Frohicky1

As with free-to-play games, the free riders provide the environment is which the subscribers can enjoy themselves you need us.

I don't like the way people are saying "no no you're using the words wrong, sex means biological organs and gender means orientation" recently. Historically these words have had nothing like those meanings, they've been much more (no pun intended) fluid. The monopoly over language is the first step in any authoritarian scheme. The words don't matter! It's the concepts they track that matter.

I forgot to add, by 'recently converted' I mean I was a libertarian socialist of the Noam Chomsky type for a number of years, but have recently moved to free market libertarianism. This was largely due to the work of Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell, along with some long thinking in the bath.

Thanks for the responses. My grandparents saved for their house easily, with a small mortgage, and so soon had money to buy further properties and rent them out. My father also rents out a house, although in his case it's barely worth it with the upkeep (as dsayers mentions). There might be no problem in a stateless or minarchist society tending to a larger percentage of renting over ownership, but I'm still unsure if that in fact would be the case. My grandparents and parents generations almost always owned homes, and indeed multiple homes, whereas my generation largely rent, and if they do buy it is through some ind of deus ex machina such as inheritance, state subsidy for deposits, or joint ownership with the bank or builders. I guess the gist of my question is, is the natural state of lowest energy in a free society one where most people rent from a small number of landlords who own very large numbers of houses.

Hi all, I've converted to libertarianism fairly recently, and have a question I haven't answered for myself yet. Will a free market housing sector always tend towards renting over home ownership? My thinking is this. 1. Most people don't have enough capital to buy a home outright, so they look for a mortgage provider. 2. The mortgage provider wants to maximise return, and implicit in that, minimise risk. 3. A larger, buy-to-let company has more capital to move around in times of financial stress, and more for the bank to reposses, so provides a safer investment. I think I'm wrong somewhere, but can't work out where.

Hi thatsmrshem, Really good book I think. I'm no english literature student, and I'm sure some there are lots of in depth essays on the net if you wanted more, but some of the things I picked up are: 1. What is being human? Is it empathy, in which case some androids show this and some humans (Deckard at the beginning, and the other blade runner he meets) don't. Is it emotions, or love? Again some androids show this. Appreciation of art? The opera singer does this. I think it puts a good case that, like racism and sexism and Peter Singer's Speciesism, the requirement that a person be organic is entirely arbitrary and unfounded. It's also interesting to note that their supposed inferiority is a justification for their enslavement. 2. Is being human a good thing? PKD paints the type of dystopian future that is common amongst many books and films (Total Recall, Judge Dredd, The Night's Dawn Trilogy, The Culture Series) that technology has progressed, but the same old problems remain because they come from our human nature. Poverty (people moving off world for a better life), violence (need for combat androids), ecological disaster (few natural animals), petty pride (the electric sheep). Have you seen Antichrist? That (very wierd and disturbing film) also has a thread about whether emotions are a good thing or not, and there's discussion of this from the ancient Greek philosophers through to Descartes and Hume. However the androids want to meet their designer, want to become human, much like the homunculi in the excellent anime series Fullmetal Alchemist. 3. Should emotions be earned? A good example is the Mood Organ. The same theme runs through Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, and was also discussed by Nozick in Anarchy State Utopia, the so called Experience Machine. If we can get happiness off the self, is it as worthy as happiness that comes from hard work? In parallel, if thee androids are programmed to have emotions, are they lesser than human emotions because more work is needed for a human to achieve them? Also, is Deckard an android?

Hi cab21, When I contrast rules and consequences I'm referring to the old Consequentialism vs Deontology debate. Another way to put it is, if it turned out (let's suppose for the thought experiment) that free trade made people more miserable, would you still support free trade? The rape example is a good one. I think (and this is a tentative belief) that every bit of happiness counts equally, and also that the total should be increased. This means each person has a responsibility to change their hopes, desires, beliefs and so on to increase the total happiness. The rapist has a responsibility to not be a rapist, the pampered heiress to not want a pony, the alcoholic to not want alcohol, etc. I han't really intended to go down the responsibility route so much, I'm more interested in the coercion route, because I think a central claim of free market libertarianism is that decisions shouldn't be coerced, and I think that being in a state of starvation, lack of shelter, etc is the same (in the relevant aspects) as being a heroin addict or having a gun to your head. As you say, both parties need each other, but not equally. The power relationship is asymmetric.

Hi alexqr1, Indeed I do think the responsibility goes both ways equally.

Hi cab21, thanks for the response I agree, and it's a good point, that both parties need each other. But this isn't enough alone to satisfy me. I think that we are all responsible for each and every person, because I think happiness is what counts, and it doesn't matter in which body that happiness or its absence resides. Can I ask, morally speaking are you most interested in consequences or rules, and if counsequences, does freedom or happiness or something else count most highly? In other words, does your support for free markets come from what they are or what they produce; is your support contingent?

Hi alexqr1, Thanks for the response. On the point of free will, if we don't have free will, nothing follows I don't think, because everything is effected equally. It doesn't mean we should cease our conversation, or carry it on. When applied to the full, it's a true but useless fact. But when we apply it incrementally, we find it more difficult to punish, more difficult to blame, more difficult to praise, and so on. This is a seperate topic though, I don't want to derail the current one, but would be happy to investigate further in a seperate thread if you like. Your video is eloquently argued, but I disagree on two points. Firstly, and not very importantly, the use of freedom you use if one you define, which is fine and useful, but not the way I would say most philosophers use the term. Freedom means the ability to do something, which includes capacity to do it, rather than being juxtaposed to it. But as I say, definitions are not particularly interesting. Secondly, you say (I hope I'm summarising correctly here) that if an inequality arises from transactions, this is a kind of fact of nature, not the fault of any person. It's just the way the world is. You can't chastise someone because of a tornado, and likewise you can't for scarcity of resources. I disagree, because the person with the wage contract has resources, and the other person does not. The decision to share those resources only as part of a wage contract is a choice, and so carries moral significance. The person who is offering the wage contract is morally responsible for the welfare of the person to whom it is offered, and depending on our conception of morality, is variously repsonsible for the happiness or the freedom of that person (or perhaps some other concept of morality).

Thanks for the responses. Awesome, so we're agreed that there's a fact about the matter (scientific fact) and that it's immoral for parents to disregard this? So in an anarchist society, what would be the mechanism for forcing parents to give their children vaccines? Would there be any mechanism at all given the coercion involved? If so, how is the coercion of a parent weighed againt the coercion against the child by the parent? For the moment I'm ignoring neighbourhood effects (risk to you and your children from another parents lack of innoculation). Thanks again.

"there is no experiment a person could conduct in a small volume of space that would distinguish between a gravitational field and an equivalent uniform acceleration'' Albert Einstein Further to FriendlyHacker (and apologies if I've got this wrong), but isn't that only for a constant gravitational field? If it is non-constant (aka tidal forces) then you can tell the difference between a gravitational field and uniform acceleration? Is this why the sentence stipulates small volume, so that the test object has no length and so has no variation in the gravitational force across it?

Thanks all for the replies. So it looks like I can put your responses in to three groups Group 1: The second case is free because it doesn't involve coercion, violence, an agent, or something like that Group 2: The second case is free because if we call this action unfree, we must call every action unfree, which is false or undesirable, so by reductio ad absurdum the case must be free Group 3: I haven't given enough information to allow a judgment to be made To group 1, I don't think the freedom of an action is related to whether a second agent is involved. I am not free to fly unaided, for example, and this is not due to another person or to violence against me. I'm not entirely settled on a definition, but I guess freedom means either 'could have done otherwise' (the counterfactual), or even better something a little more human, like 'a person could have done otherwise without sacrificing other freedoms', for example a person who can eat donuts and not get fat is freer than a person who has to weight these concerns. To group 2, I don't think the conclusion is absurd, indeed I don't believe in free will. Regardless, I don't think a person need deny free will to feel the point I made. A bit like a differential in mathematics, you can apply the point slowly and see which way it is tending, without needing to apply all the way to infinity. The fewer options a person has, and even the fewer options that a person wants to choose but could choose, limits their freedom. To group 3, you're probably right, I'll add a little more information. The wage contract can be anything you fancy (McDonalds, farm hand, librarian, contract killer, anything). I stipulate only that the person very much wishes not to do the job, but slightly prefers doing it to starving. A slightly artificial situation perhaps, but the person also has no other jobs available, and every means of subsistance (wild plants, fire wood, empty land, etc) is all privately owned and not available for use or sale. Thanks again for the uptake

An interesting article: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/24/alan-turing-pardon-wrong-gay-men

Hi all, As a soon to be father, I have a question. I'm fairly certain I've got a good position on it, but am interested what others think. It's kind of a two part question: 1. Does the moral decision on whether to vaccinate a child rest with the parents or with some other group (the neighbourhood, society, something like that) 2. Does the decision on which way the scientific evidence points rest with the parents or some other group. Thanks in advance