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"Example 3. Propositions p and p′ can't be both true is equivalent with p ∩ p = ∅. " Is is that a typo? Should be Example 3. Propositions p and p′ can't be both true is equivalent with p ∩ p' = ∅.

At first I was just nodding my head. But I kept thinking about it. The scientific method depends on empirical experiments, induction, which is just history on a small scale. Hypothesis, test, generalization. Physical experiments are not like social experiments, that's for sure. But theories are intended to universalize from history. Not this one in particular, however. Anyhow, theyre saying (ironically) "We homesteaded that word, you can't use it!" To which, I think the proper response is probably "Too late!"

Here's an anarchist FAQ that hates anarcho-capitalism so much they have two separate long sections proving that ancaps are not anarchists: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secFcon.html The issues for the authors of the FAQ seem to be hierarchy (it is always bad, can't be voluntary, might as well be rape) and socialism (which they define either as worker ownership of the means of production or worker ownership of their entire output, I'm not remembering). They claim that the individualist anarchists, such as Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, were socialists and opposed rent, interest, and wage labor. According to them, anarchists must be socialists (using that definition of socialism). This is an historical issue for them, not definitional or etymological. Proudhon was the first to embrace the epithet "anarchist" and he and all subsequent anarchists (until Rothbard) would agree on this, again according to the FAQ's authors. This seems sort of plausible in light of the fact that Spooner was a member of the first international. But it still has a funny smell. Here's s quote I found in Wikipedia, from Voltairine de Cleyre, who I think everyone agrees was an anarchist: "[The anarchist individualists] are firm in the idea that the system of employer and employed, buying and selling, banking, and all the other essential institutions of Commercialism, centred upon private property, are in themselves good, and are rendered vicious merely by the interference of the State." Wikipedia cites [Anarchism. Originally published in Free Society, 13 October 1901. Published in Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre, edited by Sharon Presley, SUNY Press 2005, p. 224.]

The topic of this thread is UPB ethics and aesthetics. Thank you for giving me your non-UPB derivation of morality, based on the foundation of self-ownership. I think I understand it, as it is admirably brief and clear. Since you seem to wish to avoid UPB, maybe you should start ignoring this thread? I will answer your other questions in the context of my quest to understand UPB, so be forewarned. When I mentioned moral prohibitions, I was thinking of UPB. For instance, "don't murder." I consider this to be a prohibition. It describes an action that a moral agent may not legitimately take. No enforcement mechanism, formal or informal, is necessarily implied. Another example: I have been in restrooms or gas stations where a sign was posted that said "smoking is prohibited on these premises." In that case, it was not a moral prohibition. Perhaps it was a legal prohibition, or simply a policy of the property owner. Presumably in that case the cops might have been called to enforce it if I had violated the prohibition too flagrantly, I am not sure. No. Maybe square4 would like to take a shot. I wanted to know why (I think) Stef would categorize it as aesthetic, and I did not understand how it flunked his version of universality. Apparently, you were not referring to his version of universality? I want to understand how UPB deals properly with his case, which seems unusual. If UPB says land must be treated the same as other ordinary objects, I'd like to see where that principle came from. It doesn't move. Land ownership has lots of little quirks from common law practice and from the odd nature of land, which I would know all about if I was a lawyer. Perhaps most of these are warpage cause by the state, but probably not all. Have you ever bought land? It's different. You can dig up all the rocks and soil on your land, until you have a mine shaft, but your land is still there. You can dig so deep that it turns into a volcano, and it's still your land. This seems unusual to me. If I take a car apart and sell the parts, I don't have a car any more. And mineral rights. If there is oil under my property, that complicates matters in a way not possible with refrigerators.Land is different from my body because my body is different from all other sorts of property, in that I cannot legitimately sell my body, at least, not the same way I can sell anything else and just cease any connection to my former property. If I sell my body, my consciousness must either go with my body or cease. That is not the case when I sell my land.

I still managed to misinterpret you. Fair enough. Well, the different strategies accomplish different goals. I think it would be valuable for me to understand UPB so that if I fully agree, I can explain it to others, if I have minor disagreements I could make helpful suggestions to fix the problems I found, or if I thought it was a hopeless failure, I could make that clear and start looking for other options. Stef has enough credibility that I was not willing to dismiss him out of hand, but not so much credibility that I am willing to just take his word for it. I want to figure it out. No. I'm not sure how to make it more clear. Each of the moral propositions that pass the UPB tests prohibits some behavior. Stef is careful to avoid committing to any specific enforcement mechanism, punishment, etc., other than to defend the idea of self-defense. Or at least, that is how I am remembering it. According to UPB, murder is prohibited to moral agents. Right? If you are saying, every sort of moral prohibition can be interpreted as a violation of a property right, I agree. If you are saying, everyone knows this, and agrees that property rights are morally justified and they are willing to think of morality in these terms, I do not agree. I am not willing to just ignore those who consider the ordinary conception of property rights to be flawed and in need of justification, I want to give them a convincing answer. So a universalizable proposition might not qualify for the ethics category, but if it cannot be universalized, it definitely fails to qualify. That is clear. So, apparently UPB concludes that you own the effects of your actions, period, full stop, no exceptions? Is this one of the axioms derived from pure argument? Where did it come from?On page 76 Stef wrote: He makes a conclusion, but leaves out the explanation. Also, he is using "own" in an unusual way. By committing murder or theft, we now "own" something, but what we own is not a physical object in reality, not the body of our victim or the loot in our bag, but responsibility for an historical truth. So if I smash a hole in your wall, I don't own the hole that I have made, in the sense that I can control it or sell it. I own the hole in the metaphysical sense that I am responsible for it, not that I possess or control it legitimately. So the hole is an effect of my actions that I *do not* own in the strictly commonplace sense of ownership. So, why shouldn't owning too much land also qualify as an exception to his principle? Does this break universality? I've been interpreting Stef's (rather strong) version of universality to mean the proposition must apply to all moral agents, at all times, in all places, but not necessarily in all circumstances. (It is the difference in circumstances that differentiates between murder and killing in self-defense, for instance.) So square4 can claim that his proposition applies to all persons, all places, all times, what is the problem?Why shouldn't we treat land differently from other property, since in many ways it actually is different? Or perhaps we could also prohibit ownership of "too much" of anything? That seems a bit ridiculous, but which principle of UPB prevents it, which test does it fail? So in various places, Stef draws the line between ethics and aesthetics using enforceability, use of violence, and avoidability. Does that mean they all agree on where the line is drawn, in all cases?

Thanks for answering. Last time I called in my connection went flakey and it wasted Stef's time and mine. That's kind of an excuse. Conversing with Stef on air makes me tense.

I like this, but UPB is supposed to use logic to justify property along with prohibitions against murder, etc., not use property to justify prohibitions against murder, etc. So this explains the conclusions of UPB, but doesn't quite do what Stef wants UPB to do. So whether or not we categorize it as ethics or aesthetics, it flunks universality. Yeah, I quoted some of that in the original post, and reviewed pg 48-52 before that. Maybe it's something in my history. Maybe I'm just not that intelligent. Maybe I am so accustomed to a certain way of thinking, that it's hard to think differently."Non-violent actions by their very nature are avoidable." Venn diagram, small circle (non-violence) inside large circle (avoidable)."Ethics is the subset of UPB which deals with inflicted behaviour, or the use of violence." Does the "or" indicate that inflicted behavior and violence are different and are to be combined (ethics = inflicted behavior + violence, inflicted != violence), or is it a rhetorical flourish, clarifying that (inflicted behavior = violence)?"In general, we will use the term aesthetics to refer to non-enforceable preferences – universal orpersonal – while ethics or morality will refer to enforceable preferences." Are "non-enforceable preferences" preferences that can be realized without force, or preferences you are prohibited from enforcing?"It is universally preferable (i.e. required) to use the scientific method to validate physical theories, but we cannot use force to inflict the scientific method on those who do not use it, since not using the scientific method is not a violent action." Implying that we can inflict something (presumably restitution, or punishment, or at least self-defense/enforcement) on people who use violence, right?

I like your statement, but did you base it on something from the UPB book, or is this something else? And now we need to distinguish between objective and subjective. Is it universlaizability? Stef pointed out several examples of APAs (aesthetically positive actions, but basically means universalizable aesthetics, e.g. "Be on time"). The objectivity Stef is trying for consists of facts implied logically from logic itself, plus norms and principles implied by the act of arguing. Is this answer based on the UPB book, or are you rolling your own? It's not that I don't care what you think, but that I've been trying to figure out UPB, and I want to know whether I'm getting the Stef-approved version or a hybrid. There is a confusing discussion of self-defense on page 87, but I don't think I can squeeze out an interpretation that matches what you wrote. I'm trying to get people to help me understand the book, which I find confusing. Do you have an answer to my question about why we categorize square4’s proposition as aesthetics, or do you just want to shame me?I think I can answer why we categorize "don't murder" as ethics. If someone shoots me, I can't choose to avoid it. (I might survive the attempted murder by running away if I am lucky, but somehow that isn't the kind of avoidance that matters.) And we categorize "don't be late" as APA because if someone inflicts their lateness on me, I can just stop associating with that person. Am I on the right track? But I do not have a good grip on the principle, so that I can confidently tell square4 why his proposal doesn't qualify as ethics.

Seems to me there is a bit of overlap, since I can run away from all the above. So we moved from trying to understand the distinction between ethics and aesthetics to trying to understand the distinction between defense and whatever that other stuff is that is not defense but protects me from the crashing bore.Do you agree with me that Square4's proposal is aesthetics? Can you explain why it is not ethics?

I might be able to avoid a robbery or murder attempt without using violence, but that doesn't mean we should categorize robbery or murder as aesthetics. Is it proportionality? I don't remember Stef discussing it this way, but his ethical violations all have in common the possibility of defensive violence. Is that somehow the real criterion, that if violence is an appropriate proportionate response to the violation, the rule is part of ethics, if the violation does not justify a violent response, it is aesthetics? This makes some sense, but in this context it seems like begging the question, since UPB is supposed to justify all this, not depend on some prior moral concept about proportionality of responses. hmmm...

I'd love to read your version. The two examples you give are not close to the boundary between morality and aesthetics. Can you think of examples that illustrate bindingness more clearly? "Binding" is not immediately more clear than "avoidable", at least for me. When I think of examples of using that word, I think of binding promises, which are enforcible by a court, or at least backed up by some serious consequence. Stef uses it differently in his book, from context he seems to mean something like "undeniable" or "logically required."This discussion comes from a thread where Square4 is arguing for a moral proposition about not owning or controlling more than a proportionate area of land, and I objected that I thought his proposition qualifies as aesthetics, not ethics, but I was not able to explain clearly because, well, I am not sure I understand how Stef draws that line. I think I can predict the result in that case, but I can't explain how we would determine whether some proposition is ethics or aesthetics. What is it about Square4's proposal that is avoidable or not inflicted or not binding or whatever? What does it mean in the context of his proposal "it is not UPB to own/control more than a proportionate amount of land?" Yeah, Stef mentions stuff like that in the book, but I never figured out how he wants to deal with it. He mentions several examples, like if someone invites you to stand next to a cliff so he can push you off, or someone who lives thousands of miles away threatening to kill you if you come close, or a guy who leaves his wallet on a park bench, etc. So, if I am at a party and someone is boring me with a shaggy dog story, and I say "you're boring, go away" but he just keeps on yammering, should we categorize that as ethics, because I said "no" but he didn't stop? I am tantalizingly close to understanding what you wrote, but can't quite get there. If it has to do with internal inconsistency, why not just go ahead and use the UPB tests to reject it on those grounds, rather than categorizing it as aesthetics and rejecting it without even bothering to do the tests? Some Aesthetic propositions also can be universalized, but because of avoidability or inflictedness, they do not get treated as part of morality. Violating them is annoying, but not evil.If "nothing is inflicted" is the critical fact, Stef should have talked about that more. And I'm not sure it is much clearer to me, as some violations of APA or even my personal preferences seem like "inflictions" to me, although I can usually avoid them by running away. Of course, I can run away from robbers just like I can run away from social torture, the difference being a robber might injure me for running away, while a bore usually would not. Your distinction is admirably clear, concrete, and credible. Unfortunately, it does not match up with what Stef wrote in the UPB book. Also, given his purpose in writing the book, he could not use property rights to define a critical distinction that he later uses as part of his argument to justify property rights. That would be "begging the question."

My bandwidth is too unreliable.

In UPB, the line between ethics and aesthetics is important, but for me it is hard to understand. Violence, consent, and maybe other factors combine into avoidability? Two issues are unclear. How precisely do we draw the line between ethics and aesthetics? And how does this distinction connect to the derivation of UPB? Pages 48-52 discuss this topic, but I have read it many times and still feel confused. Can someone help me make sense of this? Stef's discussion of avoidance seems to go to great length to show that the line is fuzzy, there are cases where someone is the victim of violence but they could have reasonably avoided it. He gives concrete examples, but does not explain where the line is drawn, or why. I could understand more easily if the line involved consent or violence. Consent mostly works, as if you don't consent to something in the category of aesthetics, you can opt out. You can't opt out of violence if you are the victim of assault, robbery, etc. OTOH, I can easily imagine someone trying to elevate aesthetics to ethics, just by shrieking "I do not consent to this bridge party!" Violence also works, except it is a bit vague in cases of sneak-thievery or fraud, where deception replaces physical violence.In any case, whichever concept we use to distinguish between ethics and aesthetics, what is the justification? How does it connect to the derivation of UPB from the prerequisite norms and concepts of debate? If we select one of these concepts without reference to the derivation, that would be begging the question. Is nonviolence a normative prerequisite of argument, and how does that translate into "violence is categorized as ethics?"

If we are including untenable inaccessible land, maybe we should include the surface of the Moon and Mars? Yeah, I am not optimistic. But maybe I will. It's avoidable so long as someone will sell you some. And let's face it, some people live their whole lives without even considering buying land. How is not owning or controlling a proportionate share of land unavoidable? I'm not clear what you mean. Is the land thing an example? Are there others? Makes a bit more sense, still aesthetics. How can you be sure I not controlling more than one body?

I'm not sure you've convinced me it is feasible. I'm not sure what land qualifies, or how to make the calculation of what the limit should be. I notice you are not pursuing the "avoidable" issue. I don't know what you mean. If I own an apartment building, do I have exclusive control over the land where it is located, assuming I got it by buying it? Is it ownership the proposition prohibits, or control, or exclusivity? Is an apartment building shared by your standard or not? If I put apartment buildings on all my land, does your proposal limit me or not? What about "state owned" land, land owned by corporations or other groups, etc.?Maybe we should toss out the proportionality angle, and just put a completely arbitrary limit on maximum land ownership. Would that pass the UPB tests? "no one may own more than one square inch of land."How about that?

I am assuming your communist is one lone dissenter in an ancap society. So is he so principled that he would rather start a violent revolution (by himself) than pay for something, or is he just so stupid he can't understand the concept of buying land? Perhaps it would be contradictory for me to pay the USG to allow me to secede, but I would do it if I thought they would really stick to the bargain. Is the point really so obscure? In ancapistan, the communist can do most of the things he can do currently (rebel, persuade, emigrate, or put up with the pain, minus one option, bribe a congressman) plus one additional option, which is, he could buy his way out. If he wants to start a commune, he could buy some land, and the ancaps will leave him alone after that. Don't you think Marx would have been happy to use some of Engels's money to buy a little communist utopia? Buy the land and "liberate" it. Out-produce the capitalists, recruit all their workers, buy more land. Lather, rinse, repeat until you have achieved world revolution without spilling a drop of blood. Or until it all falls apart. Nope.

Yes, I suppose the point has nothing to do with whether the proposal really makes sense or not, just does it pass the tests, and if so, does that create some sort of contradiction? Well, as long as we are quibbling, now I can own the entire planet Earth, so long as it all qualifies as "shared." And I still have a problem with avoidability. APAs confuse and bore me, so I mostly don't think about them. Maybe it would be simpler to say they are about good manners and reciprocity.

Am I "people" in this case?I think when it actually came down to it, neighbours would know about each other and work something out. The first time they encountered each other, there would be strife, dispute. Maybe they would seek arbitration, or maybe they'd fight it out. Eventually they'd find some workable compromise. Should we, sitting in our armchairs, necessarily be able to predict what solution would satisfy them? I am reminded of a fascinating book by Robert Ellickson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ellickson) titled "Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes". The author went out and compared the armchair predictions of economists to the actual experience of disputes between cattle ranchers and farmers in a particular place. If I remember correctly (it's been a while), he found that the law on the books specified one thing, but that what actually happened in most cases was different, that an informal system had been worked out. Elinor Ostrom is famous for studying similar things, informal means of managing common resources (like fisheries), but I've never laid hands on her book, so I'm pretty ignorant about the details. That's pretty unsatisfying to us system builders and universal moralists, and I have digressed from the point of your question. Let me see if I can find my way back. Here's the difference I see. Most statists you describe haven't thought about it, and might reject the "rulers own you and your output" premise underlying their claims if it is pointed out to them. The ancaps you're talking to have thought about private property, and they're pretty certain that private property is non-negotiable and fundamental. Their utopia is set up in a certain way, and people who have incompatible ideologies need to figure out what's up. They also are more flexible than the statists, in that your communist is able to buy some land and start a commune and no one will come on his land and try to stop him. And if communism is really superior, it can spread and take over. The statists are not offering any such olive branch/booby prize. So, if it's an ancap society, I'd explain to them that their beliefs are incompatible with the way things run around here, and he needs to save up some money or borrow some or get a rich benefactor and buy some land to start a different society. Or leave, or persuade everyone, or adapt. I'd say, check the dictionary, I don't think "consensus" means what you think it does. If the consent of the governed concerns you, you need a reasonable method that dissenters can use to opt out or secede. This question does not seem serious. If the question is, how do we justify property rights in land, Stef and a lot of the people on this forum would point at UPB. I would point to the fact that "drawing some lines" is less confusing than having no lines whatever, and in fact every society is going to "draw some lines" somehow. In every society, someone will decide where the lines are and what happens within these lines or those, it's just a question of "who decides?" and "how does it change?" The communist you describe also draws lines, he just has a different rule for what entitles him to change the lines or change who is in charge within a set of lines. He just doesn't want to call it private property, to emphasize some minor differences. My opinion is, this is just confusing. If property is theft, then possession is theft, unless you twist the ordinary meaning of these words into something much more difficult for a normal person to understand. It is jargon to be invoked while giving the secret handshake to fellow cultists, not helpful for communicating clearly.In my ideal world, people with different ideas about how to run society could run experiments and those that attracted attention by making people more happy, creative, and productive would expand, and those that starved people or made them miserable would contract. People would choose from different options and try to innovate new options. And I am not sure the process would ever end. This is all too consequentialist to get approval from Stef, I think.

I think it boils down to "how do you settle disputes?" The implicit answers I was hearing were,"don't really need rules when you've got the NAP, and we deal with those who disagree the same way as everyone else, if they violate the NAP we defend ourselves."I think that these answers are a bit abstract, as in, I don't feel like arguing against them, but I also don't understand what they mean very well. OTOH, maybe it's a good idea to keep it abstract, and fill in the details when it becomes practical.

Define "use". Land is not a commodity, where one unit can costlessly replace any other. Deserts are not like mountains are not like valleys, etc. Many land uses involve a large number of people sharing or benefiting from the land use, e.g. apartment buildings, office buildings, highways, parks, factories. Actually, almost all land uses create a shared benefit. Do all these objections reflect on the proposition, or does UPB fail by not addressing them? I can, of course, fall back on my standard objection, that probably Stef would claim your proposal qualifies as aesthetics rather than ethics. So, why does "don't steal" qualify as ethics, but this proportionality idea does not? Maybe "don't steal" should not qualify. I could pretty much guarantee that I never get mugged or have my pocket picked if I hire a troop of bodyguards to go everywhere with me. I can avoid having customers shoplift in my store by hiring a bunch of security personnel to follow customers around and keep an eye on them. Not really practical... But how do we draw the "avoidability" line? Doesn't sound feasible. But does UPB require feasibility? I think universality requires that the scope includes the universe. Maybe for practical purposes we could limit it to planet Earth, but definitely not a room. Stef rejects all unchosen positive obligations, perhaps for this very reason. A quick search of the text doesn't show me where this comes from, either he does it without using the word "obligation" or I picked it up somewhere else. Maybe someone can help me out? I think we could probably quibble with the meaning of the NAP, that it excludes unconscious actions. But you may be onto something. I've always had a funny feeling about the coma test. What is the difference, for our purposes, between a toddler and a coma victim, other than that a toddler can move her/his body? If a coma victim is not excused from the limitations of morality, why should a toddler be excused (or an Alzheimer's victim, or a lunatic, etc.)? (Or, same thing, if a toddler is excused, why not excuse a coma victim?) If a coma victim is excused, then the coma test is B.S. [added later] Here's a quote from page 65 of the UPB book that I hope speak to UPB requiring deasibility. (I say "hope" because the context doesn't make it perfectly clear that my interpretation applies.)

Good point. I think I can still use the "avoidable" issue though. Mr. Burns's mansion is a lot more avoidable than "the state". Still, property is sort of a blank check. I think that only works in the simple cases, where it's "always do this" or "never do this". Not sure I can back that up. The fact that this is constantly changing, and in fact changes as a result of each person's consumption (and birth and death), makes this impossible. Does that disqualify it? Does UPB need a separate test to reject rules that are simply infeasible? Nope, that breaks universality. And we'd better include any intelligent space aliens in our calculations. But it's not definite. Even conceptually, there are undiscovered resources, subjective valuations, and fluctuations due to consumption, spoilage, changes in production, technological innovation, etc. It's a mess. I was thinking more about the labor that is expended keeping him alive.Your statement is an argument against ever using the coma test, not an argument for this proposition passing the test. Pretty much everything the man in a coma does is like a falling rock, so if that was an excuse nothing would ever fail the test, would it? Stef's idea is, the man in a coma is not excused from morality, so propositions that categorize coma victims as evil get rejected. OTOH, UPB does excuse infants from morality, I think. That seems a bit inconsistent. I think you missed my point. If we can promote anything to the category of ethics just by enforcing it, UPB becomes nonsense. Does UPB rule that out somehow? Maybe if I really understood the relevance of avoidability I'd know.

I think the apples were tossed in just to make the 2 guys test more clear, which doesn't work, because a) nothing universal about it and b) it's no longer the same moral principle Square4 originally proposed. Square4 was asking about UPB. UPB is about morality, it does not specifically get into economics. "Don't steal" gets approved because it passes the UPB tests, not because it has beneficial economic implications. We can use the beneficial economic implications as additional evidence in favour, I suppose, but many moral principles do not have any obvious economic dimension. Perhaps you are suggesting that UPB should be expanded to have some special provisions for economic proposals. I don't think this would be an improvement.Perhaps you want to discuss economic aspects of Square4's proposal. That might be interesting, but does not respond to Square4's question and intent. Square4 is looking for a flaw in UPB. A similar approach would be to ask whether some form of the communist credo "from each according to ability, to each according to need" might pass the UPB tests. This would be a serious blow to UPB, not merely because it is economic nonsense, but because then UPB would be approving moral propositions that contradict each other, and logical consistency is one of the primary goals of UPB.You do raise an important issue, though, "what is forced and what is a choice." I think this is what Stef is getting at when he uses "avoidability" to distinguish between ethics and aesthetics. This is not totally clear to me. He discusses this in the book, but I am not really sure what the justification is or how to apply the concept in each case. UPB seems to ignore voluntary contractual interaction, so long as there are no disputes. It is all about exceptions, situations where one person does the choosing for both, imposes a decision on the other, which the other cannot avoid or consent to. So should we look at Square4's proposal as imposing a system on everyone, or as a claim that someone violating the principle is imposing on others?Was I too hasty claiming it fails the avoidability issue? By making it an enforceable rule, violators can no longer avoid? On one hand, if we use this as a model, we can promote any issue to the category of ethics just by making a rule enforceable. That is, if there is not an enforceable rule about egalitarianism, how much I consume is not part of ethics. Can the enforcement satisfy unavoidability? I wish I could say this more clearly, I am confusing myself and so I wonder if anyone reading this has a clue what I am trying to say.Another example. Does "Don't smoke pot" pass the UPB tests? I see Stef as dismissing this as aesthetics, as anyone who doesn't want to smoke pot is able to avoid smoking pot. If I take my hybrid Square4 approach, "don't smoke pot" gets promoted to the category of ethics *because* there is an agency enforcing the rule, and now some people cannot avoid the enforcement. But in that case, maybe the proposition needs to mention the enforcement, became "enforce the rule 'don't smoke pot'"? Why does this formulation fail the UPB tests?This would be a problem for UPB, as we could replace 'don't smoke pot' with pretty much anything. Fails the coma test?We could criticize it for too much abstractness, that the rule depends too much on interpretation of the words of the rule, which are not specified. But this is a general problem for UPB. "Don't murder." Where is the line between murder, accidental killing, and assisted suicide? Not specified. "Don't steal." Different societies have different rules of property (what is unowned, how can property be transferred, when can property be considered to have been abandoned, etc.), so what counts as stealing? All these concepts have some wiggle room. How much wiggle room is too much?

So does that mean they are not moral questions? If so, should property rights be tossed out of UPB? If it can be formulated as a moral proposition, it qualifies for the UPB tests. Stef thinks "don't steal" qualifies. I think Square4's "don't consume more than your proportional share does not. Am I playing fair? All these are interesting questions, but not relevant to the question Square4 is asking, does his proposition pass the UPB test, and if not, why not? Square4's use of the two apples has thrown us off. I think he really intended to ask, can his egalitarian principle pass the "2 guys in a room" test of UPB. He threw in the apples to make it concrete, perhaps, but confused the issue by making it too concrete and non-universal. Square4 wants to formulate a moral proposition like "no one should consume more than their proportional fair share of scarce resources" and submit it to the UPB tests. I claim UPB would categorize it as aesthetics, not ethics. Am I right or wrong?It would definitely pass the 2 guys test. But it's "opposite" (Don't consume your fair share of scarce resources) would also. Or would the "opposite" be "consume more than your fair share of scarce resources" or "consume less than your fair share of resources" or even "consume whatever you will"? Would it pass the coma test? Someone in a coma uses a lot of resources. What is their proportional fair share?

The two apples situation sounds more like strict egalitarianism than economics. Square4 should probably ask, why is the ordinary property rights issue part of ethics (not avoidable) but egalitarianism isn't?How about a really silly example, like the moral principle "everyone ought to commit suicide." Does that pass or fail?

The first two lists contain assumptions Stef derives from the act of arguing. The last list has some conclusions. How does Stef derive the tests and categories of UPB from these assumptions? Are there additional assumptions? Avoidability draws the line between ethics and aesthetics, why is that? What does it really even mean? What do you think of this analogy? X sees a mugger rob someone, pulls a gun and shoots the robber as the robber runs away. Y sees a jogger running down the street and shoots him. Are we treating X and Y differently if we punish Y but thank X? Does that break universality, or is that simply 2 different outcomes of the same rule in different circumstances? "Obey state laws" is not a moral proposition according to UPB, it lacks the quality of unavoidability. Also, it is vague. Each of the laws to which it refers would need to be formulated as moral propositions and tested on their own. Or does it just mean, "obey the rulers, whether or not their commands are moral"? I see the parallel. Everyone must obey the rule, but the rule categorizes persons or things according to a scheme or circumstance (trading or voting) that is not part of the rule itself. Maybe we are interpreting those words differently. I've lost the context, don't know how to answer. Maybe I was saying that one proposition that does not qualify somehow may be edited/polished by someone who understand the intent until it does qualify? This does not qualify as a moral proposition under UPB, due to lacking unavoidability. I think this is very clever, though. Reformulate this with some unavoidability and Stef will be squirming. Noesis started an incredibly long thread on that topic. I would give a link but then my ipad would probably eat this post. In another post in this thread I outlined my understanding of the moral nihilism idea in the context of UPB. As for a *well organized* derivation of UPB, good luck. I've never seen one.