You know, this is one of those propositions that sounds good and noble on the face of things when you first read it, but the more I think about it, especially in the context of some other things you’ve said about how intensely propertarian the eldrae are and how nonexistent their de minimis rules and standards for quasi-involuntary actions are, must inevitably lead to the heights of absurdity if taken to its logical conclusion in certain areas.
To wit: By this standard, the act of breathing is coercion. And not just in the narrow case of “You’re on my owned-outright space station, breathing air that I’ve bought, paid for, and had shipped exclusively for my use, without my permission”; it is the very process of respiration in itself which, in the natural state in which most bio-sophonts evolve, is inherently coercive by Imperial standards of property.
Consider: “A soph is equivalent to all that they possess.” Back in the old days before the Empire of the Star was founded and could claim that it owned Eliera (and its atmosphere) outright by the voluntary consent of its citizen-shareholder members, there must have been at some point a veritable patchwork of allodial properties. Many, if not most, had some form of plant life, which whether by right of homestead or by active cultivation were likewise considered the owners’ respective property. These plants performed the work of photosynthesis to transform light energy into chemical energy, giving off breathable oxygen. By virtue of the fact that these plants are productive agents of their owner (limited in capacity though that agency is), the oxygen produced by these plants must also transitively belong to the property owner.
Of course, oxygen – like any other gas, as a general rule – has this annoying property of being difficult to contain without specialized equipment designed for the job. Thus, much (if not most) of the oxygen produced will likely escape, where it may find its way into some sophont’s lungs without the express consent of its original owner, thus constituting trespass (however involuntary it may be).
And that’s just inhaling. Exhaling is an even worse matter, because in addition to the aforementioned containment issues, carbon dioxide exhaled from the lungs is a pollutant (by definition – it’s exhaled in the first place because it’s a waste product that will suffocate you if left to accumulate). Thus, even if by some miracle it manages to stay in the volume acknowledged as “the commons,” you are still almost literally a walking source of potentially perpetual assault torts. Better hope no one else needs to breathe where you just passed…
(Tangential sidenote: The plant-owners wouldn’t necessarily get away scot-free; after all, they’d have to bear part of the externality costs of their free-ranging oxygen causing all sorts of rust and corrosion. To say nothing of the potential legal quandary that might come about through pollen allergies…)
Again, all of this is – by my own admission – quite absurd. And yet, in the strict context of Imperial law as I understand it, I don’t find anything to suggest that the logic itself is wrong, or that there’s any sort of mitigating principle at work. Nevertheless – judging by an educated guess that the number of spree killers who were acquitted of murder on the grounds that “They were all breathing at me!” constituted an affirmation of reasonable self-defense from coercion amounts to a sum in the ballpark of zero – there has to be some kind of reasonableness test at work here, implicitly if not explicitly.
Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2017-04-07 02:33:13 wrote:
Okay, I’m going to say that when we hit this level of minutiae, not only can I not see any particular literary function in chasing it, but I am also deeply reminded of why I don’t argue the merits of hypothetical political systems with the Internet any more.
So let me put it this way:
Unless I have a really compelling story idea about the administrative travails of an executor minor at the interface between the Protectorate of Balance and Externality and the Office of the Atmohydrosphere - which isn’t impossible, but let’s face it, is unlikely - I am pretty much not going to sit around recreating eight thousand years worth of eye-grindingly fine-grained statute, precedent, easement, and arbitration on the precise boundaries of personal, volumetric-propertarian, and general-trust atmospheres, their voluntary and involuntary interchange, and to what degree changes that aren’t changes are considered changes where fluids are concerned in such a manner that forecloses on the inevitable future picking of nits, not being a shit-ton of historical geniuses with soph-centuries to spend on the issue myself.
Just, thus please, roll with the notion that somewhere between exhaling tiny volumes of CO2 into your own personal atmosphere and then exchanging chemically-indistinguishable volumes of that with the air next door (obviously permissible), and dumping a shit-ton of chlorine gas in the street (obviously not), a whole passel of very smart people sat down and defined what exactly constitutes trespass to airs, trespass to waters, and trespass to various other inconvenient similar things, that it works very well in practice, thank you, and that their descendants will happily explain the minutiae to any of the minuscule expressed-in-scientific-notation fraction of the population that needs to know anything other than the generally-expressed rules of “you don’t shit where you breathe, son”, et. al.