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@Swagnarok
@RationalMadman
@ILikePie5
@Sidewalker
@JoeBob
Any questions?
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@Barney
@whiteflame
@Mall
@Best.Korea
@WyIted
Any questions?
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Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and an anarcho-capitalist. He is the author of more than eighty academic articles in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy. Most notably, Huemer has written a paper on immigration in which he argues that states are not ethically justified in preventing foreigners from entering their borders and a paper on gun rights in which he argues that gun ownership is a prima facie right that ought not be infringed on by a simple utilitarian calculus. Huemer has also written almost a dozen books.
Dr. Huemer has generously offered to answer questions and to have his answers displayed publicly. Please be considerate and try not to ask surface-level questions that could be answered with a single google search.
I will stop accepting responses in 48 hours on April 10, 2024 at 8:40pm CST. When Huemer responds, I will post a follow-up thread with his answers.
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@WyIted
I am also thinking of promoting the site on Modern Day Debate. I made a challenge on there called "DebateArt.com is a superior debating platform to Modern Day Debate." (If the mods get annoyed, I'll take it down. But they have Holocaust deniers on there, so I think they're pretty lax about free speech.)
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@WyIted
Just curious, as I would want to emulate your approach. Were you able to get a response from any of them? If so, who did you contact and what message did you send?
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@WyIted
Any celebs you want me to contact?
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If we could get the original debate.org domain and actually organize the thing with celebrities, I think that would drive a lot of traffic. Both of those things seem difficult but doable. I'm willing to help with either as much as I can, though I'm afraid I don't have any special connections to offer.
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@JoeBob
I stand corrected then lol. Surprised ChatGPT could come up with 20 that make sense.
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@JoeBob
Tbf, Best.Korea did submit way more names than anyone else.
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@Benjamin
Yep. Apparently there's also a way more complicated method of solving it.
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@Benjamin
Two trolleys are on the same track a distance 100 km apart heading towards one another, each at a speed of 50 km/h. A fly starting out at the front of one trolley, flies towards the other at a speed of 75 km/h. Upon reaching the other trolley, the fly turns around and continues towards the first trolley. How many kilometers does the fly travel before getting squashed in the collision of the two trolleys?
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@TheUnderdog
@Best.Korea
Tip: Compliments trigger Best.Korea more than insults.
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@7000series
The documentary Life after People covers this. David Brin hypothesized that Mount Rushmore would be the last noticeable landmark.
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I'm not a hero. I'm whatever Gotham needs me to be.
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@FishChaser
That's because Earth is Minecraft for God. And trolling is the new meta.
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@RationalMadman
Cancel culture falls under politics
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Sure, but I don't think the rich people TheUnderdog is talking about are donating so much that they're toeing the line of how much they need to survive. (And I very much doubt most of them increased their charitable contributions as a result of their tax savings.)
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@TheUnderdog
The rich democrat easily could donate more to charity to fill the void.
Charity is tax deductible, so taxes wouldn't affect how much they could donate. Also plenty of middle and lower class people paid less in taxes under Trump. I don't think these people are hypocrites, it's just an example of how it doesn't make sense to blame people for accepting what the government offers them. A libertarian might not want their taxes going to public libraries, but once that library is built, they might as well go there.
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@TheUnderdog
Wanting to cut welfare while you are on it as an adult is hypocritical.
Were Democrats hypocrites for accepting Trump's tax cuts?
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@WyIted
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@Benjamin
That makes sense. OpenAI is really playing it safe with potential audiences ;)
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@Benjamin
- Capitalism - good
- Communism - good
Playing both sides of the Cold War I see
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@Mall
How can something incapable of producing good produce good?
It's not incapable of producing good.
People can be guilty even looked at as innocent so quantities, moot.
We have a good idea about crime rates even if not all perpetrators are found.
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@Mall
What gave you this "most" circumstances impression and it's bad by default ideology?
Most people haven't committed crimes.
Also something that is bad in nature, how can it produce any good?
Positive effects can outweigh negative effects.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
The means isn't a violation of rights. Taking a risk or doing something that could accumulate to a violation of rights is not a violation of rights regardless of the scale of that accumulation or risk, that was my point.
Let's say your threshold is 1%. If you do something with a 1% chance of killing someone 100 times, how is that morally different than doing something with a 100% chance of killing someone once? For example, starting a car company is statistically certain to lead to some deaths. Doing something that will kill an average of 5 people doesn't seem better than doing something that will kill exactly 5 people.
If you had never lived, or if you stopped breathing and died the exact same amount of carbon dioxide would be in the atmosphere. Actually there would be more. So you have a 'duty' to keep living and keep all that carbon sequestered in your body tissues (if anything).
This is not true. Population correlates with climate change [source]. And emitting some CO2 so you can keep living and help the environment would be another example of looking at net effect.
Comparing impacts is comparing ends. Not means and ends.
This would apply to taxes then too. Wealth redistribution makes people poorer (an end) and some people richer (an end). We're comparing ends in the trolley problem too. Maybe you're referring to the doctrine of double effect, but that gives a lot of leeway to utilitarians.
Pointing to something and saying "that's bad" isn't teaching morality. Teaching morality requires teaching philosophy, specifically ethics.
A lot of schools do cover that. Even English classes cover theories like social responsibility. What you describe as "teaching morality" falls under education and could be funded by taxes.
That proves nothing. If you free fifty million slaves overnight with no provision for how they would be taken care of / make a living you would get anarchy too. That does not mean slavery is necessary for civilization or that it is morally sound.
Sure, so we agree that sometimes anarchy is acceptable compared to alternatives. But in our discussion on taxes, you were arguing that the government violating liberty would lead to anarchy. So it sounds like you are arguing that we should accept anarchy to avoid government programs that might lead to anarchy. That comes across as self-defeating.
No, we just need a solution.
If we don't have an immediate solution, we would have a period of anarchy. Maybe that gets resolved eventually, but it will be harder to transfer power and organize now that society has turned to anarchy.
You may have noticed tickets to public transportation. This is the solution to the freeloader problem for public transportation.You may have noticed water delivery fees with meters. This is the solution to the freeloader problem for government supplied water.
Those do not cover police or paving of communal roads. And even if upper classes are provided for, some people will still be too poor to access those and will not be able to advance either. An "everyone out for themself" system is anarchy, regardless of whether you think it is good or not.
Suppose that the answer is that there are no working examples. That does not mean it cannot work. There is always a first time.That does not mean slavery is moral or necessary (for cotton).
Studies have shown that slavery decreased overall efficiency. (Even if it didn't, we obviously agree that slavery would not be justified. But that's not the point here.) But policing does reduce crime, so an absence of policing would mean an increase in violence. Places that defunded police did not see more effective alternatives emerge [source]. Hypothetical alternatives are unlikely if we can compare places with and without the current system and do not see alternatives emerging. With slavery, we could see an alternative (factories) in places where slavery was nonexistent.
The diversity of civilizations throughout time and space give ample evidence of the fact that many of the things we call necessary public services are not necessary to have those services and that voluntary funding can be sufficient to maintain public order.
The diversity of civilizations throughout time shows that places without taxes lived in anarchy by today's standards. Some places did have no government services, but that's what anarchy is.
Push it to the extreme in the other direction:If warring clans are anarchy, then why not warring nations? "Special military actions" "Police actions", or whatever other nonsense they call all this constant killing.
Anarchy tends to indicate a much lower scale of organization or authority than the conflicts existing today. We have large countries and alliances like NATO. People in most first-world countries do not live in fear of being dragged into war. Even WW2 had a "home front" in the US that was largely immune from direct war casualties.
Too little liberty = 60 million dead of starvation plus tens of millions more dead in a global struggle mostly featuring socialists who advertised their contempt for individual liberty
Well that's comparing anarchy on a small scale to socialism on a large scale. And this would be a good reason to not embrace either extreme, rather than accepting a false dichotomy of socialism and government abolition.
I do consider the industrial and technological revolutions of 1880 -> 1910 to be an example of positive correlation of economic liberty and prosperityIf that is what someone wants to call anarchy, then by their standards I am an anarchist
That's an example of the success of market freedoms in regulated capitalist societies, and regulated capitalist societies are not the same as government abolition. Just as Finland is not an example of socialist success despite having public healthcare.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Let's imagine a class of actions which in some small way contribute to an event which constitutes an attack on the liberty of others. The normal rules of causality and reasonableness would apply here. If the contribution to the damage can be quantified then only those furtherances which constitute a significant chance of being "the final straw" could be considered intentional attacks.
This would require quantifying what the threshold is for a "significant chance". Climate change is a spectrum and likely has had significant effects already, releasing CO2 has a nonzero chance of having some effect on the environment. If some minor action I do has a 1 in 100,000,000 chance of being the final straw that causes a flood, and that is morally acceptable to you, then that doesn't seem too different from saying that 100,000,000 people's right to do X is worth the risk of causing a flood. The number may not be exactly that, but at some point the ends do eventually justify the means. We could say something similar about driving cars despite the minor risk of hitting a pedestrian.
The carbon dioxide an animal breathes out is part of a closed carbon cycle. You don't breathe out any carbon that wasn't captured from the atmosphere or biosphere first.
Sure, that's true. But it does not negate the fact that you are breathing out carbon, which does have negative effects on the environment.
Carbon dioxide is cooling the planet, it does not contribute to global warming
It cools some parts of the planet, but it correlates positively with global warming overall [source]. Maybe it's not fair to use an example as extreme as breathing, so the same could be said for other actions that increase CO2 or slightly harm the environment (emitting hydrocarbons, showering, flushing the toilet excessively, etc.) These are still pretty extreme examples, but that is how reductio ad absurdums work. We could debate the minutia of global warming, but small actions have a myriad of effects on the environment, and not all of them are unjustified.
A (slightly) warmer planet is not a planet with less quality of life
If we were in an ice age, that would be true, but enough CO2 has ben emitted that the marginal impact of a greater carbon footprint is negative. And measuring net impacts instead of focusing on just negative impacts seems a lot like saying the ends can justify the means in certain circumstances.
Only teaching a man morals will keep him from attacking anyone except in the defense of liberty.
A lot of schools do teach morals. Many of them have units on genocide. I don't know what you would classify "teaching morals" as other than education. And the Nazis as a counterexample does not negate that overall, education does decrease violence [source]. Education can also decrease war [source], so at least some forms of education would be effective in decreasing anarchy. This wouldn't just be a temporary solution if we continue to educate people every generation.
The only answer that has the slightest validity to that question has been the freeloader problem. Solve the freeloader problem in other ways
If we slashed all taxes tomorrow, how would anarchy be avoided? We'd need an immediate solution. Has the freeloader problem been solved on a large enough scale in some country that we would not consider that place to be living in anarchy? Even then, my issue isn't lack of alternatives as much as it is that taxes have funded things that have been shown to reduce disorder [source]. If your threshold for anarchy is such that you don't consider a bunch of independent warring clans to be anarchy, then maybe that's an alternative. There's one example where slashing all government functions has been tried and failed [source], and no large-scale success stories that come to mind. This will of course depend on what you consider success. A society with loose authority and 1800s living standards would probably be considered anarchy by most people today.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Good can outweigh evil for the same choice, but when the evil is the violation of other's rights the cost is social morality itself.
Contributing to global warming violates everyone's rights (by a tiny amount).
The possibility of domination and forgiveness are temporal offsets that do not change the grand causality.
I don't think every violation of liberty contributes to that, through. Increased education generally reduces the chances of terrorism and gang violence, for example.
And if taxes didn't exist, you would just have anarchy anyway.That is false.
Anarchy generally means "no government." That's what anarchists advocate for, anyway. I don't think we could have a government (or something recognizable as a government) without taxes.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
because breathing is bad?
Because breathing isn't bad, despite technically having a bad effect. Breathing releases CO2, but sometimes you take the bad with the good.
The effect of violating rights is war and anarchy.
Sometimes. Probably not always. I don't know that tickling someone without their consent would lead to war and anarchy. And if taxes didn't exist, you would just have anarchy anyway.
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@Mall
Just a long way around of saying slavery can be good or bad depending on what you do with it .
Yep. Prima facie just means that it is bad in most circumstances.
But what is it until you do something with it? It is neutral ground.
Since slavery is wrong in most circumstances, I would say it is wrong unless the person doing it can come up with some justification. This is why the presumption of innocence exists. Slavery/imprisonment is wrong until proven otherwise for some particular circumstance. So the default (prima facie) for slavery is "bad" and not "neutral."
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@ADreamOfLiberty
A poor analogy.
It could be, but that would depend on how you came to the conclusion that "stealing to avoid suffering = bad." If your argument is that good+bad=bad necessarily, then breathing is a counterexample. I would say that things with good and bad effects can sometimes be bad, but not always. So observing that something has bad effects is not sufficient on its own to determine whether that thing is bad.
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@Mall
Yes, this is why I said: "You've argued that jail is slavery, so let's say it is."
And as I said after that: "Slavery is inherently wrong prima facie but can be justified by self-defense or defense of others."
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@WyIted
We could lock everyone on the planet in prison cells.
Trying that is a good way to start a war.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
not dying of suffocation = good
contributing to global warming = bad
breathing = bad
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@Mall
You've argued that jail is slavery, so let's say it is. Slavery is inherently wrong prima facie but can be justified by self-defense or defense of others. Once people commit violent crimes, most moral theories would agree that we are justified in locking them up to protect the general public.
Is killing in and of itself wrong? What about self-defense?
Is taking someone's money without their consent in and of itself wrong? What about suing someone for gross negligence?
This is where the concept of "prima facie" becomes useful.
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I second the nomination for semperfortis. He's been inactive for a year, but I do think he's achieved enough to belong in the HOF by this point. Also second the nominations for blamonkey and Lemming.
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@Best.Korea
You dont want to be upset, so why upset others?
Because not upsetting others would make Best.Korea upset.
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@Swagnarok
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@FLRW
Time travel isn't possible
Actually, I'm a time traveler from 2020. It took me 3 years to get here.
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A homeless guy asked me for money today. So I looked in my pocket for change, but all I had on me was a $20 bill. I thought to myself "Do I really want this money going to drugs, booze, and the decline of society?"
I decided I didn't, so I gave him the 20.
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In the discussions surrounding the recent events in Israel and Gaza, there seems to be little agreement on how Israel is justified in responding to Hamas' recent actions, or to what extent Hamas was provoked in the first place. Even calling Israel's actions a "response to Hamas" could easily be taken as controversial. Beyond some agreement that the death of innocent civilians is undesirable, there seems to be little consensus on what justifies the killing of x number of civilians. Preventing more deaths and acting in self-defense are both generally agreed on as mitigating factors, and intentionally targeting civilians to send a message is generally frowned upon. The scale of death is often thought to be important as well—for example, killing a thousand civilians is worse than killing ten. But these few areas of agreement do not get us much closer to how each of these factors should be weighed against one another. I will detail two possible approaches below.
I will use a number of analogies, some from popular media. Spoilers for Death Note, Loki (2021), and ASoIaF follow. I did not expect to be using the Red Wedding as a metaphor for the philosophical debate surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but few things can be expected in 2023.
Human Rights Approach:
In a previous post, most people seemed to agree that human rights should govern morality. I suppose we should start with the human rights angle since it is the most straightforward. This approach begins with the assumption that all humans have inalienable rights, which can only be violated to protect some amount of other rights. These rights can be forfeited if a human violates the rights of someone else. The most important right, presumably, is the right not to be killed. Measuring civilian casualties, then, is a simple matter of measuring the ratio of innocent people killed to innocent people saved. Different thought experiments have attempted to quantify this, and I will give five scenarios that seem to give different answers.
The classical trolley problem involves redirecting a runaway trolley toward one person to save five people. Most people who are given this scenario choose to redirect the trolley. In a different version, individuals are asked whether they would push a large man in front of the trolley to prevent it from hitting five people. Most people refuse to push the large man. This discrepancy has largely been rationalized with the doctrine of double effect—according to this doctrine, using someone as a means rather than an end is always wrong, but it is justified to directly prevent a great evil, even if it will indirectly lead to the deaths of innocent people. Israel could argue that the citizens of Palestine are not being treated as a means and that civilian casualties are simply an indirect effect of their actions against Hamas. However, the threshold here still requires a 1:1 ratio. If Israel kills more civilians than it saves, on this doctrine, it would be like redirecting the runaway trolley to hit ten people in order to save five—presumably not justifiable. We would have to account for how many more Israelis would die if Israel did not take such extreme measures in the Gaza Strip.
Complicating this is another version of the thought experiment in which the trolley, if redirected, will derail and tumble down a hill, killing someone who is taking a walk. Most people offered this scenario without hearing the others choose not to redirect the trolley, considering the person walking to be less involved in the conflict, in contrast to the trolley workers. This could work against Israel's case since the second-best scenario might involve a ground invasion with soldiers who joined the army voluntarily. Theorists could argue that killing one civilian to save five soldiers who voluntarily joined the army is not justifiable, just like redirecting the trolley in this instance.
Another event we might consider is the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Proponents of these attacks argue that while they killed about 200 thousand people, they saved even more (about 1 million). This presumes that directly killing one innocent person to save five is justifiable. Opponents typically argue that the bombs were not necessary, but it is rare to come across someone who argues that, even if the bombs were necessary, the United States should have bitten the bullet and let 1 million people die. It seems a rare point of agreement then, that in the context of war, killing 1 to save 5 is justifiable.
But on a strict human rights approach, that context should be irrelevant. Humans are individuals, and individuals do not become less innocent just because their leaders elect to declare war. So on a purist human rights approach, people's inclinations seem to have contradictory results. A final example is the anime series Death Note, in which Light Yagami saves about 20 times as many people as he kills, and saves about 200 times as many innocent people as he kills [source]. Most of Yagami's is almost universally condemned as evil, even the killings that were necessary to save a greater number (most of them). If that is the case, then this would seem to contradict the earlier consensus we saw with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would also seem to contradict the actions of his father and the other members of the Kira task force, involving handing over the Death Note to known terrorists. Kira (the antagonist) kills a small number of people to save a larger number, while the task force (the protagonists) risk thousands of lives to save one person. Perhaps a purist human rights approach is insufficient to account for people's feelings on this matter.
Principle Approach:
It was my initial assumption that the human right not to be killed outweighs most other moral values when weighted in a moral calculus. But what if that's not the case? In Loki (2021), Kang the Conqueror commits genocide on a massive scale in order to prevent a multiversal war, which would likely result (on average) in less deaths than his current approach. In terms of pure death count, the TVA status quo seems like the worst-case scenario already, so Kang is not saving lives on net. Is killing trillions of people to save a lesser number ever justified? In my readings on this, the consensus seems to be that Kang was justified in these killings because an alternate Kang would be a dictator, restricting freedom across the multiverse, even if this alternate version of Kang might kill less people. So perhaps the principle of having freedom outweighs a few trillion lives, even if protecting freedom requires killing those people directly.
It may also be assumed that if a particular war or conflict is provoked by another group, all blame for civilian casualties lies on them. At the Red Wedding, Catelyn Stark's killing of JB is often considered justified under the reasoning that even if killing an innocent person is morally worse than breaking a vow, Walder Frey has started the conflict and thus blame for the deaths of all innocents lies with him. Both Palestine and Israel would likely make this argument, with Israel in particular focusing on Hamas' decision to put bases inside of soft targets like hospitals.
Palestine often defends their actions with the principle of recovering land stolen from them. Israel often relies on the principle of non-responsibility, since Hamas often uses civilians as human shields, forcing Israel to choose between Palestinian casualties and the deaths of Israelis. Religion often factors into this war as well, although it plays a myriad of different roles and doesn't necessarily seem to be the main focus of the conflict. But it may affect how the principle approach is applied in many cases. Hamas would have to rely primarily on this approach since the killing of Israeli civilians is generally done for the sole purpose of sending a message, rather than to save others.
The hard thing about the principle approach is deciding how to weigh principles against each other. How many lives is freedom worth, and how can freedom even be measured? If we're not sure about how to weigh two moral factors, should we refrain from killing civilians just to be safe, or go with our emotions? And finally, when someone's homeland has been invaded and many of their fellow citizens killed, will their emotions be a reflection of accurate moral principles or cloud their judgment?
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z-score of top 5.31% is about 1.6 (22,812 words)
z-score of top 0.26% is about 2.8 (29,334 words)
1.2 standard devs for 6522 word diff. St dev = 5435. 22812-5435*1.6 = 14116, significantly higher than the reported average for men or women. Looks suspect.
When I pick random answers, it puts me at the bottom 22.82%, which implies a z-score of -0.8. 14116-5435*0.8 = 9768. Yet it tells me the corresponding vocabulary score is 2282, so the bell curve model here is inconsistent. Numbers are definitely off.
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@CoolApe
I remember an online IQ test that gave results above 140 when I picked all the answers randomly.
Picking random answers here puts me at the bottom 22.82%. So it's not giving random results, but it is scoring people higher than it should.
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@oromagi
I'm guessing oromagi will be in the top 1% at least.
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