Susan Hogarth wrote:
BH) 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
SH) With that, I scroll down, expecting a very truncated message. No such
luck. Apparently it's -very- motivating. (SH
That's a plausible inference for anyone who is ignorant of how much of my
message was simply cut and pasted from previous messages to you. Care to be
educated about how little of my message consisted of attempts to help you
understand things I've already plainly stated to you?
SH) I never have or would claim that I will always make the correct moral
decision. (SH
The question here obviously is what decision you would hope you would make
or would advocate that others make in such a situation. I can't tell if
your dodge here is that 1) you don't have perfect foreknowledge of all your
future decisions, or 2) you're trying to redefine "moral" to not denote what
we hope or advocate that people would do. Whichever hole you're in, feel
free to come out.
BH) 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." (BH
SH) This need to get others to agree to kill innocents (even 'virtually')
strikes me as somewhat pathological. (SH
I'm just trying to explore the implications of your ethics in order to help
me decide whether I should trade mine for yours. Your evasiveness and
apparent embarrassment about how your ethics apply to standard hypothetical
scenarios from the academic literature of ethical philosophy tell me all I
need to know about such a trade.
BH) 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? (BH
SH) Yes. Happy? (SH
Quite -- because it's clear that your "yes" also applies to the question you
snipped: "Is any scenario 'stupid' if it challenges the generality of your
ethical principles?"
SH) Are you going to put the fate of the 'nauts to a vote in your
"maximally-decentralized democratic federal constitutional republic," or
just make the individual decision on your own to blow them to hell? (SH
I'll let the decision be handled by whatever mechanism you advocate for
deciding
* whether killing a full-term fetus is murder;
* the rights of children and the mentally incompetent;
* the nature of property rights in land, non-excludable resources,
inventions, and expression;
*
the forms of allowable judicial punishment;
*
the rules for allowable extra-judicial defense and retaliation; and
*
thresholds for reckless endangerment.
This is the fourth time I've used this list to slap down your lame "who
decides?" objection. Wake me if you ever come up with a response to it.
BH) 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." (BH
SH) Is that a double-dog-dare? Sorry, I try to avoid dork-speak. (SH
Translation: "I lack either the intellectual courage to actually disagree
with Holtz's position or the intellectual capacity to at least identify a
disputed assumption being smuggled into that position."
SH) I'd rather say: "If people choose not to help others, our time and
effort is wasted in forcing them to do so, and any attempt to do so would be
wrong and counterproductive, creating more misery than it alleviates." (SH
OK, 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,
because doing so would be wrong and counterproductive and create more misery
than it alleviates."
It's intellectual cowardice to lump my position in with all possible
instances of "forcing people to help others", because I object to nearly
every scheme of such help that is advocated in American politics. In fact,
as a geolibertarian I deny that my scheme involves "forcing" at all, because
geolibertarianism makes a very powerful case that taxing resource use and
negative externalities and land rent are not initiations of force, and in
fact are required in order to correct otherwise-unpunished initiations of
force. (Tom, this is why your "steal"/"Samaritan" rephrasing wildly misses
the mark.)
But I guess geolibertarianism is "dork-speak" to someone of your
intellectual pedigree...
BH) If you want a one-sentence confession to my heresy from
zero-force-initiation ... (BH
SH) Not really. I had wanted coherence. But I've given up. Keep the bullshit
flowing. I don't mind glancing at it. (SH
Thank you for failing to meet my challenge to "pick a sentence or paragraph
of mine, and show how it could say the same thing(s) without being
'tortured'".
Of the two usual ways that my opponents concede defeat, I much prefer
name-calling to silence. Silence in the face of an argument is always
ambiguous the first time out, and it takes multiple dodgings of an argument
(see "who decides?", above) to establish that silence verges on a
concession. But name-calling is pretty much a notarized surrender, and so
is always welcome.
