Will Torbald

This is something that bothers me profoundly. I've been writing a theory that addresses my objections to this way of thinking, which while it isn't erroneous, it is unrefined. It's in the other thread about morality or in its own thread on the philosophy section. The first part was about distinctions within immoral behaviors, but I am working on a second part that explains the problems of thinking binarily about the aspect that deals with being good. The basic premise of my objection is that not doing something immoral has no information on the actual activities of the person, and it conflates inaction with action together and that us a categorical mistake. As an example, a person who spent all day sleeping would be as good as the person who found a cure for cancer. One did something for others,and the other one didn't. Those two different states of being and interaction have to be differentiated appropriately, which UPB doesn't do. I'll keep refining those ideas until I post them in full.

I think I understand the example now, thanks. However, the answer to that problem is what I suggested: To understand how gravity works in a round object. He is making the mistake of thinking that gravity pulls downwards instead of inwards.

It is not about feeling motion. You have to think of it in terms of velocity and acceleration. Velocity is how fast you are moving, and acceleration is an increase in velocity. You can only feel acceleration, but it is impossible to feel a constant velocity. You don't feel the Earth rotating because it has a constant velocity, but you would feel it if it accelerated. It has nothing to do with your blood, but you're right that it has to do with the inner ear, but that only detects acceleration. I don't understand your argument about water and bridges as it is completely irrelevant to the curvature of the Earth. For that you need to understand how gravity works in a round object like the Earth.

I agree with this insofar as it has been proven that UPB is logical as a system of ethics. I don't argue against the logic of UPB as a system of all behaviors, but only of the behaviors that are morally relevant. In that subset the logic of UPB can be contested without an axiomatic contradiction.

The basic premise is that you don't know and you can't know. Coercion is immoral and that simply means that you must insist that a society based on moral principles instead of coercive laws is required to rescue civilization from barbarism. The practical arguments exist, but it's a never ending rabbit hole. No one is saying that you should prefer liberty because garbage will be picked better off the streets, but because freedom is just good. There are no convincing arguments against someone who wants to control you by force.

I make no claim about the validity of the logic, which is another can of worms, but the fact that you try to diverge the question in that direction might suggest you have no answer to what I actually asked.

Yeah, but why choose to be moral? Your personal answer is because you enjoy it. What if I enjoy being immoral instead? If you use synonyms to the question "Why be moral" and the answer "because it's correct" you can get "Why be good? because it's good. This is begging the question. People should be moral because it's good. People should be good because it's correct. People should behave correctly because it's moral.

I'm pretty sure it's not nonsense. The arguments from extremities are valid objections to any theory. Universality has to reach the most common interaction to the least common one.

Again, I can just reply with my previous questions and continue the circle. What do you have that I can't circle back with? I think I'm understanding your use of aesthetics to be different from what I use it for. I think you're equating opinions like "better" with aesthetics. Like saying "ethics is better than egoism". But aesthetics as I understand from UPB is behavior that doesn't include the use of force. What I think you mean is that ethics have been nothing but unsubstantiated opinions for thousands of years.

And if you can do whatever you want, why be moral? That's the full circle right there, and you haven't escaped nihilism.

The lifeboat scenarions, hangling from flagpoles, starving people in the desert, all the extreme situations that critics use to try to invalidate any principle. The only answers I've heard are either to dismiss them as almost never happening, or to say that you can make an exception in that case, or to just break code anyway and it doesn't matter. None of these are satisfying answers.

Not if the choice involves breaking the NAP for some goal like not dying. This is what all the critics of morality always converge on. Give a definition yourself before you want to interject that we're being pointless. We know what kind of ethics we are debating here, no need for redundancy. Unless your definitions are different, we know what we meant already.

This is then followed by "Why be moral in situations where being immoral is better than being moral?" Which is a more interesting question than one that simply questions morality as a whole without context. If your moral rules would deem me to be evil even in an extreme scenario (which all theories should be tested against, moral or scientific) then people would feel discouraged to accept your thesis because it condemns the common sense people use to operate without a formally structured theory of ethics.

This is something I also struggle with, and I've come up with my own interpretation of morality that adheres to UPB guidelines without it itself being UPB ethics. That is, UPB has a method and a conclusion. I keep the method, and then diverge in relatively significant ways in theory without altering the practice that much, although I do see where it would diverge on that as well. I've compiled the basic premises here: https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/46314-universally-permissible-interactions-or-how-i-think-about-ethics/#entry424066 But I'll summarize how I answer the question of "Why?" here anyway. Since morality is relevant only under interactions between people, the question can have two different versions of itself depending on which interacting agent you are. The giver or the receiver of the action. What people debate or question is whether actions are immoral, but this is a mistake. The action is only the element used to exchange energy between agents. A punch is an action, but the interaction could be moral depending on the state of the agents. It's either assault or boxing (or an accident) depending on the agreements between the agents. If you translate the why question to punching you get error from it. Why shouldn't I punch people? It makes no sense because punching people can be very useful or lucrative. You can only ask it from a perspective of a giver or a receiver. Like so "Why shouldn't I attack people without their permission?" Which actually, if you abstract it, means "Why can't I give myself permission to interact with the property of other people?" And at this point the question is revealed to be totally ridiculous because it is obvious that property is personal because only you have the capacity to give or refrain permissions over it. There are other versions of the question from the receiver side, but I prefer if you would just read the theory on the other thread for that. People get hung up with why be moral from the givers side, not with the receiver.

No, that's not how it works. The water curves itself along with the curvature of the earth because it is made of molecules that interact through gravity with the earth. If the Earth didn't rotate the water on it would still cover it along its surface. Are you going to watch the video that I posted instead? I'm still waiting on that, and et this point I'm worried you might just be ignoring it on purpose.

You're right rationalistically. I'm just gathering empirical evidence by running the experiment of offering answers and getting results. It's a bad habit of mine to demand proof that a person is nuts even if I already have enough reasons from reason alone. I'll be done after he has no answer to the video.

Well, since your first sentence contradicts your last sentence, I don't know whether you are lying or not. I do however find it hard to understand how you can say that you have read books in physics, and learned about it without understanding how the relativity of motions works. Here is a short video explaining how jumping on a trampoline won't help you determine whether the Earth is rotating or not. It is the concept of relativity (but not the kind of relativity Einstein talked about). If you can't understand relativity, you can't understand anything else regarding motion and rotation. So please watch it if you want to learn more about the world, and hopefully correct your mistakes when it comes to your perception.

Have you ever had an IQ test, even an informal one? Did you finish high school? Have you ever read a book on physics? These are not insults, I'm just trying to understand what kind of person is drawn to believe into flat earth conspiracies.

Right, so I think you're not far from what UPB and the NAP already are. To break a voluntary and explicit contract is immoral under those terms if I understand them correctly. When it comes to dichotomies like good/evil and right/wrong, I deviate from the polarity of two judgments, and create three categories. Einstein said that theories need to be as simple as possible, but not simpler that they wouldn't work properly. It really is a puzzle I can't solve with just right/wrong behavior or interactions, but by separating them with right/wrong/evil I think I have reached a system that satisfies my own personal skepticisms, and I hope it reaches someone else I guess. With evil I mean wrongdoings that can't be forgiven, and only murder fits that category. All other wrongdoings are also immoral, but not in the absolute sense of murder. It's difficult to accept, as seen on the comments above where I continue debating it, but I also debated it within myself a lot before writing or posting it. To me, it's the only system I can live with that counters my own inertia towards nihilism. UPB didn't do it for me as much as I tried, but my solution wasn't to discard it, but to expand it.

It does matter. It matters because you have created a trauma through aggressions and abuses. It would be like saying that a woman who has been drugged has the capacity to consent, which isn't true. In the same way, a pathological emotional state cannot be considered a platform for sound moral judgment. If you continue to dissent on this issue you have not understood the concepts of moral agency and permissions, and you'd be arguing from a misunderstanding. This does matter. To claim that something doesn't matter is not proof that it doesn't. None of those scenarios are moral in any way, shape or form, but they are not situations were life was endangered either. If you cannot make distinctions between wrong behavior and murderous behavior, you need to keen your senses and use a finer and sharper knife. Not all interactions are murderous, and murder is the only action without the capability of forgiveness. To conflate two different kinds of interactions into one sole and undifferentiated category is a categorical mistake. It would be like saying that cat and dogs are of the same species, but they really don't mate together. They are of the same larger group called mammals, but not of the same subset of mammals. Yes, you can absolutely say the interaction was immoral. Yes, the grown up can forgive the immoral act, but it truly depends on the kind of immoral act that was committed. The point of the theory is to differentiate two different categories of immoral acts that were once conflated into one, which is why there are so many objections and difficulties when it comes to the understanding and application of UPB in the real world. Now, what I have said a few times now is that coercion is in a separate category to the basic wrongdoings because it is a threat to your life. The parents are the lifeline of a child, which means that parents have an infinite probability to inflict coercion on their children because they would die without them. Parental abuse under threats of neglect, malnutrition, abuse, violence, and so on, are understood to be a threat to the very life of the child. A parent need not literally threat with murder, but to even say "if you don't do what I say I will abandon you on the street" is equal to being threatened with death, it is coercion because the life of the child is in the hands of the parent. It is even much more a delicate situation than one between two morally capable adults, which is where the basic theory is developed, but applications on more complicated cases are also possible to derive from it. I know that I only explained the basic premises, and objections based on more complicated scenarios are perfectly acceptable. So, since it is established that parental abuse is equal to in most cases to lethal coercion, to have a child that grows up, and returns to forgive such abuse would be to side with coercion, with evil, with death threats. That is not an encouraged behavior in the theory, but it's true that I might have implied that by not explaining the relationship between parents and children. There are however other interactions that do not involve life endangering coercions, and while it does sound distasteful to say that they are forgivable, they nonetheless cannot be claimed to have a zero probability either. Maybe, just maybe, imagine a scenario where a mother who is otherwise a peaceful parent has received a very traumatic and enraging interaction. She would be temporarily hysterical and out of control, and in the collateral damage she hits her child. This would be hurtful to a child who doesn't understand the situation in the moment, but after growing up and learning about why the mother lost her mind in that time, the child could come to forgive her in that particular and local interaction. The child would have carried with him resentment, hate, a grudge within him for years towards the mother, but after realizing the local circumstances of the event, the adult is now willing to lift the curse towards her. History has not been rewritten. Two people interacted and exchanged energy. One gave, and one received. It is, however, a matter of decision and permission. In the same way it is possible to retroactively permit an interaction, aka forgiving, it is also to possible to retroactively revoke the permission. If you were dating a woman, and six months later she tells you that she's HIV positive, and the she knew about it before dating you, and she didn't want to tell you - you would immediately understand that you would have never consented to have sex with her (well, in most cases, maybe you would I don't know why) and that every interaction that you had with her is now a rape. She lied and raped you, and every permission that you gave her would now be available for invalidation. You could, like I said I don't know why, but you could say that you understand her and that you want to be with her anyway, and not revoke the consent - but I think that has a very low probability of happening. Anyway, it is categorically possible to curse her with raping you because of the invalid consent that you gave her. Consent exists in the present, and in the past, and in the future. It is not an act of supernatural abilities to realize you've been cheated, when it comes to revoking consent, nor an act of sacrificial altruism to forgive someone after acquiring a higher understanding of the situation.

I'm with you on everything you said with the exception that I would like them to piss off after they have shown to be unable to change their minds. I'm being nice to him in the first impression. If after that he continues to deny the evidence, or shows no signs of curiosity or doubt, then yes he can very well be ignored.

Stockholm Syndrome happens after a person has been held hostage or kidnapped enough time to have their mind develop pathological affection to their kidnappers. It is you who brought up SS, so you can't blame me for making that assumption, and I find that very dishonest. On the second part, if you define rape as a sexual interaction without permission from the receiver that happens under coercion of lethal force or murder as in "I will kill you if you don't comply" then I clearly stated that it is evil and is not a forgivable interaction because it invokes murder into the equation. When you say "the same act" you are invoking actions, not interactions. It is the interaction between two moral agents that is the element of the theory. When you say "action" you are referring to "sex", but the interaction is either "love making" or "rape" depending on the permissions given by the receiver of the energy. The action is what is transferred, but the interaction is the moral event. Since permission can be given or revoked, to give permission after an interaction is to forgive - that is, to transform the moral value of the interaction - but that doesn't change the fact of the simple action that was the "sex". It stays as sex in the past and the present, but the moral value changes.

Welcome JP. About the round Earth, yes, it is true that the Earth is not a perfect sphere. However, that is not the scientific theory, as the Earth is described as an oblate spheroid with a slight bulge in the equator. It is not a smooth round continuum, but on average it stays curved. It is possible to have a long flat surface on the roundness of the Earth, but at some point it would have to bend to the curvature. I hope that clears up the misunderstanding.

And how did the victim get the stockholm syndrome if not from being kidnapped in the first place through force? We would understand that such mental health conditions would exempt a person from being a moral agent in the first place, thus her consent or permission of the rape isn't actually a valid consent, and the rapist would be acting without permission. That on top of it being an interaction that happened after a previous violation which was her kidnapping.

Well, I'm sorry to be so stern at the beginning because I really don't want to give this more thought that it needs to. Terms like "optimal" and "controlled" are so vague that they really don't mean anything. It's just preference. Some people would say that X is more optimal, or that Y is more optimal. The only viable answer is who cares and those who don't like cities can go live elsewhere. The only reason cities cannot develop naturally and with the space they would choose "optimally" is because of government regulations, they decide where to build the roads, the sewers, the wiring, and so on. A city under statism cannot evolve naturally, so you get the cramps you complain about. That's all.