Susan Hogarth wrote: SH) I do not seem to be able to ask a question and get an answer from you I find useful. (SH
BH) Are you seriously claiming that I don't answer your questions more completely and directly than you answer mine? (BH SH) You seem to have a reading comprehension problem. What have I ever said that suggested such a notion? (SH I don't have a reading comprehension problem; I have a Hogarth comprehension problem. I didn't realize that you would blatantly admit your double-standard: SH) I am interested in understanding your thinking, not having you understand mine. (SH Thanks for letting me understand that shard of your thinking. I'll let you figure out for yourself the extent to which this motivates me to help you understand the things I've already plainly stated to you. BH) In a thread with you entitled "Defining Libertarianism", I wrote: [...] (BH SH) That works, along with your assertion that government should provide a 'safety net'. (SH What I assert is that, to the extent that private charity fails to provide a safety net of sustenance and shelter for fellow community members facing death due to indigence or misfortune, then the state should finance such a safety net through a uniform system of marginal taxation on resource use, negative externalities, and land value, as decided under the rule of law by a maximally-decentralized democratic federal constitutional republic. SH) I still don't find your answers coherent, but no doubt that's due to my low tolerance for long apparently semi-random strings of multisyllabic words (i.e. bullshit). (SH I'm happy to concur with your stipulation that there is something about you that leads you not to understand the positions of mine with which you nevertheless claim to disagree. SH) Good luck with the "maximally-decentralized democratic federal constitutional republic" thing. (SH Thanks, but luck won't be necessary. I repeat: According to the three leading <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_indices_of_freedom> indices of freedom, only 13 nations (out of almost 200) are currently more free than America. America's constitutional republican framework has been by far the most successful in human history. It has been increasing personal and civil liberties almost monotonically for two centuries, and we are among the most economically free nations in the world, with a per-capita GDP exceeded only by Norway and Luxembourg. Our 300 million people live and work in a continent-wide nation with a $13 trillion economy built on a twenty-first century technological infrastructure. Good luck asking for a complete overturning of how this polity provides for its common defense and secures its members' right to life, liberty, and property. Good luck convincing Americans to support your moralizing a priori claim that America would be a better place if we completely dismantled our system of rights protection in favor of a promise by liberty-lovers to set a good example of aggression abstinence. BH) Are you stating categorically that you would never kill an innocent to save a thousand innocents? (BH SH) Can't you read? Are the words too simple for you? (SH I read you just fine when you wrote on Apr 12 that you "might even, despairing, make the choice you seem so excited about - to kill one person rather than let five others be killed if I could imagine no alternative". I read you just fine when you re-affirmed that position on May 12, saying "Sure. I might." You've since rejected the idea of such a dilemma as "stupid", but you haven't explicitly said you would never kill an innocent to save many more innocents. Feel free to quote your "simple words" if you think you have. Even now, you evasively say: SH) I do not consider the deliberate killing of innocents to be correct moral behavior under any circumstances. (SH Even here, you might be hiding behind an unspoken claim that the circumstances of my question could never arise. You also are merely saying what you would "consider correct" instead of saying what you would actually DO. So what I dare you to say is: "under the extremely unlikely circumstance in which me killing one innocent could be confidently predicted to save a thousand other innocents, I would still never choose to kill the one to save the thousand." (I confidently predict that you will either ignore this challenge or dodge it under the pretense that you don't know what a confident prediction is. :-) SH) It -is- stupid, because it rests on assertions of knowing the future, which is impossible. (SH If anything is "stupid" here, it would be the pretense that nobody could ever have enough information about the future to face such a dilemma. I repeat to you for the third time an example that annihilates your laughable dodge about this "impossibility". Consider a manned mission to plant a nuke on an Earth-crossing asteroid to prevent an impact that will surely kill millions. Suppose the ship has some technical problem that prevents it from separating from the asteroid before the window of opportunity for diverting it with the nuclear explosion. Suppose further that the crew refuses to detonate the nuke before separation, but NASA has the ability to detonate it remotely. Are you going to call this scenario "stupid", too? Is any scenario "stupid" if it challenges the generality of your ethical principles? SH) OR (it seems to vary with you) it rests on the assumption of a sort of moral calculus (which, oddly enough, you seem to deny) for deciding just how certain is 'certain enough', and just how many innocents it is proper to sacrifice for a fairly-certain-but-not-certain-certain desired outcome. (SH What "vary"? The Trolley Problem obviously depends on assuming both 1) that the future is not completely unknowable (as you laughably try to pretend) and 2) that people tend to consider the death of more innocents to be worse than the death of fewer innocents. You cannot quote me EVER denying the need for a moral calculus as in the latter assumption. All I said was that I can't write down for you a computer program that can calculate how I will answer every possible variant of the Trolley Problem. SH) At any rate, your trolley problem leads directly to the assertion that Truman 'had to' slaughter a city full of folks to 'save' many more. (SH Not "directly" -- it instead depends critically on a set of empirical judgments about what would have happened under various alternative decisions by Truman. Perhaps the judgments I offered to you earlier were so compelling that you don't dispute my empirical analysis, in which case it is indeed true that Truman had to drop those bombs. I wrote that the citizens of Hiroshima were living in a major supply and logistics base for a militarized society completely mobilized in support of a war of territorial conquest and racist genocide. In addition to all the Japanese troops and civilians whose lives were saved by not having to invade the imperial homeland, the bombings also stopped the deaths of over 100,000 Asian noncombatants each month living under Japanese conquest -- as well as the lives of hundreds of allied prisoners under orders to be executed upon invasion. The atomic bombings killed about 200K Japanese. The projected fatalities for invading Japan included hundreds of thousands of Americans, and over a million Japanese. [Leaving Japan alone would have been] better for people in North Carolina, maybe -- at least those whose primary concern is their clean hands. Not so good, however, for the hundreds of thousands of slave laborers controlled by the Japanese, or the tens of thousands of "comfort women" abducted from Korea and China for use in Japanese army brothels. Not so good, especially, for the roughly 100K Asian non-combatants who were dying each month under Japanese military occupation, joining the six to ten million Asians that had already been slaughtered by Japanese aggression. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes if you can stomach further details. For more, see my blog posting Why Truman Had To Drop <http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=187> The Bomb and my debate <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/msearch?query=gregory+hiroshima > with Anthony Gregory on the topic. I dare you to reference the above explanation in any criticism of my defense of Truman's decision to nuke Hiroshima. SH) Yes, I am sure your defense of Truman's (and before him, Roosevelt's) mass slaughters of innocents is going to be very stirring to the Libertarian community. (SH Those of us who have the courage of our convictions are not afraid for those convictions to be accurately announced, no matter what the audience and no matter what historical or hypothetical circumstances are invoked. However, my endorsement of Truman's decision to nuke Hiroshima doesn't imply that I don't question any aspect of FDR's conduct of WWII. SH) Right up there with your assertion that government's role is to provide a 'safety net' for folks. (SH I dare you to stand next to me in front of ANY Libertarian audience and say: "to the extent that private charity fails to provide a safety net of sustenance and shelter for fellow community members facing death due to indigence or misfortune, then the state nevertheless should NOT finance such a safety net through a uniform system of marginal taxation on resource use, negative externalities, and land value, as decided under the rule of law by a maximally-decentralized democratic federal constitutional republic." SH) I'm happy to have you repeat those bizarre assertions publicly (SH I too am happy to stand by them, when reported accurately. I'm even happier to stand next to you as you assert their grammatical negation. SH) However, sadly for me, your writing is so tortured that few people seem to have the patience to wade through it, and I guess they often mistake sheer volume for coherent thought, and/or give you credit for at least putting in the hours. (SH I make no apologies for my beliefs not fitting on a bumper sticker. If you want a one-sentence confession to my heresy from zero-force-initiation absolutist Rothbardianism, use this: To the extent that private charity fails to provide the public (i.e. non-excludable and non-rivalrous) good of protecting life and liberty through 1) a justice system, 2) national defense, and 3) a safety net of sustenance and shelter for fellow community members facing death due to indigence or misfortune, people should not be allowed to free-ride on the contributions of others toward such goods, but rather must help finance them through a uniform system of marginal taxation on resource use, negative externalities, and land value, as decided under the rule of law by a maximally-decentralized democratic federal constitutional republic. You continue: SH) You seem to be saying here that an exchange of authorities could 'improve the quality of debate' on the platform - which we are only months away form adopting. (SH I said nothing about the need for better Platform debate being confined to this Platform cycle. SH) I beleive that a discussion of whether it's right to kill innocents for the greater good (??) belongs less in an LP platform discussion and more in a pub discussion. (SH The Trolley Problem is discussed more in philosophy journals than it is in pubs, but I guess your belief here is shaped by the sort of forum you're more comfortable with. :-) As it happens, in the 1005 messages so far on the PlatCommLP08 forum, zero have mentioned killing innocents for any reason whatsoever -- let alone the strawman reason of a generic "greater good". SH) Don't be looking for any long treatises or appeals to authority from me soon in this discussion. I've worked - and still work - under the assumption that brief and pointed is the best approach to truth in all but the most technical cases (and even there, brief and pointed is still called for as much as possible). (SH I'm a fan of terseness. I'm also a fan of taking criticism seriously enough to comprehensively (but tersely) answer it. SH) You can make all the snide comments about drive-by aphorisms that you like, and I can match them with equally snide comments about your tendency to tortured prose, (SH If your "tortured prose" criticism had any substance at all, you could pick a sentence or paragraph of mine, and show how it could say the same thing(s) without being "tortured". Can you?
