dsayers

Or not applied at all? Even if the teachers would get paid on value provided, would the people paying the teachers be getting paid on value provided? Or are they paid because the money was taken under threat of violence? This is a situation where I would say don't let gesture be the enemy of rational thought.

Reason = virtue = happiness. As I read, I noticed a strong, recurring theme: Lack of honesty with yourself. Before I get into that, I want you to know that I can relate. I played WoW for a long time and grew to despise anything that could be described as group play. When you enter group play, you HAVE TO accept that your success is no longer determined by your skill/effort alone. Otherwise, you will experience anxiety. Additionally, if the people you are teamed up with are random strangers and not people you've developed co-operation with, know to be skilled, etc again, the likelihood you will achieve your goal will diminish. If you're not honest with yourself about this, you're going to experience anxiety. I found this quote to be most telling of all. "Optimal" and "might end up being" is impersonal language. You speak as if it's something that's not in your control. This perception will provide anxiety as it's a rejection of reality. Furthermore, viewing something as out of your control renders you powerless to correct it. Did your parents control such aspects of your life? Did they ever negotiate with you and/or groom you for making such decisions on your own? Could it be that you would harm yourself in this fashion in an attempt to have control over SOMETHING after growing up not having control? Do you view spending so much time on something you're not enjoying and/or spending too much on food while you don't have a job and you do have a son to be dysfunctional? Would you (if you felt you had a choice) choose to inflict that dysfunction on your son so that later in his life, he will experience this same, seemingly unexplainable misery? Yeah, you could do things like set goals and manage your time. If you do not pursue self-knowledge though, you'll only be managing the symptoms rather than working towards a cure.

Yeah, I wouldn't call being deliberately harmed to the point of not being able to rationally think and/or achieve happiness as "unfortunate." I call it a disproof of the theory that the title "parent" means anything other than having biologically produced. "On some level, your murderer will always value you as a human being and them stabbing you is unfortunate." It not only dispenses with defining terms, but flies in the face of what those terms are considered to mean.

Aborting fetuses does not compare to initiating the use of force against people. I hope you'll check out the discussion found here. Whether or not unprincipled "steps" are steps at all is logically discussed there. You mention the unseen wolf and illness, so is the act that is believed to be moving forward that isn't actually moving at all.

A suggestion if I may. I'm of the mind that the quickest way to fail at persuading others is to overstate your case. As such, if you're talking about something subjective, such as empathy or kindness, it's best not use objective terms such as moral. It comes across as stating opinion as fact for the purpose of preempting dissent/scrutiny. Similarly, to be able to to cite numerous, specific numbers and then balk on precision in terminology lands as lacking integrity. You have a good cause and a convincing presentation. Don't drop the ball by being so careless with the concept of morality, especially amid a crowd of people who have a clear perception of it. Also, while its a great cause, those who have pointed out that human mistreatment is more important and remedying it will remedy mistreatment of animals make a very strong, objective point.

@Jamz: What does the word immoral mean to you? To me, it means lack of consent/violation of property rights. People who engage in porn (perform, commission, consume) MAY do so as the result of childhood trauma. This doesn't make their behaviors a violation of the property of others and/or non-consensual. Also, if we could teach the world healthy living, deferred gratification, etc, I don't think it's realistic to think that there will be no more cupcakes. I don't think eradicating child abuse will lead to the disappearance of the trading of ANY goods or services, including sex workers.

The capacity for reason. The ability to conceptualize self, the other, formulate ideals, compare behaviors to ideals, calculate consequences...

Yep. There's only one thing you can accomplish with violence that you cannot accomplish without violence: violence.

How do you know? I've made the case before for peaceful interaction as the default and studies have revealed that humans are naturally empathetic. Without trauma during the formative years, we literally couldn't speak the language of aggression. This is like saying that in order to chop a tree down, the best place to start is with the youngest branch. If we help people to understand self-ownership, how that is universalized, that it is the root of morality, that morality is objective, etc (the roots), you will simultaneously address the war on drugs, the federal reserve, government schooling, taxation, government... ALL forms of evil, including those not associated with the State. It's far more efficient. I can certainly sympathize with your anxiety over not being able to make a difference right now. However, you cannot fix a problem you don't fundamentally understand. That anxiety could be harnessed as motivation to study how people think and why. Learn how to communicate more effectively. Pursue self-knowledge so that the people you try to save can't drag you into wasting your time, etc. If you haven't already, I think Stef's An Introduction to Philosophy and The Bomb in the Brain series are fantastic places to start. I review them periodically as sort of a self-calibration.

I understand I think, but I disagree. Go to any campus, market, restaurant, etc. People gladly move out of each others' way as opposed to running into one another. All sharing the same space, not initiating the use of force against one another. The State isn't there to referee this and nobody there could say that they'd be stabbing you for what's in your back pocket if they didn't think there was a government. The initiation of the use of force is counter-intuitive to our own survival. If I steal your car, I now have to live a life of watching over my shoulder, not being able to sleep well out of fear of retribution, living every day wondering when you or somebody you know will find me, etc. It would be exhausting! My point is that we don't peacefully co-exist because there is a State, we do so in spite of the State and all their various programs to dumb us down and render us fearful/feral towards one another.

And unless I then force them to engage in the transaction, I have successfully argued that it is not immoral. Unless you can satisfy the two challenges I put forth as the null hypothesis. Begging the question means providing an argument that assumes the conclusion of the question it's meant to answer. In a thread that's essentially asking, "is deceit the initiation of the use of force," you're saying that deceit is the initiation of the use of force. For the third time now. You won't explain how. You won't address the null hypotheses. You're repeatedly putting forth a conclusion without acknowledging the challenges or explaining how you arrived at that conclusion. You appear to be engaging in bias confirmation, not a discussion. If this continues, I will cease to operate under the assumption that it is in fact a co-operative discussion for the purpose of determining the truth. Oh and pointing out that theft is immoral by definition is not evidence that NOT theft is also immoral by definition.

If this were true, they wouldn't need words like taxation, arrest, imprisonment, war, fiat, etc. It's not that people don't fear violence in the name of State, it's that they don't see it. Think about this for a second as it's REALLY important to understand. Our daily lives are filled with empirical evidence of people meeting their goals without the use of violence. The narrative is so strong, that people are tricked out of their own experiences! This could never happen if people actually understood that taxation is theft, war is mass murder, etc. Most people would be upset at $50 being taken by a mugger and don't even notice that their unborn children have been enslaved.

Again, begging the question. I accept that if you point a gun at somebody's head and they sign a contract, they did not give consent. I can logically explain how what looks like mechanical consent in that scenario is not moral consent (therefore I accept that mechanical consent might not be moral consent). However, you have not. Deceit is not the initiation of the use of force. So for me to offer to buy your $20k bracelet for $20 to be immoral, I would have to be responsible for understanding the exchange while you are not responsible (which is internally inconsistent) AND I would have to be more responsible than you for YOUR agreeing to sell something you didn't know the value of (which is logically impossible). Do you accept human capacity for error? If so, then you understand that even your own eyes cannot provide you with a perception that is necessarily representative of the real world. It is absurd to say that another person must provide what a human being cannot absolutely provide.

Ugh. It really gets my goat to hear people say things like "kids are just that way." We still have a LONG way to go.

Once upon a time, Freud noticed that a number of his child patients described sexual contact with their parents. Society was not (and largely still is not) ready to accept that parents are fallible. As such, his very consideration that these children were being sexually abused was so controversial that he had to alter the narrative to being an actual desire in the child out of self-preservation. As a result, child molestation was able to continue on to this day, largely under-recognized. What a truly horrific story. Similarly, there are a LOT of psychological disorders that are given fancy names to conceal the fact that these children were abused. If you want to know whether or not a psychological disorder is real, it needs to fit certain criteria. For example, what is the test for it? Is the test and its results objective? Does the test and its results identify a naturally occurring phenomenon? If the answer to one of these questions is no, then the "disorder" is a work of fiction to conceal child abuse for the benefit of the abusers especially and everybody's comfort who does not possess self-knowledge. I think that OCD is one such thing. I must not be a coffee guy, because much of what you described, I cannot even visualize. Though I did read, "hold the seam" and visualized a hand holding the cup in such a way as to reinforce its structurally weakest point. I wouldn't call that a problem, even if most people don't look at a seamed cup that way. Is your focus on it such that you would experience anxiety if it wasn't or anxiety if you witness others not doing it that way? If not, then it's a preference, for whatever reason, and should not be considered a problem. Regarding not having control in your childhood: There might be people out there that do things a certain way in order to have control over something in life as a result of an abusive childhood of child erasure. However, in order to be a problem I think the person would have to be oblivious to the child erasure and/or the damage that it causes. If you can identify this in your childhood and hold those responsible accountable, and have the presence of mind to at least consider if a preference of yours is problematic, then I would say it likely isn't. So drink on however you prefer!

These are assertions and begging the question.

helot, your post is rife with dishonesty whether you meant it to be or not. You claim that pyramids and space travel wouldn't exist without a state, which logically isn't true. There's only one thing that you can accomplish with violence that you cannot accomplish without violence: violence. You assume that the free market WOULD produce these things. While space travel I'm sure is something we would get to eventually for reasons of species preservation and learning about our environment, the idea that we'd build these great big, inefficient buildings just to honor a single person so that their stuff could be taken with them into a fairy tale? Not so much. You offer as "proof" a small group of people being indecisive on where to share a meal. Which to actually serve as proof of the point you were making would require those people to starve as a result of their indecision. The indecision comes from being considerate of others, but would never lead to NOT eating. Belief is of no use to a philosophical discussion. "Positive outcome" says in no uncertain terms that the moral consideration is inconsequential compared to utilitarian consideration. The problem with that position is that it contradicts reality. In the real world, the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of property rights (immorality) is internally inconsistent. You cannot escape this. Most offensive was your use of the word "persuasion." If I point a gun at your head to get you to do something, I have not persuaded you. I have initiated the use of force against you. This deception in particular leads me to believe that your dishonesty was deliberate. As hannah pointed out, the initiation of the use of force is either immoral or it is not. If it is, then there's no reason to abide the State. If it is not, then there's no reason to alter the State. Why do you need for the single greatest destructive force in human history to be justified?

My critique is that it's a utilitarian argument, making it inferior to a moral argument. Morality already provides for self-interest by being internally consistent. I've made the case before that morality is the default simply because its integral to our self-preservation. The guy that assaults somebody has a greater risk of undesired things happening to him compared to the same guy that doesn't assault somebody for example. Still, it's great that the anti-assaulting children message is getting out. I for one can identify. My father is perpetually dumbfounded as to why I don't spend any more time with him than he forces me to for the sake of benefiting from the effects of my labor.

The capacity for reason is a requisite for self-ownership, which is a requisite for being a moral actor. Ethics/morality does not apply to plants or non-human animals. Tyler Durden made a fantastic case for why we as consumers should work to reduce the demand for such practices and he did it without resorting to dishonesty/manipulation (while making that case). Lars makes such fantastic points, I wish I could upvote it more than once. To resonate, large portions of the meat/poultry/dairy industry is propped up by money that's stolen from you and used to artificially inflate those markets by subsidizing the costs. IIRC, it takes 7 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of meat. That's incredibly inefficient AND not as good for you. I admit this is a utilitarian argument, but in the realm of human-animal interaction, there is no moral argument to be made.

If somebody steals a piece of paper from you, it's not justifiable to shoot them in the head. The restitution outweighs the debt to such an extent that the restitution creates a debt itself. Similar is the example of "Go kill 1,000 people or I will kill you." This is not a credible threat due to the scale. Simply put, a person could not kill 1,000 people and claim it was out of fear. So while the person issuing the threat is definitely guilty of immorality, so would the person who killed 1,000 people.

If this is true, then why are you wasting time anthropomorphizing governments?

I don't know. You refer to "fraud" after it's been established that the word has very different meanings. The topic is about the moral consideration of deceit prior to a contract. Near as I can tell, adapting your post to that topic, you are claiming that deceit prior to contract invalidates consent. In order for this to be true, one party would have to be responsible for understanding the trade while the other is not (which is internally inconsistent) AND somebody else would have to be more responsible for somebody consenting to a trade than the person consenting is (which is logically impossible).

If I may nitpick: If it can be repealed by man, it is not a law My counter argument is that if the reason the legislations are repealed is anything other than consistency/conforming to the real world, then the results will not be consistent or conform to the real world. How many times throughout history have legislations been enacted that were repealed elsewhere or enacted after having been repealed? If the methodology by which the conclusion to repeal was unprincipled, it will be temporary at best. Meaning it wouldn't be a step, but a stumble. An accident. Nothing to praise. Not indicative of anything but a lucky guess.

Are you saying that the act of challenging a position is proof that the position is false?

This would be true between you and me. I have made the case above that for a parent to do it to a child is a violation of contract, and therefore immoral.