Metric

For entertainment purposes only, here's a real-life mad scientist talking about his proof of the afterlife, god, etc. at TEDx. This guy actually was, at one point, a great theorist -- you can judge for yourself the extent to which religion has rotted his brain:

The first digit will be a 7 one time out of 9. The first two digits will be a 7 one time out of 90. The first three digits will be a 7 one time out of 900 -- roughly 3 years. The fourth digit was not a 7, nor was the leading digit of the % gain. I am guessing there are ~100 days of some religious significance on the calendar. So, you can expect this particular "sign of the end times" (that no one would have cared about until after the fact) to happen roughly every ten years. Now that your mom has pushed in all her chips on this issue, do you get a free pass?

Just to rephrase one more time, I think a large number of these "extreme case" arguments are a special case of the following: Take a perfectly normal man, and do brain surgery on him, removing the part of his brain responsible for moral behavior. After the surgery, who can blame him for violating the moral principles you propose? Therefore, your moral principles are broken! Instead of surgery, substitute "dying of thirst" or "family about to die" or "falling from a building" or whatever -- anything that short-circuits moral agency for fundamental, biological reasons. The conclusion of anyone actually using this argument will inevitably be that government doesn't violate any moral principles (since they are all broken). But of course it is the argument that is broken -- moral theories only apply to moral agents, not brain-impaired rage-monsters.

I don't think "extreme cases" are necessarily bad things to consider -- they can give important hints as to where some theory is likely to break down. However, one has to be careful about what you can actually conclude. For example, in the "guy dying of thirst vs. absurd price gouger," you're explicitly constructing an example where you can conclude nothing. The guy is not going to try to conform to ANY moral theory -- he's just going to grab the water, as any animal would. There is just zero application to anyone's take on government -- government is not a bunch of people in a situation where they are forced to behave like animals in order to survive.

Nope, it just means that one cannot live a life upholding the NAP in a pure unfaltered way. It just means that NAP is also a matter on how people around you see it. While I can see people staring at me as a violation of NAP, because it creates distress to me, if I live along peers that do not feel the same way it isn't. If however everyone around me sees that 'staring at people' as a violation of NAP, then it might get enforced or somethin. Remember, the NAP is much more difficult to apply to individuals in contrived situations than it is to apply to institutions like government. In the case of government, it's almost trivial -- men with guns coming around to take half your income whether you agree or not. In the case of contrived trolley problems and the like, you can make anything into an agonizing case. This is why the NAP can form the core of libertarian thought -- it's extremely clear cut when you use it as intended.

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwrsKGzcZLM] I liked the over-arching point Stefan made, that articles like this just have the wrong focus -- people aren't dying because of too little aggression-against-the-innocent in the world. I also liked the point that it's an unreasonable (at this point) to demand that every possible variable and improbable circumstance be taken into account by a one-line principle. I didn't so much like the discussion of "implicit contracts" -- that seemed a little like stepping into quicksand. But anyway, I mainly wanted to point out something else -- I think perhaps Stefan was saying something like this, but it wasn't fully distilled. None of these improbable scenarios that are used as justifications for violence (attempting to discredit the NAP) actually address the NAP in the way we use it. Of course we may forgive some guy for violating the NAP in an extreme survival situation, where he must act more like an animal than a moral agent in order to survive. The circumstance is deliberately constructed such that his choice is to A) violate the NAP or B) die horribly -- instinct kicks in and would win against ANY principle of basic civilization. What we're saying with the NAP is that aggression-against-the-innocent is immoral as a fundamental working component of any institution. If it can't work without aggression-against-the-innocent as a working component, something is horribly, horribly wrong with it. THAT is the core libertarian principle. And this is the version that was barely addressed by the Zwolinski article (there is some relevance in the case of pollution, but I think something as fundamental as the 2nd law of thermodynamics deserves special treatment -- all human activities including life itself increases the entropy of the universe).

I agree that human babies don't have any inherent properties making them different from animals, which are owned. Their "special" status comes from the fact that they are extremely valuable to their parents, and will eventually become moral agents themselves (inheriting self-ownership etc. in due time when their physical properties change). I have a feeling most people are not ready for this.

...and another demonstration of the state failing even a basic comprehension of what they're supposed to be regulating. What exact behavior do they want the "bitcoin foundation" to cease and desist?

Just generally, I like the concept of being free from commtting three arguable felonies per day in the course of normal life: http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.aspx

Something called a "major intellectual achievement" should involve an actual discovery or creation, not just a personal fight to come to terms with reason. The latter, at best, would be a "personal intellectual achievement."

On some level, this is interesting and counter-intuitive. On another level, we've all known it for a very long time -- huge numbers of people can't wait to get into that voting booth to flush their liberty and opportunity away (along with everyone else's).

I would say it is deterministic though. Lightning seemed like something random and not determined until science explained how it formed. Now with meteorology, even without every single variable, humans can make pretty decent predictions about when there will be lightning. With all the variables it could be predicted 100 percent of the time. I have little faith in the idea of true randomness. Edit: Ok so I have been googling this stuff a little now and apparently in this post I am taking the position of support for the hidden variable theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory). It appears there is a lot of evidence going against this theory. That is bothering me so much. How can true randomness be physically possible? I can't fathom it...... Yeah, hidden variable theories were mostly destroyed by experimental evidence. It appears that there is true randomness in QM. However, the randomness does not come from time evolution -- states still evolve from t1 to t2 deterministically. The probabilities come from the way information is shared between subsystems at any given time -- it is a property that is independent of time evolution. Basically, QM looks probabilistic because you are a quantum mechanical subsystem of the universe -- not because of a breakdown of cause-and-effect.

Yes, I like this approach. What is happening in a resturant is very different from what is happening with the "social contract." In a resturant, the implicit understanding is that we can avoid the whole business with escrow accounts and enforcability and simplify things greatly for everyone if you just pay the bill. If this understanding breaks down and hurts the profitability of a resturant, then the whole process has to get more explicit and more enforcable (and more complicated and expensive). It's just a market condition to which the resturant must adapt, but the market has already found a voluntary solution which is optimal for everyone. In the "social contract," someone is trying to enforce something on you that you may explicitly disagree with, by claiming that you implicitly agree to it. As usual, it's a smokescreen argument -- yes, there is "something" that is implicit in both cases, but that's where all similarities end as the "something" is completely different.

The question was answered already by a proto-libertarian a couple hundred years ago: "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild,[1] and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, Paris, May 27, 1788[2] That's why it's rarely happens -- states are constantly in the business of seeking out and capturing new powers.

Deep question. People have purposes, and a lot of philosophy has been invented with different purposes in mind. But I suspect that most of us here are interested in using reason as a guide for the betterment of mankind (as well as individuals).