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.

Alan, that makes no sense. We required division of labor to come up with a rocketship to get to the moon and humans are aggressive. As a matter of fact, I don't see how being aggressive fundamentally stops our ability to take over our solar system and move into interstellar space. Sure it could slow it down, or speed it up depending on your view, but it doesn't STOP it unless we happen to bomb ourselves back to the stone age. We have had aggressive aspects to humanity throughout our entire history and yet we have still gone to the moon and dominated this planet. So to say that it is improbable for an aggressive species to do so flies in face of the only evidence we have of any species doing so... us.

@SeleneTo be honest I am a pretty easy going dood by nature. I had a very loving/nurturing mother and have always been the sort of person that gets along with most people and looks for compromises. I grew up on a small farm but had a great childhood playing with animals and never felt poor at all, even though we couldn't afford to eat anything that we didn't grow ourselves. As such I have seen the cycle of life and death countless times as a child, realizing that it is just the natural world. Personally I still feel that a lot of city folk that grew up isolated by human activity don't appreciate the circle of life that has been going on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. Perhaps part of my "negative" energy in the post is due to the fact that I am trying to strike a compromise with the NAP people who think that there is no use to aggression. I enjoy a good debate and finding cracks in any argument that proposes a 100% solution, as the NAP seems to do. I am simply trying to show both side to the aggression story. Basically that it can be useful to the human race, or any species actually. We can talk about building shields to defend against swords, but if you have been using shields to defend against swords and someone comes at you with a nuke, well so much for your shields. My post was aimed at showing that humanity's own squabbles may help prepare our defensive technology enough to defend against a potential alien threat. I find it unlikely that Aliens will be using swords to attack us... We have no way of truly knowing how aggressive aliens will be if we ever encounter them. Many assume that they will be peaceful. The other part of my thread is to show that this assumption is very risky given what we see on this planet. Yes, Einstein was a pacifist yet he was an important part of the development of the nuclear bomb. Einstein himself saw it as a defensive tool to end the aggression of the Nazis, even though he had actually helped create the most powerful weapon mankind had ever witnessed. He knew they were trying to build it and was scared that if they got it first, they would not hesitate to use it to accomplish their goal of racial cleansing on the planet. He was likely right.And if you wonder why Japan got nuked twice, you really need to look at the history of Japan. I would suggest starting with Oda Nobunaga and how he "unified" Japan. It is highly unlikely that they would have surrendered without being shown that they had no chance.Even though I may not be an aggressive or violent person, I am wary of dismissing it as unnecessary or innately immoral. To talk about aggression as "bad" without realizing how it has shaped every life form on this planet is like saying that nature itself is bad or immoral. Sounds to me like a fall back to old religious top-down declaration of "good" vs "evil".

I wouldn't say that being a former kid is exactly a great answer to this statement. For one thing our childhood memories are often very skewed from reality. I have two sisters and we all have different memories about how our parents were like, specific past events and so on. One thinks that the other was always the favourite while the other thinks the first was always the favourite. They can't both be right. Another thing is that each child is a unique person on this world with their own set of genetic expressions that will change how they react to the world around them. A method of parenting that works for one might not work for another, so the idea of a universal way to raise children is frankly absurd. This is why people say "You don't have kids so what do you know!" What they are really trying to say is "You don't know my kid, so you don't know what she responds to; her temperament, her ability to understand, her mental ability to cope with stress.. and so on" Some kids simply respond better to the carrot than the stick and others vise-versa. When giving advice to other parents, just be mindful of this... There are 7 billion people on this planet and to assume that they are all born identical is very unrealistic. It is not nature vs nurture, it is nature AND nurture. And nurture doesn't always mean treating your kid like a porcelain doll. A healthy, proper use of discipline can go along way to mental stability and dealing with the real world. After all, in the real world there are deadly consequences for making certain mistakes, and part of parenting is preparing your child to face the real world on their own.

As some make the claim that war and violence can lead to revolutions in technology and human organizations, I am going to propose the claim that it also prepares the human race against external threats. Namely, aLieNS. Here's why. When we meet aliens they will likely be aggressive. In fact, if we look at life on this planet as evidence, life seems to be pretty aggressive! Think about it. Complicated life forms need to eat other life forms in order to survive.That means most of the life on the planet has to be aggressive to others in order for its very survival. Like almost all of it! Almost every living thing is a savage beast devouring other life forms constantly........... So you really think aliens are going to FOR SURE be that cool? Not likely, from the evidence. Even if they have totally switched to using synthetics for their energy, I would still see the obvious evolutionary advantage to keeping an aggressive, opportunistic gene in the gene pool. War and violence and governments and large corporations and huge superpower forces of humanity all struggling against each other in a human eat human world might be our only chance to mature enough to deal with aliens. Most large scale animals are completely dominated, as is most vegetation and land mass. We have some issues with bacterial and viral forms of life but that's about it right now. But as a race? As a power in the universe? We are doing crazy good! We just took over a planet for crying out loud. One life form suddenly gaining dominance over most others would be a strain on any planet, we deserve a pat on the back. And we did this all by "aggression" towards the natural state of the planet. Otherwise we wouldn't even have food let alone shoes, cellphones and rocketships. Maybe being aggressive towards another is exactly what we need to harden and expand our power at this point. Unless we completely annihilate ourselves, we are the only thing left to challenge us. And as most capitalists would agree, competition breeds streamlined and effective systems. Which we will need when the aliens come.... It just doesn't seem like the NAP is a stable system, or that it even does any good for humanity as a struggling species. It only makes sense for small local systems that have no outside forces or ability to expand. Fortunately for us, we are starting to hit up the solar system for energy and resources so really we are in expansion mode. A bit of good old fashioned evolutionary brute competition might just be what the doctor ordered. grin As long as we don't end it all by accident first.

Yeah, my argument was not very good against the NAP as the "initiation of force" as you put it. But I stick to my feeling that the initiation of force has its appropriate moments. For the large case example we are living in a world where a handful of people with the right knowledge and resources could kill millions instantly. I am very doubtful that the whole nuclear weapon scare is a cleverly fabricated lie intended to chill the public into giving more power to the governments of the world.The consequences of waiting for the smoking gun are sometimes far too drastic to simply dismiss. I'm not saying we should give up all our freedoms and just voluntarily live in prisons, but I am saying that we do need a certain amount of collective, proactive force to minimize the occurrences of these major catastrophes.The other example of childhood discipline can carry the same line. Children are learning what kind of world this is, and sometimes they are so stuck in their own heads that they do not even realize that the outside world can affect them. An appropriate use of discipline can wake them up to the fact that their actions have results and those results can be painful. This can be a very powerful lesson in humility for a child. There can often be a subtle difference between discipline and abuse, and each child has their own personalities. Some people are naturally born aggressive, squashing bugs and hogging toys, etc. To completely blame these actions on the abuse or neglect of the parents is to completely ignore the role of genetic expression. Some children simply respond better to the stick than the carrot, while others will be traumatized for life. Even with our big brains and intelligent conversation, I am still wary of saying that we are so evolved that the morality of the cheetah eating a zebra scenario doesn't apply to us. The initiation of the use of force can and does win the day in many respects and likely contributed largely to our domination of this planet. At any rate, I feel that getting "forcefully" pulled over at a police checkpoint to check and see my intoxication levels is a good thing and that there are certain freedoms I am willing to give up to an authority in order to raise the probability of safety in society. If I am still completely missing the point please inform me. Does NAP simply mean "NEVER initiate the use of force"? Or are we willing to have some colour and depth in this?

I touched on this in another topic but it was actually really the wrong thread, this is the right spot for my argument AGAINST the NAP. It's not that I don't like the NAP or practice it myself. I simply recognize that this stance is fundamentally flawed when we look at the laws of physics and the life forms that have spawned from it. Part of the problem that most people have when talking about the NAP is that they forget (or don't accept the evidence) that we are evolved apes that climbed out of trees hundreds of thousands of years ago and have been doing our best at figuring out what is going on in this world. First of all, Force (in Newtons) is a physical entity that is fundamental to the nature of our universe. There is no way to avoid "Force" in our lives as there will always be things like hurricanes, the need to eat, the need to regulate body temperature, the need to avoid getting our limbs chewed off etc.The "use of Force" is such an important aspect of living creatures that it basically defines whether or not they can survive long enough to produce offspring. Violent coercion is and always will be the ultimate "use of Force" because it has the power to end the lives that mother nature created. She doesn't care who's lives end, only that those who are better at controlling the "use of Force" are rewarded in the evolutionary chain.To say that this is "immoral" is to ignore it as a fact of nature and to somehow convince ourselves that humanity is "above" nature. I feel that the NAP simply an extension of old religious thinking that puts humanity outside of nature. No one would claim that a cheetah's right to kill a zebra is immoral. Or that they do not have that right because of the zebras right to self ownership. Yet we seem to think humanity is except from this law. I'm sorry, but if you are convinced by the evidence of evolution then you will have to agree that we are just animals, that we are as natural as the zebra or the cheetah, and that we follow the same rules.Just look at the history of humanity, you may not like it, but it is obvious that we are not exempt from the rules of nature and that "use of Force" is the single most powerful method that nature has provided us.Once you admit that we have to deal with this, then we can decide on how to create rules regarding the "use of Force". This is what a government is for in the first place. Rules are meaningless unless enforced, and you can't enforce a rule unless you have more power than the rule breaker. Hence the creation of the state, laws and modern democracy aimed at TRYING to ensure that governments have their own check on the "use of Force". If the government abuses their responsibility too badly, the people rise up and replace it. We see this all throughout history. Either that or their populations suffer and die while their government crumbles in defeat by another civilization that is better at the "use of Force".Do yourselves a favour and study a bit more science, start with the fundamentals and it is much easier to explain how and why things are the way they are. Philosophy is meaningless unless it is based on the real world.

Yeah I should probably edit that out, its not a very good argument. Thanks for pointing it out. I have adjusted the post to be more in line with what I am thinking.

JSDev, unfortunately for ideologies, history shows that indeed might makes right. It may not be an "eat or be eaten" world, but it is definitely a "grow spikes or get eaten" world.While I myself am a very non-violent person and always try to solve difficult situations with mutual agreements, there are times it simply wont work. Violence will always be used as it is the most effective means of coercion. Yes we may not like it, but tell that to mother nature and see if she cares. It is fundamental to living structures and patterns. I may fear the NSA and government control of the population, but at least it is in their best interest to keep us healthy and productive. If they go too far we will have a revolution and replace them. Yes, it sucks, but it is part of the human struggle as history shows. Their power is gone if there is no one able to work for them. I also fear the crazy lunatics that care nothing for humanity or even their own lives and wish for as much destruction on the world as possible. Yes these people exist, and some have lots of money and power. It does take some form of collective might to stop them.There are many good reasons that we evolved the government systems of today, and trying to "grow giant spikes" is exactly one of those reasons. When the predators are sleeping, these spikes may seem too heavy, large and cumbersome. Shrinking them or axing them to become more efficient in other areas is a risky venture not to be taken lightly.

Different spin on topic. Force (in Newtons) is a physical entity that is fundamental to the nature of our universe. There is no way to avoid "Force" in our lives as there will always be things like hurricanes, the need to eat, the need to regulate body temperature etc. So now the question is, should we have rules regarding the "use of Force" in order to compel other's actions? Let's consider the options. No! - Do not make rules regarding the "use of Force" So what happens? We have a perfect case study! We didn't have rules regarding the "use of Force" (other than natural physical limitations) as we evolved into present day humans, so we can use this as our starting point. What happened? Over time we made rules regarding the use of force.... lulz Anarchists always seem to forget this. We started with Anarchy and it led to what we have now. If we go back to Anarchy, guess what - it's going to naturally separate into power structures, and the only way to stop it is to make rules... Do you see the circular logic here? Ok, so now we see that whether we like it or not, rules about "the use of Force" are inevitable. And a rule ain't a rule unless it's enforced. In order to enforce rules about "the use of Force" we need to have an entity that can exert more Force than the ones who break the rules. This is how the whole concept of GOVERNMENT originated in the first place. As some people correctly identify, if the government has a monopoly on Force, then they are free to make or break any rule because obviously there is no Force more powerful than them. This discovery is what led to present day democracy, with attempts at checks and balances so that the "use of Force" enforcement is in some kind of loop. It is an ATTEMPT to tie the circle in such a way that any power has a check on it by another power that is greater. Unfortunately for humanity as a group, this is REALLY FREAKING HARD TO DO! It has been a much more difficult road than any of us can imagine. Mother nature is constantly trying to kill us, our evolution has implanted the desire for self-interest at the forefront of our actions, and we are developing new technologies with greater and greater ability to use Force every day. And since "self-interest" can be such a twisted human obscurity, when the wrong people get too much of the "use of Force", bad stuff happens. As you can clearly see, the delicate loop we have made to check power structures can go out of balance at any moment due to a large variety of factors. Just look at history. Added to that, the universe is constantly growing and creating new things. But one thing is for sure, "GET RID OF THE GOVERNMENT" is not the solution to the problem of "How do we make and enforce rules regarding the "use of Force"?" It's going to be a loooooooooooooooooong process before utopia folks...