Oceans Yet to Burn

No, you did not explain why it ‘does not make sense,’ you posited some objections that I answered. You have no ‘violated its understanding of unified agents,’ given I answered your supposed objections each time. You have NOT pointed out how it does not logically follow, you’ve merely said it doesn’t. The fact that minds ‘precede’ ownership isn’t even relevant, and so on.

Well, let’s see your derivation for self-ownership, then.  Explain how it logically follows. 

Keep reading

I’ve already explained why your axiom does not make sense, I have violated its understanding of unified agents in several ways, I have repeatedly pointed out that “self-ownership” does not logically follow from its premises, I have pointed out that minds themselves precede ownership because ownership isn’t even meaningful in one-agent systems while the borders of minds still are, it’s just - 

- ach, I was going to just leave the post and not read it because I know this discussion is pointless, but I wanted to see how you’d respond to the Delegate Organization Republic so I read it anyway.  Or enough of it.

I’m never going to be convinced by your premises, because aside from the general worldview, intuition, and so on, for me, a morality system is about good things happening and bad things not happening, and any moral system that isn’t about that is, to me, pointless.  As far as I am concerned, there is no other possible root, and it is bizarre that people say “no, these rules being followed is more important than outcomes” because why would you even bother having rules if not to seek outcomes.  (So, logically, the ultimate system is the one that seeks the ultimate outcome.)

And as for your part, you seek a different kind of control that you don’t have.  You want a system in which morality is far more fixed and far less dynamic, incapable of being redefined in its broad details according to who actually exists within the system, at a much more concrete/intermediate level than under a Consequentialist system, which the fixed core is at a higher level of abstraction.

You want a system in which a consent violation is always wrong, no matter what.  That’s what makes you feel like you’re valued.  Not having it makes you feel like you’re not in control.  If a consent violation happens to you, it’s important that it be deemed wrong, no matter if it reduces consent violations elsewhere or prevents someone from involuntarily ceasing to exist.

But that dooms you into a framework in which terrible things can happen without even being considered regrettable/immoral by the system because it has no language to mark them as bad.

millievfence:

K comments on a slate star codex post about the curious way people react to failing rebreathers.  Deep divers use a rebreather rather than just an oxygen tank, because it decouples length of dive from amount you have to carry.  Rebreathers can fail; that’s okay, you bring an emergency oxygen tank with you, enough to get back to the surface.  The problem is noticing; oxygen deprivation is hard to notice because noticing requires oxygen.  So they put a monitor in that beeps at you if the oxygen content of the air gets low and you need to switch to your emergency tank.

All your incentives are aligned here.  You want oxygen.  You have a source of oxygen.  You have a clear signal as to when you need to switch.  Switching is not hard, you just need to swap your mouth pieces.  And yet, people are horrible at this.  They panic and in their panic they can’t detach from the thing that has been your source of air, even if intellectually they know it is no longer a good source of air.

Some people do this even when they are on land in a room full of normal air when they knew they’s need to switch at some point.  It is just too hard.

This is a great metaphor for anxiety.  Even if you intellectually know the cause of your stress it can feel too dangerous to separate from it long enough to introduce a healthier replacement.  You have to get the rebreather working first, and then you can switch sources.  It is related to but not quite the same as a sick system, although I can’t quite articulate the difference.

So “clinging to the rebreather” is a thing now, please introduce it to your lexicon

I think those two things are intimately linked, though. 

Look man, if you want a cynical explanation, might I suggest that clearly from my expectations I expect to suffer and maybe die under Anarcho-Capitalism, and that at some point I might need state assistance.  Not guaranteed, but it’s been mentioned in various places that I don’t have perfect executive functioning.

Keep reading

collapsedsquid:

mitigatedchaos:

kaptainkulak:

anarchyinblack:

mitigatedchaos:

Except whether using “evil” to do good is “evil” is one of the matters in dispute, and AnCap does not have a way to say those categories of suffering are bad - only people within AnCap do and only by using theories which are not part of AnCap even if they aren’t incompatible with it. For my part I still consider the concept of self-ownership at the AnCap level invalid. As a being with imperfect executive functioning I will never accept an infinite liability morality of that class.

“I reject your self ownership because I lack self control.”

Holy fucking shit.

Can’t make this shit up, ladies and gentlemen.

Hey man, if you want to let your drunk self sell your sober self into slavery and call that 100% upright and moral, well that’s your philosophy of infinite moral liability for finite lapses of judgment/attention by finite beings, not mine.

Uh oh Miti, you get to be “tamed or even physically defeated and must also be punished in proportion to the severity of their crime to make them understand the nature of their wrongdoings and hopefully to teach them a lesson for the future.”

I’m a wild and dangerous animal that can be exterminated like a pest though, so it could be worse!

You know the irony is that I would materially contribute to fighting against an armed Communist revolution, but since I believe involuntary taxation for things other than defense spending is justifiable and I’m to the Left of Augusto Pinochet…

Also the Communists would probably treat me as a Class Enemy or something.

Edgy Centrist problems, man.

kaptainkulak:

mitigatedchaos:

kaptainkulak:

anarchyinblack:

mitigatedchaos:

Except whether using “evil” to do good is “evil” is one of the matters in dispute, and AnCap does not have a way to say those categories of suffering are bad - only people within AnCap do and only by using theories which are not part of AnCap even if they aren’t incompatible with it. For my part I still consider the concept of self-ownership at the AnCap level invalid. As a being with imperfect executive functioning I will never accept an infinite liability morality of that class.

“I reject your self ownership because I lack self control.”

Holy fucking shit.

Can’t make this shit up, ladies and gentlemen.

Hey man, if you want to let your drunk self sell your sober self into slavery and call that 100% upright and moral, well that’s your philosophy of infinite moral liability for finite lapses of judgment/attention by finite beings, not mine.

If the alternative is to be implicitly owned by outside forces from the beginning, then yes, I’ll take the first option.

You always were. In practice, property is a product of the ability to exclude through force, not a metaphysical entity. With the purity of the world already broken, excluding infinite liability for finite mistakes is not actually shocking or ridiculous.

kaptainkulak:

anarchyinblack:

mitigatedchaos:

Except whether using “evil” to do good is “evil” is one of the matters in dispute, and AnCap does not have a way to say those categories of suffering are bad - only people within AnCap do and only by using theories which are not part of AnCap even if they aren’t incompatible with it. For my part I still consider the concept of self-ownership at the AnCap level invalid. As a being with imperfect executive functioning I will never accept an infinite liability morality of that class.

“I reject your self ownership because I lack self control.”

Holy fucking shit.

Can’t make this shit up, ladies and gentlemen.

Hey man, if you want to let your drunk self sell your sober self into slavery and call that 100% upright and moral, well that’s your philosophy of infinite moral liability for finite lapses of judgment/attention by finite beings, not mine.

I’ve said it several times over the last few days, but a lot of this comes off more with not liking the implications of the principles, and they disagree with your sensibilities. You made a claim, in the prior post, about it not being emotional, but frankly, this post doesn’t really lend credence to that, it instead makes it far more likely that it is a highly, perhaps even primarily, emotional response.

I was explaining why I hate Anarcho-Capitalism, not why I think it’s logically incorrect.

Because it’s not ‘under anarcho-capitalism, my life doesn’t matter to the wealthy’ that is really the complaint, it’s ‘my life has no intrinsic value and I don’t like that.’ Because in truth, that’s the complaint, and it would be so under any system that proposed the same. Yet value is subjective, it can’t be intrinsic. Value is just an abstract concept of how we measure things. There is no absolute value to anything.

Value, as I consider it, is directly experienced, on a root level of reality in the same park as “I think, therefore I am”.

Value is not an axiomatic concept, not to me and I’m guessing not to you either, because if you’ve got issues with my axioms of self-ownership you can’t rightfully turn around and declare one for value.

I’m not assuming value, I’m experiencing it.

I could go on about the constructed scenario, but lets go for it. Yes, if that loaf of bread somehow belonged to this man, it would be a violation of their property rights to take it. It actually would be a violation to even be on the planet, if they did somehow own the whole thing. I suspect you’d still do it (and so would I) if my life depended on it on that moment, but that doesn’t make it not a violation, it merely places you in a shit scenario were you’re gonna have to make some choice and live with the consequences. There is no argument of why it isn’t a violation of their property rights, you outright admit that it is.

People are fundamentally more real than property.  Your idea that essentially argues that property is people (as an extension of them) is part of why you do not accept the people > property ordering.

but the issue about scruples is precisely why I don’t what you and your plan for some authority to control the breeding population of the planet, among a vast number of other frankly terrifying proposals.

My default support for Bland Liberalism, which I don’t discuss much on Tumblr, is grounded in my own skepticism based on previous events.  Further, while it may be the case that it turns out we don’t have to resort to such measures (it looks like population growth is falling, but technological advancement rate is not guaranteed), what I more accurately object to is taking them off the table entirely completely independent of actual conditions.

And if you recognize the unscrupulous nature of humanity as you seem to, than it is fundamentally irrational to propose creating the very Actual Boot we joked about not long ago, now with fancy lights attached.

Water flows without regard to where we wish, but with sufficient accuracy we can control it and force it to.  However, Anarcho-Capitalism, much like Communism, is too willfully unaware of the nature of the water to adequately plan for it.  Communism can ‘work’ too if you assume everyone goes along with it and doesn’t obey the local incentives or behave irrationally (or ‘irrationally’).

Although I would like to see both it and an AnCom commune attempted.  I predict both would implode dramatically and subsequently be denounced as not real Scotsmen, but I’m not all-knowing.

And that’s why your consequentialism is both ethically and logically bankrupt. You list all these reasons, and contrast them to “lol I don’t want to,” but “lol I don’t want to,” is no less arbitrary than any of those other reasons you listed.

People are real and precede property.  They ‘physically’ exist regardless of the nested layer of reality and available metadata in a way that property does not.  Likewise, the subcomponents of their minds also exist.

I bring it up because frankly, a lot of your objections in prior places, and now here about charity spending, are essentially this, and perhaps the role reversal is doubly ironic then, because you are transhumanist technocrat, yet you seem to be criminally unimaginative about these problems, because you’re basically just turning back to the old style responses to them all. I don’t need charity giving to reach 30-40% of GDP, I need ways for charity to be less necessary.

It isn’t a lack of imagination, it’s an observation of how businesses and individuals have proceeded in the past, and then assuming that hey, they will likely do so again in the future.  

If you want to hear a more imaginative solution - I want the government to subsidize the distribution of an executive-function-enhancing genetic modification.  Not only would this significantly decrease crime, but it would boost the economy, lower welfare budgets, and have all sorts of positive secondary effects.  Also, it would be hilarious watching the “just pull yourself up by your bootstraps lazies” people get BTFOd by the simultaneous increased competition and evidence that it was non-trivially biological all along.  But that’s trivial in comparison to the likely reduction of the prison population to 1/10th of current levels, fewer homicides, etc.

I know you don’t follow me, so you haven’t seen my favor of wage subsidies at the current level of technology, which would also likely - reduce crime, reduce welfare spending, have positive secondary effects, recover some economic value, etc etc.

But like, why would I say that in an argument such as this, since it would essentially go without saying, and does not in any way justify the AnCap position to me?  This is a coordination problem.  States are a method of solving coordination problems.  I don’t consider using states to solve coordination problems inherently immoral.

You can’t make people value you, though. And you’ve no right to try to use force to make people value you, or anything else. This sucks. It’s a horrible thing to accept, and that’s why so many folks reject it. Because the implications aren’t nice.

Because I experience value directly, I have value independently of whether other people value me.

But neither good or truth are reliant on being nice, or the sensibilities of any given person. Or even all the peoples that exist and ever have. No amount of offended sensibilities will stop the sun from rising.

AnCap is not truth.

And the flat truth is that you and your sensibilities are exactly the sort of folks who lacked scruples prey upon and thus drove (and, in truth, created) the communist horror that has afflicted the world, and many movements before and since. 

Communists often don’t actually behave like Consequentialists.  You’ll notice they argue a lot about “oppression” and “justice” and the moral responsibility of classes in society, and wax poetic about killing perceived enemies.  Not, you know, just jailing them.  Or exiling them.  Killing them for reasons of collective justice.

For many of them, including Tankies, the “good” includes suffering of class enemies.  Likewise with SJ.  Likewise with Feminists.

And as for people like you, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was justified by such sensibilities, and rampant support of Capitalism has enabled every other tragedy perpetrated in its name.  (I don’t collect detailed lists of those because hey, I’m not a Communist.  But I know it isn’t trivial.  You may object that this is not true AnCapism, but Commies talk about how No Really That’s Not Socialism’s Fault all the time, and failures of this kind reflect on Capitalist markets generally.)  

And the property instinct? Itself emotional, as another commenter noted elsewhere regarding people getting offended at ‘stealing’ images they had themselves ‘stolen’ and not credited them for, for example, cleaning up and organizing pages of manga that they had never paid for.  So don’t pretend that you’ve escaped emotionality when choice of axioms is itself under the influence thereof.  If your mind were devised differently, you would not have likely ended up as an AnCap.

anarchyinblack:

mitigatedchaos:

Except whether using “evil” to do good is “evil” is one of the matters in dispute, and AnCap does not have a way to say those categories of suffering are bad - only people within AnCap do and only by using theories which are not part of AnCap even if they aren’t incompatible with it. For my part I still consider the concept of self-ownership at the AnCap level invalid. As a being with imperfect executive functioning I will never accept an infinite liability morality of that class.

“I reject your self ownership because I lack self control.”

Holy fucking shit.

You lack self control too.  We ALL do.  And if you think you don’t, you’re only one injury away from that changing.  Infinite moral liability for such limited finite beings is not justified.

mutant-aesthetic:

cybercupcakementality:

TFW 4chan alt-right trolls try to use your call out and accountability process to set people you care about against you

this is a good sign that maybe call out/accountability processes are a bad idea because there’s no way to stop them from being weaponized against you by bad faith actors

what if demonstrating this was half the reason they do it in the first place

thivus:

desetoilesdslesyeux:

UK : fucks up

America : fucks up

France : rejects Voldemort as president

France : *looks at the camera like on The Office* oh yeah baby

i never understood fundamentalist Christians hatred of harry potter until u people started trying to describe all geopolitical events using references from that cursed children’s book

I find none of this convincing, but it isn’t worth my time to argue it.

And to be honest, I have an emotional loathing for Anarcho-Capitalism.

This isn’t to say that my opposition is fundamentally emotional, but whenever I interact with it, I find it highly annoying, as well as what I consider to be the extremely unrealistic projections of AnCaps on how it would turn out.

And sure, you can dispute if using evil to do good is evil all you want, but that debate is not a winning one for the “advocating evil” side, quotes around evil or not. Its why we have to go through so many lengths to obfuscate certain actions, and why folks, if you pitch them the same idea but sans obfuscation, will recoil in horror at the implication

The “evils,” under AnCap ideas of what counts as evil, of a typical modern state, have fairly broad public support.  So yeah, it actually can be a winning one, relative to some standards of evil.

I’m curious what categories you are specifically thinking of though, and actually potential solutions that cannot be achieved under anarcho-capitalist structures.

Population control, that will likely require some involuntary non-action that will have to be enforced, depending on conditions on the planet, once life-extension capabilities hit.  Under AnCap this is effectively impossible unless you cheat/exploit the AnCap rules by doing things like physically trapping people.

Actually caring for the poor at a sufficient rate.  Now I know you think this is unwinnable because “then the state becomes something to fight over too,” but just because a perfect solution has not yet been found does not mean that a good solution does not exist.  The AnCap answer is a non-answer and the actually-charitable will likely be outcompeted in the brutality of the market.

Environmentalism, since you have to resolve whether emitting carbon dioxide, or indeed any substance, violates the NAP, and if so what the appropriate level of response is, and people will necessarily disagree on this issue - they may even disagree on the facts without even just doing so out of being greedy.  (Edit: In fact, whether emitting carbon dioxide is a problem is defined by whether other people are emitting carbon dioxide, and if so, how much.)

Malthusian conditions are actually bad, and I won’t be persuaded into not even trying to prevent them because of AnCap principles I don’t even agree with.

Plus most of those random things Argumate keeps bringing up that bleed a little too much detail for your perfect axioms - which a well-designed Consequentialism can decide on IFF it actually matters to someone, but which your axioms cannot.

Except whether using “evil” to do good is “evil” is one of the matters in dispute, and AnCap does not have a way to say those categories of suffering are bad - only people within AnCap do and only by using theories which are not part of AnCap even if they aren’t incompatible with it. For my part I still consider the concept of self-ownership at the AnCap level invalid. As a being with imperfect executive functioning I will never accept an infinite liability morality of that class.

remedialaction:

argumate:

barryogg:

argumate:

remedialaction:

argumate:

Even the axiom of self-ownership isn’t so simple to pin down, and biological experimentation is only going to make it worse.

I literally could just amend “to you” to every post you make on the subject, at this point. :P

It’s pretty tough to define self-ownership given the existence of chimeras and conjoined twins, let alone psychological issues like split personalities and all the future weirdness that biotech is going to unleash.

Given that people have been arguing over the definition of “self” for thousands of years so far and it shows no sign of abating I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that there are still unresolved issues here.

So this post has helped me finally crystalize a recurring train of thought I am having when confronted with other people’s opinions. See, my first reaction to the post above is absolute terror.

Because my brain tends to very quickly and wildly extrapolate any given view to its most extreme consequences. And boy howdy can you extrapolate a lot of things from a negation of self-ownership. Existing terrible things, like the war on drugs (of course the actual historical reasons for the war on drugs are horrible and racist but in theory you can rederive it from one’s health being a public matter), or reproductive coercion; but also lots of speculative terrible things. So th thoughts short-circuit from ‘there are weird things going on in the margins’ to ‘Argumate wants use the fact that chimeras exist to be able to kill me and harvest my organs for the greater good, and I will not have any moral foundation to object to that’.

Of course this is a bizarre way of thinking because the majority of people argue for issues because they care for these specific issues and not some wild consequences that are conceptually related, and aren’t trying to use foot-in-the-door tactics (and those who do try to get a foot in your door can be identified pretty easily). And in the concrete example of this here conversation it’s not even a policy discussion, but rather a theoretical musing. So all that anxiety is completely unfounded. Alas.

And I think that most concepts are useful even if they’re fuzzy at the margins. Non-relativisitc moleds were wrong but still we’ve managed to come up with planes.

Personally I think that some kind of contractualism is a better approach for getting the outcome that you want.

I don’t want to have my organs harvested without my consent, and nor does anyone I know, and even though the veil of ignorance is not mandatory, in practice in a world of seven billion people it’s very difficult to make rules that say you can’t be a dick to anyone except barry specifically.

Negotiating the individual issues is always going to be necessary; simple axioms either imply too much or too little, and are best used as slogans and rallying points to guide the political process.

While I believe in self-ownership, that really means I support most of the positions associated with the concept of self-ownership, not that I think they can necessarily be derived from this single axiom nor that this axiom is necessarily the foundation for morality and politics.

The issue I have with this, my esteemed strigiform and self-employed pharmacist, is idea that someone can like the arguments and concepts that surround a thing (ie: self-ownership in the recent case, but broadly libertarian ideals in general seem to get caught up in this a lot) but then dislike or even reject the principles behind those arguments. In short, there is a lot of folks who seem to like the results of libertarian arguments but don’t like where they come from.

Which is sort of a running issue, because in many cases the principles the arguments are founded upon can lead to some unpalatable ends, at least to some people. Folks will seem to say they don’t want to throw out the baby with the bashwater and ditch the principles with the unfortunate implications for their wants and desires, and keep the results, but the problem is you can’t really do that.

Like, the arguments and the like that surround self-ownership, and the derived protections from it, cannot be defended by the merits of how you, or anyone else likes them. The issue is that far from being difficult to make rules that say you can’t be a dick to any of the seven plus billion people except Barry, it’s actually exceedingly easy to do so unless your moral and ethical foundations are in order, and are universal.

Because that’s the only way to avoid explicitly allowing arbitrary and subjective choices into the system of morals and ethics.

Like, yeah, you have to use negotiation and navigate the complex network of human interactions and any society is going to be heavy on contract, but you can’t build your ethical framework from the top down. It’s got to have a base to build up from. Folks like the results of the principles but hate the principles, and that is just a recipe for disaster. 

In practical terms, people liking something enough to take up arms to force others to comply with it - like property in general for instance - is how a political theory is physically realized. So if everyone hates the principles, then it doesn’t matter how much you think they’re true, unless you have all the guns. And from what I’ve seen of actual human behavior and actual markets and not hypothetical spherical cow markets, AnCap/pure libertarianism’s consequences will ensure that it is never the most viral meme. Which, IMO, is good because it lacks the ability to recognize that entire categories of human suffering are bad.

quoms:

the nation and the state are inseparable concepts. the struggle for ‘national liberation’ is, from its very beginning, a struggle for the existence of a state (this is true even when ‘the nation’ doesn’t seek independence and only seeks acknowledgment and accommodation within an existing state apparatus; the struggle is dependent on that apparatus and envisions its indefinite continued existence)

Good thing I’m no Anarchist.

I’m Consequentialist, so I don’t think the fundamental difference in axioms will be resolved here.  Any other system seems to prioritize rule-following over people to me.

What squid said, plus there’s a reason states own (yes, own) all the valuable land.  It isn’t some kind of accident.

You want a justification?  The state owns the land as a joint private owner, you’re just renting it.  Tada!  Now everything the state does except for foreign invasions is justified.

memecucker:

wow i guess france just isnt ready for a woman president