ObserveandReport

To be precise, dsayers imported the language of "moral actors" into my initial argument. I used no such words. Mine is argument about the source of personal identity, and what it means to make moral judgments about something that lacks the necessary physical components to bear such an identity. The short of it being, that brains are the source of identity and without them, more constraints cannot apply (so long as there are no other minds involved). I survive a full body transplant. I do not cease to exist, nor do I become two people.

If you're trying to drive through a state and you know you might not find lodging that is a problem. Have you never had a flat tire? An accident? Any number of reasons? Network, a vast number of people connected by similar activities, each having to doe with others. The "internet" doesn't pass the five year old test, but you understand it just fine, or maybe you don't. Imagine the internet but strictly for commerce. The fiberoptic cables are roads and distribution centers servers.

When I said "one form or another" this could mean Stefan's dispute resolution organizations, or civil courts such as those in Brehen Law. You have not established that a civil court system necessitates opposing moral categories, however you have asserted it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_law Theareas of law that would or could survive would be private law. Torts, contracts, etc. Specifically the violation of a contractual obligation to participate in the networked economy you benefited from is the wrong I allege. Contracts do not need to be written or explicit. Rather courts can infer them and they can be implied by conduct. You might object that benefiting from other's even handed participation does require your participation to be equally non-discriminatory. That seems like the discriminating actor is acting in bad-faith. Please copy and paste where I suggested the initiation of the use of force (show your work). You call it a non-problem. To the extent that integration and and assimilation are retarded, it is a problem worth solving.

I'm advocating for ostracism and noncoercive remedies as you suggest. The only addition is that perhaps civil suits against such proprietors should swing in favor of those discriminated against. Sorry if I wasn't clear. This is/was the very problem that brought cases before the Supreme Court throughout the 50's. I think it was a mistake to leave it up to government to fix the problem (civil law/courts would presumably exist in one form or another in an AnCap society).

Right. But you can't morally force them out correct? That's maybe what I thought you were suggesting.

This again exemplifies taking more from a study than is said. It's what it demonstrates to you. There is a reason scientists and statisticians don't make many related but not fact specific claims upon releasing data. It's because they are not supported by data. Saying "perception is skewed" is like saying "price is wrong." I'll fall back on the fact that this is a market, not a dictatorship.

DNA is completely irrelevant. I don't think you understand my point. I'll attempt to clarify: Even if you slowly replaced all the DNA in my body, one strand at a time, with someone else's DNA, I would merely have undergone a genetic change, not died. I continue to exist, therefore what I am can't be my DNA. Rocks have unique irreplaceable histories where each individual atom of a rock was synthesized billions of years ago either in suns or at the big bang, that doesn't give it a personal identity. It doesn't grant rocks the ability to be harmed. Whether or not someone can respond about whether they possessed the bare minimum for consciousness in the past is not what my argument is based on. Before some point, there was no possibility that the fetus was an degree of conscious. One point for certain is the zygote. I hope this clears things up.

Ok, your story may have been an example, but it was still anecdotal. I'm not disputing the content of the studies, I'm disputing the conclusions you draw from them. Women have made themselves attractive on the sexual market place. To the extent that men fail to do so is their own failing. You can't blame women because they aren't interested in what the average man is offering. Power disparity would require the woman's choice to override the man's choice (a.k.a. sexual assault). There is no coercion, there is no power disparity. If you want to say there is a difference in bargaining power, similar to an employer vs. an employee, you have a long way to go. More simply: I accept that women have, on average, more interested suitors than men at any given time, all things being equal. Unless men in general are being forced into not improving their sexual marketability, OR men are victims of circumstance such that they could not be more assertive or picky in relationships, because women can levy power than would leave them destitute (like an employee with children and poor marketability who wants to renegotiate but can't) women have no more power. MTGOW leave the sexual marketplace altogether, so clearly men have the choice to restructure their marketplace tactics. If men were dissatisfied with the options provided to them by their current approaches to dating, they could start to be more picky. Women in turn would have to lower their standards (or ramp up competition, or coercively limit the men's actions). The fault lies with men as well as women. What percentage of men are looking for long term partners as opposed to women? Might this not be a decisive factor in the difference between number of suitors? If a man is looking for sex and short term companionship, his best strategy would be to not be picky. It is a sexual marketplace, not a sexual dictatorship. Supply/demand. As an anarchist you should appreciate the invisible hand working its magic. EDIT: I would like to point out that Stefan is specifically responding to the charges of feminism that try and place all the blame at men's feet. He falls short of asserting that men are dis-empowered to select their mates.

Please elaborate

Must they leave? If I own land, why must I sell it or sacrifice it's value in order to opt out? I'm not saying I have good answers (because I havn't really thought through or consulted good arguments).

I'll try and parse my response accordingly. Sorry if there is redundancy. Harm=being aggressed against Necrophilia is not harming or agressing against anyone. You cannot be harmed/aggressed against after death. "defamation of someone's memory" morally has no weight. I can aggress against your memories of someone who is dead. Cheating on a partner without getting caught is self-harm. There may be some situations where it actually might be best not to reveal said infidelity. Even there, there is a being harmed. What makes you assume an action is morally neutral if it results in no conscious person being harmed? Think of the things you can't do to a comatose patient even one with no hope of recovery. Think destroying a tree. Is there no hope of recovery because there is no brain? If there is a brain, stuff might be going on. If it's certain there will never be consciousness again, doesn't matter. There is no violation of the non aggression principle for cutting down a tree. I'm not sure where you are getting any of this. There are ways you can benefit moral agents and ways you can harm them. If you are doing neither, your actions are morally neutral. I can eat as much peanut butter as I want, but it is neither hurting nor benefiting any moral agent other than myself (except perhaps peanut butter producers) What makes you assume transgressing against another party is only possible if their potential is realised in the now? Think of the comatose patient who needs months of cerebral healing and reconfiguration. Think of little trees. I posted many responses as to why potential human beings are morally distinct from actual human beings. I recommend you start at the beginning and scroll your way down. That being said, it's not your dna or your organs that make you, you. You begin existing no earlier than your ability to think and be conscious arises. Therefore, there is no one to deprive of a future existance. The same way you cannot harm someone after death, you cannot harm someone before existance. This is a reductio but imagine someone being tried for homicide, not just for the murder they committed but for all the children that person planned on having. That would be rediculous in my estimation.

While self-correction and profitability are strong motives, I'm looking for a stronger case. I'm not sure many places in the Jim Crow south would have opted for the more profitable option (I would wager that some still don't so clearly government isn't the answer). The benefit isn't just derived from being a member of one stream of commerce, instead it comes from all industries. More than that that, there seems to be an expectation when being an active participant in the workplace (either owner or employee), that along with trading your goods/services, others will do the same according to things like supply and demand. There is an expectation that McDonald would no more only sell to brown eyed people than would its beverage supplier. The inefficiency is the result as you described, but the harm has impact beyond that. Social cohesion and integration is a extremely valuable thing as Stefan has so often stressed (along with homogeneity). So when these people discriminate in their business practices, real people are being hurt. When SCOTUS was beginning to take cases referring to the 13 and 14th amendments, the question still arose as to whether private business would have to conform. Black travelers would be unable to find lodging in entire swaths of certain states. If we truly want the black community to change and assimilate, the first step is knocking down barriers to those that are trying. White flight precedes property values dropping. Affluent blacks move in and whites move out.

Hopefully it doesn't take much time to wade through the candidates issues but... even an avid reader has a lot of material to go through.

I'll have to ignore your experiences as they are anecdotal. I will watch the video when I have the time. However, because women are less likely to approve a suitor than men, doesn't mean they have more power, simply that they exercise it more often. Literally at any point in the woman's vetting the man can say "fuck this, I'm investing my time elsewhere" and because women outnumber men slightly, he has all the options of who to pursue. Men choose to narrow their scope (by doing so men empower women so to speak). What you have done is pointed out who initiates relationships and who terminates them most often. You have also illustrated a lengthy vetting process men and women go through. None of this is arguments for a power imbalance, by which I mean mean can equally terminate a given relationship.The sexual market, like any market is one of supply and demand. If men desire different things, the market will change. Lol no, she holds herself responsible. If you look closely, she even views the woman as "partially responsible" for the deficiencies a single parent child will suffer. She has an IUD and she's intimated that she is not willing to have a child at this time in her life. I trust that she'll give me a heads up if that changes.

And while undoubtedly most animals lack this, or anything close, what about the smartest of other animals? Particularly dolphins (mostly kept in captivity, not eaten) and pigs come to mind. As Will pointed out, most great apes are not really in the equation because they are not being hunted (though their habitats' destruction might be problematic and that is widespread). Even if none of the above mattered, I'd ask why the cutoff is fully understanding as opposed to the gradations between, say, human and snail? What makes the full ability to reason as opposed to some lesser abillity key? It was my understanding that pigs rank among the most intelligent non-human species in the world. I agree with your grey area statement. Considering the widespread eating and raising of animals (especially pigs) it might be worthy of our investigation. Additionally, there might be some principle that we out to hedge our bets, such that where we can easily avoid the widespread pain caused to animals (I'm thinking factory farming here) we ought to. I think this is where we get pulled into the slipperiness of "capacity." I despise that word. While children differ from animals (most likely) in that they will one day have the full duties and rights of a person, it seems that the mentally impaired lack that distinction. This I'd say is quite interesting. Do you happen to know Stefan's take on the rights of those who are mentally impaired?

Criticisms noted, points taken, and appreciated. I am trying to work on being a more effective communicator/listener, something I've found particularly difficult to do via text exchanges on the internet (or over the phone, don't get me started lol). I'd like to narrow the focus on the power disparity you mentioned in regards to terminating a relationship. Do you see an avenue for testability there? I'm not sure this proves what you are suggesting it proves. I'll at least go as far as to say, women are more prone to disapproving sexual proposals, but so long as men are equally capable, then their decisions are equally important. Call me an optimist, but I'd like to think that despite our lizard brains, we have the ability to reason beyond PRETTY GIRL! SEX NOW! However, men might be incapable of doing so. Still I'd say more evidence than that study is needed to conclude that women are "the gatekeepers."

The only thing I have to add is, if they have a weapon and your arms are inferior, give up your possessions if you think that will satisfy them. If they have a knife, strongly consider running. If you are armed and well trained and they are not, rejoice you have the upper hand!

I take it your stance is not voting, for the impact it has on other decidedly straight forward issues, is not an option for cost/benefit reasons (not an argument, simply trying to gauge your position)? I don't disagree with your statements (to the extent I understand them). Does the right of self-defense allow us to be complicit in the force which results in the deaths of others, even if those others won't miss us and are complicit in their masters hostility towards us? More simply, how far does self defense go in your estimation?

Network benefit- a benefit derived from participating in and deriving goods or services from a vast, interconnected group of individuals. The easiest example is file sharing. If you are familiar with bit-torrent this is very helpful and you can skip the following until the space: Bit torrent is an effective means of peer to peer file sharing and it relies n multiple sources sharing the same desired content. It downloads from these multiple sources, allowing for much higher download speeds than if it were one person merely uploading to another persons computer all on their lonesome. Each person that has the file and is sharing it is a "seeder" and each person who is downloading the file is a "leecher." Those who leech, but do not seed once the file is downloaded are loathed in the file sharing community, because if each person did this, the efficacy of the entire network would break down. Am I describing the problem of free riders here? The chain of commerce is like the file sharing network in that many people interact to produce goods valuable to all involved. The average non discriminating businessman/worker is like a seeder and the discriminating businessman/employee like a non-sharing leecher. Ostracism is a remedy that I accept. I am arguing for why we ought to ostracize (not for coercion or why we ought to coerce). It seems that shirgall has provided another succinct reason! The legal terms were largely irrelevant and in retrospect I should have avoided them, or noted their function in my thought process as an aside. Definitions, simple terms, and good reasoning. I gotcha man. Well said.

"Don't know well enough" is your value judgement which you are substituting for the woman's. It is not empirical to say a woman didn't know her man well enough to have a child with him. It is subjective, based on substituting your ends (or the ends you believe she has) for her actual ends. It is to assume she is choosing a man based on virtue, rather than something else. If you want to be empirical, I suggest thinking about the benefits of choosing a mate based on a short term reproductive strategy, when state aid is plentiful. Undoubtedly your argument here about the incentives and behavior of single mothers is accurate. That being said, single motherhood existed pre-subsidy. At least some percentage would then presumably be making their decisions based off of mistaken assessments of virtue. (I admit the tripling of single motherhood since the welfare state is damning). I suppose this resembles a "not all X are Y" argument, which to that extent, I erred. Agreed, low IQ, violent parenting, and government subsidies are particularly problematic as it relates to the communities of people of color and single motherhood. Rent seeking is the natural function of subsidizing. My only addition to that assessment would be the cliche "it takes two to tango." That being said, I realize most arguments are aimed at the mainstream view and are responses to singling out of deadbeat dads. I suppose if I had thought about this longer, I might not have posted the original thread. I'm not asking for content or follow ups other than to the question, do you think I engaged your arguments as requested? A "yes" or "no" will suffice.

so you stoked a fake controversy?

I'm 7:37 in and so far the distinction Stefan draws is that animals cannot compare options to a standard. How he makes this determination is beyond me. If his argument is that animals do not speak language, I'm not sure he's right. I'd say he might be right that some form of language may be necessary for comparison, but how would we know whether animals have their own language? I'll keep on listening. So it did come down to language. We don't witness language, therefore no comparison of options to an ideal standard. Got it. If animals had primitive forms of language, would we be able to detect this? Stefan seems to think so. I am less certain. In fact, because of the different neural and physical structures of animals compared to that of humans, it might be quite a bit harder to determine whether or not they have language. Just one thought about how animals might have language that would escape our detection: Imagine that in the gorilla world there are may body language signs and cues that are obvious to them as gorillas, but non-obvious to us humans who rely on vocalized language to transmit the same information. However, when these are couple with certain vocalizations, that themselves would be inadequate at transmitting more than a sliver of simple information, what results is a complex system of communication. Beyond sophistication, abstraction might be similarly hard to detect due to a anthropocentric bias. While dogs may be incapable of language, that doesn't mean they will be forever. That is, it is not a scientific certainty. Evolution could go a number of ways. This could happen for cows, apes, pigs. Stefan points out why it is unlikely for animals to have this latent capacity as of now. I agree. Might it not develop though? Might it be latent in the sense that we are just too early in the evolutionary history? This does shave off the geniuses to normal people argument. Also, I think my alien argument falls by the wayside too. If aliens had sufficiently advanced technology to get here, I imagine they would be smart enough to discover how complex our language was, such that we are capable of abstraction. I guess the real fear is that they are so sophisticated that they consider our capacity to reason morally as inconsequential. That is, they have some moral reasoning that is so advanced, that by comparison we might as well be ants picking the juiciest leaves to eat. Is our ability to abstract unlimited in its capacity or is such a requirement unnecessary for Stefan's arguments to follow?

I was really hoping someone would have something to say about this, as it is still quite relevant when it comes to homosexuals these days.

Why can't their be opposing moral categories within the same species if their is wide variance of characteristics amongst that species? So generally we don't consider the moral implications of how we slaughter animals and if this is due to an intelligence difference, we have a problem. There are people in this world so smart, that many of us are closer in intelligence to animals than those super geniuses. If telepathic aliens came down and saw us with our "primitive tools" and "primitive communications" might they not feel equally indifferent (and justifiably so) about subjugating and eating us? I have listened to UPB twice now (though t has been some time since I have), and Stefan argues that any moral system that uses separate moral categories is invalid. At this moment I'm forgetting his precise arguments. Any thoughts? this may actually be a tacit argument for ethical veganism. (also, I'm bringing this up, not because I'm trolling UPB I quite like it, but because I'm legitimately confused) A quick googling found the passage I was referring to! "Not only is it illogical, it contradicts an observable fact of reality, which is that human beings as a species share common characteristics, and so cannot be subjected to opposing rules. Biologists have no problems classifying certain organisms as “human” - 45 - because they share common and easily identifiable characteristics – it is only moralists who seem to find this level of consistency impossible." Perhaps he develops this argument in a video or another piece of literature I have yet to read. Point me the right way please. Also, I realize it would be completely unfair to expect Stefan to defend or sketch every moral proposition he assents to in one book.

Multiple methods of achieving the "good" wouldn't necessarily require a single answer, yet saying that doesn't plunge one into moral relativism. Sam Harris, in his book "A Moral Landscape," describes absolute senses of peaks and valleys, yet there being multiple peaks and multiple valleys. There is nothing subjective about a continuum of ideas and possibilities. So I'll grant you that being certain that one's specific principles are the only diviners of what is "right" may be overreaching. Again, that doesn't mean everything is subjective when it comes to morality. Imagine "the good" is an actual mountain. There are are right ways to get to the peak and wrong ways and some ways which are more productive than others. That doesn't make scaling the mountain subjective. Mind you, this is not the attitude of UPB or anyone here as I have yet seen.