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Karia posted:Utilitarianism is the greatest good for the greatest number. The harm done by 49 of the people being murdered vastly outweighs any possible benefit the 51 could get from them being killed. It's not a voting system. Your description of utilitarianism is absurd and has literally no resemblance to what anybody believes. Make some loving effort to understand what you're arguing against. There's a *kernel* of legitimacy in his criticism here, in that the notion of the "utility monster" (i.e. someone who derives more happiness from murder than his victims derive from being alive) is something that utilitarians must grapple with, but it's not like a fatal blow to the philosophy or anything since in practice utility monsters don't actually exist and the harmful repercussions to society of someone being murdered are more extensive than just the dead person's loss of future enjoyment of life.
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Aug 12, 2015 23:33
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Karia posted:Utilitarianism is the greatest good for the greatest number. The harm done by 49 of the people being murdered vastly outweighs any possible benefit the 51 could get from them being killed. It's not a voting system. Your description of utilitarianism is absurd and has literally no resemblance to what anybody believes. Make some loving effort to understand what you're arguing against. Voting to kill the 49 people is wrong, but if those people are slaves then by got is it Principled to kill your Property however you want 
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Aug 12, 2015 23:34
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Plastics, I'm genuinely trying to understand, what's the difference between a slave not killing themself to avoid slavery, and you not killing yourself to avoid paying taxes?
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Aug 12, 2015 23:35
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reignonyourparade posted:Plastics, I'm genuinely trying to understand, what's the difference between a slave not killing themself to avoid slavery, and you not killing yourself to avoid paying taxes? The slave has no principles? 
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Aug 12, 2015 23:48
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Official languages and code bases are beneficial to free market exchange but verboten to the great captains of Galtian industry
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Aug 12, 2015 23:55
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Hey, Plastics, here's some food for thought so you may someday see the light of reason. I think that politics and economics are a means to an end, and so we ought to have our ends properly configured before we evaluate a political-economic system. What do we want? We want all kinds of things. I want everyone to live a satisfying life that allows them to achieve (or try to achieve) their goals (unless those goals prevent others from achieving their goals...it gets complicated when goals conflict). This means they probably need to be healthy, have an education, have access to some material resources like food and shelter, and be protected from others preventing them from achieving their goals. Now, we have human limits here. We might not have the medical science to cure everyone. People might have disabilities that prevent them from getting an education. There may be scarcity problems (to be clear, we don't live in a world with scarcity problems, especially in the first world). But this is what our political and economic systems should aim at, at least in my opinion. They ought to try to maximize these things (since they contribute to well-being and living that satisfying life). Now, when we're evaluating a political and economic system, we don't look at whether the principles are pretty or derived from pure reason or respect liberty or whatever. We look at whether they get us what they want. You really like your principles, but do they get us what we want? No, and you've said so yourself. So I'm not sure why I should buy them. If I adopted an ethical principle that said drop-kicking babies is good and just, you'd tell me I'm insane, simply because any principle that endorses something as obviously wrong as drop-kicking babies has to be false. Why are your principles not subject to a similar sort of reductio ad absurdum? Can you give me a single reason to think that I should adopt your principles in light of this? note: some very smart people are what are called 'proceduralists' who think that what makes a political system legitimate is whether or not it follows the right procedures to get to its conclusions, no matter how abhorrent, but I find proceduralism to be a weird position, since surely outcomes matter (I've also strawmanned proceduralism a bit here but the puzzle remains). A democratic procedure that resulted in the extermination of a minority population is surely broken and illegitimate, or so I say. Ghost of Reagan Past fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 23:59
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Hey Plastic, how does it feel to be promoting an economic and political doctrine pushed by people who fully admitted they've made it all up and it is not subject to evidence?
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Aug 13, 2015 00:05
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reignonyourparade posted:Plastics, I'm genuinely trying to understand, what's the difference between a slave not killing themself to avoid slavery, and you not killing yourself to avoid paying taxes? Taxes come from government, while slave owners are private/corporate. That's all there is to libertarianism. The most brutal oppression and outright genocide is ok so long as the people carrying it out don't self-label as a "government". It's really no deeper than that, there's nothing more to discuss. Anything the government does, its mere existence, is a Injustice. Anything any group or individual who isn't "government" (no matter how identical they are in power) does is just Fine and absolutely Justified.
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Aug 13, 2015 00:06
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Plastics posted:Or you could look at the statistics from the era featuring the greatest economic growth in American history INCLUDING the largest rises in real wages ever! Here's a table showing real hourly earnings.  1970-2000 brought gains of only 11.1%. poo poo is hosed up and bullshit. Clearly, a change is needed. Let's look to the previous century. 1870-1900 saw a gain of 87.8%. That's a very impressive improvement in only thirty years! Perhaps we would be better off under a robust system of property rights, guided by the benevolent dicta of our hereditary tycoon-lords. 1800-1830 saw a gain of 93.9%. Ooooookay. Perhaps the nation would be even more prosperous if we all went back to farming. 1930-1960 saw a gain of 170.8%. Wrap it up laissezfailures; you've been skullfucked by FDR. Please cite a source for your claim re: real wages or admit that you were mistaken. GulMadred fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Aug 14, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 00:07
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Plastics, I'm not even joking when I say this, but if you or people like you ever get even a sliver of social power, like even a bad tv show, I'm calling for purges. We will wipe you fuckers out. Bash the fash, but also bash libertarians. My moral precepts says that you should be killed as a vile weed in human society. Jesus Christ, even schizophrenia or whatever the hell is wrong with that makes you write so weird isn't an excuse for this.
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Aug 13, 2015 00:10
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Political Whores posted:Plastics, I'm not even joking when I say this, but if you or people like you ever get even a sliver of social power, like even a bad tv show, I'm calling for purges. We will wipe you fuckers out. Bash the fash, but also bash libertarians. My moral precepts says that you should be killed as a vile weed in human society. Jesus Christ, even schizophrenia or whatever the hell is wrong with that makes you write so weird isn't an excuse for this. He has the Libertarianism disease of choice - pseudointellectualism. Write long and drawn out nonsense, slip in references to logic and rationalism and act smug.
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Aug 13, 2015 00:12
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Political Whores posted:Plastics, I'm not even joking when I say this, but if you or people like you ever get even a sliver of social power, like even a bad tv show, I'm calling for purges. We will wipe you fuckers out. Bash the fash, but also bash libertarians. My moral precepts says that you should be killed as a vile weed in human society. Jesus Christ, even schizophrenia or whatever the hell is wrong with that makes you write so weird isn't an excuse for this. Settle down there, tough guy.
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Aug 13, 2015 00:15
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Taxes, like government itself is a unique human invention specifically designed to eliminate violence, war and human suffering. The complex structures and functions of an ant colony for example do not allow for freedom of thought, action or self determination. Taxes allow society to give you freedom as a business transaction without dooming you and your descendants to indentured servitude for an aristocracy unmoved by your thoughtless bleating about how your theft through the use of infrastructure is violence because your entirely philosophy is based around being a selfish greedy shitbag. You didn't build yourself. You are not being held back by government, you exist as a matter of governments remarkable ability to collect and protect surplus civility. RuanGacho fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 00:19
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Political Whores posted:Bash the fash, but also bash libertarians. But you repeat yourself.
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Aug 13, 2015 00:19
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Falstaff Infection posted:There's a *kernel* of legitimacy in his criticism here, in that the notion of the "utility monster" (i.e. someone who derives more happiness from murder than his victims derive from being alive) is something that utilitarians must grapple with, but it's not like a fatal blow to the philosophy or anything since in practice utility monsters don't actually exist and the harmful repercussions to society of someone being murdered are more extensive than just the dead person's loss of future enjoyment of life. Huh, Omelas is where I'd have gone for criticism of utilitarianism. The utility monster is pretty easy to dismiss, you're right. Harming somebody else for the greater good, not just an individual's good, is the main point where it seems to fall apart. Still, in my opinion, pretty easy to deal with: harm done to people in the name of the greater good should be weighted based on the impact to the person compared to the societal average. Thus, small impacts (either positive or negative) on the most well off people are relatively inconsequential, while hurting or helping the people who are in the worst position takes much greater weight. In the case of Omelas, the difference there is so great that pretty much any non-physical harm to other people would be acceptable to assist the one poor person. I'd also hold that a society based off of that imbalance must have issues in other places (an over-dependence on child suffering as an energy source, for example, leaving them vulnerable to power disruption), so there would be large societal benefits to breaking the status quo anyway.
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Aug 13, 2015 00:53
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GulMadred posted:Here's a table showing real hourly earnings. When you believe strongly enough, anything that goes against those beliefs is propaganda. Your numbers are all faked because if they aren't some Principles might be Wrong, and that's Not Okay! Tell us your opinion on child labor laws, plastics 
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Aug 13, 2015 01:09
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Karia posted:Huh, Omelas is where I'd have gone for criticism of utilitarianism. The utility monster is pretty easy to dismiss, you're right. Harming somebody else for the greater good, not just an individual's good, is the main point where it seems to fall apart. Still, in my opinion, pretty easy to deal with: harm done to people in the name of the greater good should be weighted based on the impact to the person compared to the societal average. Thus, small impacts (either positive or negative) on the most well off people are relatively inconsequential, while hurting or helping the people who are in the worst position takes much greater weight. I think Omelas is a good argument for "utilitarianism with side constraints" (i.e. certain things such as torture or rape are out-of-bounds, regardless of the outcome they produce) since while it is theoretically possible that doing something awful to an innocent person might be necessary for the greater good (and therefore morally permissible), in practice most of the time when people argue that torture, oppression, etc. is necessary they're doing so in bad faith. They want to hurt people and the "greater good" is just a convenient excuse.
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Aug 13, 2015 01:33
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And I would never wish Something Awful on an innocent person.
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Aug 13, 2015 01:34
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Falstaff Infection posted:I think Omelas is a good argument for "utilitarianism with side constraints" (i.e. certain things such as torture or rape are out-of-bounds, regardless of the outcome they produce) since while it is theoretically possible that doing something awful to an innocent person might be necessary for the greater good (and therefore morally permissible), in practice most of the time when people argue that torture, oppression, etc. is necessary they're doing so in bad faith. They want to hurt people and the "greater good" is just a convenient excuse. I don't like the idea of having a blacklist of not-allowed things, since it's going to necessarily be reactive rather than proactive, and can't cover all instances. I hold that a society that would allow such things must be broken and dysfunctional on some level, even if it did somehow benefit the society as a whole from a purely pragmatic point of view.
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Aug 13, 2015 01:54
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GulMadred posted:Here's a table showing real hourly earnings. Hang on, let me tack back towards "mankind must be extinguished, if it serves the Principle of Justice."
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Aug 13, 2015 02:18
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Wolfsheim posted:When you believe strongly enough, anything that goes against those beliefs is propaganda. Your numbers are all faked because if they aren't some Principles might be Wrong, and that's Not Okay! Going to try predicting his response as boiling down to being totally okay if you're an immigrant who irresponsibly created too Many mouths to Feed. Falstaff Infection posted:And I would never wish Something Awful on an innocent person. A guilty system recognizes no innocents. 
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Aug 13, 2015 02:56
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Plastics posted:I have already explained more than once that I think we need to come to Anarchist Libertarianism in a certain way and that as a result of that I think that some sacrifices need to be made in order to reach that point. I do not like doing this but I know well enough that if I tried to defy the Government as it stands today I would very soon end up in prison and be silenced just like lots of historical figures have ended up (and I am just a regular guy rather than a gifted speaker or leader or anything) so I could throw myself on my sword and achieve nothing or I could accept that I am not abiding by all my Principles (and I seem to be the only person around here who actually AMITS they can not or do not live up to everything they hold True) because I hope that in so doing I will achieve something down the line. Unless you all think that Slaves who did NOT let themselves be tortured and killed instead of doing the work demanded of them were wrong then maybe you should all back off me! I'm sorry, this is a Consequentialist argument for paying your taxes, but I have it on good authority that consequences have no moral value. Plastics posted:But what I realized that was most important of all is that Consequences do not have moral value. Only the Act itself matters and the Morality of the Act depends on personal freedom and the free association of everyone involved. Sorry, justifying your financial support of America's horrific oppressive wealth-hating police state because of the Consequences of withdrawing it instead of on Principle is vile and immoral. And from a rhetorical standpoint, telling us that your mighty Principles are so right and unbreachable that it's better the entire human race be destroyed than compromise with a single safety regulation, yet in reality you're willing to bargain your Principles away immediately because they're not worth following if it means you personally will go to jail...well that's not exactly getting me on board with your crusade to abolish the FDA. If you're not willing to spend some time in the clink for your Principles I don't see why I should be okay with a few thousand more thalidomide babies.
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Aug 13, 2015 03:52
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Political Whores posted:Plastics, I'm not even joking when I say this, but if you or people like you ever get even a sliver of social power, like even a bad tv show, I'm calling for purges. We will wipe you fuckers out. Bash the fash, but also bash libertarians. My moral precepts says that you should be killed as a vile weed in human society. Jesus Christ, even schizophrenia or whatever the hell is wrong with that makes you write so weird isn't an excuse for this. Libertarians do strike me as the "Bolsheviks in 1915" of our century. Already radicalized, gung-ho about a system they do not fully understand but full of fire and vim to bring it about, and just one bad national fuckup away from getting into a position to cause massive damage. Except the Bolshies, for all their flaws, were actually rebelling against a callous, outdated tyranny that was starving people en masse. Libertarians are quite cool with that; it's the whole vaccines, 40-hour work weeks and mercury-free water that will make them set the system on fire.
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Aug 13, 2015 05:31
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Man this guy isn't even fun. I keep noticing his posts when I get home and just going  At least Jrod would try and engage and get pissy, plastics is so noninteractive I had to google some of his quotes to see if he was just cleverly copying from elsewhere. Plastics is like... he's like the Walking Dead adventure game of libertarians. Sure you have a bunch of choices on how you want things to get hosed up, but in the end everything leads to one place and the whole thing sucks.
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Aug 13, 2015 06:12
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Caros posted:Plastics is like... he's like the Walking Dead adventure game of libertarians. Sure you have a bunch of choices on how you want things to get hosed up, but in the end everything leads to one place and the whole thing sucks. This is one thing I think Jrod will have over all of his successors: I am 100% convinced he reads the threads he posts in. Yes, he will ignore posts pretty blatantly and he may even intentionally misquote people but by God if he quotes a post I'm at least confident he read it long enough to find a way to cherry pick it to make it say the opposite of what the author clearly said. If Plastics is real, I'm fairly sure he just skims posts, finds 2 or 3 words, and then just writes a post and hope that the post he quoted matches up.
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Aug 13, 2015 06:43
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Sephyr posted:Libertarians do strike me as the "Bolsheviks in 1915" of our century. Already radicalized, gung-ho about a system they do not fully understand but full of fire and vim to bring it about, and just one bad national fuckup away from getting into a position to cause massive damage. It's all reactions to modernity. The problem with modernity is real and all the groups that look at modernity and go "This is some hosed bullshit" are not wrong to do that. What they are wrong to do is to assert that their answer, their particular synthesis, is true and will save us all.
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Aug 13, 2015 07:00
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Caros posted:Man this guy isn't even fun. I keep noticing his posts when I get home and just going I would go significantly further and argue that he's the Heavy-Rain-if-you-took-out-the-cool-FBI-agent-hologlasses-parts of libertarians.
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Aug 13, 2015 07:42
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paragon1 posted:I would go significantly further and argue that he's the Heavy-Rain-if-you-took-out-the-cool-FBI-agent-hologlasses-parts of libertarians. I liked heavy rain.  Then again I suppose you are right. Once you've seen the game you've seen it all and there isn't really any reason to go back to it. Good call.
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Aug 13, 2015 07:44
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Caros posted:I liked heavy rain. It cheated on the mystery, I just can't forgive that.  It was crap for other reasons too, much like Plastics posting.
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Aug 13, 2015 07:55
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I've said it before and I'll say it again; libertarians have become like a terrifying cult at this point. If you look at it every time somebody says "we tried your policies and they didn't work during X era" they only respond with "well you didn't do them right/didn't deregulate hard enough! Try again." That or "well it didn't work because some filthy statist sabotaged it." No, lolbertarian, it didn't work because your ideas are stupid.
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Aug 13, 2015 08:05
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Even if you nail the Libertarian dead to rights on bad outcomes, they'll just abandon the argument that libertopia would be better for the people living in it and fall back on ontological ethics. A libertarian system is better because it's libertarian, not because it's actually better to live there (if you aren't in the aristocratic/warlord class). It would actually save a bunch of time if Libertarians were honest from the start like Plastics here, immediately acknowledging that the most horrific dystopia imaginable is a small price to pay for a sufficiently capital-V Virtuous society, if only he'd follow this to its logical conclusion and not bother to make the case that Libertarianism would lead to less suffering and death since that doesn't matter according to his captial-E Ethics anyway. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 08:42
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Political Whores posted:Plastics, I'm not even joking when I say this, but if you or people like you ever get even a sliver of social power, like even a bad tv show, I'm calling for purges. We will wipe you fuckers out. Bash the fash, but also bash libertarians. My moral precepts says that you should be killed as a vile weed in human society. Jesus Christ, even schizophrenia or whatever the hell is wrong with that makes you write so weird isn't an excuse for this. Hey can I get first dibs?
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Aug 13, 2015 08:48
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Plastics posted:This is the bit that a lot of people seem to be having trouble with! The Free Market is completely not that you are right! It is not a knowing and knowledgeable thing that exists but it is rather a Mechanism by which other things can be figured out! quote:The wage (and other benefits) that you can negotiate with your employer is BY DEFINITION fair in a system that does not have coercion in it. If you do not like the wages you are getting or are offered then find another job. If you can NOT do that then you do not have skills people find useful so why should you be paid more than your utility? If people want to PRIVATELY CHOOSE to help you then they can do that but you can not Force people into this kind of distorted market insanity and act like that is Just. Now what?
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Aug 13, 2015 14:46
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Plastics posted:
The market does do some things well, and I do like new gadgets and gizmos, so I support markets to a point. You support them to a fault.
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Aug 13, 2015 15:01
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VitalSigns posted:Even if you nail the Libertarian dead to rights on bad outcomes, they'll just abandon the argument that libertopia would be better for the people living in it and fall back on ontological ethics. A libertarian system is better because it's libertarian, not because it's actually better to live there (if you aren't in the aristocratic/warlord class).
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Aug 13, 2015 15:29
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theshim posted:Prospective employers offer you a wage that is too little to actually survive on. There is collusion between the hiring managers of the firms in the area (or a simple monopoly, always fun) to depress wages as deeply as possible. You do not have the money to move. Libertarians *choral*: "Well that wouldn't happen in a marketplace truly free of Statist collusion/coercion!"
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Aug 13, 2015 17:22
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Maybe it's my pop culture-addled mind, but how is it that Plastics' view of remaking society sounds worse and makes less sense than anything that Ultron had ever conceived?
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Aug 13, 2015 17:57
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GulMadred posted:Here's a table showing real hourly earnings. Thank you 
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Aug 13, 2015 18:21
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mojo1701a posted:Maybe it's my pop culture-addled mind, but how is it that Plastics' view of remaking society sounds worse and makes less sense than anything that Ultron had ever conceived? Ultron's attempted murder of the human race would at least have been quick. So yes.
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Aug 14, 2015 01:02
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paragon1 posted:Ultron's attempted murder of the human race would at least have been quick. So yes. Honestly I think Ultron was on to something that time he hooked up with the Phalanx and attempted to hegemonize the entire universe into an omnimorphic hive-mind. Being subsumed into a clonal meta-mind of infinite complexity is something I might be willing to try.
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Aug 14, 2015 04:01
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