[While Alton had posted a few times about a year ago as "junioreality", he had
not fully identified himself until now. We are pleased to receive his posts.
**Kitty]


What would a peonage enjoinder look like in a situation where a trial
determined a person raped another or a person shot and wounded a
person after a confrontation? Or in other words, what can the
specification of privileges be like in limiting the possible actions
of a Peon?

--Alton

[I am very pleased to see that Alton has been reading and considering the
details of what is now titled an Interim Social Contract. One of the reasons
that it is now called "interim" is because "peonage" is no longer included in
the new Natural Social Contract (which is now uploaded and available at:
http://selfsip.org/solutions/NSC.html - but is still not linked to the main
menus of SelfSIP nor does it have all its annotations complete).

[Please hold on questions/comments - make a list in the meantime - until Paul
"completes" this draft of files. We've been delayed due to starting a (slow)
change-over to a Linux based system, supplement/chemical modifications resulting
from blood & DNA testing, Olafur's visit, several needed property repairs, and
other non-SelfSIP.org activities. And now we'll be returning to Ontario at the
end of the month to the cottage that still has renovation work awaiting.
**Kitty]

Peonage (essentially a loss of liberty by a person who has not yet paid
restitution for harm s/he has caused to another) was placed in the Interim
Social Contract because I thought (and still do think) that few people in
current society will be ready to initially accept any arrangement whereby
someone who harms them will not be *compelled* to pay restitution to them or be
punished in some manner for hir transgression. On the other hand, currently most
people do accept that criminals are not compelled to restitute their victims and
even that tax payers are additionally victimized to pay for the incarceration of
such criminals. Actually, I think that it is completely untrue that, even
currently, victims accept lack of restitution from the violator, and, in fact,
remain psychologically scarred for a long time afterward. It is only uninvolved
others who "accept" such non-restitution and try to tell victims that they also
should accept it, because they should be altruistic and not care about their own
happiness but only that others are not harmed by the person who harmed them.

The idea of peonage arises from the notion that violations are essentially a
relationship between the violator and the victim (once the violation is found by
a trial to have occurred), rather than any relationship with any others in
society (who are all essentially disinterested parties - ie. they have no direct
value interest in the situation of violation). Therefore, until the violator
fully restitutes hir victim, the violator is in a type of subordinate or debtor
relationship to the victim. If the victim is concerned that hir violator will
not pay the restitution required, then s/he (the victim) can require that s/he
be given effective custody of the violator so that s/he can be actually forced
to pay the restitution if necessary. (I envisage private peonage companies whose
specialty is to extract restitution payments from a violator as quickly and
efficiently as possible.) Thus, peonage is a limited ownership or indenture of
hir violator by a victim for the purpose of gaining full restitution for the
violation as quickly as possible. Even though I envisage the need for such
Interim Social Contracts (likely more than one) as stepping stones on the path
to fully understanding and accepting the full power and sufficiency of social
preferencing, the current one will need major changes to bring it into
consistency with the definitions, concepts and methods of the Natural Social
Contract as I have it now constructed.

With this background explanation, I will now examine Alton's questions. The
simple answer to the first question is that the nature of the peonage enjoinder
(the indenture contract approved by the trial) is whatever form the victim
requires. The reason for this is that just as only the victim has the ability to
read hir own subjective loss of happiness from the violation and decide what
form the restitution should take (ie. what actions by the violator will truly
restore hir happiness to what it would have been if the violation had not
occurred), so too only the victim has the ability to evaluate hir concerns about
whether hir violator will fully restitute hir. Therefore, within reason (decided
by the trial in the Interim Social Contract - without any clearly objective
criteria - which is why this arrangement ultimately had to be removed from the
Natural Social Contract), the peonage enjoinder would be of whatever form the
victim desired and required.

Nevertheless, with respect to your first question above:

"What would a peonage enjoinder look like in a situation where a
trial determined a person raped another or a person shot and wounded
a person after a confrontation?"

The two types of actions may be quite dissimilar in their violational nature.
The act of rape is by definition a direct physical violation of one person by
another. However, when one person-A shoots and wounds another person-B after a
confrontation, who is the violator and who is the victim depends completely on
who both initiated the confrontation and on whose property it took place. If
person-A initiated the use of force without any prior force or threat of force
by person-B then, of course person-A is the clear violator and person-B is the
clear victim. However, if person-B has made a clear threat of doing harm (such
as a large man suddenly approaching a woman with no explanation when there are
no people around), and person-A has given person-B a warning to stop such action
which warning has been unheeded, then such a shooting by person-A is fully
justified defense. In the latter case, there is effectively no victim or
violator at all. Of course, if person-B charges person-A with a violation, then
whether or not the shooting was justified defense is something that will have to
be decided by a trial. Thus, one can never take lightly actions of self-defense
or one may end up being the violator and owing restitution to the person shot or
otherwise harmed. In this regard, it will be highly important in the future (as
it actually is right now) for each person to carry on hir an audio transmitter
recorder and a set of video cams pointing in each direction also transmitting
continuously to an Internet based recording of all that occurs around you. The
purpose of these records will be to have an objective recording of every
possible interaction with another person that occurs to you, just so that the
courts can clearly determine that your actions were not violations and that
someone else's were.

With respect to the amplification of the meaning of your question:

"Or in other words, what can the specification of privileges be like
in limiting the possible actions of a Peon?"

the specification could be as great as total incarceration in a workhouse under
control of a company that attempts to get productive work from him as
effectively as possible or as little as giving the violator full freedom of
action and merely requiring monthly reports on his productive work and financial
position (so that restitution payments of, say, a certain percentage of the
violator's earnings can be monitored). --Paul]