with any other known consequences of this particular course of action).
This is, I think, an "ethical" argument. I am appealing to the humanity of the readership. One does not want to impose undesirable conditions on one's peers, nor on oneself; not unnecessarily. Which is to say, conditions are truly undesirable if and only if they are unnecessary (for the greater good, or whatever).
I do not say force is unnecessary. I say unnecessary force is wrong.