Anarchy - Peaceful solutions to societies problems.

[CosmicJoghurt]

What about amoralists like me? What's for me in all of that talk about morality?

 

[CruciFiction]

2) If one action is deemed moral, the opposite is immoral. Example: Murder is immoral, not murdering is moral.

Nope. This ignores anything resembling context. Killing is moral in some contexts (self-defense, defense of others) and immoral in others. It also is completely uncompromising and black and white. I donate blood, which I consider to be a moral action, but I don't dismiss everyone who does not donate as immoral.

I think we disagree on the definition of murder here. Obviously, self defense isn't murder. We all know that.

Ridiculous. There's a wide range of morally neutral actions, and it's perfectly possible for one person to be moral and one immoral at the same time.

Yes, but it must be POSSIBLE for both to be moral at the same time. I think you just missed what I was trying to say there.

Having sex with my wife is moral, therefore it is moral for me to have sex with any woman at any time and any place. Or, if you limit it to the same parties, I can have sex with my wife right in front of the schoolchildren that I teach to show them proper technique. :lol: Listen to yourself speak for half a second. Context is extremely important in determining morality.

Well that's why one is called sex and the other is rape. One is willing the other is unwilling. Sex is morally neutral, rape is morally wrong. Rape is wrong because it violates a persons ownership of their body. You do not own another person, so you cannot do with them as you please. Same goes for murder.

What if they were using force on someone else? What if they were inflicting damage by some means other then force? What if they were so obviously going to attack me that any delay on my part would result in serious damage to myself? You can't just point and say "They started it!" like some grade schooler.

Third party self defense.

That's not an argument, that's an assertion. You're missing the bits where you connect all these scattered dots. How is government immoral? Under your definitions they could be considered immoral simply because they operate differently then an individual does, which is ridiculous.

You're right, it isn't an argument. But I think my first post as a whole is close enough. Government is immoral because it initiates force on innocent people.

 

[CruciFiction]

What about amoralists like me? What's for me in all of that talk about morality?

I've never met an amoralist before. I have an honest question for you, what do you think about ownership of self? I actually haven't done any reading on amoralists before so this is new to me. I could go to wikipedia but I'd rather hear your opinion - don't want to assume you are something that you aren't.

Oh, and I find your signature interesting as well. Can you explain to me which part of that sentence was deformed by my interpretation? How much of it was deformed? Personally, I think the senses are quite accurate for analyzing the world around me. If they weren't, we wouldn't be relying on language, writing, or sound for communication. The fact that we can communicate proves that our senses are good for something. Sure, they can be fooled and they might be limited - but that's where the scientific method kicks in and lets us know if we are being fooled by our senses or not.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

Despite the fact that you have understood very litle of our actual objections, you have still haven't moved any closer to something resembling an argument for whatever you are trying to propouse. So without trying to delay this into more pointless tangents, just present your agument or else I will just ignore this topic altogether.

 

[CruciFiction]

Despite the fact that you have understood very litle of our actual objections, you have still haven't moved any closer to something resembling an argument for whatever you are trying to propouse. So without trying to delay this into more pointless tangents, just present your agument or else I will just ignore this topic altogether.

I've been waiting for you to ignore it the whole time. Your first post was hostile and just flat wrong. I'm not going to talk to someone that is here to simply berate others. Perhaps you should have followed your own advice and asked some questions before telling me who I am and what I'm doing. For everyone else without reading comprehension, my argument which I pretty much outlined in the first post is as follows:

Government is immoral, because it violates self ownership and property rights.

 

[Prolescum]

CruciFiction,

at this point, I think I should ask that you address the criticisms on the first page, including those of myself, Improbable Joe and Master_Ghost_Knight. Without taking account of them, your statement that you strictly adhere to logic and evidence rings a little hollow. You also said

I consider myself a philosopher who is dedicated to reason and evidence

We've had the courtesy to articulate issues we found with your OP, as you requested we do, please grant us the same respect by either acknowledging the flaws and finding a way to fix your assertion, or giving valid reasoning behind their rejection.

Thanks.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

I'm talking about the ownership of ones own body. Perhaps I need a better term to describe it. But you cannot argue against the fact that people own their bodies. Not logically anyway. I mean, who or what else is responsible for making the argument? Surely it is you that is typing at the keyboard. Aren't we responsible for our actions? If we didn't own our bodies we could blame anyone for our actions. I hope I've cleared that part up, it's extremely important to my argument. I think it might be the most important part.

If we can't agree on property rights, then I'll have to move along. So what problem do you have with my argument for property rights (if any)? Do we own our bodies?

You don't understand the difference between "argument" and "assertion". You've ASSERTED 'property rights' while having presented zero argument in favor of them, or having even defined it or set limits on its scope. The same goes for pretty much your whole presentation so far.

For instance, the idea of "property" is generally understood to be an economic term as much as anything else, which is generally ascribed to objects and sometimes non-human animals. The concept is generally NOT used to describe humans, unless in the case of slavery. Since you're using the term in a non-standard sense, you have the burden of explaining your use and then defending it from criticism. You've skipped those steps and have gone straight to treating your definition of "property"(which is vague and currently ill-defined but certainly non-standard) as axiomatic and seek to base further assertions on a primary unfounded assertion.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

I've been waiting for you to ignore it the whole time. Your first post was hostile and just flat wrong. I'm not going to talk to someone that is here to simply berate others. Perhaps you should have followed your own advice and asked some questions before telling me who I am and what I'm doing. For everyone else without reading comprehension,

Altough I don't think my initial and some what hostile heads up was necessarely fair (altough my worries maybe justified). You can still answer them ignoring the roughness.
And I can sumarize the main objection as a response to your answer:

my argument which I pretty much outlined in the first post is as follows:
Government is immoral, because it violates self ownership and property rights.

This isn't an argument, it is a unjustified assertion. You haven't given me any reason why I should be convinced by it, why would you then expect me to be convinced?
From the very start I am quite convinced that you are never going to move past this stage, and I wonder how long will it take for you to come to the same realisation.

 

[CruciFiction]

I have to say I'm kind of surprised that I have to justify property rights. I'm sorry that I didn't take this into account. I'm going to try my best to lay out an argument for property rights. I'm pretty busy right now so I'll get back to you when I can concentrate. I can see that we really need to get down to basics here and I'll do my best to explain myself. Please have patience.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

I have to say I'm kind of surprised that I have to justify property rights. I'm sorry that I didn't take this into account. I'm going to try my best to lay out an argument for property rights. I'm pretty busy right now so I'll get back to you when I can concentrate. I can see that we really need to get down to basics here and I'll do my best to explain myself. Please have patience.

Our patience lasts about as long as you pretty quickly start making an actual step-by-step case, and answer criticism fairly, honestly, and with an eye towards evidence and logic. We'll wait a fair amount of time between posts, and try not to bog you down too heavily. Otherwise, you're better off just letting it go until you're ready to do so. You've got a position that is a minority view, and has been studied and rejected by most of us, and in fact by most/all rational people. It is also grossly ahistorical and ignores human nature. If you're going to take that position, fine and bully for you. If you've got it in your head that you're going to convince anyone else, you've got to do a whole lot more than make a bunch of unfounded assertions in list form, and then slap a "therefore" in front of your concluding unfounded assertion.

You didn't think this was going to be easy, did you? :lol: :lol:

 

[ArthurWilborn]

Nope. This ignores anything resembling context. Killing is moral in some contexts (self-defense, defense of others) and immoral in others. It also is completely uncompromising and black and white. I donate blood, which I consider to be a moral action, but I don't dismiss everyone who does not donate as immoral.

I think we disagree on the definition of murder here. Obviously, self defense isn't murder. We all know that.

Don't conflate murder and killing. Murder is illegal killing; illegal and immoral are not necessarily the same thing. I used "killing" to avoid conflating terms.

You also did not answer my second point; it is moral of me to give blood, but not necessarily immoral for others to choose not to. The opposing action to moral action is not per se immoral.

[quoteRidiculous. There's a wide range of morally neutral actions, and it's perfectly possible for one person to be moral and one immoral at the same time.

Yes, but it must be POSSIBLE for both to be moral at the same time. I think you just missed what I was trying to say there.[/quote]

I fail to see the point of what you said, then. For something to be moral it must be possible; of course it's possible, or else we wouldn't be talking about it. We're discussing morality, not fiction.

Having sex with my wife is moral, therefore it is moral for me to have sex with any woman at any time and any place. Or, if you limit it to the same parties, I can have sex with my wife right in front of the schoolchildren that I teach to show them proper technique. :lol: Listen to yourself speak for half a second. Context is extremely important in determining morality.

Well that's why one is called sex and the other is rape. One is willing the other is unwilling. Sex is morally neutral, rape is morally wrong. Rape is wrong because it violates a persons ownership of their body. You do not own another person, so you cannot do with them as you please. Same goes for murder.

You really need to read my whole paragraph when i type, I tend to make more then one point.

Hoo, boy, you're up against nearly everyone by calling sex morally neutral. Some think it's good, some think it's bad, but almost noone would call it neutral. What about the classic case of honesty - generally held to be moral, but hardly moral when you're sharing secrets or browbeating someone with their faults and mistakes. Saying the exact same, completely accurate words has a vastly different moral context depending on who you say them to.

What if they were using force on someone else? What if they were inflicting damage by some means other then force? What if they were so obviously going to attack me that any delay on my part would result in serious damage to myself? You can't just point and say "They started it!" like some grade schooler.

Third party self defense.

Oversimplification. Just initiating force does not make actions immoral - force is often necessary and justified.

That's not an argument, that's an assertion. You're missing the bits where you connect all these scattered dots. How is government immoral? Under your definitions they could be considered immoral simply because they operate differently then an individual does, which is ridiculous.

You're right, it isn't an argument. But I think my first post as a whole is close enough. Government is immoral because it initiates force on innocent people.

That's moving towards an argument, but it's still just an assertion. How does the government initiate force? Who is "innocent", and how is that defined? How can you demonstrate the initiation of force is unjustified?

I suspect you're building towards some version of "TAXES ARE EVIL". To move this along; do you like roads? Do you use them on a regular basis? How would you propose to fund, set aside land for, build, and maintain these roads through strictly voluntary actions?

 

[Laurens]

States arose independently all over the world whenever populations became large enough. To me this indicates that some form of government is required when populations reach a certain size. A large stateless population, for one reason or another cannot sustain itself as well as a state, otherwise they would be as prevalent and successful as states. I think that it is a fact of nature that egalitarian societies can only function on the level of bands and tribes - when it gets to the level of chiefdoms and states centralised power and organisation becomes a necessity, if it weren't then egalitarian tribes without centralised power would have successfully formed larger egalitarian populations without government.

Also the band/tribe level of society might seem more peaceful and lovely, but without the institutions created for the peaceful resolution of disputes, murder rates are actually quite high:

Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts,such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men,suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.

Source: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html

The Fayu consist of about 400 hunter-gatherers, divided into four clans and wandering over a few hundred square miles. According to their own account, they had formerly numbered about 2,000, but their population had been greatly reduced by Fayu killing Fayu.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel page 266

It might be nice to fantasize about, but I think a stateless society would not be able to sustain itself when the population is above a certain level, and living in smaller groups wouldn't be as lovely as some dreamers would have you believe.

Edit: Is it immoral that the existence of states decreases the level of violence in society? I'd say that was a morally good thing myself.

 

[televator]

^^ Isn't anarchy just full of wonderfully peaceful solutions? :roll:

 

[Laurens]

^^ Isn't anarchy just full of wonderfully peaceful solutions? :roll:

Oh yeah like if I catch my girlfriend cheating, I can just kill the guy, then his brother can come and kill me, and my brother can go and kill him and so on - without any government funded and organised institutions to stop us...

Isn't that just a wonderful way of solving problems?

 

[Dean]

Laurens
*Sigh* I'm not going to attempt to defend CruciFiction's earlier points, but I will say this:

^^ Isn't anarchy just full of wonderfully peaceful solutions? :roll:

Oh yeah like if I catch my girlfriend cheating, I can just kill the guy, then his brother can come and kill me, and my brother can go and kill him and so on - without any government funded and organised institutions to stop us...

Isn't that just a wonderful way of solving problems?

Frankly, I'm struggling to think of alternatives myself. But nonetheless, that's a non-sequiter. I don't see how you can equate no state-organized legal system to "no legal system per se".This is probably the most complex and knotty of subjects in anarchist circles, be it market-based, be it .. Syndicalism, etc. Personally, I feel that a stateless society in which there was some absolutist belief in property rights as some kind of ... inalienable natural right , a la CruciFiction , there would probably be a very high chance of a state (or at least something very similar to one) emerging from that society as a consequence. After all, it's pretty clear to see that such a view could quite easily be usurped by an elite group of people, and misused as a means to control the population.

Most people in the Austrian School seem to advocate for the whole poly-centric legal order idea, e.g. the notion that they collectively refer to as the Common Law, meaning that law would emerge from what legal systems are considered most fair, across a population.

And in that sense, "Property" can be considered an aspect of the Common Law. If you've got any specific questions about this matter, do tell, and I'll respond as best I can.

And to clarify, as I have made abundantly clear before, it appears to me that such a system could not be sustained, since , again , things could end up becoming rather chaotic, even without the intention or foresight of anyone. As I also said in the past, if you could institute some sort of universal standard to enforce basic rights, there would be little need for all of the intermediate stages of organization. Local legal organizations and free-association might make it, but this seems tentative still, and unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future.

Laurens

[ ... ] I think a stateless society would not be able to sustain itself when the population is above a certain level [ ... ]

Hmm. The final resting place of all debates on this topic. First off, couldn't you just as easily levy this argument against states? After all, states have historically proven anything but sustainable. Like all other human institutions , while flawed , they are sustained so long as they continue to be viewed with legitimacy. By contrast, I doubt (though it's hard to tell) that in an anarchist society there would HAVE to be some widespread authoritative belief in the legitimacy of state-less-ness. There would not necessarily have to be some widespread cultural acceptance of Libertarianism, although I guess that would help.

 

[Laurens]

Frankly, I'm struggling to think of alternatives myself. But nonetheless, that's a non-sequiter. I don't see how you can equate no state-organized legal system to "no legal system per se".This is probably the most complex and knotty of subjects in anarchist circles, be it market-based, be it .. Syndicalism, etc. Personally, I feel that a stateless society in which there was some absolutist belief in property rights as some kind of ... inalienable natural right , a la CruciFiction , there would probably be a very high chance of a state (or at least something very similar to one) emerging from that society as a consequence. After all, it's pretty clear to see that such a view could quite easily be usurped by an elite group of people, and misused as a means to control the population.

My object to this notion of inalienable property rights - which I raised in another topic, would be as follows:

Supposing I legitimately became extremely rich through my own hard labour. The money I'd earn would be my property which no one has the right to remove from me via taxation and other means, correct? Supposing I decided to buy up all the stocks and manufacturers of, say penicillin, in the entire country - this would then be quite legitimately my property to do with as I see fit. So what if I decided that with my newly acquired property I wanted to stop the manufacture and halt the distribution of penicillin in the country? What happens to my inalienable property rights then? Do they trump the rights of the masses to acquire penicillin easily?

I could even start to use penicillin to blackmail people and so on.

If no one has a right to dictate what I'm supposed to do with my own property, then how could such a situation be dealt with?

Hmm. The final resting place of all debates on this topic. First off, couldn't you just as easily levy this argument against states? After all, states have historically proven anything but sustainable. Like all other human institutions , while flawed , they are sustained so long as they continue to be viewed with legitimacy. By contrast, I doubt (though it's hard to tell) that in an anarchist society there would HAVE to be some widespread authoritative belief in the legitimacy of state-less-ness. There would not necessarily have to be some widespread cultural acceptance of Libertarianism, although I guess that would help.

Well I agree that many states do collapse once they start to push hard at certain boundaries (I keep meaning to buy Jared Diamond's book on the subject). My point was that from an evolutionary perspective it would seem that societies that lack centralised power can only function as small populations, it seems that once a certain level of population is reached, centralized power becomes necessary or else that society would be replaced or engulfed by another society that does have centralized power. If this were not the case then we'd see from history that societies lacking centralized power could withhold large populations, fend of threats from other societies, and function just as well as states with centralized power - the fact that we don't would indicate that centralized power is a better method of living in large groups than anarchy at least from an evolutionary perspective.

 

[g0dh4x]

Anarchy ftw!

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

 

[televator]

My object to this notion of inalienable property rights - which I raised in another topic, would be as follows:

Supposing I legitimately became extremely rich through my own hard labour. The money I'd earn would be my property which no one has the right to remove from me via taxation and other means, correct? Supposing I decided to buy up all the stocks and manufacturers of, say penicillin, in the entire country - this would then be quite legitimately my property to do with as I see fit. So what if I decided that with my newly acquired property I wanted to stop the manufacture and halt the distribution of penicillin in the country? What happens to my inalienable property rights then? Do they trump the rights of the masses to acquire penicillin easily?

I could even start to use penicillin to blackmail people and so on.

If no one has a right to dictate what I'm supposed to do with my own property, then how could such a situation be dealt with?

No, see there's this magic stuff called "self regulation" that will instantly fix that...or something of the sort...just close your eyes and believe! Suddenly, the same folks chasing the self interest profit motive will choose to totally contradict and compromise that pursuit. Cognitive dissonance be damned!

Another angle may be competition in the form of other upstart companies trying to fill in the demand for penicillin...but you're the big fish...Maybe you totally own the right to produce penicillin outright and any company that dares to steal what's rightfully your (bought) idea might get an order to cease production via a rather generously sized, militarized, private security firm... It's natural law in an anarchy anyway, so it's your call.

Asking the monkeys to control the Zoo and/or seeing which monkey brought the most guns to a business conflict...I'm sure all the lands will bask in everlasting peace as a result.