Will Torbald

Because you already come with a conclusion and demand others to work for you, as in, give you that which is your responsibility to do I can't take you seriously on your demands. You poison the well, make opinions as if they were facts, and you're very rude. It is not my job to make you understand. Nor is it my job to give you the answer. It is your job to think without premeditated conclusions, and work from there. Since you do not subscribe to the NAP and continuously mock it and straw man to the nth degree to discredit it, I have to assume you are an aggressive person who has no intention of changing his ways. I cannot extend any courtesy to you that way. All the definitions you ask for are in the UPB book, so I don't have to give them again. It is your job to look it up. Here's a short summary of UPB if words in a book/computer screen are too difficult for you:

Yes, in time he will, but at least his Bible is open source.

Because they are strawmen. If you understood what "everything" is actually made of, you'd know it makes perfect sense for a universe to have come without a creator. When you only study philosophies and you don't learn science you only get a narrow sense of reality, which cannot be grasped only though rationalism.

Har har.

It's not a hope, it's just that a logically sound creator is not a god. When you mix your god with cosmology, it doesn't work. You either have to keep cosmology and drop your god, or keep your god and drop cosmology.

But who defines what is possible or impossible? It's like a man saying he has the largest penis only if you measure it with his ruler, and all other rulers are invalid. If logic defines what is possible then god is not beyond this world. If reason defines what is possible then god is not beyond a human.

Indeed I sensed this tendency of regressing to ontological infinity very early in the discussion. It is very easy to start sophistry with "but you can't prove objective reality exists" or so diatribe like that. The very fact that you can construct sentences with disbelief and skepticism of a theory is not proof that the theory isn't true, and that's something a lot of people don't get. "Look at me, I don't believe in the NAP, therefore it is wrong!".

All the definitions I use are in UPB. I told you that is what I use. All your objections in so far can be summed up as "I don't understand" and that's not an indictment of the theory, only of your capacity to reason. All terms are made up terms, it doesn't muddy the waters nor does it keep outsiders at bay to tell you to read the text and understand it. UPB is a meta-ethical framework of evaluation. It evaluates theories, not actions. If you say that an action is moral or immoral you are using a moral theory to define it. For your theory to be a valid and true theory, it must be universallizable. It must be a theory everyone can properly apply in the real world. Everyone. At the same time. Always. That's what universal means. Universally preferable behavior is a limit. It says that if your theory of morality can't be universally preferable behavior, then it can't be a valid moral theory. That's what it is.

Right.

I don't think it needs to be said, but resisting capitalism using the products fo capitalism is insane. Which is what you need to be in order to resist capitalism in the first place... ohhh, I see.

I had to pause at around page 4 because my brain was drippping out from my ears a bit. Thanks for the stuff, it's fascinating. I never hated the prequels but conceded that the originals were better. This makes me want to rewatch them sometime with this commentary.

They are not contradictory propositions, but they are subjective and relativistic decisions. For problem A you choose violence and for problem B you choose voluntarism. The contradiction is when you say that doing both things at the same time can coexist in a single moral theory at the same time. That is the problem. You can empirically alternate between aggression and non-aggression in the real world, but by doing so you also switch your moral framework. Both operations are mutually incompatible. It would be like waking up as a Jew, then being a Christian by noon, and a Muslim by night, and then repeat the next day. But you can't be a Jew, a Christian, and Muslim at the same time at once. Does that make sense to you? Is that clear? Because I'm running out of examples. The discussion here is that UPB can be consistently applied at all times without contradictions for all people no matter what. You don't need to switch morality or create relativistic pseudo solutions.

It is not unfair to say that to argue against UPB you need to use UPB. It is axiomatic in that sense. It would be like saying that language has no capacity for meaning while using language. You may believe that language has no meaning, but maybe even only in your head - and even then you would have had some kind of inner thought process that uses words and concepts and abstractions. If you want to demonstrate that UPB is wrong, you have to accept a universal preference for truth over falsehood. Because if it's not universal, and it only matters to you, there's no reason for why it would matter to me and I can just dismiss it. If it only matters now, and not in the past or the future, then tomorrow I will revert back to my old belief and you would have wasted your time and my time.

If UPB isn't proof to you, what is? UPB is enough proof for me, and to many others here. Do you have a standard of proof that is higher and stronger? I don't know of any other philosophical construct that needs to be further than UPB, or anything else. Instead of continiously and rather pedantically reject all arguments and moving the goal posts you must define your standard of proof, because you are asking for the unrealistic.

If your nation is evil, you're supporting evil. If your nation is virtuous, you'd be supporting virtue. Some nations are more evil than others, and some are not so evil. At the very least you can be nationalist when comparing yourself to a hell-hole nation as long as you know it's not in the absolute.

Sure, I'll expand on what I meant. First of all thanks for your comment, I appreciate it. We understand that analogies aren't perfect, but serve the purpose of providing context to another idea. While you can calculate probabilities in QM, it is not the same kind of calculations used for moral judgements. However, when we compare two different, but related and linked, concepts like morality and justice it is possible to make soft inferrences about the nature of their interactions. What I mean by the "certainty of morality" is a system like UPB which provides clear and well limited boundaries for ethics. There is no relativity or personal preference, no "it's their culture". It's very objective in that way. On the other hand you have the opposite of that line of reasoning with the preference for "morality is whatever we say it is and if you disagree we shoot you" approach of statism, utilitarianism, and so on. It puts the punishment before the morality. So if you can imagine how there are two sides of a scale, where if one becomes well defined, the other becomes undefined. Since "rule of law" and "penal codes" are based on the attempt to have a hard code of justice, the examination of the ethical principles behind the total sum of the laws will result in an undefined, arbitrary, subjective, and rather chaotic combination of moral precepts. When you try to define a course of action after a violation has been made as the only enforceable outcome, you lose objectivity in the big picture. I mean, just try to imagine what kind of principles are behind the justice system of any country, and it resolves to nothing but mush. When it comes to the name "Morality Uncertainty Principle" I focused on the uncertainty part, and how it's a principle because it applies universally to any example of a comparison between moral systems and justice systems. I could have given it a cute name like the Torbald Uncertainty Principle, but I didn't want to put a name to it because it loses the information of what it is about. It's just the theme of the conversation. Now, I don't mean by uncertainty that all morality is uncertain. Because you could call other systems that aren't UPB "morality" with huge air quotes as well. Situational ethics, or objectivist ethics, or plain nihilism, you name it. They're all "moralities". What I mean to suggest with the uncertainty is that all of those systems have degrees of certainty and relativity. UPB is one where there is almost certainly no room for opinion, and so it leaves a huge uncertainty area on the right hand of the equation for reactions to immorality. It is a way to codify what Stef has said about flagpole/lifeboat scenarios of how violations of property rights don't have to be a call for violent and punitive reactions because consent can be given after the fact. If you break a window into private property it is not a crime if the owner gives consent after the fact when they find out it was a life or death situation. So for a 100% violation you can get a 0% reaction - and that's what I say that upsets people. They cannot imagine a system of morality where reactions to violations can be no reaction at all. They feel the need to punish, and cannot accept the certainty of objective morality for the desire to have certainty of punishment.

The book is called UPB. You said you read it, but you're still asking for it. This theatrical attitude is getting really absurd.

I understand what you say here, but it's just more coulds. It is a reasonable concern to say "maybe we are wrong about universality", but to leave it to the wind and demand that I remove your doubt from your head is irresponsible. Because it is your responsibility to understand why you have the doubt, and address it yourself. There many more universal implications in a debate besides the debate itself. If you want to know the truth, you have to admit a universal preference for truth over falsehood, for example. If you say "maybe I just want truth now, and later truth becomes unpreferable to falsehood" you have to explain how the values become reversed. Again, it's like going to a physics class and raising your hand and asking the teacher that gravity could be a force made by tiny gnomes, and that maybe physics is wrong. So what? Demonstrate it. Demonstrate it.

To borrow a principle of quantum mechanics called the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle which says that position and momentum are mutually uncertain. Knowing the position will leave momentum in uncertainty, while knowing the momentum will leave the location uncertain. This strikes me as eerily similar to what happens in moral philosophy in regards to ethics and justice. I call it the MUP. The Morality Uncertainty Principle says that as the certainty of morality increases, the certainty of punishment decreases. The more you know about morality, the more objective it becomes- the exercise of justice and punishment becomes less known and more subjective. The certainty of morality is the uncertainty of justice, and viceversa. People expect specifically determined punishments and judicial action out of a specifically determined system of universal ethics. However, universal ethics contain no information about the actions to follow after immoral behavior has occurred - and this upsets people. So they codify their laws, try to write down specific criminal justice codes for each and every imaginable situation, and in the process of doing that they create uncertainty of morality. As a psychological note, the preference for certainty of justice over certainty of morality seems to be as a way of managing the anxiety that uncertainty generates in people. Not knowing what to do bothers people, and they don't want to think about it. By having an instruction manual they get to relax their upset sensibilities at the expense of a rational and universal set of ethics. In other words, if it feels good, it is good. But a minority of people reject this paradigm and are perfectly comfortable with the certainty of ethics versus the uncertainty of punitive action. The anarchists, philosophers, libertarians, and so on. It is the inverse way of thinking and even feeling. Back to the topic of certainty, this ambiguity of the right side of the equation is often used as an attack on universal principles. They think that if a violation of property rights, a violation of the NAP, or any other likewise principle is broken then it must be that justice and punishment must follow and this must also be objectively determined. No, it's not like that. Tolerance, forgiveness, mercy, pity. These are all possible outcomes of a violation of ethical principles. Total and utter justice and restitution is also possible for the same crime. It is this 100% to 0% uncertainty of follow-up behavior that bothers people deeply. Some philosophers like Daniel Denett go as far as saying that they simply don't want to live in a world without punishments. It is unthinkable to them because of their feelings, which is rather anti intellectual. The approach I have to the uncertainty of justice in the certainty of morality is one of intensity. The intensity approach is as such: The intensity of a moral problem is inversely proportional to the intensity of justice. Meaning that situations of intense moral duress like life or death scenarios lower the intensity of the desire to proceed with punitive actions. In the classic flagpole example, it is certainly determined that breaking the window to save your life is a violation of property rights - but the intensity of the moral choice was so high that proceeding to prosecute a man for it would be unthinkable since it follows inversely proportional intensities. But what if its the opposite? What if someone who is in no duress whatsoever, no poverty or hunger, someone simply breaks in your window and takes your stuff just because. The moral intensity is so low, so minimal, that the resulting justice intensity increases almost to the max. There is no good reason to break property rights in such low intensity, thus restitution and actions against him are perfectly understandable - but always with the low probability of mercy and forgiveness. Maybe you just don't want to go through the trouble and let it go. In the end, it is the shift from certainty of justice to certainty of morality that can effectively change society, and it begins with individuals capable of standing up saying "I don't know what should be done about this crime, nor do I want to".

There is no such thing as having no choice.

"The principle is just that what is unwanted is evil. Therefore, what is wanted is good. " I think your straw man is on fire. Are you going to care to put it out? It's already catching up to your pants, too.

It's not society what determines what is moral, it's philosophy. This weasel way of making questions ignores basic etiquette of discussion. We do not live in an anarchist society and I doubt you would agree to someone pointing a loaded gun at you anyway.

Two people debating agree that voluntary dialogue is the best behavior they could be using to deal with their disagreements. If it wasn't, you'd have to explain why they are leaving out a better way to solve disputes in favor of something inferior. All the arguments from "could be otherwise" do is fog. If I started arguments against, say, the theory of general relativity with "it could be something else" I would be required to propose a competing theory of space and time. Otherwise I'd just be concern trolling. So, since you say "it could be that violations of property rights are not always wrong" you have to provide a competing theory of decaying property rights. A theory of situations were it isn't. Do it. Think about it. Otherwise stop wasting a debate on coulds.

You can ask the man. "I'm not sure" is not an argument against morality, but against your own capacity to understand.

Because a debate is a voluntary engagement. You have to consent to the use of your time and mind for a debate with others. I can't force you to talk to me, to use your time for me. A debate already has the element of consent derived from your exclusive ownership of your resources: body, mind, time.