labmath2

What do you mean by your choices are overly contrained? For someone in a freeze run or become robot state you seem pretty relaxed to me, but then i have never been great at readinf emotion. So you are not free to not vote Trump? If this is a case of self defense as some have suggested, you will need to show it and not merely assert it. Is your life in immediate unavoidable danger? Is voting comparable to attacking your attacker? When does politucal action take the form of moral responsibility? If you are sucessful in electing Trump, is there moral culpability on your part for his actions?

I was thinking of starting a new thread, but i think i will do it here. When did it become fine to abandon principles for what looks good in the moment? When is it fine to engage in a behavior we know to be irrational? How is this different from those who vote in the person promising goodies because it's in their immediate self interest? If voting is morally neutal, when does political action become immoral?

I did not want yo comment, but when i see people taking liberties with language, i cannot help it. What do you mean by we should kill people that want to kill people? Does that include dictators and ally country government officials? What counts as credible threat? Does a video of someone's intent to attack us count? Does it matter that they are across an ocean ftom us? What foes self preservation in todays world of international politics? Dp you think people in Iraq and Afganistan feel safe from americans? How does their experience affect you or should it afgect you

I went back and read your first post on this topic and while i agree with the claim of just acquisition, which is in my answer to the question, the rest of the post is not a valid counter argument to the position. Your insistence on arguing that their choice to sell or not has any bearing on the morality of their ownership is confusing to me. A government willing to sell you a plot of land does not make its claim valid and an individual or group of individuals unwilling to sell their plots of land does not make them immoral. This is not quite clear from what i understand about land ownership. Stefan has talked about individuals who are buying a piece of land to preserve it in its natural state.

That makes sense. The question is by how much does it change the mean and distribution?

This seems like an irrelevant point. Does the morality of ownership hinge on sales?

Sure people can buy land, but no one is obligated to sell to you. In fact i imagine if all land is currently owned, it would be in most people's interest to simply hold on to their land. So if you are the buyer or renter, the situation in theory appears quite similar (if all anyone will do is rent to you, you have no choice but to live somewhere). Lets simplify this problem. Imagine you arrive on an island the size of Hawaii with a booming economy and employment opportunity. Everyone single piece of dirt on the island is owned and and each land owner sets up the rules on their land. You try buying land, but no one will sell to you, they only offer to rent to you. Would such a situation be immoral if they justly acquired the land? If a landowner owned half the island and implemented a democracy on his half, would that be immoral? Does the current state (the particular condition that someone or something is in at a specific time) automatically determine morality? Maybe i completely missed your point.

I don't think people are really adressing his point in a direct manner. What difference does it make to the individual that governments own all land or that other people own all land? Isn't it practically identical since he will have to pick a landlord just like he would have to pick a government? If your objection is to the size of governments and the cost of changing countries, would countries the size of a state suffice? There are two answers to those questions. The first is the moral answer which says even if the outcomes look practically identical, the process determines our perception of the outcome. An example is the person who breaks into a store in the middle of the night and takes a few items, but leaves the money for those items while leaving all else the same. Even though the outcome looks practically identical to a purchase, we would still consider the man immoral. The second is that it isn't practically identical because the nature of the interactions are different. A landlord can evict me for not following his rules, but that is the extent of his coercive powers. Even if he knows i have a bag of cash in the house, he cannot demand to be paid at gunpoint. This affects the way we think about these interactions and the outcomes of these interactions. A landlord that can steal from his tenants has no incentive to kick them out. A landlord that can only kick out tenants has a lot more incentive to negotiate.

You seem to be confusing two things, the capacity for choice as opposed to reduction in choice. Coercion can only reduce your choice, it cannot eliminate it (except for complete restraining of your body so that you cannot eben twitch a muscle).

I just thought of the perfect example to resolve this problem. Look up China's factory towns. Are the children of the factory workers bound by the rules of the company?

I was leaning more in this direction but wanted to get the OP to arrive here himself through questions, instead of me just asserting it.

There is something to be said for the moral case vs the prsctical application. I had this discussion with my brother and he posited something interesting. Imagine an homeowner who has a sign above his home saying "all who enter may be raped by owner." Does that affect the rape in any way? While the sign cannot create consent, it changes the rape in some conceptual sense. It at least leaves the victim somewhat blamewordy for being raped. So at least for immigrants, taxation as theft may no not be a valid position. For natives is whete it gets complex. Lets imagine the rapist homeowner who owns multiple houses. He has sign on all of them saying "all who enter may ne raped by owner." Fortunately for a young unattractive couple it makes the house substantially cheaper than all surrounding homes (they are not exactly afraid of being raped). They have a daughter in the house. One day after her 18th birthday they come home to find the landlord raping their daughter. No one contests the immorality of such act, but you have this clause that mitigates his actions. I know this is by no means a very realistic thought experiment, but i think it helps understand those whose objection hinges on avoidability. Its not about someone cold clocking you out of no where when you step into arms length. Its about someone that has a sign saying he may/will punch any who come within arms length, then delivering on that promise.

There are two main theories on significant changes to a population attribute. The first has undertones of use and disuse, which is the idea that there was an emphasis on education (a cultural change). The second is that there was a strong selection for one attribute over the other. Their thriving being dependent on intellectual achievement can only explain the successes they had in intellectual fields at best with a minor increase in IQ. Since this is a case of simply changing what a person does, and not who they are. A similar version to this is weight lifting. Any muscular gain is only accrued over your lifetime, its not genetically transferred. Unless culture/activities can actually change the genes you pass on to your children. The second which is the stronger case is that there was significant change in the genetic makeup of the Ashkenazi Jews. There are multiple explanations for why this is the case, including less intelligent members leaving the group and higher reproduction rates of more intelligent members (rabbis). My question is about how much selection for intelligence would have to exist to go up one standard deviation in IQ over 800-900 years given the push back from regression to the mean. The latest interview Stefan did with an expert on IQ suggests that genetic expression of IQ changes over an individuals lifetime so that at early ages it is around 20% genetic and by 65 its around 80% genetic. There seems to be a great deal to research in this field, but i am not particularly well read in this and i don't know to what degree the push-back against IQ research has prevented significant developments.

At first when I read this response i wanted it to make sense, so i rationalized it in my head, but its not satisfactory. I already understood that many features of an organism is a result of multiple genes. The problem i am having is how you could get vastly different species given this regression. If most (if not all) significant variation is regressed in a few generations, then don't you simply get more variations from the average? By that i mean all possible variation of a species will be present in the group, with nature affecting the ratio. Take color for example, if we have a range of color for a species from red to yellow. It would seem you can only get more variations of color in the group (maybe darker red and lighter yellow becomes a possibility over time, and in rare cases green gets added to the possibility) and the ratio of the population color changes depending on environment. Lets assume the yellow members are more vulnerable to predation, then the ratio of yellow to red will be lower. Given the fact that their color is a combination of genes, it will be almost impossible to get rid of any color variation since all members have the potential to give birth to any color (to greater or lesser degree depending on their own colors). It would require a strong environmental change over a long period of time or a series of concerted changes that push the species in one evolutionary direction to produce significantly different species (by concerted i don't mean design). Even then, they might still not be that different from their ancestors since regression to the mean will still mitigate the change, though the mean will slowly shift over many generations. Maybe i am just intellectualizing, but i find this topic important for the discussion about the IQ gains of Jews. Unless the Ashkenazi Jews engaged in some form of eugenics (i don't mean this in a derogatory way, just in the sense that people were really picky about their mating choices and the less intelligent were significantly under-reproducing), i find the natural history account for the gain suspect.

My questions are still being ignored. When a police officer comes to arrest you for smoking weed or not paying taxes, who is initiating force against you? By your logic the police officer is solely to be blamed for the initiation of force. When an American soldier goes and attacks people in the middle east, who is responsible for the initiation of force? Here, there is no obvious answer. The soldier could go to prison for refusing orders. Plus the propaganda element is present (for many people who come from military families), but who is resppnsible for that? The Hitler example in the video gails your own argument. Hitler did not brsinwash anyone as a child. When do brainwashed kids become moral agents? If moral culpability is all or none, then you will have a hard time making the case that most of government is bad since only the enforcement wing ever actually initiate force directly.

The problem with that proposition is that you can arrive at the right answer even with a wrong methodology (guessing for example). Some things can be discovered with multiple methods. To take your example, i can arrive at the square root of 933 by using a calculator, using some equation, or just guessing 30.5.

I am getting the sense that we mostly agree, and our way of thinking about these concepts are just different.

The arguments in this thread are unproductive because people are not defining their terms. To what does morality apply? The answer to this question should suffice to resolve the abortion problem. The inability to answer this question has led to many special categories in moral philosophy. The easiest answer is that morality applies to all humans (before death) and can even carry over into death with things like will. It only took babies and the mentally impaired to eradicate this proposition. The answer Stefan gave in my call in show about animals is the capacity for conceptual language (the ability to communicate morality). There is of course a special category, those who may/will in some future time possess conceptual language to include the baby and the mentally impaired. Pregnancy is also a special category. Some libertarians (the name of the one that came on this show eludes me) have made the case that abortion is an eviction. A case would have to be made that while she owns her body, the babies right to her womb exceeds her self ownership. There exists the counter case for eviction. If i invite a friend on a trip on my personal jet, can i evict him in mid air if he proves to be a nuisance? A case has been made that there is an implied contract with my friend that i will safely (to the best of my ability) return him to the ground. If he was aware i reserved the right to evict him mid flight he would not have come. However, no such contract exists with the baby (this is where it gets tricky). The baby has no capacity to enter into contracts. Lastly some believe an obligation (contractual obligation if you will) is created through unprotected sex to the potential fetus. How this obligation came into existence is attributed to self ownership and by extension the responsibility for one's action. The OP is making the case that morality only exists for conscious beings. A body with two heads is two persons while two bodies with one head is one person. The case has to be made in three stages, brain=consciousness=moral agent. As dsayers pointed out, animals have brains. Your comment on animals is ambiguous, but implies are different types of consciousness. The main problem with your position is that you grant a special aragement of one type of cell the special property called consciousness. This allows you to avoid defining the term consciousness in a precise measurable way so as to know who morality applies to. I will end by positing the same problem you posit to others to you. When does consciousness arise? Is it at 100 neurons? Why is the emergence of the thing you call consciousness any more special that when the sperm and egg merge?

I'll put that more accurately for you. A and only A has the power to choose to commit murder or not. C and only C has the power to choose to commit murder or not. This does not make us unsympathetic to C's dilemma, but we have to be accurate.

There are two concerns about your comment. First, advisability and expectations are things in people's minds. I would lump them together under preference (or desire). What the conditional does is allow you to say "if you desire/prefer X, then Y (Y being the factual claim)." Are preference (desire,expectations,obligations,advisability) real? We know they are not facts like it is raining outside, which are empirically verifiable. They are also not true by definition (mathematical model), like 2+2=4. So when you say they are real, i have no way of understanding the statement, at least without assuming you mean subjectively real (if i believe it is advisable/expected then it is). The second problem is the one that permeates all attempts at ethics (objective moral philosophy). If meanings are flexible, then communications about objective things also becomes flexible. This flexibility weakens the logical validity of arguments (since slightly different interpretations built up over a lengthy logical sequence makes the conclusion one possible outcome and not the necessary outcome). Even science runs into this problem. Its what is colloquially referred to as grey areas. Short of me beaming my ideas into your head, the easiest way to avoid confusion and inaccuracy is to use language as precisely and accurately as possible. Where current words fail, simply invent new ones.

Preference: a feeling of wanting or liking one person or thing more than another person or thing. Preferences derive from the individual. A nihilist could prefer truth and also prefer that everyone else prefers truth. He doesn't have to prefer it for any particular reason other than his feeling. The claim objective morality exists is either true or false. The nihilist engages you in the conversation assuming you also prefer the truth. Should he find out you do not, he can give you reasons he prefers the truth to try and you to change your mind, but he has to walk away if you remain unconvinced.

Merriam webster online dictionary. Is: references be. Be: used to indicate the identity of a person or thing, used to describe the qualities of a person or thing, used to indicate the condition of a person or thing. Ought: used to express obligation, advisability, natural expectation or logical consequence. Conditional: showing that something is true or happens only if something else is true or happens. The argument put forward in this thread goes something like this, we can only discover what is if we have a desire/obligation to do so. To which i will ask, is that a factually accurate statement? My answer is no. We know the sun exists, gravity exists, and sky is blue not because of a desire/obligation to know it, but by virtue of our daily experiences. I hope this is even more clear than my earlier post.

Best response i have seen to the somalia response to date. Its shocking how accurate it is, yet elusive.

Ben Shapiro defends himself in this interview with Steven Crowder. Take form it what you will.

I started thinking about this in relation to the IQ problem. Will blacks that are smarter, given enough time, produce descendants that are around the average? Wouldn't that also mean diaspora Jews have always been smarter, otherwise they would have regressed to the mean? I looked up regression to the mean vs evolution on google and this is the best answer i found. "TL;DR answer: Regression to the mean doesn't always occur (children can be taller than either parent, as can be easily observed at any high-school basketball game), so it doesn't affect the theory of evolution through natural selection. The observation of regression to the mean was of great concern to Darwin and early thoughts on natural selection (don't confuse "evolution", which is the observed phenomenon, and "natural selection", which is one of the theories proposed to explain evolution). The problem has been effectively resolved since the rediscovery of Mendel's genetic work at the end of the 19th century. "Regression to the mean" is inevitable if inheritance works through blending of features. That was how everyone believed inheritance to work in the mid-1800s, and Darwin understood that it presented an insuperable obstacle to his theory. That is, if blending inheritance was true, then natural selection could not be true. Darwin puzzled over this quite a bit, and came up with some unsatisfying suggestions to overcome it, but at the end of the day, one of the predictions that his theory of evolution through natural selection made, was that blending inheritance could not be true. Of course, blending inheritance is not true. Mendel showed that in fact inheritance is quantal, not blending. We now know that many traits of interest look, superficially, as if they're blending (which leads to regression to the mean), but are actually the result of multiple traits interacting. With blending inheritance, the variation that is required for natural selection to work is lost, generation after generation; regression to the mean in an inevitable consequence. With gene-based inheritance, variation (can be) preserved generation after generation; regression to the mean is a common but not inevitable consequence, because the variation in the original population is still present and can be re-created given appropriate selection pressure." link: http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/41982/regression-to-the-mean-and-evolution This response can explain why we can still get taller kids from two tall parents. Given the fact that height is affected by multiple genes, aren't we getting a "blending" effect, even if the mechanism is not actual blending? I am curious if anyone has more info about this. P.S. i would like to see Stefan do a video on it, but given the current events, i can see why he may be a little more busy with other things.