Could the NAP limit humanity's ability to deal with external threats?

[Xeeg]

As some make the claim that war and violence can lead to revolutions in technology and human organizations, I am going to propose the claim that it also prepares the human race against external threats. Namely, aLieNS.

 

Here's why.

 

When we meet aliens they will likely be aggressive. In fact, if we look at life on this planet as evidence, life seems to be pretty aggressive! Think about it.

 

Complicated life forms need to eat other life forms in order to survive.That means most of the life on the planet has to be aggressive to others in order for its very survival. Like almost all of it! Almost every living thing is a savage beast devouring other life forms constantly...........

 

So you really think aliens are going to FOR SURE be that cool? Not likely, from the evidence.

Even if they have totally switched to using synthetics for their energy, I would still see the obvious evolutionary advantage to keeping an aggressive, opportunistic gene in the gene pool.

 

War and violence and governments and large corporations and huge superpower forces of humanity all struggling against each other in a human eat human world might be our only chance to mature enough to deal with aliens.

 

 

Most large scale animals are completely dominated, as is most vegetation and land mass. We have some issues with bacterial and viral forms of life but that's about it right now.

 

But as a race? As a power in the universe? We are doing crazy good! We just took over a planet for crying out loud. One life form suddenly gaining dominance over most others would be a strain on any planet, we deserve a pat on the back. And we did this all by "aggression" towards the natural state of the planet. Otherwise we wouldn't even have food let alone shoes, cellphones and rocketships.

 

Maybe being aggressive towards another is exactly what we need to harden and expand our power at this point. Unless we completely annihilate ourselves, we are the only thing left to challenge us. And as most capitalists would agree, competition breeds streamlined and effective systems. Which we will need when the aliens come....

 

It just doesn't seem like the NAP is a stable system, or that it even does any good for humanity as a struggling species. It only makes sense for small local systems that have no outside forces or ability to expand. Fortunately for us, we are starting to hit up the solar system for energy and resources so really we are in expansion mode. A bit of good old fashioned evolutionary brute competition might just be what the doctor ordered.

 

 

grin

 

 

As long as we don't end it all by accident first.

[dsayers]

When we meet aliens they will likely be aggressive.

On what basis? Human history shows that violence inhibits innovation. A strong argument could be made that in order to develop interstellar travel, you'd need peace. If we had the technology to teleport just a few feet forward and were violent, the technology would be abused. Technological abuse has almost lead to the end of the human race and some would argue we face such dangers right now.Even if you reject that, you have to understand that you cannot just presume aggression and build an entire series of thoughts on it.

[Kevin Beal]

Vicarious self defense is justified by UPB and squared with the NAP by pointing out that it is self defense.

 

Being that we will be able to make nanobots that make humans live forever, invulnerable to disease, re-grow limbs etc. There would naturally be a strong defensive element already. As far as offense, those same scientists could likely create a nanobot swarm that eats evil alien flesh and shoot canisters of this gas at their troops, which they would have to have if they wanted to preserve our resources. Otherwise they could just bomb the shit out of us or blow us up death star style and we'd be fucked, but that would just make them the most sadistic assholes in the universe, and would not make much sense as to why they'd come here at all.

 

One of these days aliens! One of these days, POW! photon torpedo right to the kisser. (Which ironically is on your alien butts.)

 

I don't know what we do, but people in the future are going to be a lot smarter than we are, probably. I trust they'd have some solution.

[Alex Bell]

I've been thinking about this just today, my hypothesis is this:

 

The greatest inventions of man are made by the smartest people who, for philosophical, psychological, and biochemical reasons, are non-agressors themselves; oligarchs and their bureacrats necessarily oversimplify reality to avoid dealing with their own contradictions, which necessarily limits their creative ability.

 

With this in mind, for an alien race to be agressive assumes the oligarchs and their bureaucrats ("the agressors") would adapt the technology of the non-agressors, but not destroy their race in the process (nanotech plauges, nuclear holocosts etc), I don't believe this is possible (just my belief).

 

Even if they could, the peaceful civilizations would be able to develop the technology faster, and more likely to develop it at all, such that the first intersteller race was peaceful, and most after them would be.

 

Still, suppose the Klingons have just become an Solar Power (dominating all the planets in their system).  The peaceful aliens, rationally, would want to observe them, not agressing, but analyzing what caused this and what can be done to prevent them from harming anyone else.  Because the peaceful aliens would have superior technology, they'll be able to stay ahead of the Klingons.

 

I'd imagine the non-agressors would take steps to both guide developing races to becoming peaceful, and defend these races from potential threat.  Icing on the cake, maybe they even seed planets with life to eventually cultivate more non-agressors to help out (the research never ends after all).

 

 

A lot of opinion and belief there, which is why I want to know: what do you think Xeeg.

[dsayers]

Wow. I really appreciate the amount of thought you put into that. Do you mind if I argue the opposing side for a moment to see how you'd answer that?

 

The NSA, the military, the CIA etc make use of surveillance technology (designed by the "free" market) to an extent much greater than the peaceful individual could, barring factors such as numerousness. This happens as a result of the violent lying to the peaceful both in regards to their existence and what will happen to others if they attempt to compete. Can we not assume that those same oppressors would similarly make use of freedom-formed interstellar travel while threatening harm upon anybody who would compete without their permission?

 

What about the context of nuclear weapons? Those who have them keep an eye on those who do not for the explicit purpose of making sure they continue to not have them. Those that do not have them have little recourse in standing up against the violent advances of those who do simply BECAUSE they already have them.

 

I agree with your conclusion, but I'm interested in how you would respond to those challenges.

[Alex Bell]

Wow. I really appreciate the amount of thought you put into that. Do you mind if I argue the opposing side for a moment to see how you'd answer that?

 

This was what I was hoping for .

 

Can we not assume that those same oppressors would similarly make use of freedom-formed interstellar travel while threatening harm upon anybody who would compete without their permission?

 

I think so.  However, my hypothesis is that because agression is rooted in unrepaired trauma, in their futile quest to gain control they can never truely have over other's/the environment, eventually they will destroy enough of their species/planet to die off themselves.  This is barring enough non-agressors taking action to influence those who can be swayed either way into taking their side.

 

If the agressors persist, lets say those who wrote the Georgia Guide Stones successfully reduce the human population to 500,000,000 as they plan, the fact that they wouldn't be destroyed themselves in the process of destroying all that wealth would be because, to some extent, they left room for non-agressive, rational actors and the cycle continues (the non-agressors posses the majority of intellectual and creative power, etc).

 

Or, perhaps they eliminate the non-agressors and survive due to the power of their buereacracy and technology; because their control is built on an oversimplification of reality, eventually the technology will degrade and they won't be able to fix it and die off as in the first scenario.

 

Perhaps during this destruction they maintain enough capital, human and otherwise, to eventually create interstellar technology.  Because they would still be "feeding" on the creativity of non-agressors, any truely peaceful race would have a greater potential to develop technology, and be able to twart any agression aginst other races, as well as help the non-agressors who were left given infinite time.

 

 

What about the context of nuclear weapons? Those who have them keep an eye on those who do not for the explicit purpose of making sure they continue to not have them. Those that do not have them have little recourse in standing up against the violent advances of those who do simply BECAUSE they already have them.

 

Not sure exactly what you mean.  I'm assuming your wondering how non-agressors could overcome the power desparity? If so, I can think of a few possibilities off hand:

 

• Non-agressors could develop a defensive technology to overcome the difference.  I think defensive tech might be inherantly cheaper ($60,000 stinger beats $5,000,000 Apache), but from an economic standpoint, a great many people want to defend themselves from this threat, and because the agressors can't really rely on a moral argument against propagation of defensive tech (at least as long as they couldn't argue that the tech could be offensive; perhaps a stinger could be pointed at a "civilian" building, but a sheild's not a very effective weapon), supply could meet demand and empower all who wanted to aquire the tech.
• As the technology is principlly built on the work of non-agressors who, as a whole, will be more intelligent than agressors, as the technology gets more complex, the gap between what non-agressors and agressors understand about it will grow, allowing for more opportunities to disable the tech.  I think hacking is a good example.  While I certainly wouldn't call all hacker's non-agressive, I think many of them fall in the camp; as far as superior intelligence, it seems telling to me that one of if not the main source of "government hackers" are those that were "turned" to avoid criminal charges.  So, I can imagine someone being intelligent enough to hack and electronically disable nuclear weapons, drones, you name it, because the oligarchs and their bureacrats are necessarily a step behind the "bleeding edge" (though in many cases they are on the "cutting edge")

And, If you want to fall a little more fully into the realm of speculation:

3. Peacful, interstellar alien races will use their technology to prevent cataclysmic destruction because of the value and potentiall of the existant non-agressors.

Please forgive my longwindedness, this is the first I've deeply thought about this and thus have yet to simplify the arguments.

[dsayers]

Or, perhaps they eliminate the non-agressors and survive due to the power of their buereacracy and technology; because their control is built on an oversimplification of reality, eventually the technology will degrade and they won't be able to fix it and die off as in the first scenario.

 

This reminds me of a Joe Rogan standup routine I heard once. It was his speculative explanation as to how the pyramids came to be and/or how future life on the planet would view our buildings in the event that we wipe ourselves out.

 

I don't mind the long-windedness. Part of my appreciation here stems from you putting into the words something that I might understand to be correct, but have a really hard time putting into a compelling description.

 

I'll try to clarify my nuclear dilemma since I didn't do too well explaining it. Your answer was from a peaceful vs aggressive standpoint, which is understandable since that's what the rest of the discussion is about. However I meant from an aggressor vs aggressor standpoint. I'll try to elaborate, though I must confess that I'm not big into world politics.

 

Anyways, as I understand it, Iran has been working towards becoming a nuclear power for a long time now. It would be to everybody's benefit since other nations would finally stop fucking with them. However, the US (and others I presume) constantly meddles with this, trying to sell its own aggression as "nukes are bad" while sitting on piles of them. I think that if more nations achieved nuclear weaponry (in a world where it's already pursued elsewhere), there'd be a lot less war/genocide level conflict in the world, which would help us all to usher peace in that much more easily. See above, the nature of the very topic itself's consideration of being attacked from without.

[Mike Fleming]

If there are aliens they will either be so far ahead of us that we will be unable to defend ourselves or so far behind us that it is irrelevant.    Considering how advanced we have become in the last 200 years, since the industrial revolution, which is but a mere fraction of the 14 billion year life of the universe it is pretty inconceivable that other civilizations, if they exist, will be at or near our technological capability.  They will more than likely be either far beyond it or far behind it.

 

In fact you could almost argue that for a civilization to advance to the point where they are colonizing the galaxy they will have probably had to deal with aggression in their own society or end up destroying themselves with advanced technology.

 

This is what gives me hope for mankind.  I think that we have to deal with the aggression in society or we will destroy ourselves or end up in a totalitarian 1984 situation.  And from what I've seen in my time here at FDR I think we can deal with it.

[Alex Bell]

dsayers,

 

I tend to agree.  As Steph's argued, the oligarchs don't actually want to be in danger, and tend to not pick on other governments with nukes.  Nuclear proliferation could be one defensive measure, but as I outlined above, I think there are other way's to do so as well that can't be as effectively argued against (everyone having nukes is a mexican standoff, everyone being able to stop a nuclear attack is a solution).

[dsayers]

@Mr. Fleming: "ahead of us" suggests that progress is a linear path when it's not. What if the race that visits never really had to deal with aggression and they view our nukes as useful tools to clear mountains on their planet? What if they communicate telepathically and find our keyboards to be a neat children's toy or way to build up a new skill? What if they only have one arm and find the progress we've made in terms or prosthetics and/or devices that allow people with one arm to function on par with those who have two as a way of doubling their ability to be productive?

 

Even if you look at the cultures of Earth and how they've progressed differently at different times in history, you can see the differences. And those are all of the same species!

[Mike Fleming]

Because technological change is exponential.  Once you are along the path it's a rapid progression.  This has been discussed many times and is the subject of many fears as people look at these exponential curves and extrapolate disaster.  What actually happens is that humanity moves to a new paradigm and then rises exponentially up that new paradigm before having to transfer to a new one again or else society would collapse in some kind of disaster.

 

The possibility that any civilization we meet is at the point where it's say had computers for the same amount of time that we have had, maybe 100 years or so depending on what you describe as a computer is virtually impossible statistically.  More than likely they have had them thousands or millions of years with all the requisite advances that brings or they haven't developed them at all and are in a much more primitive state,

 

Either way, not much point worrying about them.

 

As for telepathy.  I like the X-Men but the idea has zero basis in fact and doesn't make sense physically so I don't even know why you would postulate it as a possible attribute of some possible alien race.  It's just a story idea probably based loosely on ancient superstitions.  ie God can read your mind.   Maybe we should worry about a race of Supermen from the planet Krypton also??

[dsayers]

As for telepathy.  I like the X-Men but the idea has zero basis in fact and doesn't make sense physically so I don't even know why you would postulate it as a possible attribute of some possible alien race.  It's just a story idea probably based loosely on ancient superstitions.  ie God can read your mind.   Maybe we should worry about a race of Supermen from the planet Krypton also??

 

You might say the same thing about smells if we didn't have a sense of smell. We build transmitters and receivers, so there's nothing that says they couldn't exist as a biological component. Nor does the word "telepathy" in a thought experiment have to equal a force of will. Babies can communicate with their expressions. Hell, I am able to interpret quite a few things my cat tries to communicate.

[Seleneccentric]

edit — removed the post, not qualified to speak on the subject

[Xeeg]

@SeleneTo be honest I am a pretty easy going dood by nature. I had a very loving/nurturing mother and have always been the sort of person that gets along with most people and looks for compromises. I grew up on a small farm but had a great childhood playing with animals and never felt poor at all, even though we couldn't afford to eat anything that we didn't grow ourselves. As such I have seen the cycle of life and death countless times as a child, realizing that it is just the natural world. Personally I still feel that a lot of city folk that grew up isolated by human activity don't appreciate the circle of life that has been going on this planet for hundreds of millions of years.

 

Perhaps part of my "negative" energy in the post is due to the fact that I am trying to strike a compromise with the NAP people who think that there is no use to aggression. I enjoy a good debate and finding cracks in any argument that proposes a 100% solution, as the NAP seems to do.

 

I am simply trying to show both side to the aggression story. Basically that it can be useful to the human race, or any species actually. We can talk about building shields to defend against swords, but if you have been using shields to defend against swords and someone comes at you with a nuke, well so much for your shields. My post was aimed at showing that humanity's own squabbles may help prepare our defensive technology enough to defend against a potential alien threat. I find it unlikely that Aliens will be using swords to attack us...

 

We have no way of truly knowing how aggressive aliens will be if we ever encounter them. Many assume that they will be peaceful. The other part of my thread is to show that this assumption is very risky given what we see on this planet. Yes, Einstein was a pacifist yet he was an important part of the development of the nuclear bomb. Einstein himself saw it as a defensive tool to end the aggression of the Nazis, even though he had actually helped create the most powerful weapon mankind had ever witnessed. He knew they were trying to build it and was scared that if they got it first, they would not hesitate to use it to accomplish their goal of racial cleansing on the planet. He was likely right.And if you wonder why Japan got nuked twice, you really need to look at the history of Japan. I would suggest starting with Oda Nobunaga and how he "unified" Japan. It is highly unlikely that they would have surrendered without being shown that they had no chance.Even though I may not be an aggressive or violent person, I am wary of dismissing it as unnecessary or innately immoral. To talk about aggression as "bad" without realizing how it has shaped every life form on this planet is like saying that nature itself is bad or immoral. Sounds to me like a fall back to old religious top-down declaration of "good" vs "evil".

[Alan C.]

It's highly improbable that an alien species would be aggressive because they would require division of labor in order to develop the technology to travel through space.

[Xeeg]

Alan, that makes no sense. We required division of labor to come up with a rocketship to get to the moon and humans are aggressive. As a matter of fact, I don't see how being aggressive fundamentally stops our ability to take over our solar system and move into interstellar space. Sure it could slow it down, or speed it up depending on your view, but it doesn't STOP it unless we happen to bomb ourselves back to the stone age.

 

We have had aggressive aspects to humanity throughout our entire history and yet we have still gone to the moon and dominated this planet. So to say that it is improbable for an aggressive species to do so flies in face of the only evidence we have of any species doing so... us.

[Kevin Beal]

The division of labor necessarily implies cooperation by definition.

[Xeeg]

yeah but cooperation and aggression are not mutually exclusive.

Example - an attacking army

The army itself is made up of cooperating individuals, but they are being aggressive towards others.

[Livemike]

If we encounter an intelligent alien race what level of technology will they be at?  This will mostly be determined by how long it's been since they evolved sentience.  This in turn is overwhelmingly determined by how long since their planet developed life, which is overwhelmingly determined by how long since their planet formed which is overwhelmingly determined by how long since it's star formed.

So for instance a star like the sun but 0.01% older would (all other things being equal) develop intelligent life 457,000 years earlier.  Even if the aliens developed technology only 1/2 as fast once they became a sentient species they would still be about 28,000 years ahead of us.  With a gap like that being willing to shed their loathsome green blood will not do us any good.  If they want to fight we're doomed.  Conversely if we are more developed we would probably be at least thousands of years ahead, if not tens of thousands.  So if they attack they only have the advantage until we break the rifles out of storage and rustle up some Kevlar.  I don't care how aggressive they are, after the first taste of bolt action fire they'll drop their atlatls and run.

 

So we either can't, or don't really need to try to, defend ourselves from aliens.  What makes sense therefore is to cooperate with them just like other humans.  Those who are most efficient at cooperating will prosper, just like they do now.

[Seleneccentric]

@Selene

 

My apologies for this post, it was a hasty projection. Thank you for responding with such even-tempered regard.

[Xeeg]

If we encounter an intelligent alien race what level of technology will they be at?  This will mostly be determined by how long it's been since they evolved sentience.  This in turn is overwhelmingly determined by how long since their planet developed life, which is overwhelmingly determined by how long since their planet formed which is overwhelmingly determined by how long since it's star formed.

So for instance a star like the sun but 0.01% older would (all other things being equal) develop intelligent life 457,000 years earlier.  Even if the aliens developed technology only 1/2 as fast once they became a sentient species they would still be about 28,000 years ahead of us.  With a gap like that being willing to shed their loathsome green blood will not do us any good.  If they want to fight we're doomed.  Conversely if we are more developed we would probably be at least thousands of years ahead, if not tens of thousands.  So if they attack they only have the advantage until we break the rifles out of storage and rustle up some Kevlar.  I don't care how aggressive they are, after the first taste of bolt action fire they'll drop their atlatls and run. 

 

So we either can't, or don't really need to try to, defend ourselves from aliens.  What makes sense therefore is to cooperate with them just like other humans.  Those who are most efficient at cooperating will prosper, just like they do now.  

 

To a large extent I agree with you livemike. I've often wondered what would have happened if the dinosaurs got smart. It is entirely possible that another planet within 200 million lightyears evolved along the same timeline as the dinosaurs, but instead of its large life forms getting mostly wiped out, they became smart like us. So when we talk about the differences in technological advances, there would seem to be such massive disparities that it would be futile to compete.

 

However that does not mean that our own battles and warfare technology are a total waste. Especially if they are carrying on as we advance to dominate our solar system and move into interstellar space. If our warfare technology keeps up with our exploration technology, we might very well have a good chance at defending from another species.

 

Some of these technologies might even have large plateaus. The "tooth" can be considered a technology, and has been useful for many lifeforms on this planet for about 500 million years. I think this is a great example of how some technologies can stand the test of time. At any rate, just because they might be much more powerful does not mean that practicing against ourselves is useless.

[Stoic_Dreamer]

When humanity was in its infancy it was beneficial to dominate the other species (particularly other predators) as we evolved to better navigate the world and mold it into something useful (consider the origin of dogs).  In the modern era dominating say like a cow or chicken has become incredibly inefficient and giant subsidies are needed to maintain our stocks of readily available cheap meat.  No other animal keeps other animals in such a manner- if a lion is hungry a lion eats a gazelle, but it doesn't then raise gazelle to eat in the future.  The other species are not capable of philosophy, cannot be reasonably expected to follow the NAP because the NAP is a human technology.  Aliens will have the capacity to reason, will have to have had long periods of little to no warfare or enslavement in order to achieve the technological advancement necessary for lengthy space travel. 

 

Violations of the NAP retard human progress (case-in-point, Africa). The ancients had the steam engine but made no use of it because they chose to rely on enslaved individuals.  If these aliens have the technological ability to reach our system then it's improbable that a military force will be what they send- more likely traders, miners, or scientists interested in resources or curious about a newly discovered species. If they have that kind of technology then they will have very little to fear from the relatively primitive human race... other than in fantasy films, humans tend not to wage war against monkeys.  That is not to say that these aliens might not exploit the planet for its resources, but it is unlikely that an Independence Day scenario is going to play out when they make contact.

[Xeeg]

The argument that a peaceful group with "little to no warfare or enslavement" is necessary for lengthy space travel is based on little but assumptions. If you value evidence we can see from our own history that humans have explored and travelled great lengths, all the while never ceasing such non-peaceful actions. It used to take a year to travel from England to China by boat. Now it takes less than a year to travel from Earth to Mars, and I would hardly call humans a peaceful race.

 

You say violations of the NAP retard human progress, yet the English did very well at violating the NAP and it turned them into a world superpower; gaining control of an entire continent, enslaving another continent, etc. So while it hurt the african continent, i would say that humanities power and progress as a whole got larger throughout this period. I am not using this example to justify the use of slavery in today's world, however it may have been useful in the past, before we realized the power of the human mind to create things much stronger than humans themselves at specific tasks. There is an analogy of the tunnel in this video (http://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence.html) which i find useful for the description of slavery in the past.

 

And to say that other animals have no ability to reason and philosophize is also an assumption. Yes we can say a car will not drive without an engine, but to say that a car will not drive without a gas-powered 6 cylinder engine is false. Just because animals may not have the same brain parts as us does not mean that they are not capable of certain tasks, especially ones that we have no ability to measure. We have no idea if a group of birds sitting in a tree chirping are actually philosophizing. If you can prove that they aren't, please send me your references as i would be very interested in the research.

[dsayers]

The argument that a peaceful group with "little to no warfare or enslavement" is necessary for lengthy space travel is based on little but assumptions.

 

One of the first things you said was "When we meet aliens they will likely be aggressive." Why is "is based on little but assumptions" reason enough to disregard people who do not agree with you, but not enough to even question those who do or the premise itself?

[Xeeg]

One of the first things you said was "When we meet aliens they will likely be aggressive." Why is "is based on little but assumptions" reason enough to disregard people who do not agree with you, but not enough to even question those who do or the premise itself?

 

Because I backed up my assumptions with evidence. The evidence that almost every single life form on this planet is aggressive towards other life forms due to the fact that they have to eat them. I admit that few of these creature are space faring, which undoubtedly hurts my argument. However, at the very least I can clearly demonstrate that most life we know of is aggressive towards other life. Since the only space faring creature we know of is humans, and humans do not obey the NAP at all times, it would be further evidence that such a principle is not required.

[dsayers]

That's like saying that slavery always existed, so it must be inherent. It ignores free will entirely.

 

No, humans do not qualify for "space faring." In the context of making contact with species not of our world, we've barely engaged in acts that could be described as anything more than playing in our own backyard; We haven't even been around the block yet.

[Xeeg]

That's like saying that slavery always existed, so it must be inherent. It ignores free will entirely.

 

It's more like saying slavery always existed, so we should expect it and prepare for it. It's not ignoring free will at all, if anything it is allowing for more free will because it provides more options. Which is kinda the point of this post in the first place. The NAP is basically a self imposed handicap under the pretense of a liberation movement.

 

And you're right, we aren't close to space faring but that wasn't the point of my argument.

[dsayers]

The NAP is basically a self imposed handicap under the pretense of a liberation movement.

 

"The initiation of the use of force is immoral" is not self-imposed, a handicap, or a liberation movement. I look forward to all three cases if you'd be so kind.

[Xeeg]

"The initiation of the use of force is immoral" is not self-imposed, a handicap, or a liberation movement. I look forward to all three cases if you'd be so kind.

 

1. Self-imposed. Well by definition you can't impose the NAP on someone else, so the only person you can impose it on is yourself. Pretty simple.

 

2. Handicap. Since no one else is forced to obey they NAP, those who choose to follow it have less options.

 

3. Liberation Movement. I did not say that the NAP was a liberation movement, i said that it had the pretense of a liberation movement. This means that followers of this ideal feel that they will gain freedoms if and only if everyone follows it.

 

Since you can't force people to follow it, by definition, there will always be some subset of humanity that chooses not to follow it at any given time. These people who choose not to follow it have more options available to them because they are not restricted by ideals. The followers of the NAP will be forced to defend themselves from such aggression and therefor never truly be free.

[dsayers]

Handicap. Since no one else is forced to obey they NAP, those who choose to follow it have less options.

 

This is providing a definition, not making a case.

 

Saying "the initiation of the use of force is immoral" is not self-imposed, a handicap, or a liberation movement.

 

Do you own yourself? Are people fundamentally different in such a way that why you own yourself could not be applied to just about everybody? If you accept these, then stating that the initiation of the use of force is immoral is merely observing what is true. Just like saying that objects fall to the Earth is not imposing gravity, but merely observing/describing it.

 

The only options this observation removes is options of evil. This isn't a handicap, it is a purification. Plus as you've stated, people can still understand this and cross it, so handicap couldn't even describe it if you were being honest. You're just making the common mistake that "initiation of the use of force" doesn't include the word initiation.

 

Saying that objects fall to the Earth is not the pretense for a murderous movement of people in high places. The fact that unrestrained people in high places will fall to their death is just what follows the observation of gravity.

[Xeeg]

Well what is the point of morality in the first place? You can define morality as obeying the NAP, but who cares? What tangible benefit does this moral law provide? If there are no real world consequences, then what "good" is the moral statement?

 

If the initiation of the use of force is NEVER GOOD then why has the universe allowed it to be a strategy for so many life forms on this planet throughout history?

 

I'm sorry but i can't help to think that you are trying to see black and white in a world full of colour.

[dsayers]

The NAP is basically a self imposed handicap under the pretense of a liberation movement.

 

This is a false claim three times over. You don't have to accept my refutation, but you do have to acknowledge if you want to continue the conversation.

 

Also, saying "the universe allowed" is an anthropomorphism.