Xeeg

I'm surprised that both Stefan and Dsayers avoided answering this question by essentially saying "we don't answer hypothetical situations that make our moral cause look bad". If they want a real world scenario to answer consider the Calgary flood in 2013. In 2013 there was an abnormal amount of rainfall in the rocky mountains that resulted in a flood that hadn't been seen for over 100 years. The Old Man River Dam was preventing the water from flooding Calgary while at the same time was starting to overflow and flood the surrounding region. You can look up the details online. Question. If you were the decision maker would you open up the dam to minimize losses in the surrounding region while exposing Calgary to a large risk of massive property damage? Or would you leave the dam alone and flood the area around it? I think the answer NAPers should give is, "It is immoral to do an action that results in harm to another in order to help someone else." Meaning, they would not open the dam, no matter the scenario.

What other people do with their time is up to them, but someone who follows the NAP will not pull the lever. NAP does not change with the argument "But more people will be saved!". Forcing someone to die for any reason other than self defense is clearly against the NAP.

Well what is the point of morality in the first place? You can define morality as obeying the NAP, but who cares? What tangible benefit does this moral law provide? If there are no real world consequences, then what "good" is the moral statement? If the initiation of the use of force is NEVER GOOD then why has the universe allowed it to be a strategy for so many life forms on this planet throughout history? I'm sorry but i can't help to think that you are trying to see black and white in a world full of colour.

1. Self-imposed. Well by definition you can't impose the NAP on someone else, so the only person you can impose it on is yourself. Pretty simple. 2. Handicap. Since no one else is forced to obey they NAP, those who choose to follow it have less options. 3. Liberation Movement. I did not say that the NAP was a liberation movement, i said that it had the pretense of a liberation movement. This means that followers of this ideal feel that they will gain freedoms if and only if everyone follows it. Since you can't force people to follow it, by definition, there will always be some subset of humanity that chooses not to follow it at any given time. These people who choose not to follow it have more options available to them because they are not restricted by ideals. The followers of the NAP will be forced to defend themselves from such aggression and therefor never truly be free.

It's more like saying slavery always existed, so we should expect it and prepare for it. It's not ignoring free will at all, if anything it is allowing for more free will because it provides more options. Which is kinda the point of this post in the first place. The NAP is basically a self imposed handicap under the pretense of a liberation movement. And you're right, we aren't close to space faring but that wasn't the point of my argument.

Because I backed up my assumptions with evidence. The evidence that almost every single life form on this planet is aggressive towards other life forms due to the fact that they have to eat them. I admit that few of these creature are space faring, which undoubtedly hurts my argument. However, at the very least I can clearly demonstrate that most life we know of is aggressive towards other life. Since the only space faring creature we know of is humans, and humans do not obey the NAP at all times, it would be further evidence that such a principle is not required.

The argument that a peaceful group with "little to no warfare or enslavement" is necessary for lengthy space travel is based on little but assumptions. If you value evidence we can see from our own history that humans have explored and travelled great lengths, all the while never ceasing such non-peaceful actions. It used to take a year to travel from England to China by boat. Now it takes less than a year to travel from Earth to Mars, and I would hardly call humans a peaceful race. You say violations of the NAP retard human progress, yet the English did very well at violating the NAP and it turned them into a world superpower; gaining control of an entire continent, enslaving another continent, etc. So while it hurt the african continent, i would say that humanities power and progress as a whole got larger throughout this period. I am not using this example to justify the use of slavery in today's world, however it may have been useful in the past, before we realized the power of the human mind to create things much stronger than humans themselves at specific tasks. There is an analogy of the tunnel in this video (http://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence.html) which i find useful for the description of slavery in the past. And to say that other animals have no ability to reason and philosophize is also an assumption. Yes we can say a car will not drive without an engine, but to say that a car will not drive without a gas-powered 6 cylinder engine is false. Just because animals may not have the same brain parts as us does not mean that they are not capable of certain tasks, especially ones that we have no ability to measure. We have no idea if a group of birds sitting in a tree chirping are actually philosophizing. If you can prove that they aren't, please send me your references as i would be very interested in the research.

This topic ties into the age old question "Why anything?". I have searched for the answer myself and the best explanation I have seen goes something like this: In the mathematical sense of infinite possibilities for states of a universe, there exists a certain subset of stable conditions. Meaning, a universe that did not contain cause and effect would not contain interactions. Something cannot affect something else if there is no cause and effect. In such a universe there could be no time or space or any indistinguishable "effect" of the universe. This "universe" may very well exist, but it will never affect us and we will never affect it. Imagine now that every state of every possible universe exists. Even a universe with nothing. All of these other universes that contain certain conditions that nessesarily remove the ability for us to interact with it are essentially unimportant. That is not to say that they don't exist, it is just that we cannot live in or interact with such a universe. Now imagine a universe where cause and effect exists, but there is no method of growth. There is no method of which new information is somehow provided by the universe. Conceptually this is like looking at a closed-box universe with a ball inside that bounces between the walls in the same path for all eternity. This is the universe postulated by determinism, as a very complicated ball that takes a very long time to go along it's set path. It is possible that we live in such a universe, however it is also possible that we live in a universe that cause and effect exist, but also an element of seemingly random creation. This would definitely suit a universe that seems to be expanding as "new" things appear without cause, while still allowing for the cause and effect of existing things to take place. Once we consider that all possibilities of all states of every universe exist, the question changes from "why?" to "what?". Meaning, what is the configuration of our universe? This is the scientific pursuit, the question "Why?" is purely in the interest of "What caused this effect?" Unfortunately for science, there will always be information lost from the past, in such a way as to make it impossible to see forever into the past. It is very difficult to determine, experimentally, whether or not "things" can come into existance without a cause, as the whole pursuit of science is to find the cause in the first place. Some scientists claim that they have witnessed "things" popping in and out of existance without cause, but can they really be sure? Just because they cannot determine the cause does not mean that there is not a cause. At any rate, if you imagine that all universes and configurations exist, and that only a few of these configurations could lead to a universe that we have today, the question changes. "Cause and effect" become merely part of the stable configurations for a universe that looks the way ours does.

Exactly. So now the question becomes, who should help the newborn?

To a large extent I agree with you livemike. I've often wondered what would have happened if the dinosaurs got smart. It is entirely possible that another planet within 200 million lightyears evolved along the same timeline as the dinosaurs, but instead of its large life forms getting mostly wiped out, they became smart like us. So when we talk about the differences in technological advances, there would seem to be such massive disparities that it would be futile to compete. However that does not mean that our own battles and warfare technology are a total waste. Especially if they are carrying on as we advance to dominate our solar system and move into interstellar space. If our warfare technology keeps up with our exploration technology, we might very well have a good chance at defending from another species. Some of these technologies might even have large plateaus. The "tooth" can be considered a technology, and has been useful for many lifeforms on this planet for about 500 million years. I think this is a great example of how some technologies can stand the test of time. At any rate, just because they might be much more powerful does not mean that practicing against ourselves is useless.

1. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1209_051209_crops_map.html - Over half of the land on the planet is farmland according to sattelite photos http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/10/territorial_disputes_how_much_of_the_earth_is_claimed_by_multiple_countries_.html - about .5% of earth's land is under dispute of ownership. Please don't just say something isn't true without showing your references.2. Claim is a part of ownership, as is the ability to defend your claim. It is not as simple a concept as some would have you believe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ownership 3. In the last 100 years human population has gone from 1.7 billion to around 7 billion people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.svgSo Dsayers, the challenge is back to you to show me how a newborn baby gets to own things without help from anyone.

So I watched Larken Rose's video, and I will admit that he mostly has some good points about how we learn. But he completely fails to understand what "TEACHING" is about. The first part about teaching he completely disregards is exposure. You cannot learn a language that you are never exposed to. You cannot learn concepts that you are never exposed to. This is a "Teachers" number one job! He seems to think that people wouldn't be barbarians without teachers, he then goes on to explain how Hellen Keller was a "violent wild animal" until a "Teacher" exposed her to the relationship between water and some physical signal. Contradict yourself much? I'm surprised he didn't notice. Look, we have thousands of years of knowledge available to humanity. Expecting parents to be able to sift through all of this and expose their children to the best ideas is rediculous. Are all educational systems in the world perfect and flawless? Obviously not. You are basically arguing that we should halt any attempt at a formal education system because some are bad? There are many different education systems around the world with many different approaches on what the best knowledge to teach is. And this is an evolving debate, for sure the internet revolution plays a large role in shaping the future of education. But to say that a formalized education system is somehow inherintly bad is to totally miss the point of what our alternatives are, or have been in the past. There are good reasons that groups of humans all over the world have developed education systems. If they suck, improve them, but don't get rid of them. If you don't believe me, why dont you do some research on countries with the worst educational systems, and compare their population's quality of life with countries that have great educational systems. If you are right then countries with non-existant educational systems should be a pretty great place to grow up and live, like Somalia where only 10% of the children go to a public school. What a shining example of the sort of place Libertarians would like to live. Basically no tax structure and a failing state, what a utopia.

What makes humanity so much more powerful than all the other creatures on this planet is our ability to pass down knowledge between generations. We can learn from knowledge obtained by people thousands of years ago, and how it has been built on and improved since. Most of what we think we know, we have heard from others, even language itself. We can all agree that education is very important, otherwise each generation has to reinvent the wheel. Let's look at what works. Check out the NCEE top performing countries and see what kind of systems they have. You will notice that USA is not one of them. I doubt the solution is more cuts to the public education system. Without a public education system, children's education is dependant entirely upon their parents ability to either teach them, or afford a good school for them. Notice that I am not arguing against private education. I have nothing to say about private education and if parents wish to privately educate their children that is their prerogative. But they should still pay taxes into a well funded, regulated and monitored public education system. What do you value more, equal opportunity for children to get a world class education or private rights of parents to withhold that opportunity? I know where I stand, and that is with the children's opportunity independent of their parents wealth or educational background.

The question here is, how do you get property in the first place? If the land was everyone's, and you try to use it, then everyone has a right to defend it. This is the argument for the state, as it is a representation of a large group of people and can defend the public land from private users. When a baby is born, what property does it own? How does it obtain property as it grows older? We must first understand how to obtain property before we can talk about defending it. In order to claim that one can morally obtain property according to the NAP, one must take it from no one. This is the argument against the state, that only individuals can own things, not groups of people. If groups of people can own things, then there is nothing morally wrong with the state because it is just a large group of people that hire enforcers to defend their alleged collective property. The problem with saying that no one owns land until one uses it, is that we are living in a world where basically all the land/resources are claimed by one group or another. And these people/groups have the right to defend their property, yes? A newborn baby in 2014 has no chance to grow up and obtain land from no one, they must take or buy it from someone or a group of someones. Since taking it from someone implies stealing, which is already considered immoral, then they must buy it. In order to buy it they must obtain money, and in order to get money they must perform useful work for someone else. But a newborn baby cannot perform useful work for someone else. They require years of nurturing, feeding, training before they can be useful to someone. Without the aid of a collective group of people, these newborn babies are entirely dependant on their parent's ability to provide for them. If their parents aren't that great at this, then they suffer a disadvantage to those who have "better" parents. So in the end, a "groupless = stateless" society is one that caters only to the families that provide better training for their children so that they can perform useful work, or inherit resources from their parents.

yeah but cooperation and aggression are not mutually exclusive. Example - an attacking army The army itself is made up of cooperating individuals, but they are being aggressive towards others.