Will Torbald

What do you mean by "bound to starve to death". How did he get to that point? If you begin your argument with a made up situation you can't have any moral judgement without understanding how it even began.

I know this is what you want, but I also know that it is dishonest. You can't come into a forum and ask about morality by demanding a validation of ontological principles. Make a separate thread about metaphysics if you want to debate whether reality exists or some "first principles" like that, but ethics is way after that and it requires an objective reality outside subjective consciousness, self ownership, and so on. Even a debate at all has to start on the premise that the other person you are talking to exists and isn't an unconscious robot incapable of changing his own mind. So no, your request to start from principles is not granted here at least from me.

Tu quoque is not the justification of self ownership, it is the refusal to debate with someone who wishes to deny self ownership while expecting the debate to happen according to the rules of self ownership. It would be like refusing to play baseball with someone who brought a tennis racket to the field. Baseball just doesn't work like that, and if you want to play baseball, play by the rules of baseball. In other words, if you want to believe self ownership isn't real, go ahead and believe it. But if you want to convince me using the medium of a debate you have to realize that the rules of debate necessitate each participant to enter voluntarily and be responsible for their arguments, which requires the exercise of self ownership - thus it's like sitting on a chair trying to tell me chairs don't exist - and arguing with that kind of people is insane, because they are insane.

What is violated is consent, not the self ownership. Your self ownership gives you the right to offer consent over actions done unto it. Only you can determine if a person slicing you open has permission to do it. It doesn't mean that they cannot do it without it, but that doing so would violate your exclusive right to the ownership and property of your body. When a doctor is operating on you and cutting you up and removing your spleen he would need you to sign consent forms and documents explaining how the procedure is done and you understand the risks of it. Self ownership and property rights are a necessary requirement for ethics, but not a sufficient requirement to deduce whether someone is being a surgeon or a Knives McStabby. The rest is the question of consent.

If you want to claim that humans can be divided in two opposing moral categories you have to provide evidence of this distinction. It's not about saying that some people are better at basketball or math than others. It's about "why would it be right to steal for some people while wrong for others?"

Well, you already have exclusive use of your body and your mind. You can say that because you are your body you have exclusive use of your body. It is also empirically verified by the experiment that no matter hoe much I try to think about moving your arm with my mind, only you can move your arm by thinking about it. So if you try to argue that you don't have exclusive use of your body you are either possessed by a demon, which you would have to prove somehow, or you would be delusional or schizophrenic to think that and you'd need mental examination by a professional. Or you could just be trolling ad infinity. So my question is - what is the theory that explains the decay of your exclusive property rights of your body? When do you start losing ownership of your spleen? Well, I could stab you and rip your spleen open, but that is obviously assault, injury, organ theft, etc. I'd be stealing a piece of you, of your self. So you never lose ownership of yourself. Again, if you do you'd have to explain how and why it happens without being crazy or possessed.

It's fair and I understand the frustration. What I would do in that case is by beginning the argument with the large topic of abuse, and don't proceed to make it specific before they agree that no matter who is making the abuse it is universally wrong. "Good, we both agree that no matter whoever is abusing it is always wrong. Which is why I am also interested in the subject of abuse done by women (...)" Something like that. So if they try to divert you to another subset, just remind them that they already agreed that all abuse is wrong.

There's a distinction between "independent of opinion" and "incapable of having an opinion about it". You can have any opinion you want about UPB or the NAP, but that doesn't mean that UPB or the NAP are opinions. "My car is slow" is an opinion, but my car still works despite that opinion. What you want is to say that the NAP is not an opinion itself. Well, how can it even be an opinion? It's not describing anything else in the way "slow", "ugly" or "idiot" are opinions. If you want to say is that "The NAP doesn't depend on opinions to be true" then you have to point out where the opinion is. Now, if you want to say "consent" is an opinion, then you are wrong. It is not an opinion, it is a decision. The NAP requires a decision from the person receiving the threat of aggression to either accept it or reject it. That does not mean that it is an opinion about flowers or the weather. It is not an opinion to say that rape can only happen if the receiver of the offense does not consent since consenting would make it love making, not rape. It is not relativistic in the way moral relativism would say "honor killings are bad in america, but good in Saudi Arabia because they are different cultures". It's not like that either.

If I remember correctly, "liking jazz" is a personal aesthetic preference according to UPB. Being on time requires multiple people to happen, but liking jazz is solely on you. It is not an interaction between multiple participants in the behavior. That's why it's considered "personal" even though it's still just an aesthetic.

If the argument is that the child doesn't have the capacity for reason, then inflicting pain will not result in any learning experience. A being with no reason will experience the pain as torture unrelated to any causal events. It will not understand the pain as a punishment for a bad behavior, since it lacks reason. It will simply understand it as "ok now I am suffering and I have no idea why".

Alright, first lets just clarify what the NAP is, and what it is not. Aggression is not simply violence, it's the initiation of violence from a state of non violence. It's very easy to confuse aggression with violence and think that the NAP is some sort of pacifist statement about never using force at all. It's not, since the use of force is necessary for self defense against initiations of force. Is that clear? It simply says "don't start a fight with me, but if you do, you'll get it". Why is it important? Because it's a rule that can be respected universally. Everyone can agree that they don't want to have force used against their will. But force in accordance to their will is ok, and we call that wrestling or boxing, or whatever. Since you also ask about evil, well, what is evil? Evil by itself is nothing. It's a tag, a label, a spook. Evil by itself is not a useful word that conveys information. The information is what matters. If you say that breaking the NAP is evil, what you really mean is that it is a universally unwanted behavior. You can't want to have "evil" done onto you, otherwise it wouldn't be evil. If I said that you couldn't want to be stolen from it would be true because stealing is, by definition, an unwanted removal of property from you. If I said you could want to be stolen from, two things would happen. A) the resulting action would not be a theft, and B) I would have made an error because of A. Since no one can prefer to be stolen from, that action is "evil", but again that's just a label for immorality in relation to consent. If you want a string of statements it would be like this: 1- Self ownership is a valid description of human behavior 2- Consent is a valid exercise of self ownership of your body and property 3- Behaviors against consent can't be universally prefered 4- Morality to be valid must consist of universally preferable principles 5- Rules that can't be universal can't also be morally valid 6- The NAP is universally preferable meaning it is a rule that respects consent and the requirements for morality 7- The opposite of the NAP, or the AP "The initiation of aggression IS universally preferable" is impossible and illogical 8- Thus the NAP is possible, logical, and universally preferable. I'm sure you will have a ton of objections and doubts and questions about definitions, and that I can be wrong as well, but this is the synthesis of what I personally understand to be the ethics of the NAP and the framework of UPB.

Well, what kind of proof do you want? Since you are asking for proof, I must ask you what your standard of evidence is. What would it take for you to recognize a moral principle as valid? Do you want experiments? Charts? Mathematical equations? First of all, I would only be paraphrasing UPB. Read that first. If you disagree, you have to say which of your necessary requirements for proof hasn't been met.

I don't doubt that's what people are using it for, just avoiding an emotional distress, but as a rational tactic they are indeed right that focusing /only/ on one side is not rigorous. If you could maintain them on the big picture without letting go of their subset at the same time you have a chance at making a difference.

Behaviors don't exist objectively like a tree exists objectively. You can only judge if a behavior is preferable or not, and the crux of defining morality as universal is finding behaviors that cannot be preferred by anyone at all. If you start a rebuttal to this with "I'm not sure what you mean by" go read a dictionary.

Because you're arguing subsets of a whole instead of addressing the whole. My left arm is on fire, but what about my right arm that is being eaten? Both are correct. Whataboutery can be avoided if you begin your argument about wholesome issues, like abuse, rather than female abuse. You are doing the same mistake your annoying friend is doing by ultra-focusing on subsets.

Not-A is anti A in the sense that if you insert it as an instruction it achieves the nullification of A. If you have a robot with the instruction "walk" it will walk. If while it's walking you insert the command "not walk" it will stop walking, thus working as an anti-walk. Morality is about behaviors, not noun-things.

You're looking at a magnet stuck on a fridge and saying that magnetic fields could not be true. I'm done with this.

The physical evidence I have is that you are the person who is making an argument. I'm not talking to a computer AI, but a person who is deciding to do it by himself with his time, energy, and body. Your argument came into motion by your decisions. It exists because you moved yourself. You can be nihilist about it and say that maybe your argument came into being without you owning yourself, but at that point I will simply stop replying at all. You'd be forfeiting responsibility for your own actions, and I'd just be wasting my time.

I described self ownership already. I didn't assert it exists, I already defined it. It is very annoying to be told that I am making baseless assertions when you are the one ignoring my arguments. If you do not have a standard of proof, you also don't have a standard of disproof, which means any objection you make is what is baseless, not my arguments. You're just saying "I don't know how it can be true, but I am sure how it can't" and that's just not symmetric. I can't take that seriously.

It's not circular reasoning, it's A = A. You can't have "HUMAN" without the letters m, n, h, a, and a. That's not a tautology. If the concept accurately explains reality, it's not just a floating immaterial construct. It's the truth. I am not positing a non existent property of magnets to explain magnets, because magnets are by definition that which has that property. A property which is described after it already is seen on the object. It's not an ad-hoc solution. Since I've already explained this, and you're refuting it erroneously by equivocating it with something it isn't, I'll ask you to present your thesis of how you expect to prove self ownership? You don't seem to understand that just being vague and asking for "the way I see it" kind of fog doesn't get you any closer to the truth. It's not a productive exercise. What do you want? You keep making arguments, well, just obfuscations of arguments actually, and I am not going to keep repeating things over and over because you have no standard of objectivity. It's like boxing with a fern. Inverse your statement, and see if it's symmetrical. Ask not why people "should" be allowed to continue owning what they do, but why "should" their property rights expire? You need to posit a contesting theory of expiring property rights. Give it an equation. What is the rate of decay of property rights give time n? Since property rights also apply to my body, at what age would I cease to own my spleen given the rate of decay of ownership? What virus must infect me to cease to own my spine? At what point does a masseuse gain ownership of my ribs if she's massaging them? Since you're asking for effects in the real world, it is your job to come up with a reason why I can't keep owning myself, thus owning the effect of my actions.

Self ownership is an emergent property of a human being. The self awareness, self actuation, sentience, consciousness, objective intelligence, all that jazz. A rock doesn't have any of that. A human does. A rock can't own itself. A human does because it can. The field is an analogy, I'm not saying it's actually a field. The field is what allows the magnet to a) be called a magnet, and b) stick to fridges. Without the field it can't be either a or b. You are shifting the goal posts here. I was talking about how "arguing against self ownership" ignores the objective reality that you own the argument because you are directly causing it, being responsible for it by using that which you are the sole owner of - it being your body, mind, and time. That's what you ignore when you argue against it. I am not talking about sandcastles in that instance. You have to jump through that hurdle, ask me to ignore you performative contradiction, and pretend that you are without yellow cards to make a soccer analogy. Now, you are literally saying that toppling my sandcastle is a violation of my property, so arguing how violations of property rights aren't violating property rights because they don't exist is literally making my head spin.

I don't see how it couldn't be applicable to humans without the implication of human beings not being biological entities. What's actually in question is the correlation of r/K behaviors against liberals/conservatives. That's the actual interesting bit, because those are two dichotomies that could have causation or deep correlation with underlying causes.

I'm not claiming ESP or anything, this is pretty much what they actually say and do. I've been to the theology classes in school, talked with them, and since I wasn't always an atheist, also understand it from the inside.

I live in Ecuador, very christian, catholic, JW, the works. I know how these people think, they're in my extended family, all around school and high school, and college. I've done the hands-on fieldwork.

Like a physical property. Imagine I say that magnets stick to fridges because they have a magnetic field. I explain and define the properties of the field and how it sticks to the fridge, and you say there's a possibility that the magnet could stick to the fridge without a magnetic field (glue or adhesive notwithstanding). Then I say that if it didn't have a magnetic field it wouldn't be a magnet in the first place. That's sort of where we are. A person is the magnet, a property of magnets is the magnetic field, and the sticking-to-a-fridge is an effect of the "self ownership" that causes the effects of people being responsible for their actions, their time, bodies, being able to self actuate on their own without being coerced, and so on. If you can remove a magnetic field from a magnet and tried to stick it to a fridge and it fell, it would prove that it sticks to a fridge due to the magnetic force. If you can remove self ownership from a human and still have it have sentience, and consciousness, and self awareness, and decision making, and moral capacity, and still have it be called "a human being" you could have an argument on how humans can exist as they are now and not have self ownership. But you can't, because that would be like taking the magnetic field off a magnet, and still call it a magnet even though it is no longer a magnet. It would just be a piece of metal or ore.