Max Hartford

If I were a hot girl, I would seriously consider being a stripper. I already like dancing and money!

My advice? Worry less about what other people think, and ditch the guilt. Life's too short for that nonsense.

If I understand correctly,according to you, preferences are what we would choose to do in an ideal world, whereas choices are what we choose to do in the necessarily limited world of reality? But in this case, it seems preferences are not all that relevant a phenomenon to consider. I might prefer to be immortal, have unlimited sex, and be able to shoot lightning bolts from my fingers, from these are not all that relevant when making my everyday choices.

Let's not call it a debate then, let's call it an exchange of rhetoric, or advise, or whatever. Anyway, why would you allow the provisional, temporary requirements of some internet discussion to affect your decision-making outside of that context? Doesn't seem like a persuasive reason to act morally. The difference is that science and rationality do have egoistic uses for the individual actor, whereas moralism is only useful for bamboozling gullible people.

No, of course there's no 'requirement' to accept my conclusions, you're not 'required' to do anything. If you want to enslave yourself to useless moralistic phantoms, that is your prerogative. But perhaps not everyone wants to believe in useless things like you; it is to them I direct my words.

It most certainly is not an arbitrary standard. Who cares what happens after we're dead? We won't be there to see it. The most we can do is try to comfort ourselves in our dying days that things will be better for the people that we love after we're dead because of our actions while living. But we will have no way of knowing whether our actions actually did make things better or not, hence there is always a heavy dose of wishful thinking involved here.

Ah okay, got it, thanks for clarifying. I don't think that considering the 'internal inconsistency' of their coercive actions is really going to deter anyone from engaging in these actions though. Hence why the practical utility of this kind of morality is suspect.

It's not "moving the goal-posts', it's a necessary question to answer in order to determine whether the answer that you gave is a persuasive one or not. "We should conform to those principles that are correct": You have not proven this premise. Why should we?

I think this is the best answer so far. Reciprocity, combined with empathy, can provide very substantial reasons for acting in ways that are deemed 'moral' by others. A couple points to mention though: First, it would seem that in this case, the kind of morality you are talking about would not be the logically-deduced UPB morality that Molyneux favours, but rather the kind of 'rule utilitarianism' morality advocated by the likes of Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt. Rule utilitarianism is based on finding general rules of behavior that are conducive to the smooth functioning of a peaceful and prosperous social order. Second, there could well be opportunities for the individual to slip in some individually-beneficial 'immoral' actions, without upsetting the balance of society too much, or triggering any kind of negative retaliation. In these (perhaps limited) cases, individuals may still have no reason to act morally.

This 'answer' is perhaps even a step below: 'Because Jesus says so!'. Why would anyone but a fanatic sacrifice any aspect of their personal well-being in order to follow things that are 'True' or 'Correct'? This seems like a bizarre form of idol worship to me.

Some points in response: 1. What is beneficial for 'society' (however one defines it) may not always line up with what is beneficial for the individual decision-maker. There's no good reason why individuals should sacrifice themselves in any way in order to benefit 'society'. 2. Not sure what exactly you mean by 'corrupted'. 3. Conscience is an internal enforcer of morality. If we do not care about morality, we will not have a conscience, and hence can't have 'disasters' of it. 4. I don't think the analogy between morality and science holds here. Science helps us to understand how the world works, whereas morality is just a set of criteria for judging other people's actions. Morality doesn't actually lead us to an understanding of what motivated those actions. For that, we turn to psychology, which is a science. 5. If we don't care about morality, we don't want to defend ourselves from 'evil in general', but rather from things that are harmful to us personally. The amoral person should be capable of recognizing what is harmful to them equally, if not better than, the moral person. 6. Since morality was not formulated with the maximization of individual happiness in mind, but rather based on logical reasoning, it would be a strange and unlikely coincidence if following it led to this outcome. Also, different things make different people happily, so it is highly unlikely that following a universal set of rules would lead to the happiness of every unique, individualized person.

I don't follow you: seems to me that if no one in the world had any use for a hammer, its utility would disappear altogether. Also, what do you mean 'behaviors that are binding upon others'? What binds them to it if they have no reason to be so bound? I think the default position is to not think about the 'morality' or 'immorality' of an action at all when deciding whether to perform it. As for empathy, seems that if a moral system is formulated based on logical reasoning rather than on what the most empathetic person might want to do, than there's no necessary connection between the dictates of morality and empathy. For instance, super empathetic people might believe in taking from the rich to give to the poor (maybe they think it will hurt the rich less than it will benefit the poor), but someone who believed in libertarian morality would not approve of this course of action. Also, I don't think there's a non-arbitrary standard for determining what 'enough' empathy is. It's just a personality trait like any other.

I've been thinking about this question for a while, and I would be interested to hear your thoughts. The question is: Why Be Moral? Why be ethical? Why adhere to UPB? Why be a 'good' person? The only reason that really makes sense to me is: because doing so, in this specific case, would make me happier than an alternate course of action. But if this is the answer, than the concepts of ethics, morals, UPB, etc... seem to lose their utility, being replaced by a series of personal, egoistic, utilitarian calculations. What are your reasons? Is there something I'm missing?

I think you're right in your analysis, Shaeroden, but my question is: why would anyone's objective be to be moral? I mean, maybe people might want to be nice to people that they like, or to people in general, but to be 'moral'? Seems like a strange objective to hold, especially since it doesn't seem to lead anything that's beneficial in a more primal way.

Most people at high school have very little knowledge or interest in serious intellectual topics, so trying to 'convert' them to your position is probably going to be a waste of time. Better to just take people as they are, rather than as we want them to be, and enjoy their positive aspects, rather than focusing on their negative ones.

If this could actually replace all the other welfare state measures, it would be very positive. I wrote about this on my blog: I would call my system the ‘share of spoils’ system. The system has two components: the input, which I would call ‘the loot’, and the output, which I would call ‘the spoils’. Every citizen in the country with an income is to be looted by the government, while every citizen, including children, whether they have an income or not, is to share in the spoils. The looting is to be done by taking a fixed proportion of everyone’s annual income, let’s say 10% for now. But when distributing the spoils, each citizen is to receive the exact same monetary amount as one another, determined by dividing the amount of money loot by the number of citizens. For example, if the annual 10% income levy resulted in $150 billion of loot, and there were 30 million citizens in the country, than each citizen would receive $5000 for that year as their share of the spoils. One of the main merits of this system is its simplicity. Relatively little bureaucracy is needed to make it work. The flat proportional looting rate keeps assessment relatively simple, the only thing that must be determined is the person’s income for that year, no messing around with income brackets or credits. For spoils distribution, no ‘needs test’ is necessary, and the same, standardized payment can just be sent to everyone in the country. Besides simplicity, the flatness and universality of the looting rate and the spoils distribution amount also reduces, as much as possible, the negative effect on production incentives that any system of redistribution will necessarily have. With my system, there is no special disincentive to move up from one set income bracket to the next, as there is in most countries’ current ‘needs based welfare’ and ‘progressive taxation’ systems. The general production disincentive will of course remain, as the higher people’s income, the more monetary units will be looted from them. But as long as the flat proportional looting rate is not set too high, this shouldn’t be a major problem.

Seems that if we want to have a shot at whittling down the state in our lifetimes, some compromises will be necessary. So yes, if atheist and christian libertarians are in alignment on certain political position, absolutely we should be friends and align with them. Otherwise, no progress will ever be made, as pretty much the entire history of political change illustrates.

These lists seem awfully restrictive, and prone to exclude almost every woman on earth. I think you need to understand another person more as a whole rather than as a list of traits in order to determine if they are right for you or not.

Perhaps we need a value system in order to discover truths, but once they have been discovered, we do not need to continue adhering to the same value system in order to use these discovered truths to improve our lives. We can switch our value systems based on which is most useful to us at the moment. Hence, it seems moral relativism lives.