Yet it clearly does, and given you already recognized the premise of “I think, therefor I am,” you clearly recognize there is a unity here. You seem to want to have unity when it matters to recognize self and attempt to derive value, and then reject it now. You can’t have it both ways. Either there is an entity, a self, or there is not.
Actually, both can be true simultaneously, in the sense of both self and subself existing and being relevant at once.
Like, causal bundling again - people talk about nations being “just lines on a map”, but they’re actually a very complex wave-like phenomena involving institutions, land, resources, people, culture, and so on that form a clear causal bundle and natural category.
So one can, actually, coherently both talk about a nation doing something and the factions and individuals within a nation doing something.
The self can exist in a way that derives value without totally ignoring that it is composed of subcomponents that aren’t wholly unified. Much like the self can exist despite the influence of drugs on the mind, but without ignoring the influence of those drugs.
The primary reason to say that we cannot recognize the influence of the subcomponents on a moral level is a desire for applying infinite moral liability. Thus, effectively, pretending that there is no tension between the internal components and therefore, for example, when a person says they “want” to be of a healthy weight, but then eat too much junk food anyway and find it distressing, that this is their “true, revealed preference” that applies to their whole self, even if they hate it.
There is, of course, the practical matter of lack of access to sub-delineations - or at least, there is now at the current technology level. But that’s a practical matter, and often modern courts of law will change sentences according to psychological state.
As for the ability of nations to think, that depends on how one defines the term. I don’t think they feel. Not yet. The concept of what is to states as Transhumanism is to humans is not yet more than a grain of sand.
The point of my objecting to your granulation is not that you can’t subdivide parts, but that those subdivided parts remain part of a whole. The claim about natural boundaries within people is irrelevant here in the subject of moral responsibility because the very concept hinges upon distinguishing that which is inside and that which is outside. Those inner boundaries all share one aspect, and that is the very fact that they are, even in your argument, inner, and therefor distinct from outer boundaries.
Inner/outer is being used for convenience, not revealing something.
I like this metaphor as well, as it accurately fits the concept of every person a nation unto themselves. :P
It’s not such a bad metaphor, since it exposes the problem with your way of thinking.
People treat subnational units as relevant in international politics quite frequently, which is part of why, while destroying much of the German army during WWII, the result following the war did not involve putting all the Germans to death. The national responsibility for the war was actually split up according what the individual people and factions within the country did. In fact, they didn’t even execute the entire German army itself.
Attempting to subjugate a country and knock out its entire army is typically done not because the nation as a whole is sufficiently unified in order to justify total moral liability to all of its subcomponents, but because trying to individually negotiate with all the soldiers and so on while the state apparatus is in the control of a dictator is extremely difficult and unlikely to succeed.
While people may recognize that, say, Texas does not get to speak independently on the international stage, they recognize that it still has an influence on the government which is different from that of, say, Ohio. This is actually a big part of the large, televised anti-Trump protests, establishing non-total-liability to outside observers.
I could also discuss the nation as a whole as having an inner and outer, and claim that morality exists at the level of the nation and not at the level of the individual. What makes that boundary more special to the point that we can’t care about the subcomponents?
@argumate gotta admit I seen a lot of “down with Islamophobia” posters from local socialists and very few “down with religion” posters
Yeah, there’s this problem where if you say stuff like that, people mostly use it as a reason to take that religious group that has all that money or oil or is just inconvenient and just kill them all.
Yeah, well there’s also this problem where different cultures are actually different on more than just what kind of food they eat, and if you heavily push “anyone who heavily questions this foreign religion or culture is an evil racist bigot and should be fired”, you end up covering up massive child sexual abuse scandals.
I find it very frustrating that a religion that is actually worse than Christianity in many ways, and is oppressive in itself, and is so far difficult to secularize people out of and water down, with elevated rates of fundamentalism among second-generation immigrants, is getting this free pass from the people who were supposed to be all anti-oppressive and logical.
I have a vague like (well below the level of actual political preference) for a monarchy.
And, well, I really, really, really don’t like British Monarchy Apologism. It’s simultaneously obscene and cowardly.
If we see a restoration it will, and will have to be, different. Above all things the historical aristocratic contempt for all things useful and practical and especially for labor must pass away.
I’m not sure it’s possible to have a monarchy without some level of aristocratic contempt for useful and practical things. What would a non-aristocratic monarchy look like?
I didn’t necessarily say “a non-aristocratic monarchy”.
What I was specifically thinking of is, like, people who form entire cultures around considering Working For A Living to be basically illegitimate, and who then don’t have the saving grace to live in austere and ascetic poverty when their rent fails them.
In my ideal nation, the royal family would have the role of safeguarding the nation’s culture (and a few other things) rather than being a tourist attraction or having full political power better reserved for the civilian government.
Their membership would be drawn from national heroes, waning over several generations and requiring new heroes to marry in for the line to remain royal. So, great artists, great scientists, great warriors, those who have made amazing sacrifices - people who just knowing they’re from your country and embody its ideals, make your heart swell with pride.
This keeps the genetic lines fresh, rewards those who benefit society, helps keep the nation united, and so on. In many countries the monarchy is reduced to a national mascot and cultural institution - so if we’re going to do that, let’s do it right.
guys but like…not every vocal atheist is an m.r.a dudebro with a goatee and a fedora and a hard-on for richard dawkins. plenty of people have a legitimate reason for mistrusting and criticising religion and religious practices (i.e. abuse survivors, lgbt people, people from former or current colonies, many women all over the world) and atheism might actually be important to some people as a space for resistance. which is not to say i advocate black and white thinking and i think all criticism of religion should be sensitive and placed within careful consideration of context (i.e. people not using “atheism” as an excuse to be islamophobic, anti-semitic etc.) but religions are social institutions that still exert a lot of power and we should let oppressed people have safe spaces in which to criticise them
I’m still trying to understand how the Left started hating atheists, associating Atheism with being anti women’s rights, and consider religious people as a morally superior group?
Like, what the fuck? What happened to the god-hating liberals my (abusive) Christian parents despised?
The complement of Divide and Conquer: Unite and Conquer. Make alliances of convenience to gain power. Leftists aligned with Islam because they’re both opponents (especially in America) of neoliberal globalism, as well as Conservativism. Islam has money and power behind it, Atheism has none. Islam also fits into the antiracist agenda, especially in the west where Muslims are a minority that’s also correlated very much with ethnicity. Racism is a tough rap to beat and it means people who want to spread Islam and Islamic power are naturally aligned with the left, who want to hurt the same people and take their power too.
Before Islam was a noticeable group in Western politics, atheism was fine/good. But if you want to ally with an increasingly powerful Islam, you HAVE to shit on atheists. Because atheists are willing to actually attack Islam, whereas feminism and LGBT issues can, via doublethink, sidestep it, they get thrown under the bus.
Yeah, but you could take measures to ameliorate the long commute for employees--for example, running a high-speed train line there for their particular use. (If the commute is long even then, you could make that commute time paid--have people punch in/out as they get on/off the train, or just add a set amount per day.) Of course, that's expensive.
Airports and sewage treatment plants have other constraints on their locations (flat land, downstream) and it’s not just the employees who have to travel to reach them but every construction vehicle, delivery truck, etc.
But eh infrastructure is hard, Melbourne doesn’t even have a regular train line to the airport yet.
You can’t subdivide out entities that way, though, even if we distinguish them due to the complex interactions involved. The lack of a unified, detached ‘will’ animating our meat puppets doesn’t change the fact that at the core, it remains a single entity, a single actor. You are attempting to granulate things that don’t have any business being so granulated.
Actually, the effects of Ritalin prove that it IS so granulated. And I, myself, have taken it and am familiar with its effects. So yeah, actually I can subdivide entities out that way.
That is a thing, even if it’s one you don’t like.
You have created a false boundary that ignores causal distinctions and elevated it to full status, but reality is not so cleanly delineated, which is something I’ve tried to get at with you for a long time but which hasn’t gotten through to you.
Some kind of nihilistic type might object that a boat is just a collection of atoms that we have arbitrarily labeled as a boat, and that reality doesn’t care. (They’d likely also take your “but you just don’t like it” shtick, too.)
However, even though the natural categories are fuzzy (for instance, when is a skin cell a part of someone, and when isn’t it?), we can still define object boundaries - but we have to use causal bundling instead.
That is, the impact on the world. A “boat” is defined as a cluster of possibilities based on its effects on the world compared to alternative configurations of matter at the same time and place.
There are natural boundaries around people, but it is necessary to also consider the natural boundaries within them, rather than arbitrarily declaring them off limits for moral consideration. These are themselves real causal clusters with impacts on the state of the world.
I think you need to justify placing your causal cutoffs where you place them. Why is placing them at the total mind level valid, but both the sub-agent and incoming-causes levels are invalid?
I started writing this, then realised that factual description of time spent in an airport was already sufficiently horrifying, and no further comment was required.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.” Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs. – Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
That said, the S2 concourse (D gates) of Terminal 4 at Sky Harbor is not bad at all.
Airports are prime liminal space, which is why I love them. People sitting tailor style on the ground in business wear and charging their phones, a line of children with small faces lit by tablets, silent under headphones too large for little heads, chest-high counters often abandoned, side-scrolling orange led displays that make subtle changes to the lighting, the resonant thunk as a luggage carousel starts an empty rotation before bags tumble noisily down its chute, the omnipresent sports team made up of teen girls in matching uniforms with matching bags and matching ribbons in their hair.
I love that everything is in motion and everyone is going somewhere and sometimes it all goes to shit but mostly it works and sends people all over the world to meet family or start a job or take a break.
My local airport reminds me of a cross between a cathedral and a library; it’s all high glass ceilings casting beams of dusty light over broad expanses of silent travelers seated on evenly spaced benches. If you want something more to look at than that you can stand at a wall of windows liking at an endless field of blue and watch the planes fly into forever.
If you were a committed moral realist, how do you think your other beliefs would be different? What about opinions? Basically, what is committed_moral_realist!argumate like?
Wow that’s a tough one. At first I think that version of me would be completely unrecognisable, but then I’m not so sure. I already have very strong moral inclinations, even though I am aware they are not baked into the universe; perhaps if I believed that these moral principles were fundamentally real then there would be few observable differences in my behaviour, besides what I might say in discussions about moral realism!
To think otherwise is to fall into the Jack Chick fallacy, where an absence of the god of Abraham immediately gives one a license to kill, cheat, and steal.
We’ve already had that talk? The short form is that we recognize ourselves as thinking entities, IE: I think, therefor I am as you’ve repeatedly stated. What follows is a recognition that our actions have effects upon the world, and those can be directly, due to being directed by our thinking minds, attributed consequentially to us. We ‘own’ the results of our actions, we are responsible for them. From this flows such necessary moral precepts such as the illegitimacy of initiating force against another thinking actor and the necessary fact that because are responsible for the results of our actions, we also own them, and that includes actions that mix with other material goods.
What follows is a recognition that our actions have effects upon the world, and those can be directly, due to being directed by our thinking minds, attributed consequentially to us.
We ‘own’ the results of our actions, we are responsible for them.
This requires a kind of internal unity of agents/minds that I’ve already established does not exist. You want absolute moral liability, but people do not have absolute control over their minds and never did, which is why brain injuries, drugs, and mental illness can alter behavior.
For your position to make sense, the effectiveness of drugs such as Ritalin should be impossible. It shouldn’t be feasible to change someone’s level of alignment between their will and its execution through biochemical means if their will is absolute and unified.
And if will isn’t absolute, if it’s subject to all the limitations and complex complications of life in physical bodies in a physical world, then the result of binding liability (if we even accept that) is far, far lower.
Because of this lack of perfect unity, if we took your proposition seriously, then it should be possible to charge someone’s executive functioning capability with a crime (or just moral liability) independently of the other subcomponents of their mind.
Some sort of unification of limited moral binding based on limitations of execution, limitations of information, the default will, targeting of subcomponents of mind, does not, I think, move towards AnCap, but some new class of moral theory that has yet to be born, which is the first thing new/valuable I think I’ve actually gotten out of these discussions with you.
…though not entirely without precedent, but rather not formalized into a total system. See typical handling of limitations in many common courtrooms, and many laws.
Why is the historical entrenchment of property ownership never touched on by libertarians? I think the overwhelming majority of landholdings were acquired through what they define as theft and then passed on. And even if we started from scratch in ancapistan utopia you'd have to deal with the issue of already existing public infrastructure and how even the most basic infrastructure would require cooperation that is coerced on some level
That recent essay went over this, the fact that if you freeze property rights in their current state you may be condoning stolen property, yet Libertarians typically shrink from a large-scale one-off redistribution that would cancel out earlier thefts and allow everyone to start fresh.
Ultimately much of the Libertarian concept is based on an aesthetic of a small landholding being worked by a rugged freeman mixing his labour with the soil (but like, not in a kinky way).
In practice this falls apart: the rugged freeman is either standing over the body of the guy he just killed to take the land in the New World or is bound by a complex web of mutual obligations and tradition and common law in the Old World, both of which are far removed from Libertarian paradise.
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.
If anon’s explanation of that “Benedict option”as Catholics retreating into catholic-only communities is accurate, it operates under the serious fallacy that a hostile government won’t utilize forced integration and diversity against such a thing.
Freedom of association doesn’t apply to cash cow and designated ‘oppressor’ groups. See also: the town of Oranje in South Africa.
Why Left/Libs can’t demobilize the new increase in White Nationalism, part 86.
Why is the historical entrenchment of property ownership never touched on by libertarians? I think the overwhelming majority of landholdings were acquired through what they define as theft and then passed on. And even if we started from scratch in ancapistan utopia you'd have to deal with the issue of already existing public infrastructure and how even the most basic infrastructure would require cooperation that is coerced on some level
That recent essay went over this, the fact that if you freeze property rights in their current state you may be condoning stolen property, yet Libertarians typically shrink from a large-scale one-off redistribution that would cancel out earlier thefts and allow everyone to start fresh.
Ultimately much of the Libertarian concept is based on an aesthetic of a small landholding being worked by a rugged freeman mixing his labour with the soil (but like, not in a kinky way).
In practice this falls apart: the rugged freeman is either standing over the body of the guy he just killed to take the land in the New World or is bound by a complex web of mutual obligations and tradition and common law in the Old World, both of which are far removed from Libertarian paradise.
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.
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
Statist:
Yeah, but how would that work in the real world?
Libertarian:
ok let me try an ec
---
Libertarian:
Voluntary action will solve environmental problems.
Statist:
It's already failing to solve environmental problems in China.
Libertarian:
But the Chinese government is authoritarian and corrupt and is failing to solve environmental problems.
Statist:
But it doesn't prohibit solving environmental problems through voluntary action, they lie about the smog levels being low so they would hardly stop you actually clearing the smog, and other countries have environmental problems managed through government. If voluntary action is enough, why isn't it already there and working?
AnCaps acting as if we forgot about workers locked into burning factories, rivers so polluted they became fire hazards, meat packing plants so vile they contributed to more deaths of soldiers than enemy action, women licking radium paint, dumping PFOA in the water supply, and every other abuse by business. They would have us believe voluntary consumer action is sufficient to address all these and other problems, when it already isn’t sufficient now. They say that “well that isn’t worse than what states have done”, but that’s mostly because these companies do not have freely-operating military arms and are instead militarily subordinate to states. Even abolishing LLCs does not actually solve it, since it’s possible to set up alternate webs to escape liability, and it’s far easier and cheaper to cause damage than to fix it. People cheated at Commie rules. No reason they wouldn’t cheat at AnCap rules, too.
Probably, digging up old discourse here, but I really really really do not trust any QALY measurement that doesn’t allow for negative values. If you’re rating a year of depression at 0.6 times the value of a non-depressed year, something in your model has probably gone off the rails. I mean seriously, even if a person spends an entire year in a nursing home in constant pain, barely able to sit up, and isolated from all the friends and family they used to see every day, the people claiming to be making rigorous utilitarian calculations will STILL insist on expressing that as a non-negative percentage value relative to a year of health, no matter how much the patient insists that they would rather be dead.
I wish this was just an isolated methodological error, but sadly this seems to be the norm for everything when we talk about happiness economics, life satisfaction, and healthcare.
@remedialaction Although I guess I will add on one more thing, regarding my policy proposals not being “innovative” enough -
I’m an edgy centrist, not a far-right reactionary, extropian, or Anarcho-Lumberjack. My idea of a “cool authoritarian regime” is Singapore, which is noted for being successful, safe, fairly open, and wealthy.
I tend to favor incremental policy rolled out experimentally, which won’t break the economy or be non-reversible. I’m proposing things that I think are likely to actually work, which in some ways means they won’t be so different in kind from existing programs.
Revolution is, after all, overrated.
It’s true that in the space of all possible political policies, “ease up on zoning laws, end rent control and issue housing vouchers instead, throw on a tax based on expected new infrastructure required, then let the new housing stock roll in” is not particularly radical or revolutionary, but it’s likely to work and if it fails it isn’t likely to fail catastrophically.
It’s still innovative relative to typical American and European politics, but my goal isn’t to be an innovation-maximizer within the absolute space of all political ideas.
@remedialaction That will be my last response to you for a while, because I noticed typing all that up was time-consuming, and these things tend to be distracting and leave me anxious wondering when a reply will drop.
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.
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.
he’s sort of an infamous (well, as far as anyone knows he’s an okay guy? maybe??? no one seems to have ever actually talked to him???) big name furry
who is notorious for one thing
he is, singlehandedly, the source of almost every single piece of Falco x Fox macro art out there (and we’re talking literally hundreds of pieces. maybe even a thousand.)
he’s reclusive, has extremely specific tastes in kink, and commissions so much art (and not just still pieces, we’re talking like several minute long animated porn shorts)
we’re talking like “this guy could buy several houses with the amount of money he spends on commissioned furry porn of his very specific kink”
theres one other thing we know about him- the reason he can afford all this? is because he’s apparently one of the top heart surgeons in the country
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.
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.
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.
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
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
According to Anarcho-Capitalism, my life is not worth even the smallest sliver of involuntary suffering by the wealthy. It’s worth nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
Under Anarcho-Capitalism, it is impermissible for me to perform even the smallest violation to the point that I could be on a garden world owned by one man, take a loaf of bread that he doesn’t even consciously know exists, for my own survival, and it’s a total violation.
It’s very difficult for me not to take that as personally insulting, especially as someone who has experienced how deeply biological (and thus relatively arbitrarily distributed) executive functioning is.
Private charity is never going to hit 30-40% of GDP, even if the state were abolished, unless it isn’t really voluntary.
And let’s not even pretend that AnCap would turn out Consequentialist in practice. It won’t. That is not how people work, that is not how businesses work, that is not how land works, that is not how pollution works, and so on. If people were that scrupulous, Communism would not have been such a disaster.
Various Consequentialisms do not think my life has zero value. They may say that I can’t steal the bread because there isn’t enough bread and it would collapse the economy. They may say the same thing about taxes and medical operations. But it’s trading for something of greater value than “lol I don’t want to and property is absolute”.
And that is far, far more acceptable to me. Especially because executive functioning and everything else was never distributed fairly at the very start.
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.
I’d rather the Invisible Fist than the Actual Boot, tbh.
It’s a joke name dude. My Communism tag is “The Red Hammer”, which should not be interpreted in the benign sense of the word. More in the sense of “the nail that sticks up gets hammered” and, well, red as in blood.
I should make a joke tag so folks know when I’m not being overly serious, I think. :P
“#The Actual Boot” would be a great tag for tankie posts, tbh.
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.
I’d rather the Invisible Fist than the Actual Boot, tbh.
It’s a joke name dude. My Communism tag is “The Red Hammer”, which should not be interpreted in the benign sense of the word. More in the sense of “the nail that sticks up gets hammered” and, well, red as in blood.
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.
its been over a month since this came to light and so few people are talking about this
This entire article is heartbreaking…
I don’t want to hear a SINGLE Islamophobe talking about “THEY PUSH GAYS OFF OF ROOFTOPS” ever again.
You know that Chechnya is ~95% Muslim,
right? You know that MUFTI (wikipedia:
an Islamic scholar who interprets and expounds Islamic law (Sharia and fiqh) ) of Chechnya during assembly of other religious figures in central mosque of Grozny (there were about 15000 ppl) said that
journalists who covered the subject of gay men will be punished by the Allah?
Do you really have the arrogance to
think that you know more about islam than a religious authority of the region
which was muslim for a longer time than US exists?
Do you think that MUFTI of Chechnya
is also islamophobe because he paints islam as a homophobic religion with no concern for gay people suffering (which it fucking IS)?
Are you a Trump voter? Because they’re the only people who toot their horns about how Muslims are homophobes that don’t belong in the country.
No, in fact, I didn’t know that! I’m sorry I’ve been too busy preparing documentation for a job than to know absolutely everything about everything, which is required on Tumblr! SILLY ME!
I am no expert that would fit Tumblr standards either but at least we can realize it’s homophobia, not Islam.
The Chechen gov.m is allowing this to happen, not the Muslim people who live there…
You mean the Chechen government that is made of Muslims? That Chechen government? The Muslim filled government of Islamic Chechnya?
That is no excuse to criminalize Islam and all the Muslim people of Chechnya.
“criminalize”?? what are on about? No we want the corrupt islamic government to stop abusing and killing people and calling that out, Islam is heavily tied to their political movements its a contradiction to support them under any circumstances.
We want to criminalize islamic-state backed capital punishment legalized murder and child abuse and genocide of lgbt and atheist/other religions too chechens. It is unavoidable collision with the philosophies of islam that put as at odds with their fascist governments. for as long as one believes in freedom you cannot support islam as a religion.
is right; they didn’t push this kid off of the roof.
Meh, Islam’s had relatively freethinking phases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age I checked and as per usual the fuckers in Chechen responsible for the most radical anti-gay sentiments are everyone’s favourite, the Wahhabists. I don’t understand what’s so hard about singling out the fundies.
“I don’t understand what’s so hard about singling out the fundies.”
It’s too precise and doesn’t induce enough cognitive dissonance. You’re either a bigot who hates brown people or you have to think there’s zero correlation between fundamentalism and hating gays. You have to be in one of those two bins, because these people don’t want to parse an opinion for nuance. They just want to be mad about something on the internet.
Let’s be realistic - a compromise where specific sects of Islam are punished, and we just ignore e.g. Quranists, is not on the table. That would mean admitting this foreign non-white religion can be bad at more than the random nutter level, which is not going to happen no matter how many gay nightclubs get shot up, not to mention the loss of pride involved.
Gays are lower on the Progressive Stack than Muslims.
Though admittedly, I still don’t get why they love such an oppressive religion so much.
