Pasted: (conclusions reached via UPB in bold, near bottom)


[quote user="blackacidlizzard"][quote user="atypicalanarchist"]
It's understood among humans and throughout much of the animal kingdom that aggression is met with aggression. If I attack you, you attack me. Of course, we don't have to sign any agreements in order to share this understanding. Does that make it an implied contract or is this simply an issue that goes beyond contracts?

[/quote]

I see the phrase "implied contract" as a self contradiction designed to allow for anything once it is accepted. A contract by any definition I know of (save the eerily religious "social", "implied", etc. varieties) must be explicitly agreed to with conscious intent. The acceptability of violent self defense is not of contractual nature, but the impossibility of a non-self-contradictory prohibition upon it can be shown. If it is not acceptable to stop the destruction / harming of life because the nessecarry actions would harm life, then violence must be allowed to go on unimpeded beacause violence can not be allowed. Once violence has begun, there is often no way to end it, except through violence. Therefore one can not be prohibited from violent reaction, as passivity would also be an endorsement of violence.

Quote:

What about a situation in which one person attacks another and a third, having been a witness to the original attack, steps in on the victim's behalf? Did they have a moral right or duty to do so and if so, does that make them a party to this contract? If the answer is yes, and we can apply this to two or three individuals, then it must apply to all individuals.

The impossibility of a prohibition on violent response to violence, as outlined above, in combination with the nessecarry universality of rules, allows a "right", if you like that term, for anyone to respond to violence with violence. Making this a duty would require everyone to be constantly seeking violent aggressors to react to, as well as require that every person put their life at risk in the name of protecting another's well being - yet another contradiction of morals : one's life must be protected, meaning another's must be put at risk - not very universal.

Quote:

Thus we have the social contract and the seed for the state. As we all know, that seed can quickly grow into a twisted vine as people begin to seek power for its own sake. The essential truth, however, is that people are entitled to protection if for no other reason than the fact that a danger to one could be a danger to many. Wouldn't you agree? And if so, would you also agree that people are entitled to equal protection?

In conclusion, the social contract is indeed a lie created by those who seek power. A person is not entitled to have protection, he merely can not be prohibited from offering protection to himself or others. The number of people who may be affected by a danger has nothing to do with the rights or responsibilities applicable to the situation. What one may do, one hundred may do.



Please let me know of any flaws or other problems with this line of reasoning. Thanks.

[/quote]


[quote user="blackacidlizzard"]

Quote:

Interesting. So you're saying that a prohibition against violence could not, itself, be enforced by violence as that would imply a contradiction.

Actually, I'm saying.... (the converse, perhaps?), that there can be no prohibition against violent reaction to violence, because demanding passive non-response would promote violence in the name of denying violence. Does prohibiting the initiation of violence (which I did not bother to address) come out to the same conclusion? Not as far as I can tell - here's what I got on that:


Once violence is underway, there is no option of non-violence, the acted upon party can not be held to blame for the violence. Also, to prohibit any action is to sanction the use of violence to stop it (how else can one enforce anything?). If unprovoked attack is bad, then the use of violence to cease it must be acceptable. If there is nothing wrong with unprovoked attack, than I can see no way that attack in self-defense could be called bad. If self defense is not bad, then a prohibition against initiating attack can not be bad.


So if initiation of force is evil, violent response is acceptable.
And if initiation of force is amoral, or even good, violent response is still acceptable.


Therefore, I do not find it to be contradictory to use violence as the means of prohibiting initiated violence, and in fact, can find no way that such a prohibition could be called wrong in any way.
The evil of initiating force is another matter, and seems to be solidly supported in the self-ownership framework.

Quote:

Also, you view the concept of an implied contract as a slippery slope. Is this correct?

Actually, I view the coruption of language as one of the primary tools to destroy minds, to warp and enslave people.
The value of a contract is that it is an objective measure of what people explicitly agree to. A contract is a wonderful and valuable thing. Now take that word that has so much value, and graft it onto something that lacks all of the properties that give the word value - it feels like something valuable because the word itself has that attachment to something valuable, but it is in fact stripped of it's value. Now it is an "implied" (therefore never agreed to, never codified, merely some vapor-like vague idea, subject to whim) "contract". To give this air of nobility to that which is it's opposite screws up thinking and morality in serious ways.


Just consider what has come in the name of the following self contradictions:


"public property" "collective responsibility" "religious truth" "peacekeeping force"

Quote:

So, just to clarify, you think that a person has a moral right to protect themselves and others. And, you do not think they have a moral duty to do so.

Correct. I can see no reason that one must only survive an attack if they are able to resist it on their own. This would be a right of an initiator of violence to not face violence from anyone except who they choose. The victim of attack has already had this hypothetical right violated, therefore the attacker should have no protection against the same.
Nor can I see any duty of self sacrifice being valid, for the reasons stated in the previous post. (it would make one a sacrificial lamb to another... are there different classes of people?)

Quote:

Can I assume that you agree with the idea of moral rights but do not agree with the idea of moral obligations?

I am not completely comfortable with the term "rights", perhaps for asthetic reasons or the abuse the word has gone through in the hands of many - also because at this moment, it seems to imply a positive to me, even when the ridiculous "positive rights" are removed from the definition. For now I'll say that I do not agree with setting up different categories of people with seperate moralities, and therefore there can be no moral justification for initiating interfereance with another's choices. This stance supports the "right" to be left alone, and also destroys any notion of duty or obligation, save for chosen obligations.
I find chosen obligations to be valid because once one agrees to them, to withdraw is an act of force - some common methods are theft, fraud, and neglect.

[/quote]

I actually think Stefan is incorrect in the way that he handles "gray areas" in his book, and if he consistently adhered to his own theory, he would take a different position on the issue (this isn't a problem unique to Stefan; even the most respected philosophers are sometimes guilty of it -- for example, Rawls was famously guilty of misunderstanding his own Difference Principle at times). Let me try to lay out what I mean.

I think you're correct in noting that the way Stefan handles gray areas in his book is to say that there can, in principle, be exceptions to correct moral rules, and that these are not problematic because of the lower standard of precision characteristic of "moral science." But remember how Stefan's moral theory goes about judging ethical statements: It starts with a maxim, universalizes it, and searches for problems. If the maxim is sufficiently precise, and there are no problems, it seems that Stefan's theory would need to reach the conclusion that the action in question would be morally permissible. If there were problems, then either the maxim would need to be replaced by a different one, or if this could not be done legitimately, the action would need to be condemned as impermissible.

If Stefan grants that exceptions exist, this method for evaluating ethical statements doesn't function. For example, take the maxim, "In all situations, I will avoid killing people." If we universalize it, we will immediately discover that we are forbidden from defending ourselves with lethal force, and that this is a problem. Accordingly, Stefan's method requires us to reject the maxim and search for a better one. If Stefan says, "Oh, well self-defense is just a gray area and it's still generally wrong to kill people," then it seems clear that we have completely neutered the method. "In all situations, I will do what makes me happy," for example, is generally acceptable, but has important exceptions which make it an unacceptable maxim. The reason that we reject the maxim is that it produces situations where we don't think it's giving us the right answer. If we allow that the correct maxim will sometimes give us the incorrect answer about how we should behave, then the train never leaves the station.

What Stefan should have said is that gray areas represent areas where our ethical views are incomplete. If we can't quite capture the kind of situations in which an action is right and when it's wrong, we might rely on a general "rule of thumb" that we know is not quite right, but still works in a lot of situations. "In all situations, I will not steal," for example, works this way. That maxim is clearly wrong: we can definitely apply Stefan's method and approve of the maxim, "In situations in which I am starving to death, and I want to live, and the only way I can save my life is to steal some bread, and I know that the victim wouldn't be made too badly off if I took it, and I'd be willing to compensate him later if he wanted, I will steal the bread." And because that kind situation is a subset of "all situations," it can't be that we are always morally required not steal. But perhaps we can't capture the essence of kinds of situations in which stealing is justified in a way that would enable us to clearly distinguish the kinds of situations in which stealing is always wrong from the kinds of situations in which it's never wrong. So we might therefore accept provisionally a maxim that says "In all situations, I will not steal," and accept that there are certain gray areas inherent in that rule where it might not always apply. But that's not because there are supposed to be gray areas in morality, or that a correct moral theory can have gray areas. It's because we don't have the correct moral theory, and need an almost correct rule of thumb to work with while we try to figure it out.

So that's what I think about gray areas; I'll address the rest of your post later.

We eat other beings for our sustenance. There is no getting around this. There is no magic. We just wish there was so we wouldn't have to deal with reality when we look in the mirror.

- NonE

Lizzard, Stefan's theory requires that morality operate according to immutable laws. So yes, a correct moral theory that's built the way that Stefan's is built has to be black and white. But just like "Stuff falls when you drop it" is an acceptable rule of thumb, even though balloons rise when you drop them, for someone who doesn't understand how gravity and mass work, moral rules with gray areas can be acceptable placeholders for moral theories which correctly identify what's acceptable and what's not acceptable.

I can't stress enough, though, that this is an artifact of the structure of Stefan's theory. Morality doesn't inherently have to be black and white. As I noted earlier, there are lots of ways to get around the kind of rigidity that Stefan's theory produces. I alluded to certain kinds of feminism before; virtue ethical viewpoints are another example of a way to think about morality from a more nuanced, context-based, and person-centered perspective. It's when you start working from a maxim-based perspective that you end up committing yourself to a black and white view. If morality is not black and white, then the entire method of evaluating maxims is simply useless for determining what the correct moral rules are -- you'll never get a concrete answer!

Regarding Stefan's claims about reasonable expectations, the whole point I'm making is that you can wipe out gray areas by interrogating what makes certain actions acceptable and others unacceptable, and that's what Stefan needs to do. He can't just say that infringing upon property rights is always wrong, because clearly it isn't wrong in the flagpole example. Stefan seemed to be defending (apparently without realizing it?) the acceptability of the maxim, "Whenever the only way to save my life is to break someone's window, and I expect that I will be able to compensate them for the damage if they want me to, I will smash the window." If that maxim is acceptable, then the maxim, "In all situations, I will refrain from infringing property rights" seems inadequate. It requires us to die in the lifeboat example. If one balks at the prospect of using the theory's own methodology to evaluate moral claims, then the theory is neutered.

-----------------------------------

I'm not sure if the empirical verification you discuss in your earlier post has any real moral component. Whether or not communism raises living standards does not involve any moral hypothesis; it is a question of fact. It becomes morally relevant only when you look at it from the point of view of a particular moral theory. The moral theory you had in mind seems to have been some variant of consequentialism which would be advancing the moral hypothesis: "That system of social organization which produces the best outcomes for workers is the system that ought to be adopted." The positive hypothesis that your example relies on is: "Communism is the system of social organization which produces the best outcomes for workers." We can go out and empirically determine whether this is true, and indeed I think it's fair to say that it has been demonstrated to be false. But that doesn't create any problems for the moral hypothesis, that the system that produces the best living standards for workers is the best system.

Further, it's unclear how Stefan's ethical framework could deal with such a point of view, since as far as I can tell, Stefan doesn't give us any explanation of what morality is working towards achieving.

But the point is, you can't disprove a moral theory with positive facts. That's just not the way it works. I'm not sure what moral theory would produce the statement "Soldiers are great because they defend our lives," but I assure you that no empirical evidence you could come up with would disprove that theory (unless somewhere in the theory, something were based on the existence or nonexistence of some thing, and reality were not as the theory claimed). I haven't listened to the conversation that you're referring to, so I have no idea how Stefan attempted to connect empirical evidence to a moral position, so perhaps you could give me an example of how you could do it?

When I wondered what Stefan's moral paradigm is supposed to achieve, I wasn't referring to outcomes. To illustrate what I meant: A rights-based view grounded in inherent value would say that you ought to do what it says because the things that have rights are inherently valuable, and they deserve respect. A virtue ethic would say that you ought to do what it says because that's what makes a person good. A utilitarian ethic would say that you ought to do what it says because it knows the best way to achieve the most wellbeing, and wellbeing is the only thing that's valuable in itself. Stefan doesn't offer anything like this in his ethical theory, as far as I can tell. He comes close in the beginning when he talks about what's "required," but he seems to abandon this kind of thinking as he goes on. It's a good thing, because only with an extremely odd definition of "required" could you possibly show how refraining from theft, for example, is objectively "required".

Cool! Didjall see that dog chasing it's tail? Funny stuff! ;-)

- NonE

okay, thanks for the example. i don't think i dig though how UPB is applied to this. you mean in terms of universalizing the principle and pointing out the ensuing contradictions?

blackacidlizzard wrote:

Once violence is underway, there is no option of non-violence, the acted upon party can not be held to blame for the violence. Also, to prohibit any action is to sanction the use of violence to stop it (how else can one enforce anything?)[If unprovoked attack is bad, then the use of violence to cease it must be acceptable.

well, the idea of pacifism says exactly this: ithe initiation of violence is prohibited but so is self-defense. This is not logically contradictory. it does mean that the 'not initiate violence'-part is much harder to enforce, but they're making a principled point and the lesser likelihood of its successful enforcement does not seem to invalidate the doctrine itself

[quote]

Quote:

. If there is nothing wrong with unprovoked attack, than I can see no way that attack in self-defense could be called bad. If self defense is not bad, then a prohibition against initiating attack can not be bad.

the last bit i don't think follows. if one says 'do whatever you can get away with' then self defense is not bad but a initiating attacks is not bad either

Quote:

So if initiation of force is evil, violent response is acceptable. And if initiation of force is amoral, or even good, violent response is still acceptable. Therefore, I do not find it to be contradictory to use violence as the means of prohibiting initiated violence, and in fact, can find no way that such a prohibition could be called wrong in any way. The evil of initiating force is another matter, and seems to be solidly supported in the self-ownership framework.

so i reckon you want to use the UPB test of consistency and universality to prove your points here, but I don't think you were successful in it. there is of course an almost-negligible chance of my being wrong...

So it's sort of a side point, but I wanted to note that Stefan's account of self-ownership is puzzling to me, to say the least. Stefan argues that our responsibility for our actions entails self-ownership, but that seems completely false. It certainly entails self-control, to the extent that we ought to be held responsible for all of our actions, but not self-ownership. For example, there is no logical contradiction in the idea that I am
morally responsible for whatever I do, but that there's nothing morally problematic about somebody tying me up and dragging me off.

The rest of Stefan's discussion of property rights is addressed my article on this subject:
http://www.strike-the-root.com/72/shahar/shahar1.html

I'd also point out that Stefan's brief account of how self-ownership entails property ownership is clearly inadequate, for reasons that have been widely understood for at least 40 years. As Nozick pointed out in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, we don't create property with only our labor; we need to use material stuff. The idea that Stefan needs to rely on is the Lockean notion that when we "mix" our labor with unowned material stuff, that stuff becomes ours. But as Nozick pointed out, this is not a necessary conclusion: why doesn't mixing what we own with what we don't own mean that we lose what we own, rather than gain what we don't? He provides the example of someone pouring a can of soup into an ocean and letting the soup mix with the water. He points out, I think rightly, that it would be somewhat plausible for someone to argue that this action was an abandonment of the soup, and not a homesteading of the ocean.

Further, Stefan makes no mention of the concept of scarcity, dispossession, and the desirability of a proviso on appropriation. In short, Stefan doesn't do such a good job with the property theory.