Uh… “morality” is about maximising everyone’s awesomeness? Using what metric?
This is the entire basis for good economists’ objections to the supposed utilitarian basis for the State: it is plain that utility (awesomeness) is not summable-across-people… in fact in all likelihood it is not intertemporally summable for an individual (at a given point in time) since discount rates are neither time-stable or predictable.
So seeking to maximise the present value of all future social utility (the claimed rationale of ‘democracy’ advocates) seems to me an exercise so laden with hubristic nonsense, that only megalomaniacal sociopaths would dare pretend that they could do so (and would do so in order to live in palaces at everyone else’s expense).
How about this: morality is about letting individuals do as they like, so long as their doing so does not impose costs on others.
morality is about letting individuals do as they like, so long as their doing so does not impose costs on others.
Then morality would be about letting babies eat pieces of broken glass, and yet that’s not the moral calculation that our brain makes. Indeed our brain might calculate as more “moral” a parent who vaccinates his children against their will, than a parent who lets them eat broken glass as they will.
I wonder if you’re mistaking the economico-political injuctions of e.g. libertarianism as to be the same as moral evaluations. Even if you’re a libertarian, they’re really really not. What’s the optimal system for the government to do (or not do) has little to do with what is calculated as moral by our brains.
Babies are people and a lacerated oesophagus is a cost.
Kratoklastes spoke about morality being “letting individuals do as they like, so long as their doing so does not impose costs on others.” The baby’s action imposes a cost on itself.
Again ArisKatsaris—the “correct-line-ometer” prevents me from responding directly to your comment (way to stifle the ability to respond, site-designers!). So I’ma put it here...
In short your description of what morality entails isn’t sufficient, isn’t complete
It was a comment—not a thesis, not a manifesto, not a monograph, and certainly not a “description of what morality entails”.
To assert otherwise is to be dishonest, or to be sufficiently stupid as to expect a commenter’s entire view on an important aspect of moral philosophy to be able to be transmitted in (roughly) 21 words (the bold bit at the end). Or to be a bit of both, I guess—if you expect that it will advance your ends, maybe that suffices.
Here’s something to print out and sticky-tape to your monitor: if ever I decide to give a complete, sufficient explanation of what I think is a “description of what morality entails”, it will be identified as such, will be significantly longer than 21 words, and will not have anything to do with programming an AI (on which: as a first step, and having only thought about this once since 1995, it seems to me that it would make sense to build in the concept of utility-interdependence, the notion of economic efficiency, and an understanding of what happens to tyrants in repeated, many-player dynamic games.)
Downvoted, as I will be downvoting every comment of yours that whines about downvotes from now on. Your downvotes have nothing to do with your positions, which are pretty common in their actual content around these parts, and everything to do with your horrid manner and utter incapacity of forming sentences that actually communicate meanings.
It was a comment
And as such it was judged and found wanting.
and certainly not a “description of what morality entails”.
Then it shouldn’t have started with the words “morality is about...”
To assert otherwise is to be dishonest, or to be sufficiently stupid as to expect a commenter’s entire view on an important aspect of moral philosophy to be able to be transmitted in (roughly) 21 words
It’s you who put it in bold letters. Perhaps you should start not emphasizing sentences which aren’t important ones.
It’s you who put it in bold letters. Perhaps you should start not emphasizing sentences which aren’t important ones.
A sentence can be important without being the complete rendition of one’s views on a topic: you’re being dishonest (again).
Seriously, if you spent as much mental effort on bringing yourself up to speed with core concepts as you do on misdirection and trying to be everyone’s schoolmarm, the community (for which you obviously purport to speak) would be better off.
I note that you didn’t bleat like a retarded sheep and nitpick the idea to which I was responding, namely that morality was about maximising global awesomeness (or some other such straight-line-to-tyranny). No demand for a definitions of terms, no babble about how that won’t do for coding your make-believe AI, no gabble about expression.
And last but not least—given that you’ve already exhibited ‘bounded literacy’: what gives you the right to judge anybody?
I’m not going demand that we compare academic transcripts—you don’t have a hope on that metric—just some indication apart from “I feel strongly about this” will suffice. Preferably one that doesn’t confuse the second person possessive with the second person (present tense) of the verb “to be”.
I suggest you don’t be so hasty to accuse people of dishonesty. Downvoted without comment from now on, since you seem incapable of doing anything other than insulting and accusing them of various crimes.
I also find it bitterly amusing that someone who admitted to taking delight out of trolling people presumes to even have an opinion about morality, let alone accuse others of dishonesty. And indeed you clearly don’t have an opinion about morality, you obviously only have opinions about politics and keep confusing the two concepts. All your babble about tyranny-tyranny-state-violence-whatever, would still not be useful in helping a five-year old learn why he should be nice to his sister or polite to his grandmother, or explain why our brain evaluates it morally better to make someone feel happy than to make them feel sad, all else being equal.
If you have a moral sense, instead of just political lectures, you’ve yet to display it at all.
Yeah, so I’ll just leave this here… (since in the best tradition of correct-line-ism, mention of ‘correct line’ cultism perpetrated the morally-omniscient Aris Katsaris results in… ad hoc penalisation by the aforementioned Islamophonbe and scared “China and Russia will divide and conquer Europe” irrational fearmonger).
Not only are you an economic ignoramus (evidenced by the fact that you had no idea what transitivity of preferences even MEANT until late December 2012) but you’re also as dishonest as the numbskull who is the front-man for Scientology.
If you can’t read English, then remedial language study is indicated: apart from that you’re just some dilettante who thinks that he doesn’t have to read the key literature in ANY discipline before waffling about it (“I haven’t read Coase”… “I haven’t read Rand”… “I haven’t read anything on existentialism”… “Can someone on this forum tell me if intransitive preferences implies irrationality?”).
You’re a living, breathing advertisement for Dunning-Kruger.
Wait—don’t tell me… you aren’t aware of their work. Google it.
Here’s the thing: if I was as dishonest as you are, I would get together 6 mates and drive your ‘net’ Karma to zero in two days. It is so stupidly easy that nobody who’s not a retard thinks it’s worth doing.
And the big problem you face is that I don’t give a toss what number my ‘karma’ winds up at: this is the internet.
I’ve been on the web for a decade longer than you (since the WANK hack, if that means anything to you, which I doubt): I know this stuff back to front. I’ve been dealing with bloviating self-regarding retards like you since you were in middle-school (or the Greek equivalent).
You do NOT want this war: you’re not up to it, as evidenced by the fact that you think that all you need to do outside of your narrow disciplline (programming, no) is bloviate. Intellectual battles are not won or lost by resorting to stupid debating tactics: they are won by the people who do the groundwork in the relevant discipline. You’re a lightweight who does not read core material in disciplines on which you pontificate, which makes you sound like a pompous windbag anywhere other than this site.
You would be better off spending your time masturbating over Harry Potter (which is to literature what L Ron Hubbard is to theology) or hentai… and writing turgid pretentious self-absorbed fan fiction.
You not only made a ludicrous attempt to supposedly shame me by googling previous stuff about me, but your attempt to do so is as much of a failure as everything else you’ve posted—it took me a min to figure out what the hell you were even referring to in regards to “transitive preferences”. You are referring to an Ornery forum discussion where someone else asked that question, and I answered them—not a question I asked others.
Your reading comprehension fails, your google-fu fails, etc, etc...
You also don’t seemingly see a discrepancy between your constant accusations of me supposedly being “dishonest” and yet how I openly admit my levels of ignorance whenever such ignorance may be relevant to a discussion?
Nor do you seemingly see a problem with so easily accusing me of such a serious moral crime as dishonesty, without the slightest shred of evidence. Is this what your moral sense entails, freely making slanderous accusations?
Really? You went straight for a baby right off the bat? A baby is an actor which is specifically not free to do as it wishes, for a large range of very sensible reasons—including but not limited to the fact that it is extremely reliant on third parties (parents or some other adult) to take care of it.
I’m not of the school that a baby is not self-owning, which is to say that it is rightly the property of its parents (but it is certainly not the property of uninvolved third parties, and most certainly not property of the State): I believe that babies have agency, but it is not full agency because babies do not have the capacity to rationally determine what will cause them harm.
Individuals with full agency should be permitted to self-harm—it is the ultimate expression of self-ownership (regardless of how squeamish we might be about it: it imposes psychic costs on others and is maybe self-centred, but to deny an individual free action on the basis that it might make those nearby feel a bit sad, is a perfect justification for not freeing slaves).
Babies are like retards (real retards, not internet retards [99% of whom are within epsilon of normal]): it is rational to deny them full liberty. Babies do not get to do as they will. (But let’s not let the State decide who is a retard or mentally ill—anybody familiar with the term ‘drapetomania’ will immediately see why).
Yes. Of course. It was the blatant flaw in your description of morality. Unless one addresses that one first, there’s hardly a need to discuss subtleties.
A baby is an actor which is specifically not free to do as it wishes, to do as it wishes, for a large range of very sensible reasons
If you’re creating exceptions to your definition of morality for “sensible reasons”, you should hopefully also understand that these sensible reasons won’t be automatically understood by an AI unless they’re actually programmed in. Woe unto us if we think the AI will just automatically understand that when we say “letting individuals do what they will” we mean “individuals with the exception of babies and other people of mentally limited capacity, in whose case different rules apply, mostly having to do with preserving them from harm rather that letting them do whatever”.
In short your description of what morality entails isn’t sufficient, isn’t complete, because it relies on those unspoken and undescribed “sensible reasons”. Once the insufficiency was shown to you you were forced to enhance your description of morality with ideas like “full agency” and the “capacity to rationally determine what will cause them harm”.
And then you conceded of course that it’s not just babies, but other people with mentally limited mental capacity also fall in that category. Your description of morality seems more and more insufficient to explain what we actually mean by morality.
So, do you want to try to redescribe “morality” to include all these details explicitly, instead of just going “except in cases where common sense applies”?
That is not that great of an idea. As Muga says nearly any action imposes a cost on others. High powered individuals cannot necessarily step lightly. Plus your idea is even more vulnerable to utility monsters than utilitarianism since it only requires people with moderate unusual or nosy preferences (If you kiss your gay/lesbian lover in public, are you imposing costs on homophobes?) and will lead to stupidly complex, arbitrary rules for determining what counts as imposing costs on others. Plus the goddamned coordination problems.
I’m not saying your criticisms are bad (I don’t actually understand them). I am just saying that non-initiation of force, or forms of it, is distinctly unworkable as a base rule no matter how good of a heuristic it is.
Plus your idea is even more vulnerable to utility monsters than utilitarianism since it only requires people with moderate unusual or nosy preferences …snip...
That might be what you imagine “my” idea to involve, but it isn’t.
There is a perfectly sensible, rational way to determine if people’s supposed hurt feelings impose actual costs: ask them to pay to ameliorate them. Dislike watching gay folks kiss? Pay them not to. (I dislike watching anybody kiss—that’s just me—but not enough to be prepared to pay to reduce the incidence of public displays of affection).
What’s that? There are folks who are genuinely harmed, but don’t have the budget to pay for amelioration? That’s too bad—and it’s certainly not a basis for permitting the creation of (or continued existence of) an entity whose purposes have—always and everywhere—been captured and perverted, and ruined every economic system in history.
And not for nothin’… it’s all fine and dandy to blithely declare that “high powered people cannot necessarily step lightly” as if that disposes of 500 years worth of academic literature criticising the theoretical basis for the State: at this point in time no State is raining death on your neighbourhood (but yours is probably using your taxes—plus debt written in your name—to rain death on others).
Let’s by all means have a discussion on the idea that the non-initiation of force is ‘unworkable’ - that’s the same line of reasoning that declared that without the Church holding a monopoly to furnish moral guidance, we would all descend to amoral barbarism. These days churches are voluntary (and Popes still live in palaces) - and violent crime is on a secular downtrend that has lasted the best part of a century. And so it will be when the State goes away.
Are you really saying that an action can be recognized as moral or immoral depending on whether other people are willing to pay money to stop it, or am I grossly misunderstanding you?
That would mean that the hiring of thugs to beat up other people who engage in e.g. “sinful behavior” would serve as proof (not just evidence, but effective proof) that person doing the hiring is on the moral side, just because they’re willing to pay money to so beat such people up.
Your description of morality is becoming more and more incoherent.
it is plain that utility (awesomeness) is not summable-across-people… in fact in all likelihood it is not intertemporally summable for an individual (at a given point in time) since discount rates are neither time-stable or predictable.
There are a large number of things whose utitlity is very subjective (free Justin Bieber CDs anyone?) and a small number of things that are of utility to almost everyone. These include health, eductation and money, which are just the sorts of thnigs states tend to concern themselves with. It seems the problem has already been solved.
The problem has been ‘solved’ only to the extent that people accept 2nd-year Public Finance as it’s taught to 3rd years economics students (which stops short of two of the most critical problems with the theory - bureaucratic capture/corruption, and war—and a third… the general equilibrium effects of a very large budget-insensitive actor in goods and factor markets).
The basic Pub Fi model is that the existence of publicness characteristics in some goods means that some markets (health, education, defence) are underexpanded, and some (pollution, nuisance) are over-expanded, due to social benefits and costs not being taken into account… which—on a purely utilitarian basis—are to be resolved by .gov… from there you learn that diminishing marginal utility of money means that it imposes the lowest “excess burden” on society if you tax income progressively. The nyou add up all the little Harberger (welfare) triangles and declare that the State serves a utility-optimising function.
HUGE problem (which I would have thought any rational individual would have spotted) is that the moment you introduce a ‘.gov’, you set on the table a giant pot of money and power. In democracies you then say “OK, this pot of money and power is open for competition: all you have to do is convince 30% of the voting public, which is roughly the proportion of the population who can’t read the instructions on a tin of beans (read any LISS/ALSS survey)… and if you lie your head off in doing so, no biggie because nobody will punish you for it.”
Who gets attracted by that set of incentives? Sociopaths… and they’re the wrong people to have in charge of the instrument that decides which things “are of utility to everyone” (and more to the point, decides how much of these ‘things’ will be produced… or more accurately how much will be spent on them).
Others’ education is not of utility to me, beyond basic literacy (which the State is really bad at teaching, especially if you look at value for money) - and yet States operate high schools and universities, the value of which is entirely captured by higher lifetime incomes (i.e., it’s a private benefit).
Others’ health is not of utility to me, except (perhaps) for downstream effects from vaccination and some minimal level of acute care- and yet States run hospitals with cardiac units (again, things with solely private benefits).
And State-furnished money is specifically and deliberately of lower utility year on year (it is not a store of constant value).
You seem to think that in the absence of a State, the things you mention will ‘go to zero’ - that’s not what “public goods” implies. It simply implies that the amount produced of those goods will be lower than a perfectly informed agent (with no power in or effect on factor markets) would choose—that is, that the level of production that actually occurs will be sub-optimal, not that it will be zero. And always in utils—i.e., based on the assumption that taking a util from a sickly child and giving it to Warren Buffet, is net-social-utility-neutral.
Also… what do States do intertemporally? Due to the tendency of bureaucracies to grow, States always and everywhere grow outside of the bounds of their “defensible” spheres of action. Taxes rise, output quality falls (as usual for coercive monopolies), debts accumulate. Cronies are enriched.
And then there’s war: modern, industrial scale, baby-killing. All of those Harberger triangles that were accumulated by ‘optimally’ expanding the public goods are blown to smithereens by wasting them on cruise missiles and travelling bands of State sociopaths.
There is a vast literature on the optimality of furnishing all ‘critical’ State functions by competitive processes—courts, defence, policing etc—Rothbard, Hoppe and others in that space make it abundantly clear that the State is a net negative, even if you use the (ludicrously simplistic) utilitarian framework to analyse it.
So yeah… the problem has been solved: just not in the way you think it has.
Ignoring for a moment the fact that pretty much all actions impose “costs” on others via opportunity costs, and ignoring the fact that economists are not ethicists … this is intended simply as an intuition pump. If you want details and “metrics” then read the metaethics sequence.
This one’s for you, ArisKatsaris—the “correct-line-ometer” prevents me from responding directly to your response, so I’ma put it here.
I have checked what I wrote, and nowhere did I write that the (well understood) Coase-style arguments about how to ameliorate nuisances, had anything to do with morality. They are something that any half-decent second-year Economics student has to know, on pain of failing an important module in second-year Microeconomics: it would be as near to impossible as makes no odds, to get better than a credit for 2nd year Micro without having read and understood Coase. So if you think I made it up from whole cloth, I suggest you’ve missed a critical bit of theory.
So anyhow… if you want to go around interpolating things that aren’t there, well and good—it might pass muster in Sociology departments (assuming universities still have those), but it’s not going to advance the ball any.
As to ‘hiring thugs to beat up people who engage in’ [insert behaviour here]… well, that seems a perfect analysis of what the State does to people who disagree with it: since I advocate the non-aggression principle, I would certainly never support such a thing (but let’s say I did: at least I would not be extorting the money used to pay for it).
This is a funny place—similar to a Randian cult-centre with its correct-line “persentio ergo rectum” clique and salon-intellectualism.
Kratoklastes, your arguments are clumsy, incoherent, borderline unreadable. Your being downvoted has nothing to do with “correct lines” or not, since we have a goodly number of libertarians in here (and in fact this site has been accused of being a plutocrat’s libertarian conspiracy in the past), it has to do with your basic inability to form coherent arguments or to address the points that other people are making. And also your overall tone, which is constantly rude as if that would earn you points—it doesn’t.
As to ‘hiring thugs to beat up people who engage in’ [insert behaviour here]… well, that seems a perfect analysis of what the State does to people who disagree with it: since I advocate the non-aggression principle, I would certainly never support such a thing
And yet your argument DOES support it: You argued that someone can prove that a cost is incurred on them by being willing to pay money to stop such behaviour. You’ve argued that morality is about letting people do as they will as long as they aren’t incurring costs on others.
Can you really not see how these two statements fit together so that your argument ends up excusing all that state violence which you decry? The theocratic Iranian state after all is composed of people, which prove that sinners are incurring costs against them by being willing to pay money (e.g. morality police wages) to stop such sinful behavior.
That’s your argument, though you didn’t realize you make it—because you just never seem to realize the precise meaning and consequences of your words.
And as for your babble about Coase, I never mentioned Coase, I’ve never read Coase, and that whole paragraph is just a further example of your incohererence.
“Your [sic] being downvoted”,,, hilarious: you’re showing the world that you can’t write an English sentence—which is hilarious given your prior waffle about “the precise meaning and consequences of [] words”.
Pretend it was a typo (which just happened to be the “you’re/your” issue, which is second to “then/than”, with “loose/lose” in third, as a marker of a bad second-rate education).
Make sure you go back and cover your tracks: you can edit your comments to remove glaring indications of a lack of really fundamental literacy. Already screencapped it anyhow.
That’s worth an upvote, for the pleasure it has brought me today.
“Your [sic] being downvoted”,,, hilarious: you’re showing the world that you can’t write an English sentence—which is hilarious given your prior waffle about “the precise meaning and consequences of [] words”.
“Your” is indeed the correct form, as it modifies the gerund phrase “being downvoted.”
ArisKatsarsis used the correct form of “your” here.
Also, you guys are filling the recent comments section with your flamewar. Please take it to a private conversation, as it has little value for the rest of us.
Oh please… what sad, sophomoric nonsense. “Down-votes” are for children: In my entire life on the internet (beginning in 1993) I’ve never down-voted anything in my whole life—anywhere—because down-votes are for self-indulgent babies who are obsessed with having some miniscule, irrelevant punitive capacity. It’s the ultimate expression of weakness.
Key point: if you have never read Coase—a fundamental (arguably the fundamental) contribution to the literature on nuisance-abatement in economics and the law—then you’re starting from a handicap so great that you can’t even participate sensibly in a discussion of the concept, because (here’s the thing...) it starts with Coase. It would be like involving yourself in an argument about optimal control, then bridling at being expected to have heard of calculus.
You brought the Coase issue into play it by implicitly asserting that that the “willingness-to-pay-to-abate” idea was mine—showing that you were gapingly ignorant of a massive literature in Economics that bears directly on the point.
While we’re being middle-school debaters, I will point out that your paraphrase should properly have been “Letting people do as they will as long as they are not imposing costs on others” (don’t mis-paraphrase my paraphrase: it’s either sloppy or dishonest—or both).
But let’s look at that statement: what bit of that would preclude the right to hire gangs to do violence to a peaceful individual? The bit about imposing costs maybe?
And nonsense like “That’s your argument, but you don’t even know it” is simply ludicrous—it’s such a hackneyed device that it’s almost not worth responding to.
Let’s just say that right through to Masters level I had no difficulty in making clear what my arguments were (I dropped out of my PhD once my scholarship ran out), and nothing has changed in the interim. Maybe you’re just so much smarter than the folks who graded me, and thus have spotted flaws that they missed. All while never having had to stoop to read Coase. Astounding hubris.
Another thing: the people of Iran do not contribute willingly to the funding of their state. That was not even a straw man argument—it was more like the ashes of a particularly sad already-burned straw man, that was made by a kid from the short bus.
Now some Iranians might be perfectly willing to fund State terror (just as some Americans are happy to fund drone strikes on Yemeni children) - ask yourself what budget there would be for the ‘religious police’ in Iran if the payment of taxes was entirely voluntary. The whole thing about a State is that it specifically denies expression of individual preference on issues of importance to the ruling clique: war, state ideology, internal policing, and revenue-collection.
I am amused that you used Iran as the boogie-man du jour, given that Iran actually has no purpose-specific “religious police”. The Saudi mutaween are far more famous, and their brief is specifically and solely to enforce Shari’a. The Iranian government has VEVAK (internal security forces, who do not police religious issues) and the Basij—the Basij does some enforcement of dress codes, but apart from that they’re nowhere near the level of oppression as in Saudi Arabia, and do not exist specifically to enforce religious doctrine (unike the mutaween).
Uh… “morality” is about maximising everyone’s awesomeness? Using what metric?
This is the entire basis for good economists’ objections to the supposed utilitarian basis for the State: it is plain that utility (awesomeness) is not summable-across-people… in fact in all likelihood it is not intertemporally summable for an individual (at a given point in time) since discount rates are neither time-stable or predictable.
So seeking to maximise the present value of all future social utility (the claimed rationale of ‘democracy’ advocates) seems to me an exercise so laden with hubristic nonsense, that only megalomaniacal sociopaths would dare pretend that they could do so (and would do so in order to live in palaces at everyone else’s expense).
How about this: morality is about letting individuals do as they like, so long as their doing so does not impose costs on others.
Then morality would be about letting babies eat pieces of broken glass, and yet that’s not the moral calculation that our brain makes. Indeed our brain might calculate as more “moral” a parent who vaccinates his children against their will, than a parent who lets them eat broken glass as they will.
I wonder if you’re mistaking the economico-political injuctions of e.g. libertarianism as to be the same as moral evaluations. Even if you’re a libertarian, they’re really really not. What’s the optimal system for the government to do (or not do) has little to do with what is calculated as moral by our brains.
Babies are people and a lacerated oesophagus is a cost. You need a better example.
Kratoklastes spoke about morality being “letting individuals do as they like, so long as their doing so does not impose costs on others.” The baby’s action imposes a cost on itself.
Again ArisKatsaris—the “correct-line-ometer” prevents me from responding directly to your comment (way to stifle the ability to respond, site-designers!). So I’ma put it here...
It was a comment—not a thesis, not a manifesto, not a monograph, and certainly not a “description of what morality entails”.
To assert otherwise is to be dishonest, or to be sufficiently stupid as to expect a commenter’s entire view on an important aspect of moral philosophy to be able to be transmitted in (roughly) 21 words (the bold bit at the end). Or to be a bit of both, I guess—if you expect that it will advance your ends, maybe that suffices.
Here’s something to print out and sticky-tape to your monitor: if ever I decide to give a complete, sufficient explanation of what I think is a “description of what morality entails”, it will be identified as such, will be significantly longer than 21 words, and will not have anything to do with programming an AI (on which: as a first step, and having only thought about this once since 1995, it seems to me that it would make sense to build in the concept of utility-interdependence, the notion of economic efficiency, and an understanding of what happens to tyrants in repeated, many-player dynamic games.)
Downvoted, as I will be downvoting every comment of yours that whines about downvotes from now on. Your downvotes have nothing to do with your positions, which are pretty common in their actual content around these parts, and everything to do with your horrid manner and utter incapacity of forming sentences that actually communicate meanings.
And as such it was judged and found wanting.
Then it shouldn’t have started with the words “morality is about...”
It’s you who put it in bold letters. Perhaps you should start not emphasizing sentences which aren’t important ones.
A sentence can be important without being the complete rendition of one’s views on a topic: you’re being dishonest (again).
Seriously, if you spent as much mental effort on bringing yourself up to speed with core concepts as you do on misdirection and trying to be everyone’s schoolmarm, the community (for which you obviously purport to speak) would be better off.
I note that you didn’t bleat like a retarded sheep and nitpick the idea to which I was responding, namely that morality was about maximising global awesomeness (or some other such straight-line-to-tyranny). No demand for a definitions of terms, no babble about how that won’t do for coding your make-believe AI, no gabble about expression.
And last but not least—given that you’ve already exhibited ‘bounded literacy’: what gives you the right to judge anybody?
I’m not going demand that we compare academic transcripts—you don’t have a hope on that metric—just some indication apart from “I feel strongly about this” will suffice. Preferably one that doesn’t confuse the second person possessive with the second person (present tense) of the verb “to be”.
I suggest you don’t be so hasty to accuse people of dishonesty. Downvoted without comment from now on, since you seem incapable of doing anything other than insulting and accusing them of various crimes.
I also find it bitterly amusing that someone who admitted to taking delight out of trolling people presumes to even have an opinion about morality, let alone accuse others of dishonesty. And indeed you clearly don’t have an opinion about morality, you obviously only have opinions about politics and keep confusing the two concepts. All your babble about tyranny-tyranny-state-violence-whatever, would still not be useful in helping a five-year old learn why he should be nice to his sister or polite to his grandmother, or explain why our brain evaluates it morally better to make someone feel happy than to make them feel sad, all else being equal.
If you have a moral sense, instead of just political lectures, you’ve yet to display it at all.
Yeah, so I’ll just leave this here… (since in the best tradition of correct-line-ism, mention of ‘correct line’ cultism perpetrated the morally-omniscient Aris Katsaris results in… ad hoc penalisation by the aforementioned Islamophonbe and scared “China and Russia will divide and conquer Europe” irrational fearmonger).
Not only are you an economic ignoramus (evidenced by the fact that you had no idea what transitivity of preferences even MEANT until late December 2012) but you’re also as dishonest as the numbskull who is the front-man for Scientology.
If you can’t read English, then remedial language study is indicated: apart from that you’re just some dilettante who thinks that he doesn’t have to read the key literature in ANY discipline before waffling about it (“I haven’t read Coase”… “I haven’t read Rand”… “I haven’t read anything on existentialism”… “Can someone on this forum tell me if intransitive preferences implies irrationality?”).
You’re a living, breathing advertisement for Dunning-Kruger.
Wait—don’t tell me… you aren’t aware of their work. Google it.
Here’s the thing: if I was as dishonest as you are, I would get together 6 mates and drive your ‘net’ Karma to zero in two days. It is so stupidly easy that nobody who’s not a retard thinks it’s worth doing.
And the big problem you face is that I don’t give a toss what number my ‘karma’ winds up at: this is the internet.
I’ve been on the web for a decade longer than you (since the WANK hack, if that means anything to you, which I doubt): I know this stuff back to front. I’ve been dealing with bloviating self-regarding retards like you since you were in middle-school (or the Greek equivalent).
You do NOT want this war: you’re not up to it, as evidenced by the fact that you think that all you need to do outside of your narrow disciplline (programming, no) is bloviate. Intellectual battles are not won or lost by resorting to stupid debating tactics: they are won by the people who do the groundwork in the relevant discipline. You’re a lightweight who does not read core material in disciplines on which you pontificate, which makes you sound like a pompous windbag anywhere other than this site.
You would be better off spending your time masturbating over Harry Potter (which is to literature what L Ron Hubbard is to theology) or hentai… and writing turgid pretentious self-absorbed fan fiction.
Ga Muti. (or Ka muti if you prefer a hard gamma).
You not only made a ludicrous attempt to supposedly shame me by googling previous stuff about me, but your attempt to do so is as much of a failure as everything else you’ve posted—it took me a min to figure out what the hell you were even referring to in regards to “transitive preferences”. You are referring to an Ornery forum discussion where someone else asked that question, and I answered them—not a question I asked others.
Your reading comprehension fails, your google-fu fails, etc, etc...
You also don’t seemingly see a discrepancy between your constant accusations of me supposedly being “dishonest” and yet how I openly admit my levels of ignorance whenever such ignorance may be relevant to a discussion?
Nor do you seemingly see a problem with so easily accusing me of such a serious moral crime as dishonesty, without the slightest shred of evidence. Is this what your moral sense entails, freely making slanderous accusations?
Really? You went straight for a baby right off the bat? A baby is an actor which is specifically not free to do as it wishes, for a large range of very sensible reasons—including but not limited to the fact that it is extremely reliant on third parties (parents or some other adult) to take care of it.
I’m not of the school that a baby is not self-owning, which is to say that it is rightly the property of its parents (but it is certainly not the property of uninvolved third parties, and most certainly not property of the State): I believe that babies have agency, but it is not full agency because babies do not have the capacity to rationally determine what will cause them harm.
Individuals with full agency should be permitted to self-harm—it is the ultimate expression of self-ownership (regardless of how squeamish we might be about it: it imposes psychic costs on others and is maybe self-centred, but to deny an individual free action on the basis that it might make those nearby feel a bit sad, is a perfect justification for not freeing slaves).
Babies are like retards (real retards, not internet retards [99% of whom are within epsilon of normal]): it is rational to deny them full liberty. Babies do not get to do as they will. (But let’s not let the State decide who is a retard or mentally ill—anybody familiar with the term ‘drapetomania’ will immediately see why).
Yes. Of course. It was the blatant flaw in your description of morality. Unless one addresses that one first, there’s hardly a need to discuss subtleties.
If you’re creating exceptions to your definition of morality for “sensible reasons”, you should hopefully also understand that these sensible reasons won’t be automatically understood by an AI unless they’re actually programmed in. Woe unto us if we think the AI will just automatically understand that when we say “letting individuals do what they will” we mean “individuals with the exception of babies and other people of mentally limited capacity, in whose case different rules apply, mostly having to do with preserving them from harm rather that letting them do whatever”.
In short your description of what morality entails isn’t sufficient, isn’t complete, because it relies on those unspoken and undescribed “sensible reasons”. Once the insufficiency was shown to you you were forced to enhance your description of morality with ideas like “full agency” and the “capacity to rationally determine what will cause them harm”.
And then you conceded of course that it’s not just babies, but other people with mentally limited mental capacity also fall in that category. Your description of morality seems more and more insufficient to explain what we actually mean by morality.
So, do you want to try to redescribe “morality” to include all these details explicitly, instead of just going “except in cases where common sense applies”?
That is not that great of an idea. As Muga says nearly any action imposes a cost on others. High powered individuals cannot necessarily step lightly. Plus your idea is even more vulnerable to utility monsters than utilitarianism since it only requires people with moderate unusual or nosy preferences (If you kiss your gay/lesbian lover in public, are you imposing costs on homophobes?) and will lead to stupidly complex, arbitrary rules for determining what counts as imposing costs on others. Plus the goddamned coordination problems.
I’m not saying your criticisms are bad (I don’t actually understand them). I am just saying that non-initiation of force, or forms of it, is distinctly unworkable as a base rule no matter how good of a heuristic it is.
That might be what you imagine “my” idea to involve, but it isn’t.
There is a perfectly sensible, rational way to determine if people’s supposed hurt feelings impose actual costs: ask them to pay to ameliorate them. Dislike watching gay folks kiss? Pay them not to. (I dislike watching anybody kiss—that’s just me—but not enough to be prepared to pay to reduce the incidence of public displays of affection).
What’s that? There are folks who are genuinely harmed, but don’t have the budget to pay for amelioration? That’s too bad—and it’s certainly not a basis for permitting the creation of (or continued existence of) an entity whose purposes have—always and everywhere—been captured and perverted, and ruined every economic system in history.
And not for nothin’… it’s all fine and dandy to blithely declare that “high powered people cannot necessarily step lightly” as if that disposes of 500 years worth of academic literature criticising the theoretical basis for the State: at this point in time no State is raining death on your neighbourhood (but yours is probably using your taxes—plus debt written in your name—to rain death on others).
Let’s by all means have a discussion on the idea that the non-initiation of force is ‘unworkable’ - that’s the same line of reasoning that declared that without the Church holding a monopoly to furnish moral guidance, we would all descend to amoral barbarism. These days churches are voluntary (and Popes still live in palaces) - and violent crime is on a secular downtrend that has lasted the best part of a century. And so it will be when the State goes away.
Are you really saying that an action can be recognized as moral or immoral depending on whether other people are willing to pay money to stop it, or am I grossly misunderstanding you?
That would mean that the hiring of thugs to beat up other people who engage in e.g. “sinful behavior” would serve as proof (not just evidence, but effective proof) that person doing the hiring is on the moral side, just because they’re willing to pay money to so beat such people up.
Your description of morality is becoming more and more incoherent.
There are a large number of things whose utitlity is very subjective (free Justin Bieber CDs anyone?) and a small number of things that are of utility to almost everyone. These include health, eductation and money, which are just the sorts of thnigs states tend to concern themselves with. It seems the problem has already been solved.
The problem has been ‘solved’ only to the extent that people accept 2nd-year Public Finance as it’s taught to 3rd years economics students (which stops short of two of the most critical problems with the theory - bureaucratic capture/corruption, and war—and a third… the general equilibrium effects of a very large budget-insensitive actor in goods and factor markets).
The basic Pub Fi model is that the existence of publicness characteristics in some goods means that some markets (health, education, defence) are underexpanded, and some (pollution, nuisance) are over-expanded, due to social benefits and costs not being taken into account… which—on a purely utilitarian basis—are to be resolved by .gov… from there you learn that diminishing marginal utility of money means that it imposes the lowest “excess burden” on society if you tax income progressively. The nyou add up all the little Harberger (welfare) triangles and declare that the State serves a utility-optimising function.
HUGE problem (which I would have thought any rational individual would have spotted) is that the moment you introduce a ‘.gov’, you set on the table a giant pot of money and power. In democracies you then say “OK, this pot of money and power is open for competition: all you have to do is convince 30% of the voting public, which is roughly the proportion of the population who can’t read the instructions on a tin of beans (read any LISS/ALSS survey)… and if you lie your head off in doing so, no biggie because nobody will punish you for it.”
Who gets attracted by that set of incentives? Sociopaths… and they’re the wrong people to have in charge of the instrument that decides which things “are of utility to everyone” (and more to the point, decides how much of these ‘things’ will be produced… or more accurately how much will be spent on them).
Others’ education is not of utility to me, beyond basic literacy (which the State is really bad at teaching, especially if you look at value for money) - and yet States operate high schools and universities, the value of which is entirely captured by higher lifetime incomes (i.e., it’s a private benefit).
Others’ health is not of utility to me, except (perhaps) for downstream effects from vaccination and some minimal level of acute care- and yet States run hospitals with cardiac units (again, things with solely private benefits).
And State-furnished money is specifically and deliberately of lower utility year on year (it is not a store of constant value).
You seem to think that in the absence of a State, the things you mention will ‘go to zero’ - that’s not what “public goods” implies. It simply implies that the amount produced of those goods will be lower than a perfectly informed agent (with no power in or effect on factor markets) would choose—that is, that the level of production that actually occurs will be sub-optimal, not that it will be zero. And always in utils—i.e., based on the assumption that taking a util from a sickly child and giving it to Warren Buffet, is net-social-utility-neutral.
Also… what do States do intertemporally? Due to the tendency of bureaucracies to grow, States always and everywhere grow outside of the bounds of their “defensible” spheres of action. Taxes rise, output quality falls (as usual for coercive monopolies), debts accumulate. Cronies are enriched.
And then there’s war: modern, industrial scale, baby-killing. All of those Harberger triangles that were accumulated by ‘optimally’ expanding the public goods are blown to smithereens by wasting them on cruise missiles and travelling bands of State sociopaths.
There is a vast literature on the optimality of furnishing all ‘critical’ State functions by competitive processes—courts, defence, policing etc—Rothbard, Hoppe and others in that space make it abundantly clear that the State is a net negative, even if you use the (ludicrously simplistic) utilitarian framework to analyse it.
So yeah… the problem has been solved: just not in the way you think it has.
Ignoring for a moment the fact that pretty much all actions impose “costs” on others via opportunity costs, and ignoring the fact that economists are not ethicists … this is intended simply as an intuition pump. If you want details and “metrics” then read the metaethics sequence.
This one’s for you, ArisKatsaris—the “correct-line-ometer” prevents me from responding directly to your response, so I’ma put it here.
I have checked what I wrote, and nowhere did I write that the (well understood) Coase-style arguments about how to ameliorate nuisances, had anything to do with morality. They are something that any half-decent second-year Economics student has to know, on pain of failing an important module in second-year Microeconomics: it would be as near to impossible as makes no odds, to get better than a credit for 2nd year Micro without having read and understood Coase. So if you think I made it up from whole cloth, I suggest you’ve missed a critical bit of theory.
So anyhow… if you want to go around interpolating things that aren’t there, well and good—it might pass muster in Sociology departments (assuming universities still have those), but it’s not going to advance the ball any.
As to ‘hiring thugs to beat up people who engage in’ [insert behaviour here]… well, that seems a perfect analysis of what the State does to people who disagree with it: since I advocate the non-aggression principle, I would certainly never support such a thing (but let’s say I did: at least I would not be extorting the money used to pay for it).
This is a funny place—similar to a Randian cult-centre with its correct-line “persentio ergo rectum” clique and salon-intellectualism.
Kratoklastes, your arguments are clumsy, incoherent, borderline unreadable. Your being downvoted has nothing to do with “correct lines” or not, since we have a goodly number of libertarians in here (and in fact this site has been accused of being a plutocrat’s libertarian conspiracy in the past), it has to do with your basic inability to form coherent arguments or to address the points that other people are making. And also your overall tone, which is constantly rude as if that would earn you points—it doesn’t.
And yet your argument DOES support it: You argued that someone can prove that a cost is incurred on them by being willing to pay money to stop such behaviour. You’ve argued that morality is about letting people do as they will as long as they aren’t incurring costs on others.
Can you really not see how these two statements fit together so that your argument ends up excusing all that state violence which you decry? The theocratic Iranian state after all is composed of people, which prove that sinners are incurring costs against them by being willing to pay money (e.g. morality police wages) to stop such sinful behavior.
That’s your argument, though you didn’t realize you make it—because you just never seem to realize the precise meaning and consequences of your words.
And as for your babble about Coase, I never mentioned Coase, I’ve never read Coase, and that whole paragraph is just a further example of your incohererence.
“Your [sic] being downvoted”,,, hilarious: you’re showing the world that you can’t write an English sentence—which is hilarious given your prior waffle about “the precise meaning and consequences of [] words”.
Pretend it was a typo (which just happened to be the “you’re/your” issue, which is second to “then/than”, with “loose/lose” in third, as a marker of a bad second-rate education).
Make sure you go back and cover your tracks: you can edit your comments to remove glaring indications of a lack of really fundamental literacy. Already screencapped it anyhow.
That’s worth an upvote, for the pleasure it has brought me today.
“Your” is indeed the correct form, as it modifies the gerund phrase “being downvoted.”
Awkward.
ArisKatsarsis used the correct form of “your” here.
Also, you guys are filling the recent comments section with your flamewar. Please take it to a private conversation, as it has little value for the rest of us.
Oh please… what sad, sophomoric nonsense. “Down-votes” are for children: In my entire life on the internet (beginning in 1993) I’ve never down-voted anything in my whole life—anywhere—because down-votes are for self-indulgent babies who are obsessed with having some miniscule, irrelevant punitive capacity. It’s the ultimate expression of weakness.
Key point: if you have never read Coase—a fundamental (arguably the fundamental) contribution to the literature on nuisance-abatement in economics and the law—then you’re starting from a handicap so great that you can’t even participate sensibly in a discussion of the concept, because (here’s the thing...) it starts with Coase. It would be like involving yourself in an argument about optimal control, then bridling at being expected to have heard of calculus.
You brought the Coase issue into play it by implicitly asserting that that the “willingness-to-pay-to-abate” idea was mine—showing that you were gapingly ignorant of a massive literature in Economics that bears directly on the point.
While we’re being middle-school debaters, I will point out that your paraphrase should properly have been “Letting people do as they will as long as they are not imposing costs on others” (don’t mis-paraphrase my paraphrase: it’s either sloppy or dishonest—or both).
But let’s look at that statement: what bit of that would preclude the right to hire gangs to do violence to a peaceful individual? The bit about imposing costs maybe?
And nonsense like “That’s your argument, but you don’t even know it” is simply ludicrous—it’s such a hackneyed device that it’s almost not worth responding to.
Let’s just say that right through to Masters level I had no difficulty in making clear what my arguments were (I dropped out of my PhD once my scholarship ran out), and nothing has changed in the interim. Maybe you’re just so much smarter than the folks who graded me, and thus have spotted flaws that they missed. All while never having had to stoop to read Coase. Astounding hubris.
Another thing: the people of Iran do not contribute willingly to the funding of their state. That was not even a straw man argument—it was more like the ashes of a particularly sad already-burned straw man, that was made by a kid from the short bus.
Now some Iranians might be perfectly willing to fund State terror (just as some Americans are happy to fund drone strikes on Yemeni children) - ask yourself what budget there would be for the ‘religious police’ in Iran if the payment of taxes was entirely voluntary. The whole thing about a State is that it specifically denies expression of individual preference on issues of importance to the ruling clique: war, state ideology, internal policing, and revenue-collection.
I am amused that you used Iran as the boogie-man du jour, given that Iran actually has no purpose-specific “religious police”. The Saudi mutaween are far more famous, and their brief is specifically and solely to enforce Shari’a. The Iranian government has VEVAK (internal security forces, who do not police religious issues) and the Basij—the Basij does some enforcement of dress codes, but apart from that they’re nowhere near the level of oppression as in Saudi Arabia, and do not exist specifically to enforce religious doctrine (unike the mutaween).