EclecticIdealist

There is certainly disparity of opportunity between those born into great wealth and those who must achieve it in their own lifetime. Shall we then resort to violence to deprive those born into wealth and disperse it to those born without it? Under what premise of justice shall we deprive those who have? Under what premise of justice shall we dispense it to those who have not? Any usage or accumulation of property inherently reduces the opportunity of others. This fact alone cannot be sufficient cause for depriving others of property, as all are inherently unjust by occupying any space at all, thereby depriving another of its usage. Thus the mere accumulation of property cannot be considered unjust, else all are unjust rendering the concept of justice meaningless. But suppose the accumulation of property is solely for the purpose of depriving or exploiting the labor of others? This would indeed be immoral. How this situation could be peaceably resolved in a stateless society escapes me. In a minarchist society, all land under the jurisdiction of the state would be recognized as ultimately belonging to all members of society under the jurisdiction of the government. As such, individuals would be able to lay claim to a parcel of land for the purpose of homesteading. This land would be retained in their possession and the possession of any heirs for the purpose of being maintained as a primary residence and consequently, exempt from property tax. If at any point, the property is no longer used as a primary residence by the heirs, it may be maintained as secondary property. As a secondary property it would be subject to property taxation to compensate the members of society being deprived the opportunity of using it as a primary residence. The taxes thus generated would be utilized to provide public housing for any who wish to live within a municipality rather than homesteading and are unable to afford to purchase land or rent housing that is privately owned within the municipality. Taxes on secondary property should be imposed at a percentage rate commensurate with the purchase price of land of comparable size and improvement that is available on the open market in near proximity, such that the taxes should be no more than 1/15 of the current market value of the property for any given year. This incentivizes the secondary property owner to either make the land productive to the benefit of themselves and other members of the community (by providing a product or service) or unburden themselves of surplus land. I said nothing about creating artificial challenges; although the creation of artificial challenges do overcome the problem of boredom. What is artificial is a world wherein every need is met without effort. No such world has ever existed. It is contrary to growth which is contrary to life itself. A marxist state is run by evil b*stards, you think this is a better solution? Show me which country has more people living in abject poverty, subject to starvation, have their governments slaughtering significant portions of the population, etc. You think individual property owners are worse than these marxist state governments? Wake up and read your history books instead of the marxist propaganda. Actually, a State monopoly is almost always much worse due to the size and scope of the monopoly that is realizable by the state with its power of near limitless taxation and bureaucratic enforcement. This is why Crony Capitalism, or Corporate Feudalism is such a problem. The corporations essentially buy off the State bureaucrats effectively securing themselves a monopoly or at least a cartel, securing a more favorable position for themselves than smaller potential competitors in the marketplace. But the worst area this occurs in is in the Crony Capitalist Cartel known as the Federal Reserve Bank system and the World Bank system. Given the mistrust that you have for private business owners, and state monopolies, I'm left to wonder who you think you CAN trust. If human beings cannot be trusted to do the right thing, then who are you going to put in charge of your marxist utopia? Puppies?

It doesn't follow from their beliefs about what is right and wrong, but the fact that their beliefs are ultimately sentiments or preferences which are inherently subjective, not beliefs which are either objectively true or objectively false (conforming to an objective fact). Physical phenomena are objective facts. Laws, Principles, and Relationships are rational facts. Moral judgments and Preferences are subjective sentiments, only their existence may be considered a rational fact. Actually, one would need a strong argument for collectively held preferences to be anything other than subjective, since the only thing that is self-evident is that moral judgements and preferences are subjective sentiments. The claim that there exists such a thing as moral facts upon which to base moral truths is a warrantless assertion, entirely lacking in any substantive support. Such a claim is as valid as the notion that there are aesthetic facts upon which the truth may be ascertained as to the best tasting flavor of ice cream, the best shade of green, the best color to paint a sports car, and the best way to eat an Oreo cookie. In short, it is the warrantless assertion of a factual ideal state of existence. If one asserts the existence of something (moral facts) which is not self-evident, one has the burden of proving the assertion. One who asserts the non-existence of something for which there is no evidence of existence has no such burden of proof.

No material change whatsoever. If on the other hand, the person, trespassed in an area they should not have, resulting in a situation wherein the host would incur a loss to extract the individual from in a timely manner (for example, the guest is trapped inside a time-locked vault that can only be opened ahead of the scheduled time at significant cost), then it would not be unjust to demand payment for an early extraction, since the guest has incurred a cost to his host which the host cannot reasonably be expected to absorb.

A perfect world by definition would not be very, very boring unless boring is your idea of a perfect world. If your idea of a perfect world is boredom, then your ideal world is one in which every desire is immediately and effortlessly fulfilled. This is not my idea of a perfect world, and not the ideal world of most freedom-minded people, it is the ideal world of the unproductive moocher. If by catering to the imperfections of the world, you mean catering to the needs and desires of others, that's how wealth and abundance is created in a free society. By property rights, I gather you mean physical property and the means of production. You are no doubt ignoring the economic opportunity afforded virtually anyone in a free society to exchange their labor freely on the open market, to improve their productivity through study and application of effort and practice, and the ability to conspire with other like-minded individuals to compete on the open market with such abilities, You are likewise ignoring the ability of such individuals to accumulate capital by not consuming as much as they earn, thereby affording themselves the ability to purchase land and other means of production. Instead, you focus on those who have already accomplished such feats or inherited such wealth from others. The Indian caste system of untouchables, while not entirely unique, is nevertheless an example of a non-egalitarian system wherein certain members of society are regarded by law, but perhaps more importantly, by custom or cultural tradition as not equal to others. Such prejudice is certainly a fundamental cause of a socially unjust system which oppresses a marginalized class in favor of other classes including possible privileged classes. The solution, however, is not to deprive all of rights and treat everyone equally poorly, but rather, to extend rights to all, and to deprive all of their undeserved privileges which come at the expense of others. In short, you don't correct the injustices of a prejudicial caste system by denying everyone rights, but by extending rights to those who are currently being denied them. Yes, this is certainly true in many respects of homesteading; for example, the idea of water rights wherein a person with a creek on his land is forbidden from damming it up to effectively prevent others further down-stream from benefitting form its usage. But this is very different from the idea of eliminating the right of the homesteader to any water rights, i.e., the right to divert at least a portion of the stream in order to irrigate his crops and obtain potable water for livestock and human consumption. Private property is not merely a mainstay of libertarianism, but of liberty and freedom to any degree. What the world is gradually outgrowing is the notion that unproductive marxist moochers and bureaucrats have a better idea of how to run the world or execute social justice than those who are committed to libertarian principles and free-market capitalism.

Hey! That's something that I actually agree with you on. I hope you don't change your mind about it simply because I agree with you.

And then, the man with the bunch of bananas points out the following: Okay, it's true that if you go shopping for fresh produce down by the garbage dump, you're very likely going to find nothing but rotting fruit and vegetables. Don't you know that the type of produce that is sold as such low prices as you're seemingly willing and able to pay is all going to be low quality!? I told you that if you want to get good, fresh, high quality produce, you have to go shopping where such produce is likely to be found. Yes it's occasionally possible to find good quality produce anywhere, even down by the garbage dump, but if you don't want to spend all of your time sifting and searching through very questionable produce, you're going to need to be able and willing to pay higher prices than what you may presently be able to afford. You say that the market for produce has changed in the past decade or two, and that may be the case; however, that doesn't change the fact that there is still a market for high quality produce, and the price of admission is higher than the price of admission down by the garbage dump. You will need to increase your ability to pay for the quality of produce you're looking for or accept the quality of produce you're currently willing to pay and able to afford.

Truth is the accurate conception of reality, including the accurate conception of physical phenomena and of abstracted laws, principles, and relationships (this includes what you refer to as philosophical truths). This is certainly a rational proposition. To identify whether or not "moral facts/truths" exist, one must first determine precisely what a "moral fact" or "moral truth" is. Truths are the conceptions of objective facts. Morals on the other hand are the collective subjective preferences for or alternatively aversion or abhorrence towards particular behavior pertaining to human interaction as well as other behavior generally considered to be virtuous or vicious held by a society. The fact that the preferences are held collectively does not make them objective. Thus, it is an objective fact or in other words, true, that all societies abhor rape and murder, but this is not the same as suggesting that rape and murder are objectively abhorrent. The former is the statement of fact about the prevalence of a particular moral position on rape and murder, the latter is the assertion of an inherent moral judgment (i.e., subjective and imputed quality) to a behavior. It is impossible for that which is subjective to simultaneously be objective, as the two are mutually exclusive. That is like suggesting that something can be simultaneously be correct and incorrect, right and wrong, entirely black and entirely white, A and Not A. It is a rational contradiction, a violation of the law of identity, an axiomatic impossibility.

But I did not deliberately misrepresent ANYTHING you said; therefore, NOT a strawman as you claim. Your claim that I did is the Strawman. I'm not mentally slow, but you and dSayers seem to be; that or dSayers is simply stubborn and irrational.

Illustrations of errors in logical consistency are not Strawman arguments.

Summarized. Person A is accidentally imprisoned by the "host" who then extorts $500 to release person A. Is the imprisonment voluntary on the part of person A? No. Is the imprisonment voluntary on the part of the host? Yes. Therefore, force is being used by the host against person A keeping them imprisoned. Extorting person A's property for his release is therefore robbery. The "host" would rightly be ostracized by the community. Person A would be justified in taking his property ($500) back from the host by force if it is not returned voluntarily.

Nope, I'm done trying to figure out your inconsistent, special-case reasoning why you think lying isn't immoral when I've provided ample arguments to show, even by your own flawed reasoning (if you'd only use it consistently) why lying must either be considered immoral because it is unavoidable, or why nothing must be considered immoral because no one is more responsible for your personal safety and that of your possessions than you. If you want to claim victory with even a semblance of rational consistency, you must prove why lying isn't immoral without using ambiguous terms with uniquely contrived and secret meanings only you seem to know..

Denying children the truth is different from lying to them. There are some things which children simply don't have the right to know, just like there are some things which other people don't have the right to know (such as the details of one's sex life). This doesn't mean that we should lie to them; only that we should withhold the truth from them. In some instances, children knowing the truth which they are not psychologically mature enough to deal with appropriately may cause them greater harm than simply withholding such knowledge until they have sufficiently matured. This is not to suggest that a young child shouldn't be warned about the behavior of sexual predators and what they should do if an adult or child tries or succeeds in touching them in inappropriate ways. It simply means that one need not go into full graphic detail as to what sexual predator might do to them or why they might do it. Hopefully, they will never experience such things, but if they do, they should be armed with truth about what it does and does not mean if they do, and what will happen to them or anyone they love or care about if it happens and they do tell someone. The only time that lying is ever justified or appropriate is when doing so is an act of self-defense or the defense of others in response to an act or the threat of an act of aggression. I can rarely think of any such instance where lying to a child would be appropriate except in the most extreme of situations where the child is actually endangering themselves or others with physical harm. As to where babies come from, I see no harm in telling them the truth, as well as arming them with the fact that many people prefer to tell "fairy tales" about things that make them uncomfortable or things that make them happy (such as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or where babies come from).

Many people I know who have tattoos get them as momentos for significant events in their life to memorialize them. An example is the number of people I know who have the name of a deceased loved one (often a child, sometimes a sibling, or friend, etc.) They get the tattoo in a spot that they see in order to remind them of the person and usually do not mind if others notice it or not. I know others who get a tattoo to remind them of a significant decision in their life such as not abusing drugs, or recovery of their sense of self-worth and self-esteem after years of traumatic abuse, etc. These are tattoos that they often have on a hand or wrist to serve as a near constant reminder of a battle hard fought and won, or perhaps one which they are continually fighting (such as addiction, depression, or feelings of low self worth, etc.) Still others I know get tattoos representing a quality or qualities which they wish to embody such as strength, peace, etc. All of these are personal tokens which they may or may not feel self-conscious over explaining to others. I'm not saying that these are the only reasons why people get tattoos meant only or primarily for themselves to understand or enjoy, but these are some of the reasons people have conveyed to me as to why they have gotten certain tattoos. In the future, I may get a tattoo, and if or when I do, it will be something that is personally meaning to me, something I want to carry with me my entire life, something beautifully and artistically rendered, and not necessarily something for anyone but my most intimate family and friends to see (unless I happen to be at the beach, etc.) or know about. I may also get one as a token to remind myself of something I wish to constantly embody in my everyday life, such as mindfulness or deliberate action. I hope that helps answer your question.

Who is doing the punishment and under what circumstances? The only situation where I can think that collective punishment would be warranted is when collective action occurred which was wrong. Those who attempted to stop the wrong action, or who lacking the ability to stop or prevent it chose to opt out should be exempted from punishment from such wrong action. There is a moral duty not only to refrain from harming others, but also to prevent some from harming others to the degree that one is reasonably able without sacrificing one's own life or safety.

Ah. What you mean by "binding" is "violates your property"? If someone attempted theft/robbery, attempted assault, attempted rape, and attempted murder but were unsuccessful, then they didn't violate your property either, so I guess that makes those actions not immoral, but merely annoying or unpleasant, right? And of course, when someone attempts to alter or distort your mental concept of reality with their lies, that's not violating your property, right? I mean, it's not like you own your thoughts and your mental concepts of reality.

Yes, it includes all soldiers who take up firearms to kill others in acts of aggression. It does NOT include soldiers who take up firearms to engage in acts of self-defense or the defense of others. The soldier would be immoral no matter who he chose to kill unless doing so was an act of justified self-defense or the defense of others. Again, it comes down to whether or not they are killing in wars of aggression, or if they are killing as justified acts of self-defense in a defensive war. It has nothing to do with the type of combat or the "collective punishment" or "scorched earth" practices (although these are typically unjustified acts of aggression, they aren't always.

I stand corrected. Apparently in some jurisdictions, this is the case.

yup. Or if that's not what you're saying then: "You cannot apply 'my reasoning' to fibbing, telling falsehoods you know to be true, libeling, and slandering because lies are not binding upon another whereas those behaviors are. If you fib to me, I can't choose to not have been fibbed to." Yup, that's exactly what you're saying.

You made an argument around the assertion that personal responsibility not to believe a lie exculpates the teller of the lie of moral responsibility. I used your assertion and reasoning to demonstrate the ridiculousness of your assertion and argument supporting it. Nice try. When you say that theft, assault, rape, and murder are binding, what you are ACTUALLY saying is that the attempted theft was successful, the attempted assault was successful, the attempted rape was successful, the attempted murder was successful. You are thereby suggesting, that because a lie is not necessarily believed, i.e. successful in convincing a person that something is true that is actually false, or something is false which is actually true; that it is not binding. This is a cheat on your part, but even your cheat fails as I demonstrated previously by showing that if lying is not binding if one is able to discern the lie and choose not to believe it, then theft, assault, rape, and murder are equally non-binding if one is able to prevent them from being successful as well. Thus we see that your conception of why an action is considered immoral is not mitigated by the personal responsibility of the victim or recipient. That makes as much sense as saying the rapist is not immoral for engaging in rape because the person he raped has greater responsibility to take the initiative to prevent themselves from being raped, such as learning self-defense and never being alone with anyone they do not wish to have sex with. When speaking of morality, we speak of actions, not their results or consequences. When we say that robbery and theft are immoral, we are not saying that only successful robbery or theft is immoral we are saying that the act of committing robbery or theft is immoral. When we say that assault, rape, and murder are immoral, we are not saying that only successful assault, only successful rape, and only successful murder are immoral, we are saying that the act of committing an assault, the act of committing a rape, and the act of committing murder are immoral. Note also that if these actions are unsuccessful, we don't consider them to be less than immoral or merely aesthetically negative. The actions, successful or not, are what we deem to be immoral, not their successful completion or their resultant consequences. When they are said to be "binding", what is meant is that the actions are unavoidable. The act of lying is unavoidable in that one cannot readily avoid the act of being lied to; one can only hope to mitigate the effectiveness of the act of lying on one's or another's conception of reality. But let's go back to your analogy with driving a car. If I see that a car is coming, but I lie and tell you that the way is clear to proceed, I am responsible for attempting to create a false conception of reality in your mind. If you proceed on this false conception of reality rather than verifying whether the way is clear to proceed with your own eyes, you are being an irresponsible driver as far as the laws of society are concerned. As the driver of an automobile, you are considered to be responsible for the accident and liable for the damages. To my knowledge, tort law does not make any accommodations for shared responsibility with passengers of the car who lie to the driver. Does this mean that the lie which resulted in the accident was not immoral? Not at all. It simply means that liability for the accident is not the same as moral culpability for the accident. When it comes to moral culpability, both the driver and the liar are responsible for the accident, the liar for deliberately attempting to cause a crash with their lie, and the driver for negligently relying upon the words of another when property and lives were at stake. In a truly just legal system, both would be held liable, and the liar more so than the driver for intentionally causing the collision.

It's not always about you (or someone else's viewing pleasure). When I said it's personal, it's personal for them. You are perfectly free to disagree, and even judge and condemn others for not sharing your personal opinions and preferences; but you started the thread by seeking the perspective of others. I hope you've found some answers.

No. It has nothing to do with how responsible you are for your own perceptions. Let's apply your reasoning to assault, robbery, rape, and murder. In order for your assertion to be true, a person who is assaulted, raped, robbed, or murdered would have to be less responsible for their own personal safety, security, and life than others are. This cannot be universalized. The victim of assault, robbery, rape, and murder is not required to avoid martial arts or personal fire arms training, advanced tactical awareness training, or training on how to secure one's property from robbers and thieves, they may avoid the assault, robbery, rape, or murder simply by exercising due diligence for their own personal safety and property; therefore, assault, robbery, rape, and murder are ineligible for consideration as immoral. Therefore, nothing is immoral because each and every individual has greater personal responsibility for themselves, their property, and what they believe than anyone else does. dSayers, if we apply that standard of reasoning to everything else, not just lies, nothing may be considered immoral by the standard of UPB. But let's take things a step further with respect to lying. Instead of lying to you, what about lying ABOUT you--libel, and slander. You certainly can't claim that libel and slander are immoral, because they're nothing more than lies; and by your standard, the person doing the libeling and slandering is less responsible than those who believe the lies and slander; therefore, one should never sue the libeler or slanderer for damages to one's reputation as that would be unjust according to your way of thinking; rather, one should sue those who gullibly believe the libeler and slanderer since they are the more responsible parties according to you. This fails not only the internal consistency test - rationality, but the external consistency test as well - empirical natural or intuitive moral or ethical sense.

Stefan recognizes that lying is immoral from an "empirical" standpoint, but does not view lying as wholly unavoidable. Thus, he's stuck with lying not quite fitting within the realm of either aesthetic (an avoidable negative obligation) or ethic (an unavoidable negative obligation). I believe this can actually properly be resolved by properly identifying the fact that lying is unavoidable in the sense that it is an assault on one's concept of reality, thus clearly making it immoral. It should also be recognized that like assault, the lie may be small and relatively inconsequential, or large and of great consequence. The proper and just response to such assaults, or lies must necessarily be proportionate to the assault or lie. A lie which results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the destruction of property valued in the hundreds of millions is of much greater consequence than a lie which results in the loss of a dozen lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars of property, or a lie which merely hurts someone's feelings or results in the loss of a few dollars or cents.

I can save you a lot of time and wasted effort if you are able to really accept what I've written below. If not, you'll continue to suffer in one way or another from your past. 1) The reason your father chose alcoholism over a sober relationship with you was that is was less painful for him to escape into an intoxicated state than to deal with the reality of the loss of your mother, the burden of a young child (which he may not have even wanted), and probably his own feelings of inadequacy in various, if not all aspects of his life (regardless of whether any or all of these perceptions were accurate), and a dominant, abusive partner than to face these realities and deal with each one in a responsible, sober manner. In short, he was not a good father; he did not believe he was up to the task of being a good father, and he ensured he wasn't by being an abusive, alcoholic. Are you really wondering whether he stopped for a moment to see what effect this might have on your life? Would it really matter if he had and simply determined that he didn't care as much about your needs and desires as his own? Why would you need him to admit as much when you both know that you both already know the truth? if it's for his sake, there's likely a better approach to take; if it's for your own sake, what is it exactly that you hope or expect to gain from such an admission if it should ever occur? 2) Do you really not know why he stayed with someone who was physically (and likely emotionally and psychologically) abusive to him? Do you really need him to tell you? Why do you need him to tell you? How would that change anything that happened or anything that might happen going forward? You know why he chose to stay with her if you actually take the trouble to think about it. What positive things did he get from the relationship that he considered outweighed the negative? Might he have actually desired the abuse as a means of punishing himself, or might he have simply felt powerless in obtaining what he wanted or felt he needed in any other way or from any other person? 3) Do you really not understand why he taught you to lie, to self erase, leaving you to feel isolated and powerless in the relationship? Or do you simply want him to acknowledge that he did? In what way would you benefit from his acknowledgement? What have you learned from him about how to manage relationships? Do you think what you learned from him is the only or best way to manage relationships? Ironically, this is good advice; although until you know HOW to choose to feel differently, you won't be able to. How might this advice reflect how he may have been told to deal with the loss of your mother, or how to deal with the dominance that the woman had over him in his relationship? Might this have also been the case with his relationship with your mother, or was he the dominant one in that relationship? Clearly, your father did not have the necessary skills to resolve conflict in a cooperative manner. It must have been incredibly frustrating for him to always feel at a loss for power and control in the relationship. I suspect you can see how this played out in his relationship with the woman he brought home who clearly had the power in the relationship. People like your father seldom have a good model to pattern their relationships after and consequently make every relationship a dominant/submissive one rather than a cooperative one. When the person who is in the dominant position of such a relationship feels their control slipping, they act out in the only way they know will always work, they resort to violence and abuse (they turn up the dominance) in order to maintain control.

Not inherently. There are some tattoos that I personally don't care for and would find distracting; but there are others which I find interesting or attractive. It has a great deal to do with where the tattoos are on the person's body, what they depict, and how skillfully or artfully they are drawn and inked. I don't think such a psychology can be generalized. One might be able to get a general psychology as to why some girls get tattoos in certain places, and why some guys get tattoos in certain places. One may even get a general psychological profile as well based on the type, size, and location of such tattoos, as well as the age that they got the tattoo; but a general psychology of people (or even one particular sex) who get tattoos? That's like asking about the general psychology of women who pierce their ears. While that certainly may be true of some people (both men and women) who get tattoos; I know that for a great many, perhaps a majority, who get tattoos, it has nothing at all to do with attention seeking, and the tattoo has a far more personal, non-attention seeking meaning.

The only obligation parents truly have to children they have procreated is to ensure that someone takes care of them until the point that they can take care of themselves. Everything beyond that is voluntary.