Much more straightforward than any additional taxes or other protectionist measures trying to compensate for the institutional discrepancies in cost between employing domestic and foreign employees, why not just correct those institutional discrepancies?
Require any company doing business in this country, be they foreign or domestic, to provide the same standards to their employees, foreign and domestic, as domestic companies are required to offered domestic citizens working domestically.
So if there's a minimum wage that domestic companies have to provide domestic employees, then domestic companies with foreign employees or foreign companies (with foreign employees) doing business here must provide at least that minimum wage to all their employees. If there are health care or vacation or other benefits required for domestic companies to offer their domestic employees, then they must also offer those to their foreign employees, as must foreign companies (with their foreign employees) doing business here. (Debate about what kinds of required benefits, minimum wages, etc, should apply is a separate issue: my only point is that they should apply the same to both domestic and foreign workers).
This way, you can say to the foreign states who might otherwise accuse you of waging economic war, and retaliate with their own tariffs etc, "We're not trying to hurt you economically, we're just looking out for the well-being of your citizens exactly as we look out for the well-being of our own." The side-effect (and self-interested reason why greedy people domestically would vote to do this to begin with) is that domestic employees are suddenly not so much more expensive to employ than foreign employees, so there's much less incentive to hire foreign workers over domestic ones, more jobs and more money stay in the country, etc.
Of course, there are less-institutional factors in the cost of domestic vs foreign workers too, such as the cost of living in one place vs another, but there's not an awful lot that can be done about that without being straightforwardly protectionist, which as plenty of others are pointing out in this thread, has a big slew of its own problems.
This reminds me of another riddle whose catch involves taking words too literally in exactly this way:
I hold in my hand precisely two coins of current US denomination whose total value is 55 cents. One of them is NOT a 50 cent piece. What are the respective values of the two coins?
(For those not in the US, the current US denominations of coin are 1, 5, 10, 25, 50, and 100 cents).
The answer is a 5 cent piece (a "nickel" as we say colloquially) and a 50 cent piece.
See, only ONE of them is not a 50 cent piece. The OTHER ONE is. The one that isn't a 50 cent piece is a 5 cent instead.
I'm arguing that moral questions need at least two parameters: the morally charged act, and the moral actor who will judge it.
And I'm arguing that the relativisation of the answer to the answer-er creates the problem of there being no objective answer. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant: if you ask each of them, with their limited observational ability, what the object in question is, you will get differing, and all incorrect, answers. Only when you combine all their observations together can you hope to get a correct answer, which is not the same as any of their individual answers. A better analogy might be asking three people facing different sides of an irregular cuboid (lets say in a zero-G environment so we have complete anisotropy of space) "what are the dimensions of the object in front of you?" If they only considered their present, two-dimensional sight, you would get different answers from each of them. Of course, most people are savvy enough to realize that for a complete answer to that question you have to look at it from several different, equally valid angles, and integrate those together. Likewise, forming a concept of an objective morality is like forming a concept of three-dimensional space: the recognition of multiple viewpoints as equally valid, and the truth lying in the integration of those. Note, however, that in the cuboid example, all three observers answering strictly from their two-dimensional sight are wrong; it is not their beliefs, the judgments they make on the basis of their observations, but the observations themselves that you are integrating, and forming a new judgment on the basis of.
You're arguing that you can come up with an answer without specifying a particular moral judge by asking 'how much do people in general believe this to be moral?'.
No actually, I would disagree with that vehemently, because as I just wrote above, it is not people's moral beliefs that I claim an objective morality must satisfy, but the phenomenal experiences which give rise to those moral beliefs: their appetites and desires. Everybody experiences certain visceral motivating impulses: gross survival-related ones like hunger, thirst, and pain aversion, but also more subtle things like the draw toward that which seems to us beautiful or otherwise pleasant. I refer to those impulses themselves as "appetites" and the intuitive objectives formed in response to them as "desires"; these are the motivational analogues to the cognitive phenomena of sensations and perceptions, neither of which themselves constitute beliefs; and likewise, neither appetites nor desires constitute intentions, which I consider the motivational analogues of beliefs. Morally undeveloped people base their intentions entirely on their own appetites, like our hypothetical cuboid observers based their beliefs about the cuboid entirely on their own sensations. But just as the experience of moving around in space and seeing things from different angles gives rise to the notion of three-dimensionality and object permanence, so too life experience, being in different people's "shoes" (as the metaphor goes), gives rise to the idea of moral objectivity, that there are other, equally valid moral subjects in this world, and that a correct, moral, decision about what ought to be needs to take their experience into consideration. This does not mean taking their intentions into consideration, because if they are morally undeveloped themselves their intentions will be wrong. It's entirely possible, by my conception, that every single person in the universe might have bad intentions and incorrect moral beliefs; yet the objective moral truth would still take into consideration all of their appetites, all of their needs.
The scientific notion of truth is not of something that takes everyone's beliefs and integrates them, it's of something that takes into consideration all possible observations. Likewise, my analogou
Thank you for the elaborate response. I may respond myself in more detail later (running on serious sleep dep at the moment), but for right now my only comment is that I didn't exactly propose utilitarianism, only that utility may be the appropriate criterion for assessing "goodness". I have more developed thoughts on the methods of aiming for "goodness", i.e. regulating action, i.e. a system of rights and duties, and I am very much a strong natural rights proponent. In other words I distinguish good/bad from permissible/impermissible/obligatory/etc: sometimes, an action which might result in the greatest good is nevertheless not morally permissible. Similar, in ways, to how a hypothesis which might, it turns out, be true, could nevertheless be unjustified to believe (e.g. as "knowledge" isn't just reducible to "true belief", "justice" isn't just reducible to "good actions"; there are elements of justification required for both, beyond just whether the thought or action corresponds to the criteria by which we judge thoughts or actions).
Hi again Shaka, just peeking at your other posts since you just friended me, and saw this. I recently wrote a longish post arguing against this very position elsewhere in this thread, I'd be interested in hearing your response to it.
If Christianity were really, truly, purely Christianity, I would agree with you. Jesus was an awesome guy with a pretty modern, ethical message for his part. A Christianity based on something like the Jefferson Bible would be mostly fine by my reckoning.
But Jesus self-identified as Jewish, the modern Christian Bible includes many of the old Jewish books of the Torah such as Leviticus, and most importantly, though many Christians interpret the Bible as such, it is not at all clear that Jesus meant to dismiss such ancient law with his teachings. Jesus did say that "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength" and "Love your neighbor as yourself" were the most important commandments (Mark 12:28-31), but he didn't say that that was the whole of the religion. If he had, or even if he had meant that, then why would Leviticus and the like still be in modern Christian Bibles?
If someone with no prior exposure to Christianity went out to a Christian book store, bought a modern copy of the Bible off the shelf (say the NIV), and read it and believed it as it was written, even if he interpreted the metaphors metaphorically and the parables parabolically and such, you still get all the baggage of those unambiguously barbaric bits like "If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads". (Leviticus 20:13). Whether or not Jesus meant that that doesn't count anymore, it's still in there, so to ignore it is a matter of interpretation, and thus not fundamentalist. A fundamentalist Christian would support that part too.
FWIW I also agree that many in America who call themselves fundamentalists have some pretty shitty interpretations of the Bible themselves (from a textual analysis perspective, not only an ethical perspective). But my point still stands that a Christianity which takes the whole of the Bible as God's written truth with no interpretation-to-make-it-sound-better -- that is to say, a fundamentalist form of Christianity -- get a lot of stone-age baggage from the Jewish texts it inherited. For their part, modern Jews mostly ignore or interpret away a lot of the barbaric bits of their own texts... but my original point was that as nice as that is ethically and socially, it's intellectually dishonest; they should abandon or amend it instead of just pretending it's what they'd like it to be.
Like Jefferson did with Christianity. Too bad his version of the book never caught on...
Also, the marriage thing was just an analogy, I meant no comment on religious views of marriage. Just that "monogamous girlfriend" does not meet any nearly modern definition of "marriage", so calling you and your monogamous girlfriend "married" when you don't have all the other bits aside from monogamous sex going on is a little dishonest, just like calling yourself an adherent of a religion and then disregarding all the parts of if you don't like. Even if you stick with what you consider the most important features of it, just as monogamous couples are sticking to arguably the most important feature of marriage. They're still not strictly married if they don't have all the other defining bits going on, and you're not strictly a Christian (given the current Bible defines Christianity) if you ignore everything in it but Jesus. Maybe marriage should just imply sexual monogamy without all the other bits, and Christianity should just imply adherence to Jesus' ethical teachings without all the Jewish baggage -- both points I might be inclined to agree on -- but that's not what they actually mean right now.
I imagine he is referring to the whole everything-from-nothing bit being a little counter to the first law of thermodynamics saying that energy cannot be created.
I never understood why evolution is such a threat to religion. How does us evolving from apes say anything about the existence of God? What does it even have to do with it?
Others have already given their thoughts on why they directly conflict, but my take on it has always been something a little more subtle. The advance of scientific explanations of the world makes God, or any other mythological explanation, an increasingly unnecessary hypothesis (as Laplace once told Napoleon when asked why his book on astronomy made no mention of God). Without a concept like evolution, atheism is susceptible to a rather plausible appeal to absurdity: "so, what, all this order in nature, including human intelligence itself, just happened to pop into existence for no reason?"
Creationists often like to portray the claims of evolution as being like this, like claiming that everything just happened by chance, but really evolution is an *alternate explanation* for the existence of order, not the assertion that there is no explanation. Evolutionary theory provides an explanation for how a chaotic system can develop into an ordered one by natural, impersonal processes, thus dissolving the dichotomy of "a person (God) made this order... or, lol, everything just happened by coincidence, right". Without the only alternative to God being that improbable coincidence, one of the major arguments for the existence of God (called the teleological argument, or argument from design) loses its foundation, and failing another, better argument, people might just think "well, if this evolution thing explains all that, then where exactly does God fit in this picture?"
And the theists don't like that idea, so they either come up with some other role for God to play, the typical ones being pushing it back further ("God created the first single-celled organisms and then let evolution take over", or even "God created the Big Bang and then let physics take over") or the "morality is the domain of religion, reality is the domain of science" angle (which I just wrote a rant against elsewhere on Slashdot)... or they argue against evolution to preserve a place for God.
I agree that certain "ought" questions are incomplete and their answers thus relative in a sense, but as you yourself use as an example, so are some factual questions (like "how tall is the tower?"). A better analogy would be something like "is this stone heavy?": you've specified a distinct object you are asking about (the stone), and a distinct, objective property you're asking about (weight), but the answer depends on your measuring apparatus. A more objective question would ask if that stone was heavy compared to other things liftable by a particular human, for example; a 100-pound stone is very heavy for me, but a grain of sand on a cosmic scale. Likewise, "should unmarried couples have sex?" may have different answers depending on a particular couple and their particular circumstances; but that doesn't mean that the complete question, filled in by context ("should this unmarried couple have sex in these particular circumstances?") doesn't have an objective answer.
Your mention of, to paraphrase, "as God (if he existed) to get the correct answer" is similar to my line of thought. You might well state a scientific, empirical notion of factual truth as something like "something is more true the more it corresponds with (anybody and everybody's) observation", and thus you might get a bit poetic and say something like "the truth is what an empirically-minded, all-seeing God would believe, if he existed". Likewise, an secular notion of objective goodness could be phrased something like "something is better the more it corresponds with (anybody and everybody's) desires", and thus you might get likewise poetic and say something like "the good is what a hedonistic, all-feeling God would intend, if he existed". (By "all-feeling" I mean to translate the technical term I like to use for this "omnipathic", which means something like "empathic with everything"; it feels all pleasures and all pains, all appetites and desires of all things everywhere. By "hedonistic" I just mean it wants to satisfy the appetites and desires it feels; it seeks pleasure and avoids pain. So, a hedonistic omnipathic God, if it existed, would intend to minimize suffering and maximize the happiness of everyone everywhere.)
If phenomenal objectivism works for factual questions, why not for normative ones as well? Only the kind of experiential phenomena which is relevant (preferences or desires vs observations or perceptions) differ. The notion of a moral "good" is an objectivized abstraction from our subjective desires, just as the notion of a real "truth" is an objectivized abstraction from our subjective perceptions.
It's religion, which, when you come right down to it, has less to do with God and Magic than it does with power and control.
I'd argue that these two things are tightly related. When a belief is not grounded in something experiential, phenomenal, observable, and consequently accessible to everyone, then you have to form beliefs about those sorts of things on faith. Which means either just jumping to a conclusion yourself and declaring yourself right, or taking someone else's word for it. So belief in the supernatural directly leads to authoritarian structures: you must either assume your own authority, or follow someone else's.
The problem was never Islam or the words of the Quaran. Every other religious text has passages in it, often misconstrued due to a lack of anthropological sophistication required to understand their meanings in their time, but the vast majority of other people practice these religions in the moderation required to integrate into society.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I've always strongly disliked this idea of religious moderation.
And before I start off on this, let me be perfectly clear: I am vehemently opposed to religious fundamentalists of any sort.
But religious moderation has always struck me as intellectually and (if your morals are religiously-grounded) morally dishonest. Saying that some book is the holy word of the God you claim to follow, and then ignoring or interpreting away vast swaths of it so that you can belong to that religion while still keeping up with the moral and intellectual progress of the modern world... you basically become religious in name only, or inconsistently, hypocritically religious.
It's like saying that you want to marry some girl... except, you don't want to live together, or have kids, or any joint property or tax status, or inheritance or incapacitation rights... but you still want to have monogamous sex with her. If that's what you want, then you don't really want a marriage, because marriage is this big complex institution that comes with all (or most) of those trappings you just said you don't want. What you want is just a girlfriend. And that's fine; maybe it's even better, maybe marriage is an outdated institution and all those trappings that you want no part of are nonsense. But if that's the case, then get rid of them, and avoid that institution; don't claim to partake of the institution but then ignore many of its fundamental features.
Likewise, many religious moderates don't want all the medieval (hell, sometimes stone-age) trappings that come with their religious traditions: the violence, misogyny, intolerance, authoritarianism, and all-around general barbarism that lies in the roots of at least the Abrahamic religions. But they want the compassion, charity, socialization, and so on that are the usual selling points of these religions. So they adopt the religions but ignore or interpret away all the parts that they don't like. Which is certainly better, from a secular ethical perspective, than dragging all that antiquated barbarism along into the modern world; but if you're going to abandon major chunks of your religion and only keep the parts that plenty of irreligious folk in the modern world have in common, then why claim to follow the religion at all? Throw it away and keep on doing what you've been doing without the intellectual dishonestly of claiming to be something that you're really not.
The fundamentalists of a given religion are the true adherents of that religion. If you don't like the fundamentalists, then just abandon the religion; or make a new one more to your liking and be a fundamentalist of that instead. You'll be living the same way you live today, but you'll be more honest about it.
Are there are any good arguments that there IS an 'ought', that it exists at all? Or for what sort of thing it is?
This is why is phrased things in terms of questions and assertions, beliefs or opinions, rather than existing objects of any sort. I'm not talking at all about finding moral "things" out there; I'm saying that "ought"-talk is not about what does exist or not at all; it's about what should exist or not. That a moral or ethical question is fundamentally, logically different from a question of fact, similar to (but not exactly the same as) the difference between the sentences "Jon runs to the store" and "Jon, run to the store". One is proposing that something is the case, while the other is proposing that something be the case. Likewise, the ways of answering the questions "Does Jon run to the store?" and "Should Jon run to the store?" are fundamentally different.
Which is what the religionists are saying too, except I disagree with them on how they are different. They say they are different in the proper method of choosing between them: that factual questions can be compared between each other against a standard criterion and selected based on how well they meet that criterion, while normative questions, well, you just gotta believe that God knows what's best and that this book is His word. I say that the method is the same as for factual questions, just that the criterion they need to meet is different: whereas factual assertions need to satisfy all observations in order for what's asserted to be universally true, normative assertions needs to satisfy all preferences in order for what's asserted to be universally good.
Of course, preferences are going to be relative to the "preferer" and how he is constituted just the same as observations are relative to the observer and how he is constituted, and coming to any agreement on what people prefer depends on there being something in common between them in that regard, just as coming to any agreement on what people observe depends on there being something in common between them in that regard. (e.g. People with only sight and no other senses would have a good deal of trouble agreeing on what the world is like with people with only hearing and no other senses). And nothing rules out the possibility of morally intractable sit
It'd just be a big continuous argument, with no conclusion, no 'answers', just outcomes.
The realm of factual questions was just as stagnant for most of human history until the scientific method was adopted. The fact that the realm of moral questions is still such a morass just means that a standard means of answering moral questions has not arisen yet. Doesn't mean it never will; though if we all assume that it won't, it certainly won't, so we're always best off trying to find it even if "in the end" it turns out that it doesn't exist. We may not know whether we will succeed, but we know that if we quit now we certainly will not. For that matter, we don't know for sure whether the scientific method can even really tell us all the truths of the world; but to abandon it is simply to stop asking questions, and that would be unwise.
(This is not in reply only to you in particular, but also to many other posts on similar topics in this thread.)
Many religious people make the argument (as this topic is all about) that certain subjects are not within the domain of science, that science doesn't answer those kinds of questions; and then, they assert that religion does answer those kinds of questions. The usual subject they make this claim about is morality or ethics. They say science only tells of about what IS or IS NOT, and says nothing at all about what OUGHT or OUGHT NOT to be. They then assert that religion is all about what ought or ought not to be, and so as long as science sticks to the "is" and religion sticks to the "ought", they can all get along just fine managing their respective domains.
Then others argue, as you do, that science can very well answer "ought" questions, and they usually follow up by noting that religion hardly restricts itself to assertions of "ought", but makes plenty of claims about what "is" too. They argue that the difference between science and religion is not about what kinds of questions they try to answer, but with how they go about answering them and the kind of justification they provide for those answers; that it's a difference of methodology, not of subject matter.
I am inclined to agree quite strongly on the point that religion is defined by its methodology and not it's subject matter, however, I also think the religionists have a good point about moral or ethical questions being outside the domain of science. But this does not mean that I think the religious methodology is the appropriate way to answer those kinds of questions.
I am a strong supporter of the "is"/"ought" or "fact"/"value" distinction, most famously articulated by David Hume, and I believe that scientifically-based attempts to answer ethical or moral questions, such as those you suggested, commit something like what G.E. Moore called the "naturalistic fallacy". You can pull out all the good, rigorous, well-done science you want, to show that THIS IS the case and THAT IS the case and that IF THIS IS the case THEN THAT IS the case, all these facts and relations between facts -- and certainly facts are highly relevant when making decisions of any kind -- but someone can always reply to your facts, even if they believe them thoroughly, with "so? why is that good?", or "why is that bad?" or "why should I care about that?". Science cannot, by itself, tell us what we should value; it can at best tell us what people DO value, or point out the consequences of things in an attempt to appeal to values we already hold. But science is not in the business of telling us what ought to be: it only tells us what is.
And that's not something that will be "fixed" eventually as new scientific fields develop and better data is collected and better theories formulated, because that is not the kind of question that science even tries to answer. And that's fine. It's not a shortcoming of science, it's not a fault, and it's not a problem, any more than my kitchen sink is faulty for not also cooking toast: it's not supposed to, and trying to use it to do so would be a backward, ugly hack that just wouldn't work at all, no matter how much steaming hot soggy bread it produced in the end.
But that doesn't mean I think that religion holds the answers to moral or ethical questions. Religion is defined by it's methodology. It's not just a belief in a god; if that were the definition, then Buddhism wouldn't count as a religion. It's not just "moral belief"; religions make plenty of factual, non-moral claims, and plenty of people make moral claims on completely irreligious (and yet not, strictly speaking, "scientific" either) grounds. If religion has any definition at all, besides some vacuous "those who identify as religious are religious" sociological one, then the defining characteristic of religion is faith. I mean that word in the sense of the absence of critical thinking, not the absence of pointlessly skeptical thinking. By the lat
In the context of special relativity, what does it mean for two things to happen at EXACTLY the same time?
Well, as you're probably rhetorically pointing out, it doesn't really mean anything at all in a global context; there is no such thing as absolute simultaneity in a special-relativistic world. Given that, I'm not really sure what they mean when they say that the entangled particles communicate "instantaneously", but my best guess would be that they're assuming the two particles are co-moving or close enough to it (both of them sitting in labs not far from each other here on the Earth and all) to ignore special-relativistic effects. I imagine if they were not co-moving you would see the collapse events properly non-simultaneous according to the relative motion of the two particles. (Back in metaphor-land, it'd be like the two shirts still always stop on complementary colors, but because one shirt is cycling faster or slower than the other from their respective different frames of reference, then when the collapse has to occur for that to happen will differ). With the right combination of reference frames you could have the two particles communicating with each other backward in time, as you would expect with superluminal capabilities in a relativistic world; but since that connection is useless for sending useful information, it's not like you can send a message back in time.
You and Alice put two shirts in a bag, shake it up, close your eyes, and you each pull out a magic mixed-up shirt which cycles through the color spectrum at random varying speeds (but the same speed on each shirt) until you look at it, at which point it stops cycling on one particular color, and the other stops cycling on the complementary color. You put your shirts in your respective briefcases and go on your trips, and when you get there, you open your briefcase and see your shirt has stopped on red. So now you know that if Alice looks in her briefcase, she will see her shirt has stopped on cyan.
However, the question is again, "so what?"
You don't get to decide whether the shirt is red or blue when you look at it (since the speed it cycles at varies randomly, so you can't very well time it or something), so it's not like you can send a "cyan" to Alice for a "0" and a "red" for a "1". Likewise, when Alice opens her briefcase and sees a cyan shirt, she doesn't even know if you have looked at your shirt or not yet; her shirt might have stopped flashing and just landed on "cyan" by chance when she looked at it (making your shirt stop at "red"), or you may have looked at your shirt and seen "red", making her shirt stop right then too on "cyan".
The only thing that's interesting about these synchronized flashing shirts is the fact that when one stops cycling the other stops at EXACTLY the same time no matter how far away they are. We only know this because when you and Alice do this over and over again and then compare your notes afterward, you always find out that your shirt stopped on one color and hers on the complement. That's interesting because if there was any time delay between one stopping and the other, you would expect the hue-difference between the two shirts to vary with distance: at close distances you'd get close to complimentary colors because they stop at close to the same time, while at larger distances the second shirt would stop slightly later making it slightly off from complementary. And of course if there was no communication between them at all, there would be no correlation between what color you see and what color she sees. But you always see red when Alice sees cyan, and you always see yellow when she sees blue, and you always see green when she sees magenta. Which indicates that anybody looking at either shirt not only stops that shirt but also the other shirt instantaneously.
Which isn't of any practical utility, however, for the reasons described two paragraphs above. But it sure as hell is weird, isn't it?
If anything, what we have learned is that extreme capitalism and communism both have the same problem: they would work only if people did not behave the way they do. In light of that, neither system is a good idea, which leaves us with needing to find something in the middle
Or maybe that leaves us with the problem in any human society being the humans, and any society, no matter how it organizes itself, is only as good as the people which comprise it. Something semi-socialist, semi-capitalist could end up being just as bad as either extreme. Maybe there is no magic bullet for making groups of bad people into good societies, and all you can do to produce a good society is to somehow make the people better. Good luck with that.
Honestly, I've never seen what the problem with scalping was. I'm not a huge concert/event-goer and so never suffer the downsides of it, so maybe I'm biased (or perhaps unbiased?), but it seems like a perfectly legitimate economic practice to me.
There is a certain price point at which exactly enough people will be willing to purchase a ticket that you will just fill all the seats at the event; nobody who have would be willing to pay will go without a seat, and no seats go unfilled because not enough people are willing to pay. That is the market price, pretty much by definition: it is the equilibrium point between supply and demand, with no unfulfilled demand and no unconsumed supply. If they were to raise the price, then demand would go down, and some seats would go unfilled; which might not be a bad thing for the seller if they made enough off the extra charged to compensate for the lost sales, but the odds of that go down quickly as the charged price goes up. If they were to lower the price, then demand would increase beyond supply and some demand would go unfulfilled: some people who wanted in to the event and were willing to pay the price would not be able to purchase a ticket.
In that latter case, of tickets priced below market, a scalper can step in and buy out the supply, but then he has to sell the tickets for it to be worth it to him. So how much does he sell the tickets for? Well, if he prices them too high (specifically, above market price), then he won't sell all of them, so he doesn't want to do that. If he prices them too low (specifically, below market price), then people who otherwise would be willing to pay more to get in might not be able to get a ticket, and he will be losing potential profit, so he won't want to do that. Basically, he will be in the exact same circumstances as the original seller, and is best off selling the tickets at market price.
Understandably, the under-pricing original sellers would be upset that this guy is taking their customers' money and they're not seeing a dime of it, and I'll agree they're certainly within their rights to refuse to sell to someone (e.g. the scalper) if they want, though the scalper is completely within his rights to buy and resell whatever they will sell him at whatever prices. But the more straightforward solution is to either:
- Increase their own price to market price, at which point there is no profit for the scalper to get in on: if he buys them out and tries to resell at a higher price, he won't sell all the tickets, because the demand isn't there at that price, and so he will have useless leftovers. Or better yet,
- Increase their supply (host more or bigger events), so that they can keep their prices low and still meet the higher demand at that lower price, which will also push the scalper out of the market, by the increased supply lowering the market price to the sales price, so that once again there is no profit to be made by scalping tickets.
In Apple's case, to get back on topic, their whole problem is their own supply is restricted so they can't just 'make more' and take option #2. Option #1 got them some bad press but honestly I think that's the best approach to take. Yeah, having higher prices at launch will get fewer people jumping to buy your products right at launch, either just because of the sticker shock or because they're anticipating a price drop and don't want to get burned. But that's the point: supply is restricted, so you raise prices until demand goes down to match it. Then as supply increases, you can lower prices and let in the higher demand that you can now satisfy.
Myth and Marathon, Bungie's two big series before they ever dreamed up Halo, are still around, and continually updated by their respective fan communities (in terms of engine, content, and server). Old-school Bungie ruled like that.
Actually it sounds to me like that is exactly what this proposal is proposing, albiet to only a limited extent. It's saying "government created this problem" by allowing these kinds of patents - where "allowing these kinds of patents" translates into actual physical action on the part of the government as "deciding in favor of the patent-holders in lawsuits and using the force of law (e.g. men with guns, when it comes down to it) to uphold those decisions". Then it's saying that it's doubtful that the industry itself can solve this problem that government created, and suggesting that the solution be to pronounce patents in such standards invalid, which translates into actual physical action on the part of the government as "no longer deciding in favor of the patent-holders in lawsuits", with the subsequent implication of no longer having the threat of men with guns coming down on you if you use the techniques thus patented in an implication of such standards.
Basically, he's saying that, within the limited domain of "industry standards" (however that's defined), patents should be effectively abolished, by not being enforced.
(And before you say that this only applies to WMF, not WP, keep in mind that they are the same entity! It won't be long before this policy trickles over into the various language WPs.)
It's already happening. You can't see the image that was deleted in that edit, even in the history, because it was hosted on the Commons and was deleted from there "per discussion on Commons -- new Wales policy". It was a shot of a woman inserting a pink dildo in her ass. This article came to my attention just earlier this week, actually, when someone I was chatting with came across it and linked me (a regular wikipedian) with surprised comments about how this sort of stuff can be on Wikipedia and how long might it take for someone to remove it. I cited WP:CENSOR back at him as evidence that there was no policy reason it would be removed any time soon. Guess I was wrong...
I gave him ample opportunity to say he wasn't the claiming the right to say what Apple's rights are.
This is what I'm talking about. I don't see him claiming the right to say (for some authoritative sense of "say") what Apple's rights are, as in by his word making something a right or not. I see him merely disagreeing with you about what Apple's rights evidently are.
<quote>I agree with the founders of our country and originators of our Declaration of Independence. Our individual rights come from our Creator, not government, nor were they found just lying around unused, and along with them I declare these rights to be self-evident truth.</quote>
So how is your, and the founders', declaration of what Apple's rights are, any different from the poster you replied to? Obviously you are declaring different things to be rights, but how is the nature of the act of declaration different? I see his claim as the same type of claim as you are making, and as the founders made, just with different content.
For what it's worth I generally agree with the founders (and thus you) on the content question, but if someone else asserts someone's rights to be something other than what you think them to be, the reasonable response isn't "what right do you have to make that declaration?" -- because in that case what right do you, or anyone else, have to make the opposite declaration? -- but rather to ask for justification for their beliefs: that is, ask why do they think that those are whoever's rights, and why should you agree. And of course, to offer similar justification for your beliefs, because your beliefs, even if they are the popular, standard, or customary ones, are no more right "by default" than his.
You just helped me have a philosophical revelation.
Often times, when people who believe in natural rights start proclaiming and such-and-such is or is not within someone's rights despite whatever the law may or may not say about it, social constructivists like you start going off about "who are you to declare what is or is not a right!?", declaring the natural rights person to be egotistical or arrogant or something for thinking that their word carries more power than the collective word of the elected legislature of the society.
I've never had much of a good response to those sorts of people, other than the tu quoque "who is the state to say what someone's right are, any more than me?" But that just sounds like the kind of arrogance you're accusing.
The revelation that just hit me is WHY this happens: a natural rights theorist like me considers right to be FOUND, not MADE. In declaring that something is or it not a right, I'm stating an observation: "in my judgement, it does or does not appear that such and such or so and so is a right." I am not attempting to MAKE something a right or not by disagreeing with what the law says is or is not a right, because I don't believe rights are made at all. People like you apparently do, so you see such observations as an attempted exercise of power, and thus accuse your interlocutor of arrogance and egocentrism.
The grandparent poster to whom you replied is not (if I may speak for him) attempting to change what rights Apple has by his declarations. He is stating his observation of what Apple's rights seem to him to be. That is to say, Apple's genuine, natural, moral rights, regardless of whatever the law may say about them. For a socially or legally constructed sense of "rights", you might say that he is asserting an opinion on what Apple's rights SHOULD be. And who are YOU to tell him that that opinion is incorrect, merely because some legislature disagrees with it? The legislature could just as easily be wrong as him, and in fact I'd argue (apart from whatever question is at hand) the legislature is more probably wrong than any random individual, because stupidity multiplies in large groups.
That said, I think all this talk about rights relating to the iProducts and Flash is silly to begin with. Nobody's rights are being violated. Apple are being jerks about the way they design their software and for that reason I remain completely uninterested in them until such time (likely never) that those defective designs are corrected. But Apple is free to make and sell whatever they want. People who buy it are free to do whatever they want with what they buy, and Apple is under no obligation to make any particular things particularly easy to do, though by making things some people want to do impossible or very difficult to do they are intentionally crippling their product and turning away potential customers like me. (Loyal Mac user since 1994 here). Adobe is free to make and sell whatever they want, and Apple is under no obligation to help create a market for such things, though again, it may be intentionally crippling its own products in doing so and alienating potential customers for no good reason. Until Apple gets it made illegal for Adobe to publish software that stock iPads won't run, or they make changes to users' iPads after those users have explicitly requested them not to, then nobody's rights have been violated.
And for the record, I hate Flash and hope it dies.
The word "data" is a plural countable noun. "Datum" is the singular form thereof. Plural countable nouns take the copula "are". Singular countable nouns take the copula "is". The sentence you quoted was thus grammatically correct: a datum "is", but data "are".
Though I admit, the treatment of "data" as a mass noun (the likes of which take the copula "is" as well) is common enough that it did sound jarring to my own ear, even knowing it was technically correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Much more straightforward than any additional taxes or other protectionist measures trying to compensate for the institutional discrepancies in cost between employing domestic and foreign employees, why not just correct those institutional discrepancies?
Require any company doing business in this country, be they foreign or domestic, to provide the same standards to their employees, foreign and domestic, as domestic companies are required to offered domestic citizens working domestically.
So if there's a minimum wage that domestic companies have to provide domestic employees, then domestic companies with foreign employees or foreign companies (with foreign employees) doing business here must provide at least that minimum wage to all their employees. If there are health care or vacation or other benefits required for domestic companies to offer their domestic employees, then they must also offer those to their foreign employees, as must foreign companies (with their foreign employees) doing business here. (Debate about what kinds of required benefits, minimum wages, etc, should apply is a separate issue: my only point is that they should apply the same to both domestic and foreign workers).
This way, you can say to the foreign states who might otherwise accuse you of waging economic war, and retaliate with their own tariffs etc, "We're not trying to hurt you economically, we're just looking out for the well-being of your citizens exactly as we look out for the well-being of our own." The side-effect (and self-interested reason why greedy people domestically would vote to do this to begin with) is that domestic employees are suddenly not so much more expensive to employ than foreign employees, so there's much less incentive to hire foreign workers over domestic ones, more jobs and more money stay in the country, etc.
Of course, there are less-institutional factors in the cost of domestic vs foreign workers too, such as the cost of living in one place vs another, but there's not an awful lot that can be done about that without being straightforwardly protectionist, which as plenty of others are pointing out in this thread, has a big slew of its own problems.
I'd happily write papers in buttplug (pronounced bootploog).
Needs more umlauts for that:
Büttplüg.
This reminds me of another riddle whose catch involves taking words too literally in exactly this way:
I hold in my hand precisely two coins of current US denomination whose total value is 55 cents. One of them is NOT a 50 cent piece. What are the respective values of the two coins?
(For those not in the US, the current US denominations of coin are 1, 5, 10, 25, 50, and 100 cents).
The answer is a 5 cent piece (a "nickel" as we say colloquially) and a 50 cent piece.
See, only ONE of them is not a 50 cent piece. The OTHER ONE is. The one that isn't a 50 cent piece is a 5 cent instead.
I'm arguing that moral questions need at least two parameters: the morally charged act, and the moral actor who will judge it.
And I'm arguing that the relativisation of the answer to the answer-er creates the problem of there being no objective answer. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant: if you ask each of them, with their limited observational ability, what the object in question is, you will get differing, and all incorrect, answers. Only when you combine all their observations together can you hope to get a correct answer, which is not the same as any of their individual answers. A better analogy might be asking three people facing different sides of an irregular cuboid (lets say in a zero-G environment so we have complete anisotropy of space) "what are the dimensions of the object in front of you?" If they only considered their present, two-dimensional sight, you would get different answers from each of them. Of course, most people are savvy enough to realize that for a complete answer to that question you have to look at it from several different, equally valid angles, and integrate those together. Likewise, forming a concept of an objective morality is like forming a concept of three-dimensional space: the recognition of multiple viewpoints as equally valid, and the truth lying in the integration of those. Note, however, that in the cuboid example, all three observers answering strictly from their two-dimensional sight are wrong; it is not their beliefs, the judgments they make on the basis of their observations, but the observations themselves that you are integrating, and forming a new judgment on the basis of.
You're arguing that you can come up with an answer without specifying a particular moral judge by asking 'how much do people in general believe this to be moral?'.
No actually, I would disagree with that vehemently, because as I just wrote above, it is not people's moral beliefs that I claim an objective morality must satisfy, but the phenomenal experiences which give rise to those moral beliefs: their appetites and desires. Everybody experiences certain visceral motivating impulses: gross survival-related ones like hunger, thirst, and pain aversion, but also more subtle things like the draw toward that which seems to us beautiful or otherwise pleasant. I refer to those impulses themselves as "appetites" and the intuitive objectives formed in response to them as "desires"; these are the motivational analogues to the cognitive phenomena of sensations and perceptions, neither of which themselves constitute beliefs; and likewise, neither appetites nor desires constitute intentions, which I consider the motivational analogues of beliefs. Morally undeveloped people base their intentions entirely on their own appetites, like our hypothetical cuboid observers based their beliefs about the cuboid entirely on their own sensations. But just as the experience of moving around in space and seeing things from different angles gives rise to the notion of three-dimensionality and object permanence, so too life experience, being in different people's "shoes" (as the metaphor goes), gives rise to the idea of moral objectivity, that there are other, equally valid moral subjects in this world, and that a correct, moral, decision about what ought to be needs to take their experience into consideration. This does not mean taking their intentions into consideration, because if they are morally undeveloped themselves their intentions will be wrong. It's entirely possible, by my conception, that every single person in the universe might have bad intentions and incorrect moral beliefs; yet the objective moral truth would still take into consideration all of their appetites, all of their needs.
The scientific notion of truth is not of something that takes everyone's beliefs and integrates them, it's of something that takes into consideration all possible observations. Likewise, my analogou
Thank you for the elaborate response. I may respond myself in more detail later (running on serious sleep dep at the moment), but for right now my only comment is that I didn't exactly propose utilitarianism, only that utility may be the appropriate criterion for assessing "goodness". I have more developed thoughts on the methods of aiming for "goodness", i.e. regulating action, i.e. a system of rights and duties, and I am very much a strong natural rights proponent. In other words I distinguish good/bad from permissible/impermissible/obligatory/etc: sometimes, an action which might result in the greatest good is nevertheless not morally permissible. Similar, in ways, to how a hypothesis which might, it turns out, be true, could nevertheless be unjustified to believe (e.g. as "knowledge" isn't just reducible to "true belief", "justice" isn't just reducible to "good actions"; there are elements of justification required for both, beyond just whether the thought or action corresponds to the criteria by which we judge thoughts or actions).
Hi again Shaka, just peeking at your other posts since you just friended me, and saw this. I recently wrote a longish post arguing against this very position elsewhere in this thread, I'd be interested in hearing your response to it.
If Christianity were really, truly, purely Christianity, I would agree with you. Jesus was an awesome guy with a pretty modern, ethical message for his part. A Christianity based on something like the Jefferson Bible would be mostly fine by my reckoning.
But Jesus self-identified as Jewish, the modern Christian Bible includes many of the old Jewish books of the Torah such as Leviticus, and most importantly, though many Christians interpret the Bible as such, it is not at all clear that Jesus meant to dismiss such ancient law with his teachings. Jesus did say that "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength" and "Love your neighbor as yourself" were the most important commandments (Mark 12:28-31), but he didn't say that that was the whole of the religion. If he had, or even if he had meant that, then why would Leviticus and the like still be in modern Christian Bibles?
If someone with no prior exposure to Christianity went out to a Christian book store, bought a modern copy of the Bible off the shelf (say the NIV), and read it and believed it as it was written, even if he interpreted the metaphors metaphorically and the parables parabolically and such, you still get all the baggage of those unambiguously barbaric bits like "If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads". (Leviticus 20:13). Whether or not Jesus meant that that doesn't count anymore, it's still in there, so to ignore it is a matter of interpretation, and thus not fundamentalist. A fundamentalist Christian would support that part too.
FWIW I also agree that many in America who call themselves fundamentalists have some pretty shitty interpretations of the Bible themselves (from a textual analysis perspective, not only an ethical perspective). But my point still stands that a Christianity which takes the whole of the Bible as God's written truth with no interpretation-to-make-it-sound-better -- that is to say, a fundamentalist form of Christianity -- get a lot of stone-age baggage from the Jewish texts it inherited. For their part, modern Jews mostly ignore or interpret away a lot of the barbaric bits of their own texts... but my original point was that as nice as that is ethically and socially, it's intellectually dishonest; they should abandon or amend it instead of just pretending it's what they'd like it to be.
Like Jefferson did with Christianity. Too bad his version of the book never caught on...
Also, the marriage thing was just an analogy, I meant no comment on religious views of marriage. Just that "monogamous girlfriend" does not meet any nearly modern definition of "marriage", so calling you and your monogamous girlfriend "married" when you don't have all the other bits aside from monogamous sex going on is a little dishonest, just like calling yourself an adherent of a religion and then disregarding all the parts of if you don't like. Even if you stick with what you consider the most important features of it, just as monogamous couples are sticking to arguably the most important feature of marriage. They're still not strictly married if they don't have all the other defining bits going on, and you're not strictly a Christian (given the current Bible defines Christianity) if you ignore everything in it but Jesus. Maybe marriage should just imply sexual monogamy without all the other bits, and Christianity should just imply adherence to Jesus' ethical teachings without all the Jewish baggage -- both points I might be inclined to agree on -- but that's not what they actually mean right now.
I imagine he is referring to the whole everything-from-nothing bit being a little counter to the first law of thermodynamics saying that energy cannot be created.
I never understood why evolution is such a threat to religion. How does us evolving from apes say anything about the existence of God? What does it even have to do with it?
Others have already given their thoughts on why they directly conflict, but my take on it has always been something a little more subtle. The advance of scientific explanations of the world makes God, or any other mythological explanation, an increasingly unnecessary hypothesis (as Laplace once told Napoleon when asked why his book on astronomy made no mention of God). Without a concept like evolution, atheism is susceptible to a rather plausible appeal to absurdity: "so, what, all this order in nature, including human intelligence itself, just happened to pop into existence for no reason?"
Creationists often like to portray the claims of evolution as being like this, like claiming that everything just happened by chance, but really evolution is an *alternate explanation* for the existence of order, not the assertion that there is no explanation. Evolutionary theory provides an explanation for how a chaotic system can develop into an ordered one by natural, impersonal processes, thus dissolving the dichotomy of "a person (God) made this order... or, lol, everything just happened by coincidence, right". Without the only alternative to God being that improbable coincidence, one of the major arguments for the existence of God (called the teleological argument, or argument from design) loses its foundation, and failing another, better argument, people might just think "well, if this evolution thing explains all that, then where exactly does God fit in this picture?"
And the theists don't like that idea, so they either come up with some other role for God to play, the typical ones being pushing it back further ("God created the first single-celled organisms and then let evolution take over", or even "God created the Big Bang and then let physics take over") or the "morality is the domain of religion, reality is the domain of science" angle (which I just wrote a rant against elsewhere on Slashdot)... or they argue against evolution to preserve a place for God.
I agree that certain "ought" questions are incomplete and their answers thus relative in a sense, but as you yourself use as an example, so are some factual questions (like "how tall is the tower?"). A better analogy would be something like "is this stone heavy?": you've specified a distinct object you are asking about (the stone), and a distinct, objective property you're asking about (weight), but the answer depends on your measuring apparatus. A more objective question would ask if that stone was heavy compared to other things liftable by a particular human, for example; a 100-pound stone is very heavy for me, but a grain of sand on a cosmic scale. Likewise, "should unmarried couples have sex?" may have different answers depending on a particular couple and their particular circumstances; but that doesn't mean that the complete question, filled in by context ("should this unmarried couple have sex in these particular circumstances?") doesn't have an objective answer.
Your mention of, to paraphrase, "as God (if he existed) to get the correct answer" is similar to my line of thought. You might well state a scientific, empirical notion of factual truth as something like "something is more true the more it corresponds with (anybody and everybody's) observation", and thus you might get a bit poetic and say something like "the truth is what an empirically-minded, all-seeing God would believe, if he existed". Likewise, an secular notion of objective goodness could be phrased something like "something is better the more it corresponds with (anybody and everybody's) desires", and thus you might get likewise poetic and say something like "the good is what a hedonistic, all-feeling God would intend, if he existed". (By "all-feeling" I mean to translate the technical term I like to use for this "omnipathic", which means something like "empathic with everything"; it feels all pleasures and all pains, all appetites and desires of all things everywhere. By "hedonistic" I just mean it wants to satisfy the appetites and desires it feels; it seeks pleasure and avoids pain. So, a hedonistic omnipathic God, if it existed, would intend to minimize suffering and maximize the happiness of everyone everywhere.)
If phenomenal objectivism works for factual questions, why not for normative ones as well? Only the kind of experiential phenomena which is relevant (preferences or desires vs observations or perceptions) differ. The notion of a moral "good" is an objectivized abstraction from our subjective desires, just as the notion of a real "truth" is an objectivized abstraction from our subjective perceptions.
It's religion, which, when you come right down to it, has less to do with God and Magic than it does with power and control.
I'd argue that these two things are tightly related. When a belief is not grounded in something experiential, phenomenal, observable, and consequently accessible to everyone, then you have to form beliefs about those sorts of things on faith. Which means either just jumping to a conclusion yourself and declaring yourself right, or taking someone else's word for it. So belief in the supernatural directly leads to authoritarian structures: you must either assume your own authority, or follow someone else's.
The problem was never Islam or the words of the Quaran. Every other religious text has passages in it, often misconstrued due to a lack of anthropological sophistication required to understand their meanings in their time, but the vast majority of other people practice these religions in the moderation required to integrate into society.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I've always strongly disliked this idea of religious moderation.
And before I start off on this, let me be perfectly clear: I am vehemently opposed to religious fundamentalists of any sort.
But religious moderation has always struck me as intellectually and (if your morals are religiously-grounded) morally dishonest. Saying that some book is the holy word of the God you claim to follow, and then ignoring or interpreting away vast swaths of it so that you can belong to that religion while still keeping up with the moral and intellectual progress of the modern world... you basically become religious in name only, or inconsistently, hypocritically religious.
It's like saying that you want to marry some girl... except, you don't want to live together, or have kids, or any joint property or tax status, or inheritance or incapacitation rights... but you still want to have monogamous sex with her. If that's what you want, then you don't really want a marriage, because marriage is this big complex institution that comes with all (or most) of those trappings you just said you don't want. What you want is just a girlfriend. And that's fine; maybe it's even better, maybe marriage is an outdated institution and all those trappings that you want no part of are nonsense. But if that's the case, then get rid of them, and avoid that institution; don't claim to partake of the institution but then ignore many of its fundamental features.
Likewise, many religious moderates don't want all the medieval (hell, sometimes stone-age) trappings that come with their religious traditions: the violence, misogyny, intolerance, authoritarianism, and all-around general barbarism that lies in the roots of at least the Abrahamic religions. But they want the compassion, charity, socialization, and so on that are the usual selling points of these religions. So they adopt the religions but ignore or interpret away all the parts that they don't like. Which is certainly better, from a secular ethical perspective, than dragging all that antiquated barbarism along into the modern world; but if you're going to abandon major chunks of your religion and only keep the parts that plenty of irreligious folk in the modern world have in common, then why claim to follow the religion at all? Throw it away and keep on doing what you've been doing without the intellectual dishonestly of claiming to be something that you're really not.
The fundamentalists of a given religion are the true adherents of that religion. If you don't like the fundamentalists, then just abandon the religion; or make a new one more to your liking and be a fundamentalist of that instead. You'll be living the same way you live today, but you'll be more honest about it.
Are there are any good arguments that there IS an 'ought', that it exists at all? Or for what sort of thing it is?
This is why is phrased things in terms of questions and assertions, beliefs or opinions, rather than existing objects of any sort. I'm not talking at all about finding moral "things" out there; I'm saying that "ought"-talk is not about what does exist or not at all; it's about what should exist or not. That a moral or ethical question is fundamentally, logically different from a question of fact, similar to (but not exactly the same as) the difference between the sentences "Jon runs to the store" and "Jon, run to the store". One is proposing that something is the case, while the other is proposing that something be the case. Likewise, the ways of answering the questions "Does Jon run to the store?" and "Should Jon run to the store?" are fundamentally different.
Which is what the religionists are saying too, except I disagree with them on how they are different. They say they are different in the proper method of choosing between them: that factual questions can be compared between each other against a standard criterion and selected based on how well they meet that criterion, while normative questions, well, you just gotta believe that God knows what's best and that this book is His word. I say that the method is the same as for factual questions, just that the criterion they need to meet is different: whereas factual assertions need to satisfy all observations in order for what's asserted to be universally true, normative assertions needs to satisfy all preferences in order for what's asserted to be universally good.
Of course, preferences are going to be relative to the "preferer" and how he is constituted just the same as observations are relative to the observer and how he is constituted, and coming to any agreement on what people prefer depends on there being something in common between them in that regard, just as coming to any agreement on what people observe depends on there being something in common between them in that regard. (e.g. People with only sight and no other senses would have a good deal of trouble agreeing on what the world is like with people with only hearing and no other senses). And nothing rules out the possibility of morally intractable sit
It'd just be a big continuous argument, with no conclusion, no 'answers', just outcomes.
The realm of factual questions was just as stagnant for most of human history until the scientific method was adopted. The fact that the realm of moral questions is still such a morass just means that a standard means of answering moral questions has not arisen yet. Doesn't mean it never will; though if we all assume that it won't, it certainly won't, so we're always best off trying to find it even if "in the end" it turns out that it doesn't exist. We may not know whether we will succeed, but we know that if we quit now we certainly will not. For that matter, we don't know for sure whether the scientific method can even really tell us all the truths of the world; but to abandon it is simply to stop asking questions, and that would be unwise.
Shit, I was trying to reply to the person you were replying to and accidentally replied to you instead. :-\
(This is not in reply only to you in particular, but also to many other posts on similar topics in this thread.)
Many religious people make the argument (as this topic is all about) that certain subjects are not within the domain of science, that science doesn't answer those kinds of questions; and then, they assert that religion does answer those kinds of questions. The usual subject they make this claim about is morality or ethics. They say science only tells of about what IS or IS NOT, and says nothing at all about what OUGHT or OUGHT NOT to be. They then assert that religion is all about what ought or ought not to be, and so as long as science sticks to the "is" and religion sticks to the "ought", they can all get along just fine managing their respective domains.
Then others argue, as you do, that science can very well answer "ought" questions, and they usually follow up by noting that religion hardly restricts itself to assertions of "ought", but makes plenty of claims about what "is" too. They argue that the difference between science and religion is not about what kinds of questions they try to answer, but with how they go about answering them and the kind of justification they provide for those answers; that it's a difference of methodology, not of subject matter.
I am inclined to agree quite strongly on the point that religion is defined by its methodology and not it's subject matter, however, I also think the religionists have a good point about moral or ethical questions being outside the domain of science. But this does not mean that I think the religious methodology is the appropriate way to answer those kinds of questions.
I am a strong supporter of the "is"/"ought" or "fact"/"value" distinction, most famously articulated by David Hume, and I believe that scientifically-based attempts to answer ethical or moral questions, such as those you suggested, commit something like what G.E. Moore called the "naturalistic fallacy". You can pull out all the good, rigorous, well-done science you want, to show that THIS IS the case and THAT IS the case and that IF THIS IS the case THEN THAT IS the case, all these facts and relations between facts -- and certainly facts are highly relevant when making decisions of any kind -- but someone can always reply to your facts, even if they believe them thoroughly, with "so? why is that good?", or "why is that bad?" or "why should I care about that?". Science cannot, by itself, tell us what we should value; it can at best tell us what people DO value, or point out the consequences of things in an attempt to appeal to values we already hold. But science is not in the business of telling us what ought to be: it only tells us what is.
And that's not something that will be "fixed" eventually as new scientific fields develop and better data is collected and better theories formulated, because that is not the kind of question that science even tries to answer. And that's fine. It's not a shortcoming of science, it's not a fault, and it's not a problem, any more than my kitchen sink is faulty for not also cooking toast: it's not supposed to, and trying to use it to do so would be a backward, ugly hack that just wouldn't work at all, no matter how much steaming hot soggy bread it produced in the end.
But that doesn't mean I think that religion holds the answers to moral or ethical questions. Religion is defined by it's methodology. It's not just a belief in a god; if that were the definition, then Buddhism wouldn't count as a religion. It's not just "moral belief"; religions make plenty of factual, non-moral claims, and plenty of people make moral claims on completely irreligious (and yet not, strictly speaking, "scientific" either) grounds. If religion has any definition at all, besides some vacuous "those who identify as religious are religious" sociological one, then the defining characteristic of religion is faith. I mean that word in the sense of the absence of critical thinking, not the absence of pointlessly skeptical thinking. By the lat
In the context of special relativity, what does it mean for two things to happen at EXACTLY the same time?
Well, as you're probably rhetorically pointing out, it doesn't really mean anything at all in a global context; there is no such thing as absolute simultaneity in a special-relativistic world. Given that, I'm not really sure what they mean when they say that the entangled particles communicate "instantaneously", but my best guess would be that they're assuming the two particles are co-moving or close enough to it (both of them sitting in labs not far from each other here on the Earth and all) to ignore special-relativistic effects. I imagine if they were not co-moving you would see the collapse events properly non-simultaneous according to the relative motion of the two particles. (Back in metaphor-land, it'd be like the two shirts still always stop on complementary colors, but because one shirt is cycling faster or slower than the other from their respective different frames of reference, then when the collapse has to occur for that to happen will differ). With the right combination of reference frames you could have the two particles communicating with each other backward in time, as you would expect with superluminal capabilities in a relativistic world; but since that connection is useless for sending useful information, it's not like you can send a message back in time.
Except it's not quite like that.
You and Alice put two shirts in a bag, shake it up, close your eyes, and you each pull out a magic mixed-up shirt which cycles through the color spectrum at random varying speeds (but the same speed on each shirt) until you look at it, at which point it stops cycling on one particular color, and the other stops cycling on the complementary color. You put your shirts in your respective briefcases and go on your trips, and when you get there, you open your briefcase and see your shirt has stopped on red. So now you know that if Alice looks in her briefcase, she will see her shirt has stopped on cyan.
However, the question is again, "so what?"
You don't get to decide whether the shirt is red or blue when you look at it (since the speed it cycles at varies randomly, so you can't very well time it or something), so it's not like you can send a "cyan" to Alice for a "0" and a "red" for a "1". Likewise, when Alice opens her briefcase and sees a cyan shirt, she doesn't even know if you have looked at your shirt or not yet; her shirt might have stopped flashing and just landed on "cyan" by chance when she looked at it (making your shirt stop at "red"), or you may have looked at your shirt and seen "red", making her shirt stop right then too on "cyan".
The only thing that's interesting about these synchronized flashing shirts is the fact that when one stops cycling the other stops at EXACTLY the same time no matter how far away they are. We only know this because when you and Alice do this over and over again and then compare your notes afterward, you always find out that your shirt stopped on one color and hers on the complement. That's interesting because if there was any time delay between one stopping and the other, you would expect the hue-difference between the two shirts to vary with distance: at close distances you'd get close to complimentary colors because they stop at close to the same time, while at larger distances the second shirt would stop slightly later making it slightly off from complementary. And of course if there was no communication between them at all, there would be no correlation between what color you see and what color she sees. But you always see red when Alice sees cyan, and you always see yellow when she sees blue, and you always see green when she sees magenta. Which indicates that anybody looking at either shirt not only stops that shirt but also the other shirt instantaneously.
Which isn't of any practical utility, however, for the reasons described two paragraphs above. But it sure as hell is weird, isn't it?
If anything, what we have learned is that extreme capitalism and communism both have the same problem: they would work only if people did not behave the way they do. In light of that, neither system is a good idea, which leaves us with needing to find something in the middle
Or maybe that leaves us with the problem in any human society being the humans, and any society, no matter how it organizes itself, is only as good as the people which comprise it. Something semi-socialist, semi-capitalist could end up being just as bad as either extreme. Maybe there is no magic bullet for making groups of bad people into good societies, and all you can do to produce a good society is to somehow make the people better. Good luck with that.
Honestly, I've never seen what the problem with scalping was. I'm not a huge concert/event-goer and so never suffer the downsides of it, so maybe I'm biased (or perhaps unbiased?), but it seems like a perfectly legitimate economic practice to me.
There is a certain price point at which exactly enough people will be willing to purchase a ticket that you will just fill all the seats at the event; nobody who have would be willing to pay will go without a seat, and no seats go unfilled because not enough people are willing to pay. That is the market price, pretty much by definition: it is the equilibrium point between supply and demand, with no unfulfilled demand and no unconsumed supply. If they were to raise the price, then demand would go down, and some seats would go unfilled; which might not be a bad thing for the seller if they made enough off the extra charged to compensate for the lost sales, but the odds of that go down quickly as the charged price goes up. If they were to lower the price, then demand would increase beyond supply and some demand would go unfulfilled: some people who wanted in to the event and were willing to pay the price would not be able to purchase a ticket.
In that latter case, of tickets priced below market, a scalper can step in and buy out the supply, but then he has to sell the tickets for it to be worth it to him. So how much does he sell the tickets for? Well, if he prices them too high (specifically, above market price), then he won't sell all of them, so he doesn't want to do that. If he prices them too low (specifically, below market price), then people who otherwise would be willing to pay more to get in might not be able to get a ticket, and he will be losing potential profit, so he won't want to do that. Basically, he will be in the exact same circumstances as the original seller, and is best off selling the tickets at market price.
Understandably, the under-pricing original sellers would be upset that this guy is taking their customers' money and they're not seeing a dime of it, and I'll agree they're certainly within their rights to refuse to sell to someone (e.g. the scalper) if they want, though the scalper is completely within his rights to buy and resell whatever they will sell him at whatever prices. But the more straightforward solution is to either:
- Increase their own price to market price, at which point there is no profit for the scalper to get in on: if he buys them out and tries to resell at a higher price, he won't sell all the tickets, because the demand isn't there at that price, and so he will have useless leftovers. Or better yet,
- Increase their supply (host more or bigger events), so that they can keep their prices low and still meet the higher demand at that lower price, which will also push the scalper out of the market, by the increased supply lowering the market price to the sales price, so that once again there is no profit to be made by scalping tickets.
In Apple's case, to get back on topic, their whole problem is their own supply is restricted so they can't just 'make more' and take option #2. Option #1 got them some bad press but honestly I think that's the best approach to take. Yeah, having higher prices at launch will get fewer people jumping to buy your products right at launch, either just because of the sticker shock or because they're anticipating a price drop and don't want to get burned. But that's the point: supply is restricted, so you raise prices until demand goes down to match it. Then as supply increases, you can lower prices and let in the higher demand that you can now satisfy.
Myth and Marathon, Bungie's two big series before they ever dreamed up Halo, are still around, and continually updated by their respective fan communities (in terms of engine, content, and server). Old-school Bungie ruled like that.
I blame Microsoft.
Actually it sounds to me like that is exactly what this proposal is proposing, albiet to only a limited extent. It's saying "government created this problem" by allowing these kinds of patents - where "allowing these kinds of patents" translates into actual physical action on the part of the government as "deciding in favor of the patent-holders in lawsuits and using the force of law (e.g. men with guns, when it comes down to it) to uphold those decisions". Then it's saying that it's doubtful that the industry itself can solve this problem that government created, and suggesting that the solution be to pronounce patents in such standards invalid, which translates into actual physical action on the part of the government as "no longer deciding in favor of the patent-holders in lawsuits", with the subsequent implication of no longer having the threat of men with guns coming down on you if you use the techniques thus patented in an implication of such standards.
Basically, he's saying that, within the limited domain of "industry standards" (however that's defined), patents should be effectively abolished, by not being enforced.
(And before you say that this only applies to WMF, not WP, keep in mind that they are the same entity! It won't be long before this policy trickles over into the various language WPs.)
It's already happening. You can't see the image that was deleted in that edit, even in the history, because it was hosted on the Commons and was deleted from there "per discussion on Commons -- new Wales policy". It was a shot of a woman inserting a pink dildo in her ass. This article came to my attention just earlier this week, actually, when someone I was chatting with came across it and linked me (a regular wikipedian) with surprised comments about how this sort of stuff can be on Wikipedia and how long might it take for someone to remove it. I cited WP:CENSOR back at him as evidence that there was no policy reason it would be removed any time soon. Guess I was wrong...
I gave him ample opportunity to say he wasn't the claiming the right to say what Apple's rights are.
This is what I'm talking about. I don't see him claiming the right to say (for some authoritative sense of "say") what Apple's rights are, as in by his word making something a right or not. I see him merely disagreeing with you about what Apple's rights evidently are.
<quote>I agree with the founders of our country and originators of our Declaration of Independence. Our individual rights come from our Creator, not government, nor were they found just lying around unused, and along with them I declare these rights to be self-evident truth.</quote>
So how is your, and the founders', declaration of what Apple's rights are, any different from the poster you replied to? Obviously you are declaring different things to be rights, but how is the nature of the act of declaration different? I see his claim as the same type of claim as you are making, and as the founders made, just with different content.
For what it's worth I generally agree with the founders (and thus you) on the content question, but if someone else asserts someone's rights to be something other than what you think them to be, the reasonable response isn't "what right do you have to make that declaration?" -- because in that case what right do you, or anyone else, have to make the opposite declaration? -- but rather to ask for justification for their beliefs: that is, ask why do they think that those are whoever's rights, and why should you agree. And of course, to offer similar justification for your beliefs, because your beliefs, even if they are the popular, standard, or customary ones, are no more right "by default" than his.
You just helped me have a philosophical revelation.
Often times, when people who believe in natural rights start proclaiming and such-and-such is or is not within someone's rights despite whatever the law may or may not say about it, social constructivists like you start going off about "who are you to declare what is or is not a right!?", declaring the natural rights person to be egotistical or arrogant or something for thinking that their word carries more power than the collective word of the elected legislature of the society.
I've never had much of a good response to those sorts of people, other than the tu quoque "who is the state to say what someone's right are, any more than me?" But that just sounds like the kind of arrogance you're accusing.
The revelation that just hit me is WHY this happens: a natural rights theorist like me considers right to be FOUND, not MADE. In declaring that something is or it not a right, I'm stating an observation: "in my judgement, it does or does not appear that such and such or so and so is a right." I am not attempting to MAKE something a right or not by disagreeing with what the law says is or is not a right, because I don't believe rights are made at all. People like you apparently do, so you see such observations as an attempted exercise of power, and thus accuse your interlocutor of arrogance and egocentrism.
The grandparent poster to whom you replied is not (if I may speak for him) attempting to change what rights Apple has by his declarations. He is stating his observation of what Apple's rights seem to him to be. That is to say, Apple's genuine, natural, moral rights, regardless of whatever the law may say about them. For a socially or legally constructed sense of "rights", you might say that he is asserting an opinion on what Apple's rights SHOULD be. And who are YOU to tell him that that opinion is incorrect, merely because some legislature disagrees with it? The legislature could just as easily be wrong as him, and in fact I'd argue (apart from whatever question is at hand) the legislature is more probably wrong than any random individual, because stupidity multiplies in large groups.
That said, I think all this talk about rights relating to the iProducts and Flash is silly to begin with. Nobody's rights are being violated. Apple are being jerks about the way they design their software and for that reason I remain completely uninterested in them until such time (likely never) that those defective designs are corrected. But Apple is free to make and sell whatever they want. People who buy it are free to do whatever they want with what they buy, and Apple is under no obligation to make any particular things particularly easy to do, though by making things some people want to do impossible or very difficult to do they are intentionally crippling their product and turning away potential customers like me. (Loyal Mac user since 1994 here). Adobe is free to make and sell whatever they want, and Apple is under no obligation to help create a market for such things, though again, it may be intentionally crippling its own products in doing so and alienating potential customers for no good reason. Until Apple gets it made illegal for Adobe to publish software that stock iPads won't run, or they make changes to users' iPads after those users have explicitly requested them not to, then nobody's rights have been violated.
And for the record, I hate Flash and hope it dies.
The word "data" is a plural countable noun. "Datum" is the singular form thereof. Plural countable nouns take the copula "are". Singular countable nouns take the copula "is". The sentence you quoted was thus grammatically correct: a datum "is", but data "are".
Though I admit, the treatment of "data" as a mass noun (the likes of which take the copula "is" as well) is common enough that it did sound jarring to my own ear, even knowing it was technically correct.