TheRobin

If no one is "fully informed ever", then you can't say that you have a gun and KNOW it has a 90%/10% either, cause you can't know that then either, so the question couldn't be asked in the first place if that were true.Either you have an estimated guess (obviously always an error margin) about the 90%/10% (which you can and MUST communicate before applying) or you dont know that it has a 10% chance of killing someone, in which case you wouldn't ask the question.But since you seem to know that there's quite a high chance of death, keeping that information to yourself is immoral, especially since the consequences are so grave.

I don't see how it could be moral to operate on a person without informing them, that they have a 10% chance of dying. If people let the doctor operate in the belief that there's no risk, then that's just deception on the part of the doctor and, considering what it's at stake, utterly immoral.

When a gang of thiefs locks you up in their cave, is it really immoral to accept the food they give you?And if your virtues require you to die (and then also be unable to be virtuous anyway), it might be that whatever ethical system you use, might have some flaws there (if virtue is basically unatainable regardless of the choice you make in this situation). The only reason that you have to rely on govt handouts is, that their presence makes a voluntary solution impossible. (The problem of disability is slightly different from charity anyway imo and would almost garantueed be solved by insurance in a free market anarchy, so don't bother calculating if you take more out than you pay in, that's how insurance work in all cases anway.)

Sry, to nitpick here, but I feel this is quite the relevant difference between the OP (in which you said "offering help") to forcing someone to "get help". Simply offering and showing empathy and concern can never be a bad thing, the worst that can happen is continuing repression. hmm, I guess this can get a lot worse over time, but seeing a close person slowly dragging him/herself down deeper and deeper and gettig worse and worse by not adresing certain issues in his or her life, will alos have a severe effect on you. I'd say communicating that is also very important. Else you're kind of stuck with suffering to see your friend destroying themself, which, if they care about you as well, is something they certainly don't want either. Of course (as said above, forcing (or bullying them) them in one way or another will not make things better, as it's extremely unempathetic and disconnecting. Basically, you see the other person disconnecting from themselves and then you threaten to disconnect as well should they not stop and get help. Which is in a way quite cruel and heartless (and as you said, can possibly lead to even worse outcomes). So tl;dr: To offer help and honestly share your feelings towards their situation and how it is for you to see them that way can't be a bad thing (imo). But trying to force them to get help would be a bad thing (imo).

Hey everyone, I just had one of those ideas, that make me unable to catch any sleep until I share it with someone, so even though it's quite a small thing, maybe this can raise some intersting debates or insights.The idea I got is rather simple: Since being a moral agents requires the capacity to choose. And since using force or violence against another person makes that person unable to chose (or so stops them from being a moral agent), NAP-violations can't be said to be immoral, but rather anti-morality.When a person's capacity to chose is (temporary or permanently) destroyed, his ability to do good (or act mroally) is gone too. So we could say that from that point NAP-violations are evil, since it prevents people to do good.The reverse however would also be true, as it prevents a person from doing evil it could said to be good.Either way, what it certainly prevents is people from being moral agents, which means NAP-violations destroy their capacity to act either morally or immorally, and might therefore be called anit-moral.So we could basically say, that even before coming up with a moral theory, the NAP has to be accepted as the basis, even before we decide what we call moral or immoral. Since if we try to make NAP-violations either a good or an evil, we'd use anti-morality to justify morality, which doesn't seem to make sense.I'm looking forward to yor feedback on that idea (and also to maybe finally catch some sleep (been awake for over 22hours now, so I desperately hope this isn't one of those posts I'll regret after a good nights sleep )

ah, it seems the link doesn't really work (my bad, can't use rapidshare correctly it seems, OR I'd need to pay to make it avaialbe for everyone, idk) this should work though http://www.file-upload.net/download-7088115/Handuch-menschlicher-Viehhaltung---Eine-Gebrauchsanweisung-f--r-Steuerbauern.odt.html(just don't press the false "download"-ads-buttons )

Hey everyone, I just finished a german translation of the "Handbook of Human Ownership", if anyone is interested in sharing it or further proofreading and editing it, here's the link (btw Swiss/Austrian spelling was used) http://rapidshare.com/files/2470576615/Handuch%20menschlicher%20Viehhaltung%20-%20Eine%20Gebrauchsanweisung%20f%C3%BCr%20Steuerbauern.odtIt's open office format and it's also not very appealing in its current visual style (I have no idea how to do that nicely the way Stef does)Enjoy and please leave a comment if you found it good or useful or not so good and not souseful (As I'm inclined to do some further translations, I'd really appreciate some feedback)

well, I'm fine with that defintion of morality if you wat to use it that way here, but I still need an explanation of "rational self-interest". Can you provide me with one please? How would this be different from "non-rational self-interest" for instance? (I'd argue, one can't act in anything else than self-interst anyway, so I won't bother asking about non-self-interest).And (as I said multiple times in this thread) I don't argue for regular lying or fraud or delibaretly trying to destroy another persons mind or sense of reality (aka gaslighting). The video (and the time) seems to deal with regular liars and cheats etc, so I don't see what this has to do with what I asked or what is being debated here.

What do you mean with "rational self-interest" exactly? and how can lying never be part of that (even in the absence of lifeboatscenarios and self-defense against violence)?

Well, I don't want to call it "silly", but it seems you're trying to somewhat equate lying with physical aggression and I don't see how one could legitimately make that case (or even come close to). In regards to children in school, in my opinion, the problem is more that they can't call you out on the lie and get up and leave, but are forced to stay and parrot what the teacher says, so regardless of the content it's horribly immoral even in the absence of lying and I don't see how adding a lie to the whole thing drastically changes that (in an even worse direction).

This has been brought up already, and neither of us disagree here. (Last but not least, because it would mean people had a positive obligation to lie). The question is whether "not lying" is UPB (or whether it is a binding moral obligation towards everyone).

I'm getting slowly irritated here, you seem to miscunstruct what I say or respons to things I didn't even claim. (and since I can't interrupt you right at the start and am now left with a wall of text based on that, it gets a little annoying to communicate, at least for me). I'm not saying you do that on puropse, but that's what it looks and feels like from my end.Maybe it would be a bit more productive if you found out first, why you have strong emotions in regards to the idea that lying is immoral. My first guess would to look at the following: IF lying actually is NOT immoral, then saying it is, was a lie itself and immoral according to that (false) standard. And what concequences would follow from that.But that's just a vague guess nothing more of course.Anyway, I quite enjoyed the convo up to this point and it got me thinkin about these things and morality and how they logically relate to each other, so thanks for that. But my gut feeling is that communcation is breaking off and I don't see this going a lot further at the moment.Or how do you perceive that?

well, you're responsible for what you say, not whether you intentions are to make true or false statements (something which can't be measured anyway).So the examples with breaching contracts and faking rape aren't ones that suffer from the idea that you can't lie. This seems a general problem I think, either it can be measured or it can't be UPB anyway and intentions can't be measured. And if it's immoral to make false statements then making an error is immoral and that's hopefully obviously non-sense. why should I be obligated to not make a statement. In case that I want to divert someone for some reasons? since that's not what I prefer to do anyway, so we have the subjecitve preference of others win vs. subjective preference of me and I don't see why I should be the one who's obliged to erm stop having my preferences.and even if its a negative prefernce. I could say I have a preference for people who write to me to not use the latters "a" and "o", but that doesn't mean people are morally obligated to stop using them, right?Also beacuse moral obligation inclued the right to use force to stop people, so are you willing to stop people from lying by (if necessary) shooting them?

I have no idea in regards to the first question, but in regards to beauty, have you listened to FDR1547 The Philosophy of Truth and Beauty ? You might enjoy that one

well, it doesn't matter if your definition is taking into account the preference of others (something, which,empirically we can not know anyway, except by peoples choice of actions). Also then you still couldn't lie to a murderer asking for directions (since being a murderer doesn't imply not prefering true statements anyway, heck not even being a liar implies not prefering true statements ) you also run into the problem that, once you start redefining behaviour as behaviour that is dependant on the preferences of others, then you already say that one person's personal preference is enough to create an obligation towards what another person should prefer, which clearly isn't UPB.That'd be like saying "you shouldn't correct people, who prefer to not be corrected" or somethingThe problem with "not making false statements" is that by trying to not make false statements you end up making false statements in the event that you don't prefer to make a true statement.To recap: If I prefer not to tell the truth to someone, can't make a true statement telling them that. I can also not make a false statement telling them that, without violating the "no false statement"-rule. So neither can be a universal preference, now I don't say that certain situations don't logically imply that either speaking the truth or telling a lie is necessarily preferable. But you can't make a general rule of which is preferable independant of circumstance.

It's taken me two days to figure out why comparing these two words bothers me. I now know. "Meaningless" is a subjective word, "illogical" is an objective word. That is, logic is a type of argumentation (actually another flavor of UPB), while meaning is the subjective classification of an object into a context. If a claim is logical, there is a mutually preferable system for proving that it is so. A claim may be meaningless to me, but very meaningful to you. As such, there is no mutually preferable system for determining meaningfulness. I do not believe the two words are comparable. To keep it short here a bit (mostly because I don't see much point or enjoyment in writing or answering lengthy posts). If we accept that, then you still haven't logically discarded the problem with the self-detonating statement in the case of "you should always tell the truth". Seein as you use the same method to discard the "never tell the truth" (correctly, imo, no disagreements here). So I don't see why you don't accept the very same method in that other instance. So is there a reason why the method is valid in one case but not in another? Also in regards to universality (and here I might differ from UPB, frankly ,I'm not sure, since I'm on and off about what it actually claims and what not, so I'm just gonna go with what I can reason out myself and we'll see if that works anyway, if that's allright with you) The reason you can't have ethics (or "the good") be non-universal is that it is defined as being preferable. So having it only preferable sometimes would mean that "that which is preferable" is sometimes "not-preferable", which obviously can't be. In any other aspect though, that isn't necessarily the case. And I don't see that the claim "it's always preferable to tell the truth" is itself trut, since both extremes of "always/never" tell the truth are not true in at least one instance (which means the always/never can't be true, so we're stuck with "sometimes" and have to go from there) Actually I'm kind of tempted to put together a short text on "the logic of lying", as I'm beginning to suspect there might be some people who have this idea, that it's somehow always better to tell the truth (a notion which I find unhealthy and also untrue). But that's not really relevant to the debate here anyway. I'm not sure those two points really clear all up (seeing as you have written quite a lot), but I think it all centers around that idea that all(or most) behaviour can/should be either "always or never" and outside certain few conditions or definitions I don't see how this is the case logically (given the reasons above). And on a side note: I too enjoyed our debate so far made me think quite a lot about this stuff and lead to some amazing (for my taste) insights, so thanks for the challenge

yes, well, as Kyle stated, I too think it would be much more productive to call in and ask directly, all that waiting for it to happen on the boards... you could have your answer in under a minute and I'd love to hear the debate for what consists as sufficient proof or not and what kind of evidence one would need etc.So, please do call in at some point, I do think a lot of people would be intersted in that.

well, do you have any other statistic that correlates another type of cause to becoming aggresive?

well, are there abusers that have been clearly shown to have not experienced any (or extremely limited and little) abuse?I'm sure you know that negatives can't be proven and that the burden of proof of the existence of such people rests on the shoulers of whoever makes the claim.

TronCat, I have no problem accepting that there are a lot of things influenced by genetic predisposition, that is then accentuated (or not) by environment (like intelligence through proper or improper nutrition or height).But the only relevant aspect in regards to the topic of a peaceful society (and the one which I understand Stef makes) is that in the absence of abuse there won't be any possibility of the person growing up to be abusive.I would use the metaphor (however correct or not that may be) that even if there's a strong genetic predisposition towards enlarged brain-regions that make anger/absuive behaviour more likely and/or more often to occur, in teh absence of any environment that nourishes those predispositions it would still be zero. In the same way, that if you had a plant which would grow to be 2 meters tall and you don't give it water and fertilizer it won't grow at all.So do you have any studies that show that there isn't a correlation between amount of abuse and people becoming more aggressive themselves (cause the whole bib-series is basically one huge proof for exactly that correlation, which so far, you haven't adressed or refuted)

You know, if you really think that all that's happening here is "thinking about it and post it in a forum" then you should probably not waste any time here.

To be a bit technical about it, so far there really isn't a contradiction in these two things. The person might have some weird motivation of wanting to be ruled by allpowerful people he hates, BUT I assume you meant something like this. 1. Hates big corp. (therefore we shouldn't give them our money)2. Wants obama to give them our money. So the result would be that he wants to give and not-give them our money simultaniously (an action, which can never exist/happen). By "true" I assume you mean that what I think of actually describes a thing other than the thought itself? Like saying "I'm currently staring at a giraffe" (false) "I'm curently typing a post"(true) "I'm currently thinking of an elephant" (true, but not really falsifiable) (or do you not ascribe true/false values to the last one?)Erm so, yes, they can exist in the sense, I can think of both concepts after another and the concepts actually pop up in my head insofar they "exist". The reason I'm using this word btw is that, if you don't say your thoughts "exist", then what do they do? I mean saying "My thoughts don't exist" seems kind of weird, since everyone experiences thoughts and thinking all the time, but if you can't call that "exist" what word do you use to describe the reality of thought? Not quite sure what you mean here. Both propositions exist as a)text on my screen b) thought/concept in my head when I think of them. And you don't need to assume any of those represent any reality outside of the thought/screen so far (given the lack of evidence for 1. and the fact that you can't proof a negative for 2.) Btw this whole "lets focus on contradictions" is something I'm currenty in the midst of trying out and seeing if it holds, so thanks for the debatte. The basic idea which I want to check is that exist=non-contadictory=true and non-exist=contradictory=false, whereas it gets a bit technical, when you use those concepts to describe thought/realworld-connections but so far I'd say even then it holds in saying, either there's a relation between the conepts one thinks up or there isn't but it can't be both. So for instance claiming "unicorns exist in the real world" implies knowledge(relation of the thought to the world outside) of unicorns (where there is none) so its basically claiming to have knowledge and not have it, which means the knowledge can't exist. Though if you have a better word than "exist" to use here I'm happy to replace that word with something else. I'm beginning to suspect I might be the only one who uses it that way, so it may be a good idea to change the word accordingly.

I didn't say that the rating put me off, I said that the critique of the methodology put me off (which also had good examples why it doesn't really apply much to reality). Might be I still get something out of the book, but I got some books lying around here that I already plan on reading, and considering the description of the method used and the cirtique I don't think I'd get that much out of it. (Also I do't see a point in reading a book which (if the criqtique holds) basically fails to arrive at anything useful for lack of proper method. In the same way I wouldn't read a mathematical proof if it's based on a faulty premise on page 2). (Again this doesn't mean that what I say about the book is necessarily so, but it puts it on the backburner of my "things I want to read in the near future"-list) Then I'm not sure what your point is tbh, I assumed you quoted the circumstance-study as an argument that a peaceful society won't sustain itself somehow (or is always on the verge). Could you maybe summarize what you intended to conclude then from your post in regards to the topic at hand? And to adress your last point: Aside from overtly using force and people not being able to escape or fight back, can you give me an example of people not participating in being exploited when they have the choice? (Or was that what you meant, people basically being basically exploited and captive slaves again?)

ok, I just checked out the book, some lenghty cirtique (under the 3 star ratings) of his methodology kind of makes me not want to read through the whole book though.But I still don't get your point then, if it all depends on the circumstance, how do you think could things ever reverse back unless someone willingly and knowingly and over time changes the circumstances in a way to make a huge scale open exlpoitation possible again?Because once exploitation is obvious its kind of hard to continue doing it wouldn't you say?

Well, logic just means non-contradiction (overly simply put). you don't need faith in it, since contradictions don't exist. In the same way you don't need faith that there isn't a god who might end the world at some point. But you're right, in that reason and evidence don't work with most people (you're incorrect insofar that this has been traced back to traumas though afaik). Which is exactly why it's most important to have a more peaceful child raising, so that the newer generations become more open to reason and logic (or don't have an automatic emotional flight or fight reaction whenever something they say is shown to be incorrect) What other reasons do you think there are then for people not responding to logic outside of traumas?