TDB

What sort of evidence would I need to show you to convince you otherwise? Maybe some books on biases and cognitive science? Not (religion = theism)Disproof by counterexample: Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism.

Guilty as charged. I should've waited to post, sorry. Let me try to be a bit more empathetic. If I summarize your point this way, "UPB is basically the NAP", is that reasonably accurate?That leaves out the objective basis or justification for the NAP. Plenty of people have endorsed the NAP without providing that.

Stef's not interested in opinions. You are thinking of "consent." Or possibly "permission." Preference is an ordering of choices. The rape victim need not make a choice in order to be raped. Preferring rape to death would not make it lovemaking. Also, we are discussing "preferable" not preference. It sneaks in as part of "if you want X it is preferable for you to do Y." This threw me off for a long time. perhaps you are very fortunate, or perhaps your self has not explained it in a way that Stef would recognize. Maybe you can explain it all to me.

Well then, do not use it. If you want to map reality, first reality should exist.

A friend of mine has gotten religion and has been sending me "evidence" about the shroud of Turin. I've been trying to figure out what sort of evidence he could give me that would actually change my mind. It seems a lot like historical evidence for a square circle. But this also shows that I am not being rational about it. I became an atheist at age 14, and I did not have particularly good reasons or philosophical methods to apply to the idea. On a slightly different tack, Buddhism is a religion, and Taoism, but involve no gods. Can an atheist have a religion? How do you draw the line? Can an atheist be a conscientious objector on purely philosophical grounds? Could we get some tax immunity by claiming atheism as a religion? There are some prosocial aspects of religion (community, mutual aid, trust), how can an atheist find an equivalent?

And get rid of "preferable," I find it so confusing. This is just another way of saying, are you sure you accept all the steps deriving UPB? I think you're just asking for a formalized reiteration. If there's a problem with universality, it should have showed up sooner. Or put it another way, provide one credible example of a moral principle that breaks universality and you've broken UPB. Gordon's critique tried, but failed to understand. His counterexample was "one ought to respect one's parents." But this is not a counterexample because for it to be true it must be true when applied to every person as the "one." The moral agent is always the subject, universality doesn't require us to apply it to the objects of the sentence. Why combine them? Or by combine, do you just mean their union can be treated as a single theory? Why bother? Either moral nihilism is a moral principle eligible for the UPB test or it is a meta principle, just a claim that the whole UPB project is pointless. If it is a moral principle, it is incorporated by testing. If it fails the test, it does nothing to UPB and is false. If it passes the test, it does nothing to UPB, because it does not prohibit anything, so there is no way to violate it, it neither adds nor subtracts any behaviours. If it is a meta-principle, the entire derivation of UpB stands as a refutation of moral nihilism.

Conditional isn't universal, right? For Stef, universal means it applies to everyone everywhere for all time.Actually, if you go along with his refutation of unconditional obligations, the same works for conditional obligations, that is, one would need to be fulfilling them every instant, to the exclusion of all else. A person can fulfill an infinite number of negative obligations at the same time while also doing something else, but could never fulfill a universal positive obligation, because you have to stop to eat or sleep. Letting poor people off the hook doesn't make this doable for rich people. So I think what you really want to do is understand and criticize Stef's derivation of his version of strong universality. At first it seems like this ought to be easy, because no one takes universality to the lengths that Stef does, it almost qualifies as argumentum ad absurdum, as in, if that is the conclusion, there's got to be something wrong with the argument. I'm not sure it is really so easy.I don't think Stef actually argues for his interpretation of universality in the UPB book. I've managed to come up with two attempts at justifying it:1) positive and negative obligations are otherwise the same. Negative obligations apply at all times, there is never a split-second where violating a negative obligation is justifiable as UPB. So there is never an instant where a positive obligation is not in effect.2) strong universality comes from the abstractness of the act of argument. When I claim a statement is true, unless the statement contains references to contingent truths ("it is eight o'clock now") it is true without regard to who is saying it, when it was said, or where. If the argument succeeds here, now, when I say it, it will succeed in other times and places, coming out of other mouths. So it will be true with respect to all persons, times, and places unless it refers to specific persons, times or places. So any moral principle we can express in this abstract way inherits strong universality.A good way to attack it would be to come up with a strong counterexample, a moral principle that applied to only a subset of moral agents, or applied differently to different subsets of moral agents. When I try to do this, I only come up with ridiculously bad examples, but this may have to do with the psychological framing. That depends on the derivation of UPB, not of NAP. I've always suspected it has to so with the distinction between ethics and aesthetics being defined by avoidance, but I can't quite grab it. This jargon also annoys me. My preferred answer would be, you cannot justify violating the standard without contradicting yourself. Maybe you could hint at the tweaks? I hope I can say this in a sympathetic way, but I don't think you understand Stef's idea well enough to fix it. My sympathy comes from wanting to understand Stef's idea well enough to explain it to someone simply or fix it if it needs fixing or abandon it if it is hopeless. I've spent a lot of time trying to understand what UPB is and how Stef thinks it can be derived, but I have failed. I think I have a good grip on what it is, but I can't quite grok the derivation. Maybe smaller than you think. I very much like the idea of swapping "justifiable" for "preferable." I think that every reference to preference in the UPB book confuses the reader with jargon. I am in a small minority around here, however. UPB, if it succeeds, distinguishes between behaviors that violate justified moral principles and behaviors that conform to justified moral principles, there is no ordering of choices as preference would imply. It's all "If you want X then it is preferable that you do Y," but then that makes my head hurt. OTOH I don't think we can call it justified or justifiable, since moral behaviour is only indirectly justified, in that it lacks self-contradictions. Okay, I am overthinking it again.

That page helped me considerably the first time I read it. It didn't give me all the answers I wanted. I wanted to know what UPB is, how it was derived, and how it is applied. It took me a long time to get to where I think I can describe what UPB is, I am still pretty fuzzy on derivation. That's pretty funny, but wrong. If you give me permission to do it to you, it doesn't need to be universalizable. So, for instance, a doctor can operate on you.

This is better from our perspective also, though difficult. I think it would be very difficult to prevent a violent revolution from producing a new state. Reminds me of a quote, something about, "use good means and the ends take care of themselves."I do ink this is a challenge. Some LEOs can be convinced, but they have a hard time keeping their jobs after that. And removing the good apples increases the proportion of bad apples.

Or, rules that everyone can obey at the same time without logical contradictions.

"A well-known example of mutualism is the relationship between ungulates (such as Bovines) and bacteria within their intestines. The ungulates benefit from the cellulase produced by the bacteria, which facilitates digestion; the bacteria benefit from having a stable supply of nutrients in the host environment." (mutualism, wikipedia) Are we the bovines or the bacteria?

Carlos Morales has been on freetalklive a couple of times, former employee of Texas child protective services. He has some horrifying stats about how kids in foster homes are 6 times more likely to die , stuff like that. http://schoolsucksproject.com/podcast-267a-carlos-morales-truth-comfort-and-child-protective-services-2014-liberty-forum-interview/

I hear your frustration. We are in a bad situation and every path looks difficult. It's hard to understand why other people don't get it.

What sort of life changes are you thinking of?When I first began thinking of myself as a libertarian, I thought, "now I should convince everyone to agree with me and we will elect smart people who will fix things." I tried that, and continued to learn, and realized that was not going to work, so I switched to "I should convince everyone and we will reform the system so it isn't so broken." That did not work so well, but I continued learning. I noticed things like PGP, BitTorrent, and bitcoin. These changed the world in important and largely positive ways, but they were done by one person, or small groups of persons, who did not ask permission, or convince anyone in advance, or make arguments. If they had required agreement from more than a handful of people, their projects never would have existed. They changed the world first, and let people's ideas and opinions catch up later. So that is the sort of thing I am looking for now, something where I can just do something and it is done. If by some bizarre miraculous accident I gained some political power, I would not repeal all the stupid laws or defund all the useless bureaucracies. I would just make it possible for some small region to gain immunity from outside laws. Let the people who are frightened of terrorism and economic change do what they have been doing, let people who want to try something new have their own Hong Kong. During the 50s and 60s, people would escape from mainland China to go to Hong Kong, to escape the tyranny and poverty. Hong Kong was a great annoyance to the Chinese political leaders, because it was a nearly deserted fishing village when the British took it over, and was still comparable to the Chinese mainland in the 40s. But people overcame their propagandized suspicion of the British and voted with their feet. I think the existence of Hong Kong restrained the Chinese government, and helped the reforms of the late 70s to survive. Not to mention how the people of Hong Kong prospered.The real enemies of freedom are the intolerant ideas in people's minds. I am looking for ways to encourage tolerance of experiments. Once people see something works, they stop objecting to it. So the challenge is to be allowed to show them what works and what doesn't. That sounds a bit condescending. So they no longer enjoy discussing politics with you? Sounds like fun.

I don't think it is a side issue. You may persuade me that your approach is superior, but it isn't a side issue. I have difficultly expressing why I think that is so, sorry. I may be projecting my own attitudes here. Stef's move eliminating APA and ANA both simplifies the analysis and departs from conventional thinking about morality. In ordinary language, moral questions are not restricted to violent actions, violent self-defense, and violent enforcement of rules. I am torn because I believe that violence deserves it's own category, that it is equivocation to include interpersonal violence and pot smoking in the same category. Perhaps he could achieve this by making subcategories, rather than just eliminating pot smoking from morality.I sympathize in that I feel that readers of the UPB book must construct a jigsaw puzzle out of many pieces, some of which are missing, some of which do not belong. I say "feel" because as my puzzle construction proceeds, I sometimes find pieces that I thought were missing, or find a place for pieces I thought mismatched. So, in effect we must construct our own system, based on ideas from the book, and revise until it makes sense. I think you have made a guess about how the complete puzzle will look, but you are slightly wrong, and it is leading you to concentrate effort on trying to match pieces that don't match. Sorry if that is too metaphorical. It is another way of saying that propositions that categorize actors into different groups are not moral propositions. I think I am agreeing? We are still allowed to categorize persons when they are the object of a moral agent's action. But the moral agent making the decision and taking the relevant action is just a moral agent, discrimination between different sorts of moral agents doesn't work. I'm not sure I agree, because the fist swinging example doesn't work. If we use UPB, your formulation of the fist swinging moral proposition fails as a moral proposition. That doesn't mean that I may bash your nose at will, it just means the moral proposition relevant to my fist and your nose is a different one, one that passes all the tests. In other words, we should either abandon UPB entirely, or salvage some interesting bits and combine them with something else. I won't be ready for this until I am sure I understand UPB properly, and believe it is so flawed it cannot be fixed on its own terms. That is, I would write the definitive critique, which would include a simple summary of UPB that Stef would accept as accurate, and an analysis of what we would need to do to make it work, and why that is impossible. What you are suggesting jumps the gun, because although you seem confident you have found an important idea that is missing from UPB, you have not convinced me that you understand UPB on its own terms. You of course are free to do as you like, but I am more interested in finishing what I started. I'm not sure which one is a bigger commitment, a more efficient use of our time. I may be overthinking this, or you may be using the jargon better than me. I would never in ordinary speech have thought of rape as an enforceable preference or enforced preference, but a violent act. I was under the impression that there is some ambiguity in Stef's usage in some places. But a quick search does not provide any examples, so I am ;probably wrong. Well, certainly not APA, ANA, or neutral. I noted this criticism and quoted labmath2 in the section about punishment, enforcement, and self-defense of my FAQ http://brimpossible.blogspot.com/2014/05/upb-faq-02.html. That's true. But by analyzing at the level of moral propositions, Stef side-steps (side-Stefs?) the is-ought problem. He doesn't make a big deal of it, so maybe I have misinterpreted this, but one way of looking at UPB is a process that evaluates only "is" statements about moral propositions. Or at least, that may be the goal, undermined perhaps by the derivation of some of the concepts (for example, separating violence from non-violence - did that beg the question a bit, sneak in some normative content?). Maybe someone else can help us out if I am wrong.

It seems depressing because your mind is still caught up in the old paradigm, "to change the world, you must take political action." You've learned that political action is unlikely to help you achieve what you want, and you feel denied, powerless. But you've only learned half of the secret, at best. You've learned that you've been tricked and the people around you have been tricked, but you haven't yet mastered the truth. The truth is not that you are helpless, the truth is you have to take a different path and apply some creativity in order to make a difference. The truth is it won't be easy, but neither is it impossible. If we were helpless, there would be no cryptography, no bitcoin, no system d, no pot smokers, no FDR, hell, no Internet. This challenges us to find our own way to matter. But it also enables us to find our own way, and to matter.It can also be depressing to feel like you are the only person in your entire country who believes what you believe, to feel like an outsider. I'm not sure how to advise you about that, it is a tough situation.

I agree it will be slow. The question is not will we end up with minarchism or anarchism, but will we move forward using political methods or non-political methods? I think even a minarchist would agree that politics is worthless in the US now. I am tempted to think it is a waste of time in other countries as well. I would trade 100 Rick Falkvinges for 1 Satoshi Nakamoto.When Rick does something, it looks cool and makes everyone feel good. But the copyright monopoly can undo it the next day. When Satoshi did something, the world changed, not everyone at once, but all at once, no turning back. We will gradually adjust to that change, each person at their own speed.

Better than firing everyone? OP assumed real wages have fallen, so your question is why would that happen without inflation? Either demand for labor has fallen, or supply increased. Or productivity could fall, though that seems unlikely. That's why econ is such a headache, everything affects everything else. I want to say real wages tend to go down in a biz crisis. My head hurts now, curse you for making me think about econ. The real problem is wage-slavery. Entrepreneurs aren't happy when they take a hit to their income, but if it happens, it happens. No one wants to monkey with prices for their sake, so that they are making the same nominal income but might not notice they can't buy as much any more. And in fact, no one is doing it to clear the labor market, either. This entire exercise is a search for the silver lining, when I'd rather think about how to get rid of the black cloud.

OP thinks this would clarify things that are confusing. I think this is true only for a small number of interested people. Presumably, OP could do it himself, if he understood UPB fully and is into that sort of thing. That's 2 big ifs that disqualify me.

I can't make an exhaustive list. The most relevant item on the list, for me, is the norm that participants in the argument will not coerce each other, or be under duress from someone else. I've been talking about this on another forum and reading up on Hoppe's argumentation ethics, and I may have a different approach than other people. I am tempted to go on and on about this, if you are interested. That's a bit too abstract for me, I don't follow. Yes, obviously that would not be a performative contradiction. That is why I changed the FAQ entry to say "A simple example of this would be for me to say out loud, "I am mute.""

Valid in what sense? We're talking about a moral proposition that involves use of force, right? Stef's jargon, "enforceable preference." Here valid=universal, invalid=not universal. This is not clear for me either. "Murder is not UPB." "Stealing is not UPB." But how are "murder" and "stealing" defined, determined? Not really following you there. There are two problems with that. First, the book is not completely consistent, but that is not the problem here. Second, in this specific instance, Stef begins with some categories, and then eliminates some later. You're concentrating on some parts, missing the whole. Proceed with care in removing the jargon, it is tricky. Stef uses "enforceable" in a way I find odd and I think it has tripped you up also. An "enforceable preference" means an action that initiates force. For example, rape is an enforceable preference.At the end of Stef's analysis, any moral proposition about force is categorized within ethics, it cannot be aesthetic or neutral. No proposition that is not about force (in some sense) is considered part of ethics, it is aesthetic or neutral. (There is either some brilliant move or lame hand-waving to account for non-violent theft.) You said: UPB analyses moral propositions, not behaviour. Previous analysis eliminated all involuntary positive obligations, so all UPB compliant moral propositions are prohibitions. Maybe I am being rigid, but I always go in this order: is it a moral proposition? This eliminates some propositions. Does it involve force? This eliminates APA, ANA, and neutral. If it is a moral proposition, is it, universal or not, does it pass the coma test and 2 guys? This eliminates non-universal propositions, leaving us with universal moral propositions that prohibit something. Using this set of propositions, one can analyse particular behaviours into good (not violating any proposition) and evil (violates at least one UPB compliant moral proposition). You proceeded with the analysis as if all 5 categories were relevant throughout the entire process. Maybe this is not wrong, but it is definitely more complicated than necessary, since it is so easy to eliminate many categories (non-moral, non-prohibitions, ANA, APA) easily. Also, you are analysing behaviour instead of moral propositions. This may seem quibbly, but I don't think it is. UPB categorizes moral propositions as universal or not. The moral propositions categorize behaviour into good and evil. So maybe I was wrong, and nothing you are doing is totally outside UPB. But you're doing it in a way that seems awkward to me.

Well, I would hate to discriminate against spiritualists, so I will switch it to "I am mute." Cool?

Here is Stef's first proof.1. The proposition is: the concept “universally preferable behaviour” must be valid.2. Arguing against the validity of universally preferable behaviour demonstrates universally preferable behaviour.3. Therefore no argument against the validity of universally preferable behaviour can be valid.The terms are undefined. What does it mean for a concept to be valid or invalid? Correct? Logically consistent? It is a sketch of the beginning of a proof. Paraphrase it like so:1. I will prove X.2. Arguing against X demonstrates X.3. Q.E.D.In the paragraph preceding the proof, Stef makes his intent clear. Then he just leaves it out of the proof. The argument is not erroneous, it is absent. He needs to show how the counter argument entails the essential components of UPB.He needs something like1. Arguments against UPB are of the form "I argue that UPB is wrong for reasons h, I and j".2. Arguing entails premises x, y, and z, and norms a, b, and c.3. By reconfiguring x-z and a-c like so, bla bla bla, I derive UPB by definition.4. So all arguments against UPB are self-contradictory.Or, let "argument" stand for "the UPB critic uses argument to express the criticism"1. Assume argument 2. Assume (X implies not UPB)3. - N. Show that argument implies UPB on its own N+1. Conclude that Argument implies UPBThat is, (argument and (X implies not UPB) ) implies UPB.Hard part would be filling in step 3 through N, which is why Stef didn't bother.

<b>How does Stef argue for the ideas of UPB? </b></br>He uses the idea of a performative contradiction to derive some fundamental norms and principles, such as universality, that cannot be denied by persons using fair argument. Using those principles as a basis, he derives the concepts and tests that he calls UPB. Then he subjects various moral propositions to the tests.</br><b>What is a performative contradiction?</b></br>In order to disprove UPB, you must engage in argument. But the activity of argument itself presupposes certain norms and premises. Anyone who rejects those norms and premises cannot engage in argument and remain consistent. Their activity depends on facts that they deny, and hence their denial calls their own conclusions into question. A simple example of this would be for me to say out loud, "I am mute." The way that I made my claim contradicts its content. Similarly, any argument that used logic to conclude "therefore logic is worthless" qualifies as a performative contradiction. If you use a typewriter to type out the message, "I can't type," you contradict yourself in the act of expressing your idea. Hoppe and Habermas have used the performative contradiction in a similar way previously.

I doubt you will convince Stef to do anything, he is busy and it's not high on his list. I've been trying to move forward with my FAQ idea, but so far no one seems interested.Syllogisms are not Stef's style. I seem to remember him saying that he didn't want his audience to be just technical academic-style philosophers. And if you take a good look at the proofs on pages 40-43, I think you might agree that he is not a syllogism kind of guy. Those proofs almost made me give up on UPB, join the skeptics. They are sloppy. But a bad proof doesn't prove anything, except the author is not about proofs (and unwilling to make use of a good copy editor?). So I have not given up.