A distributed way of approaching the goals question is to talk about rights. Rights are entitlements to an individual to do or not do something, that is recognized by the entire society. Since these entitlements might intersect, and there might be clashes between the members of society, there is a system of rules and customs – law – for arbitration.

This post is about rights. Entitlements. Now typically these entitlements derive more from moral/ethical rather than efficiency standpoints. For e.g. in earlier times, women were not entitled to vote. Even murder and thievery are considered “morally repugnant” as opposed to merely societally inefficient.
This is dangerous.

It is dangerous because morals and ethics are to a large extent determined by the prevalent societal memes, which is a shmancy word for societal brainwashing. Humans are entitled in a cannibalistic society to eat other humans (typically from other tribes) for e.g. Of course I should point here that not all the machinery involved in ethics is societally determined. We do have a mental machinery that has evolved for ethics. What’s more, as a later post shall show, ethics do follow a logic.

In spite of that, most current ethical tendencies are merely an equilibrium of prevalent societal memes and tendencies which have evolved for efficiencies of a long-bygone era. Is this a good support to base our laws upon? For animals maybe, but we are humans with the capacity for reason.

For a proper and just system of laws, we need to look outside what we (morally) “feel” is right, else we might be committing errors such as a lack of franchise to women, or slavery or some such. Better to first define goals of a society, and then derive the rights from them as opposed to declaring certain entitlements as axioms. From a qualitative standpoint, axiomatizing goals is decidedly more general and hence makes fewer assumptions.

An anarchist might argue that such a derivation of entitlement is restrictive. Why not start from the assumption that everybody is entitled to do everything. And then try to formulate a system of laws to arbitrate the clashes that might ensue?
What is important is that, while seemingly Mr. Anarchist is not making any assumptions, he is actually making a very strong one. That modulo clashes, everybody is entitled to do anything he wants. This is not obvious at all – what if more happiness can be obtained through co-ercedly co-ordinated behavior.
In fact, the very reason our large brains have evolved was for such restricted and co-ordinated social behavior!

I should point out that I agree with the entitlements demanded by Mr. Anarchist. But not with the blind faith that is used to justify it. No – we need a system of deriving such entitlements from some higher axioms. The axiom of creative progress being the goal of humanity is one such. As argued in the previous post, Liberty and Freedom as entitlements follow from it. Of course, inspite of all the axiom words strewn above – Creative Progress being the goal of humanity – does not require blind faith either, and can be derived as previous posts have strenuously done.