[moorobot]

[ QUOTE ]
This is why it was a great example. In terms of the % chance of your dying, the gun with a million chambers and the plane flying overhead are no different. Why is one bad and the other not bad when they both represent another individual's actions posing the exact same threat?

Perhaps the difference is that there's no other point to aiming a gun at someone, but that brings back the question of where to draw the line. How much utility must an individual derrive before it justifies violating someone else's rights? Who gets to decide how much utility is actually gained? Where's the line between the pointlessness of the gun and the utility of flying the plane?

The line is active vs passive. Me buying a burger drives up the price of burgers for you (though by an inperceptable amount) but that is a passive "loss" to you. Activly stealing from someone is different, just like pointing a gun a someone and pulling the trigger is different from flying a plane near them.

[/ QUOTE ] Your presuppositions here: that the ethicality or acceptability of an action is to be determined by intention (your active vs passive distinction), not consequences, and, furthermore, that the law (or "social norms" or whatever anarchists want to call the rules of human interaction) should reflect this, are debatable, to say the least. Although I'm certainly not a consequentalist of the strict sort, intentionalism of the strict sort is just nutty to me; far crazier than strict consequentalism. If you are killed by somebody crashing a plane into your house or a disease that spread because I think that state required vaccinations are immoral because they are "aggressive acts preventing passive acts", it does you no good if someone puts on your gravestone "Thanks to the wise law of the land,was killed by a passive act, not an aggressive one".