Susan Hogarth wrote: SH> Your thought experiment amounts to something like "Imagine that white was actually black. What color would absorb more light?" <SH
It's not "my" thought experiment. The Trolley Problem has been under active discussion in the philosophy of ethics literature for almost three decades. Any peer-reviewed philosophy journal would laugh at this comparison of the Trolley Problem to a logical or physical contradiction. SH> It's interesting to imagine that we could know what the future holds, but I doubt that it offers much in the way of philosophical illumination. <SH If your ZAPsolutist deontology requires that you pretend the future is an unknowable void, then your position must be yielding you an amazing amount of psychological utility to compensate for having to maintain so untenable a pretense. Does it also let you walk on hot coals, or ignore venomous snakebites? :-) The future of course will never be foreseeable enough to make political theory a significantly predictive discipline, but you only hurt the credibility of your cause when you so blatantly dodge the question of whether some policies will yield a better future than others. I see that you used your moderator privileges to veto the cross-posting to LPradicals of my critique <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LPplatform-discuss/message/2341> of anarcholibertarianism and my recommendation of radical federalism as common ground. I guess the novitiates cloistered over there haven't yet mastered the mind-altering powers of seventh-level anarcholibertarianism, and so need to be protected from impure thoughts. :-) For the record, will you also veto me when I post a copy of the Greatest Hits draft <http://marketliberal.org/LP/Platforms/2007.html> there and ask my pals Angela and Starchild and the rest of the gang to give it their best radical critique? Platform> We oppose any form of compulsory national service. <Platform SH> Such as taxation? <SH "Compulsory national service" means the mandatory performance of specific kinds of labor. A tax is a payment mandated by an official regulation. Neither is an instance of the other.
