greekredemption

Perhaps I should expand this to say that acting as if you have free will doesn't necessarily mean you have free will. The contradiction is superficial, and still doesn't refute (even if it appears to contradict) the original claim.

'If we admit determinism and at the same time fail to behave as though we have no free will, then to preach determinism is meaningless it has literally no impact on our lives. No mechanist acts in congruence with their beliefs as it is impossible to do so, thus determinism is self-fasifying, as in the statement, “language is meaningless.”' If I understand this correctly, you're saying that hypocrisy negates the truth value of a claim? Tu quoque?

Future behaviour cannot be certain because of lack of information.

Is motive relevant do you think?

Capitalism may not cause innovation per se, but it seems as if it does ensure efficient distribution of innovations.

Talking point: The footprints in the sand example seems to highlight the speciousness of the 'owning the results of your actions' account of property rights. Perhaps the basis of property is merely arbitrary, particularly with regard to natural resources (best recognised in the Georgist point of view). edit: an alternative argument is perhaps that property is merely an arbitrary expression of violence; that is to say that property can only be said to exist to the extent that the owner is willing to defend it. Perhaps, without violence, property would not exist at all.

You may say that consensus doesn't guarantee accuracy, but you have to temper this. Scientific consensus is typically correct according to information available at the time, and radical changes in information shift the paradigm to a new consensus which is correct in the same way. To say that 'scientific consensus is historically wrong' is to miss the point entirely; in a field whose raison d'etre is to attain and evaluate new information, all consensuses will be wrong to some extent at some point in the future. As to the appeal to consensus, what we have to understand is that science generally is populated by many people with many specialised areas of study. No one person can claim to have excellent knowledge in enough areas to establish originally - i.e. doing the work herself - whether any given claim is accurate. So when somebody says, "There is a scientific consensus on evolution through natural selection, mutation, and other means," what she's really saying is that the scientific method is good enough to ensure with a good level of confidence that many disparate areas of study may reach a similar conclusion and will agree on a given conclusion. So we trust that the output of palaeontologists and geneticists has gone through a robust process and that their findings are accurate. Ergo, on the balance of probability, the theory of evolution almost certainly accounts for the diversity of life.

Which brand of social contract? There are many types arguing from many views. It could even be argued that the NAP is a type of social contract.

You're the one who mentioned accountability. I rather thought I was discussing motive. But honestly I don't really care; if you want to argue a point I didn't make, that's your business.

If you'd unplug yourself from the mains for 5 minutes, you'd see that you've missed the point I was making. Reading a couple of Molyneux's e-books doesn't a philosophy superstar make, so calm down for a bit. Regardless of the deontological rights and wrongs of state schooling, my point still stands: the decision makers are much more likely to be making stupid decisions than they are to be carefully maintaining a conspiracy to keep people at large subservient.

Wow, now, that's a good description. If I may also add, when the 3XL of pure ideology can't fit in the medium-size T-shirt, it comes spilling out in the form of a dull 6 page monologue.

I quite agree with the OP. It is unclear to me how self-ownership - granting that it exists as stated - leads to property rights. Or, at least, I don't find the argument sound.

I suppose the goal of public education is to do better than no education, and then beyond that politicians use the idea as a political football. All I'm saying is that perhaps the people who make decisions in the state school system are incompetent or stupid rather than malicious. In fact, the idea that they're controlling education in order to make people more obidient and indoctrinated sounds quite far beyond the talent available to the decision-makers. It'd require levels of coherence the state simply doesn't have...

I suspect they just want to manufacture higher grades. Let's not get carried away.

Alarm bells should be ringing when you realise this film is a 'psychoanalysis' of [x]. Well, yes, it is exactly that - it takes old-fashioned and outmoded Freudian and Lacanian psychological models and poses them as philosophy. Slavoj Zizek may well be seen, and come across, as a 'rock and roll philosopher' but good god he is not in any way to be taken seriously.