bugzysegal

Now who's begging the question? First sentence, agreed. Could you clarify the subsequent deduction please? How does a person's capacity to reason make them property, let alone property of themselves? Again I am limiting the extent to which property rights can be applied. That's the premise of this entire thread. You don't make your point by saying self-ownership and ownership are both necessary apply to all moral problems. You can easily claim that property rights and ownership are theories that apply to all similar sets of circumstances, but I am looking at dissimilar ones. Again you can respond by saying these are unlikely even to the point of being highly unlikely. They are not so unlikely as to render the moral considerations irrelevant. You ought to save a person drowning, despite desiring to keep your cloths dry more than saving the life of another.

The problem of self-ownership is a very messy one. What it comes down to I think, is the idea that we cannot alienate certain properties in the person. The last few paragraphs of this article http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/pateman/Self-Ownership.pdf bare this out. However, she notes in earlier paragraphs that what once was considered inalienable bodily possessions, kidneys, bits of liver, and other organs, has changed in the advent of modern science. Now there are even underground markets in these things. What if neuroscience advances to the state that even our very source of our volition could be produced by another?

I will take a look! As you said in another thread, property rights do a really good job in, for the sake of argument, 99% of cases. The 1% becomes less mysterious and grey when viewed from the perspective that there may be practical considerations that in rare circumstances supersede that particular framework of morality. I'm not trying to expand the 1%, merely make the case for its existence and that it is likely other solutions are abound. Strictly speaking, considerations of the innate value of subverting ones desires in a small set of circumstances are reasonable considerations. That being said, I think most Utilitarians vastly underestimate the power and efficiency of relative notions of value and the handling of those valuations in voluntary manners. In deed all sorts of problems arise when you try and broaden the scope of Utilitarian calculations. Still, a tool may be valuable even if it's use is quite niche.

Totally fair. I am skeptical about the nature of self-ownership and from there extending to ownership strictly in moral terms. Markets are lovely things that work extremely well in the overwhelming majority of cases. However, the idea of clinging to ownership in the immediate presence of human suffering seems short sighted.It's humans vs. the universe and we already know who will win. I'm not saying let's tax people, have a government, or spank kids. If you see a drowning kid that's not your own, it is wrong not to save them if it would merely get your cloths wet and go against your wishes no to get your cloths wet. Do we have to donate all of our spare change, or worse live minimalist lives giving all our other income to help charities? No, because in general our concerted efforts and happiness contribute to greater overall value in the lengths of our lives. It's a weak claim, but a claim none-the-less. Ownership is useful, not absolute. Also, as I said I was on the way to a funeral, so the long view popped into my mind (though the connection was not a conscious one at the time.)

That is abundantly true. Though perhaps it may guide is in our own decision making, no? Thats a big "if." The best descriptions of self ownership seem to come down to certain inalienable autonomy. I think the inalienability of our autonomy may be jeopardized by advents of neuro-science one day. Where does this right come from? Is it magic, or merely an evaluation of who is occupying a body? Would an AI own itself? Also the scope of what self-ownership implies is not immediately cleared even if the inalienability argument survives(but let's not open up that can of worms).

Labmath, message me if you wan't to have a discussion. I am dropping out of the forum. I'm bringing questions straight to the top.

How does MBR prove uniformity? The LHC article I cited was about uniformity at extremely small scales and then extrapolates to the larger world. Undoubtedly there is good reason for this. I don't think it reinforces the argument against the idea that in a very remote place, the uniformity of the fundamental forces is not evident. What's the lightyear distance of the observable universe? Is it possible that there is more outside these bounds? I'm not saying there is evidence, but note that we call it the "observable" universe. I really think this is deliberate.

I take it the last bit of your statement was tongue-in-cheek. Again for me this wasn't about fatalism, it was about a reality check when discussing the immutable nature of ownership. Realism and pragmatism are no sins. That being said, I don't take theories of self ownership and property lightly.

Yes, you could say these things. But these things are in the arena of empiricism. They are not true in some absolute sense. The difference is that the axioms themselves are no longer considered fundamental truths of the universe. This distinction is illustrated in an extremely explicit manner by labmath in his thread....don't bother reading the side tangents, just read his or her posts.

I am quite literally forbidden by forum rules from going down a certain rabbit hole with you. See Sam Harris or private message me. Secondly, respond to the amoral outlook one might have about the world. Are there no groups of people who don't recognize property (apart from autonomy)? How are they inconsistent. If you look above, Will and I had been talking speaking about the actual testing of hypotheses regarding these matters. From a brief googling, the symmetry Will has described isn't about uniformity in laws across the spans of the universe but rather the symmetry between nuclei and anti-nuclei. http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2015/09/cern-the-fundamental-symmetry-of-the-universe-confirmed-weeks-most-popular.html If anyone has sources as to the uniformity of fundamental forces across the observable universe, as verified by the LHC, please share them. Also it is important to note that the observable universe might not be the bounds of our universe. It merely refers to the projections scientists extrapolate from the cosmic background radiation. "Infinite monkey cage" embeds the principles of infinity into the claim that an infinite number of monkeys would produce shakespear. The universe may be infinite. Your loose grasp of the difference between probability and possibility is telling. Please return when you have sussed out the difference.

Hmm... I think the way I frame it, and feel free to call it non-sense, is that all arguments are inductive. How we rank the value of inductive arguments is two-fold, their initial falsafiabiliy, and how may times they have been tested since inception. That is, the strength of arguments comes from how precise and testable they are and how often they have survived these test that would disprove them. In short "Everything's inductive."

Agreed. I personally wouldn't want consistency as a foundational basis of my reasoning. The LHC is also working on experiments that would reinforce the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. This I think might result in a sort of relativism. Non-sense. A squirrel doesn't accept anything about property, but it will hide nuts. Er actually prior to proof of uniformity that Will pointed to (and I haven't verified this yet) there was every reason to assume that in an infinite universe, exactly what I said would exist. That is, all probabilities, no matter how unlikely are happening...simultaneously... and forever. Also you are rather hostile. EDIT: I erred in going down this path Professionalteabagger and shouldn't have gone away from the main point of the argument. Labmath brought it up somewhat tangentially and I fell into the digression. The point still stands that axioms are not actually "True."

I agree. Actually I misspoke "I don't think property will matter in a few billion years." Also I'm not saying something as simple as property only matters to the living. The notion of ownership bespeaking something about the nature of reality is non-sense since it would wink out of existence without the world changing.

Was on my way to a funeral when I wrote this. I don't think it's fatalism though, but a very stark realism. Pain can often be bad. Empathy is important undoubtedly. Property rights are extremely useful in distributing resources, but they are a convention...at least in my estimation. Useful and important, yes, but ultimate determinants of morality? I think not. Do you have to look to economics and voluntarism to say why a person donating a kidney is good? What does it really mean to say we have come to own something? Has reality changed to reflect that event? Before I am born, I owned nothing, and when I die I will again own nothing. Isn't everything really just borrowed? By borrowed, I mean we use it for a while and then we don't, not something along a sliding scale of ownership to non-ownership.

It's actually an argument as to why we won't find further arguments. The mistake, in Wittgenstein's view, is to look for arguments where there are none to be found nor could there ever be. The fact that language reflects something shared, means that there are minds sharing things, thoughts, and ideas, and that those minds only do so because of the lives they are embedded into. The purpose is to put a halt into inquiry of the origin of the first principles.

"Some things are ineffable" is not self referential and not paradoxical. That there might be something existent outside the bounds of human understanding and language is not impossible. I'm glad you're omniscient. Arguments like mine aren't radically skeptical. you're being incredibly dismissive. 1. True, but it would me that inconsistency could happen here. We are speaking about the limits of empiricism and that we can't assume all swans are white. There is a difference between asserting consistency as fact, and assuming it for practicality. 2. That's fascinating. I had heard something like this. Are the results reflecting this symmetry or are they merely testing for it, with the results yet to be determinate? 3. Again, interesting. If what you say is true in 2. above, I'd say my first argument still stands as far as the limits of empiricism. You don't need to accept property rights to steal. All resources are merely at the disposal of those who do use them. This is not an immoral statement, it is amoral.

Somewhere, then bizarre things are happening. In fact, somewhere there is a planet just like this, with people exactly like you and me having a very similar conversation, but the fundamental consistency of the laws of nature is violated regularly. The odds of violations of nature are extremely, mind bendingly small. However, since these are non-zero probabilities, in an infinite universe they are actual. That means there a world exactly like this one, where apples spontaneously assemble themselves on chair tops on a semi-regular basis.

While subjective first person experience exists, everything really is objective in that all meaning is something shared. "Objective" doesn't add anything to the conversation. Calling morality "objective" only means that its meaning is understood by both of us. Indeed, people have gone about rephrasing "objective" as "inter-subjective agreement" Think how little the word "objective" adds to any conversation. "I shot you with objective bullets, and you objectively died in objective pain" What are you saying other than you are really right? Also I responded to all your stuff above, but it's being reviewed by discussion monitors.

Stefan's arguments against the likes of Peter Joseph and others held up to scrutiny, particularly the pragmatic arguments come to mind. Later I read the excellent book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In it is an elegant pragmatic argument for voluntarism. Here's a thought that occurred to me a very long time ago, that I hadn't given consideration since before my Libertarian leanings: We are animals born into a world and we claim we "own" things...that there is some magic property that makes things well...property. We flap our mouths and scuttle about on the surface of a planet, rearranging the furniture.The fact of the matter is, we simply borrow everything for a time and then we die. Ownership isn't anything we actually point to, but a method of organizing goods efficiently so as to say who can do what with what, and get on with our lives. That being said, the Sun will extinguish and our solar system will go cold, with all the ownership on this little blue planet having counted for nothing. Even if by some miracle the species escapes our local galactic neighborhood, over the course of time, our likelihood of survival in asymptotic fashion approaches zero. Everything anyone has ever borrowed during their life span will return to the melting pot that is the observable universe. The very atoms that make us up will be churned back into the cosmic stew. What then could be said of ownership? Sentience bound by our biological shells, has our minds isolated requiring we resort to the pragmatism of property rights. Don't know that I feel much different about all this. Perhaps these kinds of thoughts use to lean me elsewhere on the political spectrum. If this isn't convincing that's ok. I just don't think property matters in a few billion years.

Now ask yourself..."what if the universe we live in is infinite?"

Can the following sentence have meaning? "Some things are ineffable?" Think about that for a minute, then call me a troll.

Yours was such a gross misrepresentation of Utilitarianism, I didn't deem it important. That was stupid of me. If the conversation is to be productive, I need to remedy the situation. "Claiming to be a moral theory isn't the same as being a moral theory. Also, any theory ceases to be even a theory the moment it's disproven. Because it is predicated on a subjective measurement, it is a matter of opinion and therefore not binding upon others. "Theft is the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of property rights" is always and objectively true." Just because well-being is hard to define, doesn't mean it's subjective. Utilitarianism is a moral theory in that it proposes intrinsic value of certain things exists. Maximizing that value is making more good, and is thus the superior option in any given circumstance. Evaluation of values is done by people, but that alone doesn't require that all value be necessarily subjective. The value Utilitarianism concerns itself with is objectively valuable if anything is: well-being and lives of conscious creatures. When the choice is to preserve people or property, people (all things being equal) is the best choice. There is nothing subjective about any of this. Theft is wrong because the valuation as opposed to a fair trade is zero-sum as opposed to net positive. Economics my dear boy. Rape, assault, and murder can all be evaluated in terms of their harm vs. well-being economic trade offs. So I slap a child in an effort to hurt them, but in the process I move them out of the way of a bullet. The harm I've done vs the life I saved seem to say I've done something good. It's actually less good than if I had my motivations been different however. My motivations in my actions indicate what actions I am likely to take in the future. That means that my motivations, if carried out in the future would likely result in net harm, are bad.

Are the notions distinct? Yes. Unrelated. No. The use theory of meaning places the source of words, including abstract ones, as being founded in a way of life. By that I mean it is not that our axioms are self-evident, but rather that they come from shared experiences, practices... ways of doing things that are themselves actions of certainty, not doubt or skepticism. This however prevents us from saying certain things about our axioms, like fore instance that our axioms are arrived at through logic, or that they are the product of valid reasoning. Notions of consistency, validity, and reason are themselves the starting points of our arguments, but they cannot look backwards to prove their own givens. BOTTOM LINE: useful non-consistent theories are meaningful for the very fact that they are useful. This may be threatening to UPB. I'll be honest, rereading the bubble "meaning of words are not abstract unless there is some version of "abstraction" that doesn't contradict "definite" "consistent" and "objective " Is almost perfectly backwards (the other huge chain though is great!). In saying that words, through use, have a range of meanings that is not necessarily definite, consistent, or objective, in every case. "pain" is in some sense subjective, yet it has meaning. "definite" is contradicted by Stefan's fuzzy edges metaphor. "Objective" is tricky. If by "objective" you mean something shared between people, then yes. If by "objective" you mean words are mere stand ins for things in themselves, I'd say no.

"My contention is this, if a way of reasoning is entirely founded upon non-contradiction and there is evidence suggesting blind spots in that kind of reasoning, one should approach conclusions made prior to the discovery of the blind spots with a renewed sense of skepticism. I will be calling back to form my argument on this particular issue after I formulate my position and have some materials and sources." There is nothing practical about your conclusion; it changes nothing. If I have a valid scientific hypothesis and I am running an experiment to test it, whether I have a "renewed sense of skepticism" or not will change not change the outcome of the experiment, nor will it make my theory valid or invalid. A scientific hypothesis, is different than science as a whole. Questioning the validity of the first is different than questioning the foundations of the second, so your analogy fails. If you have evidence that a theory is untrue or invalid, then you actually have to make a claim and not just say "your theory could be wrong because of blind spots, and you should have a renewed sense of skepticism." anything can potentially be proven wrong or at least refined, and there are blind spots all over science but we have a method for dealing with this, which includes not violating occam's razor. "blind spots" was a poor choice of words on my part. It's not whether there are new theory like things ready to be tested by the scientific method, but as if there is an entirely new branch of inquiry not encapsulated within the terms of science. Korioviev actually has a pictorial depiction of my criticism above. It's quite good.

this is equivocation, no? from practical, to moral. Good for a group of people....now what? Or "net good" if you like. Logic comes from consistency in our sensory perceptions extrapolated to the workings of the universe. Also mathematicians making it up(inventing conventions). The universe itself isn't necessarily consistent, it just has been so far. True there is no reason to act as if it won't continue to do so, but there is nothing requiring that it does. See Hume's black swan argument, quantum physics, and paraconsistent logic. Right... super simple. Have you evaluated other moral systems claiming to be "objective"? Have you thoroughly tried to undertake their views? From you representations of Utilitarianism, it doesn't seem so. Mill's harm principle is remarkable similar to the NAP. You are assuming property rights and Utilitarian calculations are incompatible. Even if they are, what happens if you have two objective standards, contradictory, and equally complex.