In real life the line is always blurry... people have conflicting intuitions... What you get is more like a note of caution that real life is messier than the examples in ethics textbooks.
Great! That was the whole point of my post.
And in my defense, I haven't had to make a formal ethical argument for over a decade, so I'm just happy that I can make a passable attempt.:)
Your employer doesn't pay you for your time. He pays for people-hours, which are quite certainly recreatable through the "people" part.
I could use the same rhetorical trick to say that I don't really pay for oil, I just pay for energy, which is available all over the place.
It's okay if the society decides how the limited resource is to be used for the benefit of the whole...
That's what your ideology says. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just that your approaching this from one point of view, and with one goal in mind - and that leaves out other legitimate perspectives and goals.
Pretty much yes, though I'd rather use the term "rational".
Isn't that the word everyone uses to describe their own biases?
you could ration it... or you could sell it to the highest bidder... Which one would you prefer?
Well, taxation could be implemented at any point in the supply chain (e.g. at refineries), while rationing would have to be done on a person-by-person basis - this would have several effects:
Monitoring a few hundred refineries/ports would require only a small number of people, while monitoring tens of thousands of gas stations would require an army of bureaucrats, costing vast amounts of money, and each one of them under less scrutiny and thus more likely to become corrupt.
The more people that are involved the less responsive the regulators are going to be. When a major refinery gets an overhaul and the company wants to relocate their meter (or whatever), they might have a chance to get it approved. But is a small gas station owner going to have any luck getting a variance to make his life easier?
And what do you do when people violate the rules? If a big corporation fudges its numbers, nobody's going to cry when they get a massive fine. But when people start giving their brother-in-law an extra gallon a month so that he can warm up the car in the morning for the kids, you'll have to enforce some kind of punishment, or your rationing law won't be worth the paper it's written on. But many people will see that as cruel.
More importantly people are going to want to trade their rations, so now Al Gore still gets his private flights, he just has to buy little bits from a bunch of people rather than pay a tax, but the net effect is the same. If you make trading illegal, that just moves things from the open market to the black market, and you get a bunch of mafia-style fun to go with your larger police force. And if you manage to clamp down on trading hard enough to actually stop it, you'd have a police state - and then nobody will be thinking about "saving the planet".
A common view is that moral consideration is only warranted for moral agents that are capable of engaging in moral reasoning, and thus capable of reciprocating moral consideration.
I thought this was one of those "Intro to Ethics" bits that looks like deep wisdom that solves a major ethical issue packaged in a neat little sentence, that after a week of debate turns out to have some good points, but is still incomplete and not nearly as deep as it looked at first. If memory serves, this one usually falls to these (amusingly phrased) arguments:
1) The "Torturing the Severe Autistic Game" - they don't really understand that other people exist, so their suffering doesn't count.
2) The "Skynet/Alien/Posthuman Super-Ethics" - their ethics are so advanced that human beings can't comprehend them - good luck begging for mercy!
3) The "Problem of Other Ethics" - if boiling a lobster is OK because it can't understand that boiling a human is wrong, shouldn't that same logic suggest that boiling a human is OK if they don't believe that boiling a human is wrong?
There's no proper price that can be set on a resource which exists in finite quantity and cannot be recreated (well, there is - +INF).
My time is a finite, non-recreatable resource, so should minimum wage be $+INF?
If you use up some of that, then you basically steal from everyone else...
And if it never gets used, it's still essentially stolen from everyone else, and it's also stolen from me.
The only solution... is rationing
So it's OK to "steal from everyone else", as long as it's done in fixed quantities?
More importantly, this is starting to sound ideological. Are you actually saying that taxing can't lower the use of a resource? Or did you really mean that you think it's fairer to do it that way (or something like that)?
Not all costs to the environment can be fixed by throwing more money at them. The basic premise here is flawed.
It isn't flawed, you just don't understand it. The carbon tax isn't there to pay to have carbon sucked out of the atmosphere, it's to compensate for the use of a scarce public resource (the atmosphere's ability to absorb carbon) and encourage it to be used wisely.
You don't have the right to urinate into a public swimming pool either, even if you offer to "pick up the tab" for it.
This isn't vaguely similar. He just wants the right to drink a soda at the pool, even though he'll have to pee more often and wear out the urinal faster.
Government shifting from banning things whose negative consequences are immediately obvious, to banning things whose negative consequences are not immediately obvious.
By "not immediately obvious" did you mean "trivial" or "unproven"?
Ignore the protestations of scientists who say the problem is real
What would be the point of hiding what we can't understand anyway? Even if it lays everything out and carefully walks us through it, we'll have about as much of an understanding of its agenda as my cat had of my agenda when I got him neutered.
You can be atheist or agnostic or whatever belief you want to follow.
Almost every faith on earth has reconciled itself with modern medical treatment, even though it gives us unnaturally long lives. I don't think wanting to tack on an extra year or two (or making a few years healthier) is going to be troubling to most people, religious or not.
Now please respect MY liberty, and stay out of my wallet. I was the one who sweated/labored to earn that money, not you. You have no right to take it from me.
When did I say that I wanted anything that belongs to you?
So your argument is that death is natural, so it should simply be accepted?
And you're writing this on a plastic/metal/silicon computer connected to a global network, under artificial lights in a temperature-controlled man-made room powered by artificially generated electricity, wearing clothes made by machine out of petroleum or industrially-farmed cotton, after eating an extensively processed meal you ate with teeth that have filled cavities?
About the only fully natural thing about the average first-world person is that they're biologically identical to their ancient ancestors, and that's not likely to last much longer.
Also people are replaceable. We have 6 billion of them, with new ones constantly being produced to replace the broken ones.
Yeah, but the replacement parts are expensive, vary in quality, and don't come in standard configurations, so you have to keep re-tuning things. Besides, there's all those political issues to consider. They keep telling people to "reduce, reuse, recycle", but I have yet to see this implemented for 'broken' vagrants and retarded children.
After all, no one lives forever. What's the point of spending a million dollars installing electronics in a body if that body is doomed to expire?
Your second sentence is one small step toward solving the problem in your first sentence.
As someone who believes in eternity, I don't consider this life so great that I want to try to hang-on forever. The sooner I die the sooner I go to...
I have no problem with that, but other people have different priorities and ethical systems, and you should respect them as well.
Clearly totally private healthcare as implemented in the USA does not work.
Just to be clear, we don't have totally private healthcare here. The government covers about 40% of us, most of the rest get coverage through work, and only a small fraction actually buy health insurance on its own. This allows us to enjoy healthcare as unequally distributed as a full-blown free market system, as bureaucratic and unresponsive as any large government system, and as expensive as both put together.
... my insurance will demand I stop smoking right fucking now or face cancellation. Doesn't matter that I choose to smoke...
I don't want them to cancel, but I do want them to jack up your rates. If you're expected health care costs do to voluntary behavior are higher them mine, it's only fair that you pay for the difference.
After all, I have a 0.056% chance per year of getting lung cancer (169,400 cases per year, 300 million US citizens, easy math).
Except that most lung cancer is caused by smoking, and only a fraction of Americans smoke (and it varies with age/generation, length of time smoking, etc). Your actual risk is at least twice that.
It doesn't matter if you're talking theory or implementation. Many times socialism is defined as state ownership, and most other definitions at least mention it as a common feature. If you has said "socialism doesn't necessarily require government intervention" you'd be fine because there are forms that don't. But when you say "socialism has nothing to do with government", you're suggesting that there's no connection at all, which is silly.
And even if you were completely correct, the rest of us would only be making the same mistake that The American Heritage Dictionary or WordNet made when they wrote their definitions. That means that it's a common enough mistake you should be able to maintain some semblance of self control while discussing the issue.
I'd suggest you read that Wikipedia article and its referenced sources a bit more carefully before you try to call me a liar.
I haven't called you a liar, I'm just saying that you're wrong.
I guess you stopped reading before you got to mention of market socialism...
... market socialism, combining co-operative and state ownership models with the free market exchange and free price system...
Besides, it's still clearly true that many (if not most) types of socialism requite government involvement, so your statement that "socialism has nothing to do with government" is still wrong.
You need a better source of information than the indoctrination-with-an-agenda diet you've been fed... and I do mean "fed", because I doubt you've actively sought out any objective information about socialism. The only information you have about it is what validates your desired view of the world, and that was handed to you with that as a goal in mind. That information is wrong. Are you scared of learning something that might challenge your worldview? Grow a pair and go do some objective reading.
Either you're reacting to the fact that you screwed up and got called on it, or you really don't understand that you're using the word "socialism" in a very different way than other people are. As long as you aren't actually pointing me to "correct" sources, then I'm just going to assume that your rant is just your way of trying to irritate people.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, of course: properly planned economies, or what did you think?
They exist?
In real life the line is always blurry ... people have conflicting intuitions ... What you get is more like a note of caution that real life is messier than the examples in ethics textbooks.
Great! That was the whole point of my post.
And in my defense, I haven't had to make a formal ethical argument for over a decade, so I'm just happy that I can make a passable attempt. :)
Your employer doesn't pay you for your time. He pays for people-hours, which are quite certainly recreatable through the "people" part.
I could use the same rhetorical trick to say that I don't really pay for oil, I just pay for energy, which is available all over the place.
It's okay if the society decides how the limited resource is to be used for the benefit of the whole...
That's what your ideology says. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just that your approaching this from one point of view, and with one goal in mind - and that leaves out other legitimate perspectives and goals.
Pretty much yes, though I'd rather use the term "rational".
Isn't that the word everyone uses to describe their own biases?
you could ration it ... or you could sell it to the highest bidder ... Which one would you prefer?
Well, taxation could be implemented at any point in the supply chain (e.g. at refineries), while rationing would have to be done on a person-by-person basis - this would have several effects:
Monitoring a few hundred refineries/ports would require only a small number of people, while monitoring tens of thousands of gas stations would require an army of bureaucrats, costing vast amounts of money, and each one of them under less scrutiny and thus more likely to become corrupt.
The more people that are involved the less responsive the regulators are going to be. When a major refinery gets an overhaul and the company wants to relocate their meter (or whatever), they might have a chance to get it approved. But is a small gas station owner going to have any luck getting a variance to make his life easier?
And what do you do when people violate the rules? If a big corporation fudges its numbers, nobody's going to cry when they get a massive fine. But when people start giving their brother-in-law an extra gallon a month so that he can warm up the car in the morning for the kids, you'll have to enforce some kind of punishment, or your rationing law won't be worth the paper it's written on. But many people will see that as cruel.
More importantly people are going to want to trade their rations, so now Al Gore still gets his private flights, he just has to buy little bits from a bunch of people rather than pay a tax, but the net effect is the same. If you make trading illegal, that just moves things from the open market to the black market, and you get a bunch of mafia-style fun to go with your larger police force. And if you manage to clamp down on trading hard enough to actually stop it, you'd have a police state - and then nobody will be thinking about "saving the planet".
A common view is that moral consideration is only warranted for moral agents that are capable of engaging in moral reasoning, and thus capable of reciprocating moral consideration.
I thought this was one of those "Intro to Ethics" bits that looks like deep wisdom that solves a major ethical issue packaged in a neat little sentence, that after a week of debate turns out to have some good points, but is still incomplete and not nearly as deep as it looked at first. If memory serves, this one usually falls to these (amusingly phrased) arguments:
1) The "Torturing the Severe Autistic Game" - they don't really understand that other people exist, so their suffering doesn't count.
2) The "Skynet/Alien/Posthuman Super-Ethics" - their ethics are so advanced that human beings can't comprehend them - good luck begging for mercy!
3) The "Problem of Other Ethics" - if boiling a lobster is OK because it can't understand that boiling a human is wrong, shouldn't that same logic suggest that boiling a human is OK if they don't believe that boiling a human is wrong?
*Badly* planned economies
Is there another kind of planned economy?
There's no proper price that can be set on a resource which exists in finite quantity and cannot be recreated (well, there is - +INF).
My time is a finite, non-recreatable resource, so should minimum wage be $+INF?
If you use up some of that, then you basically steal from everyone else ...
And if it never gets used, it's still essentially stolen from everyone else, and it's also stolen from me.
The only solution ... is rationing
So it's OK to "steal from everyone else", as long as it's done in fixed quantities?
More importantly, this is starting to sound ideological. Are you actually saying that taxing can't lower the use of a resource? Or did you really mean that you think it's fairer to do it that way (or something like that)?
Not all costs to the environment can be fixed by throwing more money at them. The basic premise here is flawed.
It isn't flawed, you just don't understand it. The carbon tax isn't there to pay to have carbon sucked out of the atmosphere, it's to compensate for the use of a scarce public resource (the atmosphere's ability to absorb carbon) and encourage it to be used wisely.
You don't have the right to urinate into a public swimming pool either, even if you offer to "pick up the tab" for it.
This isn't vaguely similar. He just wants the right to drink a soda at the pool, even though he'll have to pee more often and wear out the urinal faster.
Why is it that when some one finally tells us that we must ... we start screaming at them?
Because we're human, because we want to make choices on our own, because we don't like other people running our lives, ... take your pick.
What's the case for not doing them -- contrariness?
It's a free country, people shouldn't even have to make a case.
Hating on the government has become a full-time religion in this country.
Wonderful! Now if we can turn that hatred into skepticism, we'll really have gotten somewhere.
Thank God we live in a country where morons like you do not have power.
There are 49 other states, and several other countries on Earth.
Did you discuss the merits like a rational person? No. You just rant without considering the details at all.
The GP gave a statement about his philosophy, you replied with a string of hypotheticals. That makes me think that you missed his point.
Loudmouthed ignorants are not the best people to have power.
That's why I didn't vote for you.
Why do you need the 'freedom' to do damage to my planet?
Because without the freedom to damage the planet in some way, you don't have much freedom at all.
Besides, it's not just your planet. You should get a voice in the discussion, but you don't get to dictate terms.
You really think the Founders would have been outraged over paint colors?
Given their reaction to taxes on tea ... it's quite possible.
Government shifting from banning things whose negative consequences are immediately obvious, to banning things whose negative consequences are not immediately obvious.
By "not immediately obvious" did you mean "trivial" or "unproven"?
Ignore the protestations of scientists who say the problem is real
Who's doing that?
What would be the point of hiding what we can't understand anyway? Even if it lays everything out and carefully walks us through it, we'll have about as much of an understanding of its agenda as my cat had of my agenda when I got him neutered.
Is an extra two years worth $500,000 cost? I don't think so.
Not to you, and that's fine. But it might to me, and that should be OK too.
When did I say that I wanted anything that belongs to you? -> You didn't have to.
Making random assumptions about other people does make conversations interesting, but not very useful.
You can be atheist or agnostic or whatever belief you want to follow.
Almost every faith on earth has reconciled itself with modern medical treatment, even though it gives us unnaturally long lives. I don't think wanting to tack on an extra year or two (or making a few years healthier) is going to be troubling to most people, religious or not.
Now please respect MY liberty, and stay out of my wallet. I was the one who sweated/labored to earn that money, not you. You have no right to take it from me.
When did I say that I wanted anything that belongs to you?
So your argument is that death is natural, so it should simply be accepted?
And you're writing this on a plastic/metal/silicon computer connected to a global network, under artificial lights in a temperature-controlled man-made room powered by artificially generated electricity, wearing clothes made by machine out of petroleum or industrially-farmed cotton, after eating an extensively processed meal you ate with teeth that have filled cavities?
About the only fully natural thing about the average first-world person is that they're biologically identical to their ancient ancestors, and that's not likely to last much longer.
Also people are replaceable. We have 6 billion of them, with new ones constantly being produced to replace the broken ones.
Yeah, but the replacement parts are expensive, vary in quality, and don't come in standard configurations, so you have to keep re-tuning things. Besides, there's all those political issues to consider. They keep telling people to "reduce, reuse, recycle", but I have yet to see this implemented for 'broken' vagrants and retarded children.
After all, no one lives forever. What's the point of spending a million dollars installing electronics in a body if that body is doomed to expire?
Your second sentence is one small step toward solving the problem in your first sentence.
As someone who believes in eternity, I don't consider this life so great that I want to try to hang-on forever. The sooner I die the sooner I go to...
I have no problem with that, but other people have different priorities and ethical systems, and you should respect them as well.
Clearly totally private healthcare as implemented in the USA does not work.
Just to be clear, we don't have totally private healthcare here. The government covers about 40% of us, most of the rest get coverage through work, and only a small fraction actually buy health insurance on its own. This allows us to enjoy healthcare as unequally distributed as a full-blown free market system, as bureaucratic and unresponsive as any large government system, and as expensive as both put together.
Keep it down to one orgasm.
Stop giving them ideas! And if you have to give them ideas, don't give them that one!!!
I don't want them to cancel, but I do want them to jack up your rates. If you're expected health care costs do to voluntary behavior are higher them mine, it's only fair that you pay for the difference.
After all, I have a 0.056% chance per year of getting lung cancer (169,400 cases per year, 300 million US citizens, easy math).
Except that most lung cancer is caused by smoking, and only a fraction of Americans smoke (and it varies with age/generation, length of time smoking, etc). Your actual risk is at least twice that.
theory != implementation
It doesn't matter if you're talking theory or implementation. Many times socialism is defined as state ownership, and most other definitions at least mention it as a common feature. If you has said "socialism doesn't necessarily require government intervention" you'd be fine because there are forms that don't. But when you say "socialism has nothing to do with government", you're suggesting that there's no connection at all, which is silly.
And even if you were completely correct, the rest of us would only be making the same mistake that The American Heritage Dictionary or WordNet made when they wrote their definitions. That means that it's a common enough mistake you should be able to maintain some semblance of self control while discussing the issue.
I'd suggest you read that Wikipedia article and its referenced sources a bit more carefully before you try to call me a liar.
I haven't called you a liar, I'm just saying that you're wrong.
I guess you stopped reading before you got to mention of market socialism ...
Besides, it's still clearly true that many (if not most) types of socialism requite government involvement, so your statement that "socialism has nothing to do with government" is still wrong.
No, not owned by the government.
Oh, right. Where could I have gotten the idea that socialism means ownership by the government or a collective?
You need a better source of information than the indoctrination-with-an-agenda diet you've been fed... and I do mean "fed", because I doubt you've actively sought out any objective information about socialism. The only information you have about it is what validates your desired view of the world, and that was handed to you with that as a goal in mind. That information is wrong. Are you scared of learning something that might challenge your worldview? Grow a pair and go do some objective reading.
Either you're reacting to the fact that you screwed up and got called on it, or you really don't understand that you're using the word "socialism" in a very different way than other people are. As long as you aren't actually pointing me to "correct" sources, then I'm just going to assume that your rant is just your way of trying to irritate people.
Duh: socialism has nothing to do with government. It describes an economic system.
An economic system where the means of production are owned by ... the government!