*sigh*
When you have a limited resource, you have to discriminate. Either you'll have the people you can pay or the people who don't mind waiting in line. The great thing with price discrimination is that it introduces an incentive to produce more of the scarce resource. This is what the entire economy if not the entire civilization is based on. Yes, discrimination is anti-egalitarian, but guess what, everything cannot possibly be available to everyone, that's a physical impossibility, discrimination is natural.
Unless you believe that morality is god-given (and if you do, I'm sorry for you), you have to realize that morality and ethics are relative to a society.
Ahain a false dichotomy. I am an atheist and I believe morality to be tied to the nature of the human being as a rational being. Some ethics are relative to society, the way you should behave in public for example is obviously influenced by custom. My interest is in an absolute subset of morality. To be precise, I try to define in which cases it is moral to use force.
You claimed that you "didn't mandate the government, so it has no right to tax me", which is just plain silly. You did mandate the government by not putting another one in it's place.
I don't want a government, period. If it has to be stated, let it be stated that I am not mandating any government to represent me.Again it seems to me you are arguing for might make right... I can't physically put another government in place so I have to accept this one ? What's next, a woman being raped is agreeing to the rape by not knocking out her aggressor... her "inaction" to kick the guy unconscious is proof of her agreement ?
You are either arguing for jungle law or arguing with your ass. I think the later.
You also claim that you "won't protest if [you] don't receive services" if you just could not pay taxes, and I can only surmise that you're not old enough to pay income tax and that you have no children.
I pay a large amount of taxes on my income. I have been paying taxes for three years and I don't have children. This is pure ad hominem, it has nothing to do with the subject at hand
Maybe you haven't ever been sick enough to need medical attention either.
Of course I have been sick, and I paid my bills.
My bet is you would protest a great deal if you didn't get those services.
I didn't get these services from the government.
.Finally, and here might be the root of the problem, I think you have a skewed view of what the government is (which is not unusal in Americans).
I am French. Why else do you think I'd have this obnoxious accent !
You talk about "them" and "it" and "he" as if it were somehow an opponent.
You are correct, it is oversimplifying to say that. On a first approximation, one could say: the people working for the government. It's a pretty good one. Those are the people living off other people's taxes. Of course the moral responsibility of the state goes much deeper than that.
Aren't you a part of a society governed by your government, which is comprised of members of your society? Which means "the government" is just the ones of us who governs us.
That is correct, and I think they should be opposed by force and severely punished, although this is currently impractical and dangerous.
Anyway, the government, since it's a part of our society and since it's the job we've appointed them have every right to prevent your and Amazon's trade.
There no "we". If I appoint a hitman to kill you, just because you, I and the hitman are part of a "society" it doesn't make it acceptable. Just because some people gave the government a job doesn't mean that job is moral and legitimate.
Rights belong to individuals not abstract entities. An individual may delegate his right to someone else, but if a majority vote for a government that doesn't mean I am delegating MY rights.
That's not infringeing on your freedom, it's what you are paying them to do, and hence not immoral or evil.
I am paying them to do it because otherwise people with gun will come and throw me in jail.If a bully beats you and take your lunch money, will you pretend it's not immoral or evil because "that's what you are paying him to do" ?
As I said, different people have used the opportunity that two words - ethics and morality - are available to describe different contexts. Such a distinction indeed is made in the part of the wikipedia you are quoting, it carries no generality and merely reflects the opinion of the editor. I'll repeat my claim one last time, semantically, moral and ethics are one and the same thing. There is little point in arguing about definitions though.
Since I have to accept that you can in fact read, I'll have to surmise that you sticking to your so called arguments is because you're stupid.
False dichotomy, there are other options, wikipedia is wrong, you are misrepresenting my view, you're a moron, etc.
Aah, keep wishing.
Wishing has nothing to do with morality. A woman being raped by an armed aggressor is completely correct in thinking that the act is immoral. The fact that, concretely, she can or cannot escape from him is irrelevant to the immorality of the act.
The US government is obviously much stronger than me, there is no way I will prevent it to tax me without going away. Obviously I wish it would stop, but I very well know it will not happen while I'm alive.
Your argument says nothing about morality, unless of course you are arguing might make right.
That's because there's no agreement between you and me for poems and what they cost
Agreed
If we had such an agreement, not only would you not have to use force to get your $10, it would be a morally reprehensible act for me not to give them to you.
Agreed
As for rules of a group, it is sometimes true that you can leave a group if you don't like the rules
Agreed
but what you seem to be ignoring is that sometimes it's not
Agreed
or example, you cannot leave the human race, you cannot easily leave western society, and it is somewhat hard to find a place to live where you don't have to pay taxes.
Stop. I cannot indeed leave the human race, but what do you mean by "leaving western society"? If I own land in the middle of France, it does not constitute per se an agreement by my part to any form of contract.
And if you're part of a group you can't cherrypick the rules you follow. Therefore your examples in the post I originally answered are meaningless.
You are confused. As you recognized in your post, I cannot enforce a rule to force you to buy my poems because we do not have an agreement. There are two very different kind of "groups"
Some are formed contractually, these include married couples, firms, private clubs, etc. By entering the group you also enter an agreement with the other members.
Other groups are merely sets of people identified by a characteristic. Tall people, short people, men, women, etc. Since merely having a characteristic does not constitute an agreement of any sort, there are no associated rules.
Society is the later kind. Society is a collection of institutions and individual sharing a certain culture. Being part of a society merely means that you share ideas, a way of life, etc. There are no associated rules.
What does being "part" of a society mean? I have intrinsic characteristic that make me part of groups, obviously. I belong to the human specie, I am a male, I live around a certain set of people, etc. As for taking part and interacting with the rest of the people, that ought to remain voluntary.
I don't see how this makes "let me not pay taxes and receive no benefits" void of meaning. If I sent you a poem everyday and took $10 from you, by force, in exchange, you would not see this as moral. The fact that we both belong to the group of slashdot users doesn't justify anything, nor would I be justified to require that you stop using slashdot if you don't abide by the rule, nor would it be justified if the majority of slashdot user required it.
From wikipedia:
Morality, from the Latin moralitas "manner, character, proper behavior"
Ethics a major branch of philosophy, encompasses right conduct and good life
As I said previously, they are the same thing, I am well aware that different author took advantage of the existence of these synonyms to separate different concepts, but there is no canonical difference between the two. To both greek and romans, they represented the way one should live is life, as a set of goals, values and virtues.
I'd be glad if you explained the difference between morality and ethics, apart that one is a latin root and the other a greek root:) No really they are the same word... you may very well use those two words to define two different concepts, but there's no standard, accepted, difference between the two.
I am not claiming not to be part of a society, I am claiming my participation in society has to be voluntary. Please explain how this make my argument meaningless ?
Then again, mention which details you are thinking about.
Your post is completely elusive, you don't offer a single argument to rebut mine, you merely claim that I am wrong or offer ad hominem... on someone you don't even know. Last but not least, you didn't answer my argument showing that You were the one equating his approval of something with morality.
I really don't think you understand what morality is.
You know, you may disagree with me, but by now you should have understood that I am talking about a subject I am heavily involved with. I may be wrong about morality, but I spend hours everyday studying moral philosophy.
Things you disagree with are not necessarily immoral.
I never claimed such a thing. You however gave as an argument for the sale tax claiming you didn't disapprove of it, thereby implicitly equating your approval with morality. Doctor, cure yourself
The government taxes me because I and my peers have popularily given them a mandate to perform
If so that is fine and dandy, but I didn't mandate the government, so it has no right to tax me. What if I told you me and my pal have popularily given me a mandate to tax you, would you accept it as moral?
You might be amazed, but I am very happy to pay my taxes and receive wonderful services from the governemnt.
Great ! But I'm not. Let you receive the services and pay taxes, let me not pay taxes and I won't protest if I don't receive services.
Anarchy is not a useful governing system at this time and won't be for centuries
That is a practical consideration, how is it relevant in a moral debate? Moreover, anarchy doesn't claim to provide a "governing" system, quite the opposite. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Your "approval" is irrelevant, unless you are one of the party concerned of course. As for sales tax they are a racket, the government has no right to steal part of the money that I exchange with someone, no more than I do have that right. The rules of morality apply equally to everyone, including government employees. If I don't have the right to tax you, the government has no right either.
Amazon and I agree to trade a book against money, the government steps in and prevents us to do so. By doing that he is infringing on our freedom. Immoral, evil.
True. But this is no different than all the type of "predatory pricing" or antitrust lawsuits many/. readers usually cheer for. The purpose of the law is to give bookshops an advantage to compete against big stores. It is socialist, immoral and it severely affected the book industry. Nonetheless, the whiners are not only in France, they're also right here in the US.
The Humanized website is an interesting read. While they do make valid points, they seem to fall into the "dummies" culture. Why does everything today has to be "for dummies" or in "24 hour"? What's wrong with learning curves? Learning curves exist for a reason... they're not here to make user's life miserable but simply because an interface that you learn can be more effective in the future. Of course, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's powerful. It is possible to build an unintuitive AND uneffective interface, but I think it is not always possible to be both intuitive and effective. On the humanized website, they seem to solely focus on the former : why is that? I think we are in fact facing a wide cultural problem of high time preference... before are not willing to spend a few minutes reading a manual or a few days getting use to a device, even if it can save them days later. For example, my mother works with computers all day and hunt and pecks at 20WPM. When I told her to spend some time learning to touchtype, she claim she didn't have time. Same story when I was in college, watching people spend hours writing formulas in word because it took too much time to learn LaTeX.
Back to interfaces. If what I describe is indeed a cultural phenomenom, then the guys at humanized are right, they are merely reflecting market demand for simplicity versus efficience, but this is in itself a sad thing. I think they do not emphasize the possibility of satisfying different kind of customers by providing optional advanced options.
If you do that, people will never learn and continue to use closed formats. It's too easy to fall for a closed format for your crucial documents and then go whining when the company stops supporting them. Let people pay the price of their mistake, then, then open document formats will pick up steam.
There are always cases where ownership or right is difficult to establish, that is why justice is not done merely by computers and that is why it is never perfect. However, for the specific case of new lands, if you settle somewhere, build a house, start cultivating, etc then no one can deprive you of your effort and you can claim that land. In most cases, it's not very hard to see who is the legitimate owner and who is the intruder, but there are always difficult cases, like oil fields for example.
I wish I could provide you with a lenghty answer but I have a very long thread to answer to.
Although you claim to be a libertarian, you think like a legal positivist as if ownership was granted by a government... but how does that government get the right to grant ownership? You're caught in a meaningless loop.
Property is initially acquired by homesteading, by mixing your labor with the natural resources. After that, property can be given, traded, exchanged etc. Sure, property can be stolen, and maybe the property that you own was stolen in the past, but property is about legitimate claim. Without proof of the contrary, you are the legitimate owner. If the original owner whom the property was stolen from comes and prove that it indeed has a better claim to the property than you, then he should be recognized as the sole owner, otherwise, you have the best claim.
Why is that so? Because property exists to separate conflicts. If I want to use the field you worked on to plant your crop and you don't want, who's right? Who has the best claim to the property? In this case, the answer is obvious, and that is the principle of private property.
In a conflict, both sides can not be in the right, the purpose of justice is precisely to separate conflicting claims by finding where the natural property rights sit.
"but we both know better that that doesn't work in practice" ? Oh really ? Please be more specific...
Even if you bought all the land surrounding mine, and good luck with that, I'd still have homesteaded a right to the path outside of my own that the previous owner couldn't reclaim and transfer you.
Who owns you computer and mine ? No one ! I own mine, you own yours. Similarly, the US territory is just a patchwork of individual properties.
If people who come use services that where funded by your tax dollar, you should ask yourself : why isn't that tax dollar in my pocket in the first place! If your mugged and the mugger spends the money on alcohol, don't blame the liquor store!
The "populace" does not own the US territory. If one person wants to invite an immigrant in his home that's his problem, the other people have nothing to say about it.
It would indeed create an illegitimate physical response, the border guard has no right to stop me as I am not trespassing on anyone's property. Since I did not agress anyone, it is wrong to agress me in return.
Of course being a practical person I do show my passport and smile at the custom officer, but I shouldn't have to. So, yes, I am against any form of border protection by states.
While I do believe Ron Paul is the best candidate (let's be serious, no candidate advocates totally open borders I know that), I cannot approve his campaign or his message.
Slashdot Mirror
That would just be contract enforcement between you and your shareholder.
Sorry but your shareholders don't force you to do anything either.
Your customers aren't forcing you to do anything.
No one's forcing you to support internet explorer.
*sigh* When you have a limited resource, you have to discriminate. Either you'll have the people you can pay or the people who don't mind waiting in line. The great thing with price discrimination is that it introduces an incentive to produce more of the scarce resource. This is what the entire economy if not the entire civilization is based on. Yes, discrimination is anti-egalitarian, but guess what, everything cannot possibly be available to everyone, that's a physical impossibility, discrimination is natural.
Ahain a false dichotomy. I am an atheist and I believe morality to be tied to the nature of the human being as a rational being. Some ethics are relative to society, the way you should behave in public for example is obviously influenced by custom. My interest is in an absolute subset of morality. To be precise, I try to define in which cases it is moral to use force.
I don't want a government, period. If it has to be stated, let it be stated that I am not mandating any government to represent me.Again it seems to me you are arguing for might make right... I can't physically put another government in place so I have to accept this one ? What's next, a woman being raped is agreeing to the rape by not knocking out her aggressor... her "inaction" to kick the guy unconscious is proof of her agreement ?
You are either arguing for jungle law or arguing with your ass. I think the later.
I pay a large amount of taxes on my income. I have been paying taxes for three years and I don't have children. This is pure ad hominem, it has nothing to do with the subject at hand
Of course I have been sick, and I paid my bills.
I didn't get these services from the government.
I am French. Why else do you think I'd have this obnoxious accent !
You are correct, it is oversimplifying to say that. On a first approximation, one could say: the people working for the government. It's a pretty good one. Those are the people living off other people's taxes. Of course the moral responsibility of the state goes much deeper than that.
That is correct, and I think they should be opposed by force and severely punished, although this is currently impractical and dangerous.
There no "we". If I appoint a hitman to kill you, just because you, I and the hitman are part of a "society" it doesn't make it acceptable. Just because some people gave the government a job doesn't mean that job is moral and legitimate.
Rights belong to individuals not abstract entities. An individual may delegate his right to someone else, but if a majority vote for a government that doesn't mean I am delegating MY rights.
I am paying them to do it because otherwise people with gun will come and throw me in jail.If a bully beats you and take your lunch money, will you pretend it's not immoral or evil because "that's what you are paying him to do" ?
False dichotomy, there are other options, wikipedia is wrong, you are misrepresenting my view, you're a moron, etc.
Wishing has nothing to do with morality. A woman being raped by an armed aggressor is completely correct in thinking that the act is immoral. The fact that, concretely, she can or cannot escape from him is irrelevant to the immorality of the act.
The US government is obviously much stronger than me, there is no way I will prevent it to tax me without going away. Obviously I wish it would stop, but I very well know it will not happen while I'm alive.
Your argument says nothing about morality, unless of course you are arguing might make right.
Agreed
Agreed
Agreed
Agreed
Stop. I cannot indeed leave the human race, but what do you mean by "leaving western society"? If I own land in the middle of France, it does not constitute per se an agreement by my part to any form of contract.
You are confused. As you recognized in your post, I cannot enforce a rule to force you to buy my poems because we do not have an agreement. There are two very different kind of "groups"
Some are formed contractually, these include married couples, firms, private clubs, etc. By entering the group you also enter an agreement with the other members.
Other groups are merely sets of people identified by a characteristic. Tall people, short people, men, women, etc. Since merely having a characteristic does not constitute an agreement of any sort, there are no associated rules.
Society is the later kind. Society is a collection of institutions and individual sharing a certain culture. Being part of a society merely means that you share ideas, a way of life, etc. There are no associated rules.
To put it in a nutshell, although I am part of society, I do not belong to society, i.e. society doesn't own me.
What does being "part" of a society mean? I have intrinsic characteristic that make me part of groups, obviously. I belong to the human specie, I am a male, I live around a certain set of people, etc. As for taking part and interacting with the rest of the people, that ought to remain voluntary.
I don't see how this makes "let me not pay taxes and receive no benefits" void of meaning. If I sent you a poem everyday and took $10 from you, by force, in exchange, you would not see this as moral. The fact that we both belong to the group of slashdot users doesn't justify anything, nor would I be justified to require that you stop using slashdot if you don't abide by the rule, nor would it be justified if the majority of slashdot user required it.
From wikipedia:
Morality, from the Latin moralitas "manner, character, proper behavior"
Ethics a major branch of philosophy, encompasses right conduct and good life
As I said previously, they are the same thing, I am well aware that different author took advantage of the existence of these synonyms to separate different concepts, but there is no canonical difference between the two. To both greek and romans, they represented the way one should live is life, as a set of goals, values and virtues.
I'd be glad if you explained the difference between morality and ethics, apart that one is a latin root and the other a greek root :)
No really they are the same word... you may very well use those two words to define two different concepts, but there's no standard, accepted, difference between the two.
I am not claiming not to be part of a society, I am claiming my participation in society has to be voluntary. Please explain how this make my argument meaningless ?
Then again, mention which details you are thinking about.
Your post is completely elusive, you don't offer a single argument to rebut mine, you merely claim that I am wrong or offer ad hominem... on someone you don't even know. Last but not least, you didn't answer my argument showing that You were the one equating his approval of something with morality.
You know, you may disagree with me, but by now you should have understood that I am talking about a subject I am heavily involved with. I may be wrong about morality, but I spend hours everyday studying moral philosophy.
I never claimed such a thing. You however gave as an argument for the sale tax claiming you didn't disapprove of it, thereby implicitly equating your approval with morality. Doctor, cure yourself
If so that is fine and dandy, but I didn't mandate the government, so it has no right to tax me. What if I told you me and my pal have popularily given me a mandate to tax you, would you accept it as moral?
Great ! But I'm not. Let you receive the services and pay taxes, let me not pay taxes and I won't protest if I don't receive services.
That is a practical consideration, how is it relevant in a moral debate? Moreover, anarchy doesn't claim to provide a "governing" system, quite the opposite. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Your "approval" is irrelevant, unless you are one of the party concerned of course. As for sales tax they are a racket, the government has no right to steal part of the money that I exchange with someone, no more than I do have that right. The rules of morality apply equally to everyone, including government employees. If I don't have the right to tax you, the government has no right either.
Amazon and I agree to trade a book against money, the government steps in and prevents us to do so. By doing that he is infringing on our freedom. Immoral, evil.
True. But this is no different than all the type of "predatory pricing" or antitrust lawsuits many /. readers usually cheer for. The purpose of the law is to give bookshops an advantage to compete against big stores. It is socialist, immoral and it severely affected the book industry. Nonetheless, the whiners are not only in France, they're also right here in the US.
I don't know about that but everyone on /. knows your mom.
(sorry that was gratuitous)
(did she say)
The Humanized website is an interesting read. While they do make valid points, they seem to fall into the "dummies" culture. Why does everything today has to be "for dummies" or in "24 hour"? What's wrong with learning curves? Learning curves exist for a reason... they're not here to make user's life miserable but simply because an interface that you learn can be more effective in the future. Of course, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's powerful. It is possible to build an unintuitive AND uneffective interface, but I think it is not always possible to be both intuitive and effective. On the humanized website, they seem to solely focus on the former : why is that? I think we are in fact facing a wide cultural problem of high time preference... before are not willing to spend a few minutes reading a manual or a few days getting use to a device, even if it can save them days later. For example, my mother works with computers all day and hunt and pecks at 20WPM. When I told her to spend some time learning to touchtype, she claim she didn't have time. Same story when I was in college, watching people spend hours writing formulas in word because it took too much time to learn LaTeX.
Back to interfaces. If what I describe is indeed a cultural phenomenom, then the guys at humanized are right, they are merely reflecting market demand for simplicity versus efficience, but this is in itself a sad thing. I think they do not emphasize the possibility of satisfying different kind of customers by providing optional advanced options.
If you do that, people will never learn and continue to use closed formats. It's too easy to fall for a closed format for your crucial documents and then go whining when the company stops supporting them. Let people pay the price of their mistake, then, then open document formats will pick up steam.
There are always cases where ownership or right is difficult to establish, that is why justice is not done merely by computers and that is why it is never perfect. However, for the specific case of new lands, if you settle somewhere, build a house, start cultivating, etc then no one can deprive you of your effort and you can claim that land. In most cases, it's not very hard to see who is the legitimate owner and who is the intruder, but there are always difficult cases, like oil fields for example.
I wish I could provide you with a lenghty answer but I have a very long thread to answer to.
Although you claim to be a libertarian, you think like a legal positivist as if ownership was granted by a government... but how does that government get the right to grant ownership? You're caught in a meaningless loop.
Property is initially acquired by homesteading, by mixing your labor with the natural resources. After that, property can be given, traded, exchanged etc. Sure, property can be stolen, and maybe the property that you own was stolen in the past, but property is about legitimate claim. Without proof of the contrary, you are the legitimate owner. If the original owner whom the property was stolen from comes and prove that it indeed has a better claim to the property than you, then he should be recognized as the sole owner, otherwise, you have the best claim.
Why is that so? Because property exists to separate conflicts. If I want to use the field you worked on to plant your crop and you don't want, who's right? Who has the best claim to the property? In this case, the answer is obvious, and that is the principle of private property.
In a conflict, both sides can not be in the right, the purpose of justice is precisely to separate conflicting claims by finding where the natural property rights sit.
For more details, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_servitude
"but we both know better that that doesn't work in practice" ? Oh really ? Please be more specific...
Even if you bought all the land surrounding mine, and good luck with that, I'd still have homesteaded a right to the path outside of my own that the previous owner couldn't reclaim and transfer you.
Who owns you computer and mine ? No one ! I own mine, you own yours. Similarly, the US territory is just a patchwork of individual properties.
If people who come use services that where funded by your tax dollar, you should ask yourself : why isn't that tax dollar in my pocket in the first place! If your mugged and the mugger spends the money on alcohol, don't blame the liquor store!
The "populace" does not own the US territory. If one person wants to invite an immigrant in his home that's his problem, the other people have nothing to say about it.
Your whole argument is just a spin on "ends justify mean". This is completely opposed to jusnaturalism which is deontological.
Besides, your hoppean claims that the state is the only way to organize defense are baseless, although even that's irrelevant.
It would indeed create an illegitimate physical response, the border guard has no right to stop me as I am not trespassing on anyone's property. Since I did not agress anyone, it is wrong to agress me in return.
Of course being a practical person I do show my passport and smile at the custom officer, but I shouldn't have to. So, yes, I am against any form of border protection by states.
While I do believe Ron Paul is the best candidate (let's be serious, no candidate advocates totally open borders I know that), I cannot approve his campaign or his message.