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"Based on this one absurd hypothetical scenario that is literally impossible all codes of ethics other than mine are wrong."
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Aug 15, 2015 06:17
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Even if a utility monster did exist, how would we ever know anyway? We could rely on self-reporting I guess, but a rich guy could just claim his 20th Ferrari gives him 20billion happies of happiness, or a rapist could claim raping a woman gives him a trillion happies. Since we can't directly sense anyone's subjective happiness, we'd have to define what would make a rational person happy (food, shelter, safety, medical care, a base level of entertainment, etc) and give everyone that. If a utility monster baby was born that got amazing indescribable pleasure from watching orphans starve, we wouldn't know this or have to care or ever take it into account. Of course, Von Mises solves this problem in Human Action by making personal happiness totally subjective and defining it as "whatever someone decides to do for any reason except when they're paying taxes" and then derives that paying taxes reduces happiness QED, but that's just an example of a stupid and bad way to do utilitarianism.
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Aug 15, 2015 06:30
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One of the arguments there is "if a man has $X then you tax him he now has less than $X so you've taken some of his happiness." He now has less because you took something away from him. Ignoring that some people make their money by deliberately exploiting others. A man making $X by paying wages that are impossible to live off of to the people he employs he's causing misery to others. In that case it's perfectly justified to take money from that guy and force him to give it to his workers.
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Aug 15, 2015 06:37
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:misessay: Well in the absence of government coercion those workers chose not to make that extra money so they obviously didn't want it anyway
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Aug 15, 2015 06:43
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Libertarians just understand that trying to help everyone and only achieving moderate success is worse than not helping anyone at all because hey that's nature baby.
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Aug 15, 2015 10:19
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Alright, it looks like I'm wrong and ill-informed.
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Aug 15, 2015 13:34
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:I suppose we could select some other goal, but I always thought Utilitarianism was about increasing human welfare, and human welfare is largely tied to wealth and productivity. Standards of living and all that. Productivity doesn't seem to be related, seeing as productivity soared in the us over the past 40 years while standards of living barely budged.
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Aug 15, 2015 15:27
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:Alright, it looks like I'm wrong and ill-informed. Here's a really good introduction to Rawls' and Nozick's philosophies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm8asJxdcds Basically Rawls says each person has fundamental rights that trump even the common good.
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Aug 15, 2015 15:29
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Aw man, did Plastics flare out already? This was fun. 
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Aug 18, 2015 19:23
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I haven't seen this linked in the last few pages, but I know "what happens in libertopia if a company dumps poison into your water supply" is a perennial question so I thought I'd share this excellent Intercept story: Part 1 Part 2 (and there's a Part 3 yet to come) The tl;dr is DuPont and 3M made a product with a chemical they knew to be harmful, released it freely into the water and air, knew the environmental contamination levels were well beyond their own internal limit, and sat on this knowledge for decades while people got cancer and ulcerative colitis. quote:A man-made compound that didn’t exist a century ago, C8 is in the blood of 99.7 percent of Americans, according to a 2007 analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control, as well as in newborn human babies, breast milk, and umbilical cord blood. ... because it is so chemically stable — in fact, as far as scientists can determine, it never breaks down — C8 is expected to remain on the planet well after humans are gone from it. quote:Faced with the evidence that C8 had now spread far beyond the Parkersburg plant, internal documents show, DuPont was at a crossroads. Could the company find a way to reduce emissions? Should it switch to a new surfactant? Or stop using the chemical altogether? In May 1984, DuPont convened a meeting of 10 of its corporate business managers at the company’s headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, to tackle some of these questions. Results from an engineering study the group reviewed that day described two methods for reducing C8 emissions, including thermal destruction and a scrubbing system. quote:A partner at a corporate firm in Cincinnati, Bilott had spent his first eight years as an attorney on the other side of the table, defending large companies like DuPont. But in 1999 a cattle farmer named Wilbur Tennant came to see him. Tennant told him that DuPont had bought land from his family that was adjacent to his farm, for what the company had assured him would be a non-hazardous landfill, according to a letter Bilott later filed with the Environmental Protection Agency. Soon, a stream his cows drank from started to run smelly and black, with a layer of foam floating on the surface. Within a few years, hundreds of Tennant’s cattle had died. quote:Jeromy Darling, too, is now cancer-free. But 17 years after his diagnosis, the financial legacy of his ordeal is still with him. Because he was uninsured at the time of his illness, he wound up declaring bankruptcy after being hit with more than $75,000 in bills for his surgeries. “I had all the good cards, all the good interest rates. All that went away,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s embarrassing. I work forty-plus hours a week and I can’t get a credit card now.” Sounds like this chucklefuck should've done his research and taken his water-drinking business to a competing river where he would not be surreptitiously poisoned.
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Aug 19, 2015 00:34
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That's appalling. Men with guns are shaking down DuPont and extorting hundreds of millions of dollars from them, just because a few million people regret the free choice they made to drink secret cancer water.
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Aug 19, 2015 01:30
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Antares posted:I haven't seen this linked in the last few pages, but I know "what happens in libertopia if a company dumps poison into your water supply" is a perennial question so I thought I'd share this excellent Intercept story: Thanks for sharing this. Its incredibly angering and depressing, but it was a good read.
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Aug 19, 2015 02:13
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Falstaff Infection posted:while it is theoretically possible that doing something awful to an innocent person might be necessary for the greater good (and therefore morally permissible ). Humans are a varied breed. Sure we produce libertarians and an caps and other narcissists. But we also produce people like Tsepe Kyi. http://m.scmp.com/news/china/article/1668552/tibetan-woman-sets-herself-fire-sichuan-town When something horrific actually, truly, is for the greater good - or at least a bunch of us sincerely believe it to be - volunteers generally step up to sacrifice themselves. There is still an element of uncertainty because you have to figure that some of the stories about how in the famine grandpa committed suicide/"walked into the blizzard" rather than take food from the kids are cover ups for murder ... and possibly cannabalism. But the cover ups are plausible precisely because that is a thing caring people actually do. If every human beings' base response to seeing the towers fall was to run toward them to help rather than away for safety ( or just to watch cause you don't see that every day ) then libertopia could work. There aren't nearly enough people like that for societal systems that rely on innate goodness to be workable. But there are enough to save utilitarianism's rear end in those sticky corner cases . Which is why when we wanted to test a parachute that was meant to work from space we didn't have to push a helpless victim/slave out of the space shuttle airlock ... Felix Baumgartner was happy to do it. http://www.space.com/17956-red-bull-stratos-skydive-live-video.html Nor do we have to threaten the families of doctors and nurses to find medical professionals willing to enter areas of dangerous disease outbreaks and tend the ill. Some people see the need and willingly risk themselves to answer it. Not every practitioner - not by a long shot - but enough. You do need protocols to ensure the sacrifice is truly voluntary. But I wouldn't put anything off limits, just categorize some things as acceptable only if the suffering is voluntary. Then trust that when the need truly is great volunteers will present themselves ... As they historically have. Cause when Chernobyl was about to blow unless someone dived into highly radioactive water to turn some valves ... There was not one but three volunteers: http://moralcourageheros.weebly.com/chernobyl-divers.html They knew going in that their deaths would be slow and torturous. Their bodies were so radioactive that they were buried in lead coffins.
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Aug 19, 2015 07:46
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http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
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Aug 21, 2015 04:21
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CommieGIR posted:http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow What do you mean? Sears has never looked better...  *Actual crickets chirping because they haven't had the store sprayed in months.* http://beluscapitaladvisors.com/2013/10/21/sears-vanishing-minds-shocking-14-photos/
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Aug 21, 2015 07:00
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CommieGIR posted:http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow Every Sears did become incredibly filthy and dilapidated. I always wondered what the hell had happened, it was like a bomb hit.
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Aug 21, 2015 09:18
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I like how literally every time somebody goes "Ayn Rand is a prophet, let's do what she says!" it backfires terribly.
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Aug 21, 2015 09:46
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Up to and including joining Ayn Rand's inner circle.
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Aug 21, 2015 10:04
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SedanChair posted:Every Sears did become incredibly filthy and dilapidated. I always wondered what the hell had happened, it was like a bomb hit. Hell, look at KMart. It wasn't even doing well when the merger with Sears DID happen, and even the most uninformed investor would probably tell you to avoid it. ...and it only got worse.
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Aug 21, 2015 11:33
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I'm amazed they're still in business instead of, I don't know, debtors prison or something.
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Aug 21, 2015 12:11
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paragon1 posted:I'm amazed they're still in business instead of, I don't know, debtors prison or something. KMart and Sears both used to be pretty huge and it actually takes quite a long time for that size of business to fizzle. If they have rear end loads of assets they can be selling those off to keep the wheels turning. In the case of those companies they did, in fact, have rear end loads of assets to sell off. Now, of course, they don't. It all got sold to make a golden parachute.
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Aug 21, 2015 12:14
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Yeah I get that but some part of me feels that it takes like 5 times longer than it should. I suppose I should just be glad that the economy doesn't have to deal with shitloads of desperate out-of-work laborers getting dumped on the market all at once; as they would if these companies didn't insist on limping along in a pathetic half-life.
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Aug 21, 2015 13:06
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And then you have companies like TNA, which wouldn't even exist if the CEO didn't have parents that own a major energy company. Which just goes to show what sort of people the free market actually rewards.
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Aug 21, 2015 13:09
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I went in a KMart recently just to look around. Its really quite sad.
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Aug 21, 2015 15:36
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Well if capitalism has taught me anything it is that we live in a Just World and Everyone Gets What They Deserve. I'm not sure what Sears/Kmart did to deserve Eddie Lampert, but it must have been something really really bad.
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Aug 21, 2015 15:42
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HP Artsandcrafts posted:What do you mean? Sears has never looked better... This is no joke and basically what every Sears I've been into looks like. It actually saddens me to be there and out of pure nostalgia, I almost feel that tug of "I should support this" like I do for local business. It's partly mismanagement and changing times (selling both bra's and riding mowers in a mall setting makes less sense today..) but it's also a symbol of widening inequality. Retailers that have thrived have made a choice as to whether they're going upscale or down.
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Aug 21, 2015 15:58
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I remember hearing about the Eddie Lampert/Sears story a while back, and it looks like he's still in charge, and still running the company into the ground. The Forbes article from February makes it sound like Sears is pretty much rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship, while basically all of their competitors are doing far better. So basically, the guy running the company based on Ayn Rand is pretty much doing the very worst in his industry, because it turns out that people do better when they actually work together.
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Aug 21, 2015 16:10
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CommieGIR posted:http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow It's like this guy looked at the Dilbert comics about "battling business units" and thought, "hey, this seems like a cool idea!"
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Aug 21, 2015 16:14
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Guilty Spork posted:I remember hearing about the Eddie Lampert/Sears story a while back, and it looks like he's still in charge, and still running the company into the ground. The Forbes article from February makes it sound like Sears is pretty much rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship, while basically all of their competitors are doing far better. So basically, the guy running the company based on Ayn Rand is pretty much doing the very worst in his industry, because it turns out that people do better when they actually work together. So yes Sears is failing but pointing out how a rich guy is losing all his money by running a business badly is not an argument against Rand.
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Aug 21, 2015 16:18
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I suppose this isn't an argument against Rand if you simplify her whole philosophy down to a tautology like "people who run their businesses good have good businesses"
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Aug 21, 2015 16:21
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asdf32 posted:So yes Sears is failing but pointing out how a rich guy is losing all his money by running a business badly is not an argument against Rand. The argument against Rand isn't that a rich guy sucks at business. It's that this guy is running his company purely in line with her philosophy, and they're collapsing while their competition continues to thrive by being pro-cooperation.
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Aug 21, 2015 16:27
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asdf32 posted:So yes Sears is failing but pointing out how a rich guy is losing all his money by running a business badly is not an argument against Rand. Oh god he'd back
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Aug 21, 2015 16:35
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asdf32 posted:So yes Sears is failing but pointing out how a rich guy is losing all his money by running a business badly is not an argument against Rand. The argument against Rand is that Rand argues that the wealthy and the leaders cannot be wrong.
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Aug 21, 2015 16:42
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CommieGIR posted:The argument against Rand is that Rand argues that the wealthy and the leaders cannot be wrong. What's funny about Rand is that her books also require the men of ability to be the underdogs, hated and shunned by society and opposed by men of wealth and power. In Fountainhead for example all of the wealthy people got rich because they "sold out" and gave the dumb masses what they wanted to buy and the main character spends most of the book unpopular and poor because no one likes his buildings. Atlas Shrugged has similar themes. A ton of the smartest people are poor and work as chimney sweeps and janitors and whatever while lots of people are rich and influential because they sell a lot of newspapers damning industrialists or write bestseller novels damning the industrialists or whatever. So if you're poor, but you agree with Ayn Rand, then your poverty is proof the world mistreats you and hates you for your ability But if you disagree with her than your poverty is proof that you suck. If you're rich and you agree with Ayn Rand, then your wealth is proof of how heroic and awesome you are, but if you disagree with her then your wealth is proof that you're a sellout to the stupid masses. Best example: Atlas Shrugged posted:The windows of the offices of the John Galt Line faced a dark alley. Looking up from her desk, Dagny could not see the sky, only the wall of a building rising past her range of vision. It was the side wall of the great skyscraper of Taggart Transcontinental. Her new headquarters were two rooms on the ground floor of a half collapsed structure. The structure still stood, but its upper stories were boarded off as unsafe for occupancy. Such tenants as it sheltered were half-bankrupt, existing, as it did, on the inertia of the momentum of the past. She liked her new place: it saved money. The rooms contained no superfluous furniture or people. The furniture had come from junk shops. The people were the choice best she could find. On her rare visits to New York, she had no time to notice the room where she worked; she noticed only that it served its purpose. The heroine has a lovely office furnished from pawn shops in a run-down dilapidated building because she's so smart and thrifty, but of course everyone else is only their because they are pathetic failures.
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Aug 21, 2015 17:04
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VitalSigns posted:What's funny about Rand is that her books also require the men of ability to be the underdogs, hated and shunned by society and opposed by men of wealth and power. In Fountainhead for example all of the wealthy people got rich because they "sold out" and gave the dumb masses what they wanted to buy and the main character spends most of the book unpopular and poor because no one likes his buildings. Atlas Shrugged has similar themes. A ton of the smartest people are poor and work as chimney sweeps and janitors and whatever while lots of people are rich and influential because they sell a lot of newspapers damning industrialists or write bestseller novels damning the industrialists or whatever. If I wasn't phone posting I'd bring up the train section where the deaths of a bunch of people is perfectly okay since most of them had killed their reason and thus they suck rear end.
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Aug 21, 2015 17:10
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VitalSigns posted:So if you're poor, but you agree with Ayn Rand, then your poverty is proof the world mistreats you and hates you for your ability But if you disagree with her than your poverty is proof that you suck. If you're rich and you agree with Ayn Rand, then your wealth is proof of how heroic and awesome you are, but if you disagree with her then your wealth is proof that you're a sellout to the stupid masses. The trick being you are SUPPOSED to be rich according to Rand, but only if you follow her recommendations. Apparently, questing for wealth sorts out the good from the bad, and being able to achieve that wealth means you are one of the good ones.
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Aug 21, 2015 17:12
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Ayn Rand on American Indians:quote:
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Aug 21, 2015 17:17
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sudo rm -rf posted:Ayn Rand on American Indians: "How dare those subhumans, nay, animals be allowed to keep land that no white man can exploit" 
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Aug 21, 2015 17:22
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CommieGIR posted:"How dare those subhumans, nay, animals be allowed to keep land that no white man can exploit" With Rand, if you don't know what her particular position would be on something, it's usually a pretty safe bet to just assume it's the worst possible option. Perfect example of why this works so well, pretend for a moment you don't already know the answer to, "What are Ayn Rand's thoughts on personal hygiene and cleanliness?"
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Aug 21, 2015 17:24
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Caros posted:If I wasn't phone posting I'd bring up the train section where the deaths of a bunch of people is perfectly okay since most of them had killed their reason and thus they suck rear end. My favorite is the mother and her children, because she married a government regulator. CommieGIR posted:The trick being you are SUPPOSED to be rich according to Rand, but only if you follow her recommendations. Apparently, questing for wealth sorts out the good from the bad, and being able to achieve that wealth means you are one of the good ones. Yeah but then she has to explain how rich people who disagree with her exist. Fortunately, she hates most of humanity so if you're rich and disagree with her then obviously you made your money immorally by pandering to the lowest common denominator instead of being a creative independent man of the mind (demonstrated by agreeing with her on everything). This also allows her to write wealthy powerful antagonists like the established architects in Fountainhead who use shady business tactics to squeeze the hero out of the market and ruin him like attacking him in the press and giving him bad publicity to make everyone afraid to hire him for fear of losing business.
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Aug 21, 2015 17:34
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