Still looking for answers from "anarcho-capitalists"

[bkholdem]

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Why do you think that wanting to control other people is horrible?

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Because in my subjective view it feels horrible to be controlled and feels horrible when people make attempts at controlling me.

I do not object to people entering into agreements when one person voluntarilly controls the other person as long as the controllee can withdraw consent at will however.

I think it is fine and not horrible for someone who wishes to be controlled to pair up with someone who wishes to control them.

Technically speaking I don't think it's horrible to 'want' to control other people, I think it's horrible to take steps to control people coercively or to support and advocate for others to do so (save the extreme case objections we already had the self defense discussion, when your ready to have the discussion about the 'exact' amount of food to feed a hungry person and the 'exact' frequency, etc ad naseum let me know)

[GMontag]

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The components most certainly do act. In what way is a white blood cell attacking a foreign body, or a nerve cell contracting a muscle cell any less purposeful than anything a human does? Perhaps you'd like to illuminate your definition of "purposeful".

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I mean 'acting' and 'purposeful' in the praxeological sense (when discussing moral agency, I'm not sure what other sense there could be). There are lots of praxeology resources here.

Honestly, if it isn't obvious that your cells aren't 'acting' in anything like the same way that you as a complete moral agent and rational being act, then nothing I say is going to make a difference.

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If it's so obvious, it should be easy to point out the actual difference. As far as I can tell, there is none. Both are acting. The only reason you see a difference is because you are abstracting the human to a black box, but are arbitrarily refusing to do so for the cell.

[BCPVP]

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This is a irrelevant point. Anytime an individual is "acting", it can only act insofar as the component organs that compose the individual act, yet you seem to have no problem treating the individual as a whole. Collectives are no different than individuals, just another level of abstraction up. The insistence of looking at the situation at one arbitrary level of abstraction (that of the human being) is irrational.

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The components that compose an individual don't act though--they aren't purposeful creatures using means to attain ends. I am not trying to sidestep the fact that individuals, too, are collections of chemicals, atoms, etc--but it isn't relevant when discussing action (i.e., purposeful behavior). When discussing motives, ethics, goals, etc, individuals (and not the components that compose them, nor the collectives that the individuals compose) are the primary actors.

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The components most certainly do act. In what way is a white blood cell attacking a foreign body, or a nerve cell contracting a muscle cell any less purposeful than anything a human does? Perhaps you'd like to illuminate your definition of "purposeful".

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Human Action. Don't worry, only one page.

[vhawk01]

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Well, the point is, human beings ARE a collective, and they act.

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agreed

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They just aren't a collective of parts that act, they are a collective of parts that don't. The ability to act appears to be some sort of emergent property.

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more or less agreed

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So, now you add together a bunch of parts that CAN act, and it lends intuitive creedence to the argument that groups of people can in fact act.

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well, of course groups of people can act--when a group of people is acting, it is the case that all the individual actors in the group are acting, and we speak of it as if the group was acting

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It by no means proves or demonstrates this. It just lends intuitive support.

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true

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The fact that my lungs aren't actors is BAD for your argument, not good for it.

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i think thats why jogger and gmontag brought it up in the first place. it really wasn't a part of my initial argument, and any comments i made were with the intent to show that the analogy (group->individual, individual->components) had some glaring differences.

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Ok, then it seems like I was misinterpreting what you guys were trying to say. It seemed like you, pvn and bkholdem were trying to demonstrate the fact that groups do not act by making the argument that cells and parts of acting humans do not act. This seemed glaringly wrong to me. I think I agree with your main point, just not the way that I thought you were going about demonstrating it.

Apologies.

[vhawk01]

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This is a irrelevant point. Anytime an individual is "acting", it can only act insofar as the component organs that compose the individual act, yet you seem to have no problem treating the individual as a whole. Collectives are no different than individuals, just another level of abstraction up. The insistence of looking at the situation at one arbitrary level of abstraction (that of the human being) is irrational.

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The components that compose an individual don't act though--they aren't purposeful creatures using means to attain ends. I am not trying to sidestep the fact that individuals, too, are collections of chemicals, atoms, etc--but it isn't relevant when discussing action (i.e., purposeful behavior). When discussing motives, ethics, goals, etc, individuals (and not the components that compose them, nor the collectives that the individuals compose) are the primary actors.

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The components most certainly do act. In what way is a white blood cell attacking a foreign body, or a nerve cell contracting a muscle cell any less purposeful than anything a human does? Perhaps you'd like to illuminate your definition of "purposeful".

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This is only really true if the most rigid biological determinism holds. Is that really the argument you want to make?

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Um, yes? I'm actually surprised that people on this forum would deny such an obvious fact and resort to mysticism.

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The difference is that white blood cells don't have any choice or will. They do things, but they don't ACT. Act, as they are using it, carries an implicit moral component. White cells dont act any more than rocks act to fall down a hill. Some people think people are different than this.

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Some people are silly.

Free will and choice are nothing more than artifacts of abstraction. A human being has free will only when we look at it as a black box, when we look at just the inputs and outputs, and declare whatever is inside to be making choices and deciding. Once you go down a layer of abstraction, and consider all the organs and tissues and cells, there is no will on the part of the human. Only outputs caused by the interactions of the internals. The same is true for a cell or for a collective. When you look at it from the appropriate level of abstraction, it has a will and can act.

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I don't necessarily disagree, but I think your argument isn't very conducive to discussion. It renders the result of every argument: "...because they cannot do otherwise." Which sort of makes things dull.

[nietzreznor]

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If it's so obvious, it should be easy to point out the actual difference. As far as I can tell, there is none. Both are acting. The only reason you see a difference is because you are abstracting the human to a black box, but are arbitrarily refusing to do so for the cell.

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Well, some obvious differences are free will and purposeful behavior (which humans have but eg blood cells don't) but from reading your above response you regard free will as somehow "mystical", so, as I said, I don't think there is anything I could say that you would find convincing.

[nietzreznor]

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You were right in the first place: we do have to agree to disagree, because I do not hold this belief as axiomatic. (I believe it's usually true, but the difference ("usually") is everything.)

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To be honest, I am not sure that I would say I hold that belief to be 'axiomatic' either (I'm not sure there's any ethical belief I hold axiomatically). But I think I give "the ends don't justify the means" a lot more weight than "do what works" (but this is partly because in general using 'good' means will have good consequences).

[GMontag]

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This is a irrelevant point. Anytime an individual is "acting", it can only act insofar as the component organs that compose the individual act, yet you seem to have no problem treating the individual as a whole. Collectives are no different than individuals, just another level of abstraction up. The insistence of looking at the situation at one arbitrary level of abstraction (that of the human being) is irrational.

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The components that compose an individual don't act though--they aren't purposeful creatures using means to attain ends. I am not trying to sidestep the fact that individuals, too, are collections of chemicals, atoms, etc--but it isn't relevant when discussing action (i.e., purposeful behavior). When discussing motives, ethics, goals, etc, individuals (and not the components that compose them, nor the collectives that the individuals compose) are the primary actors.

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The components most certainly do act. In what way is a white blood cell attacking a foreign body, or a nerve cell contracting a muscle cell any less purposeful than anything a human does? Perhaps you'd like to illuminate your definition of "purposeful".

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Human Action. Don't worry, only one page.

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Ok, so how by the definition of "Action means the employment of means for the attainment of ends." do white blood cells not act? They employ the means of attacking the virus for the attainment of destroying the virus. It certainly seems to fit the definition to me. The behaviour is purposeful in that it is designed to effect an end.

[GMontag]

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This is a irrelevant point. Anytime an individual is "acting", it can only act insofar as the component organs that compose the individual act, yet you seem to have no problem treating the individual as a whole. Collectives are no different than individuals, just another level of abstraction up. The insistence of looking at the situation at one arbitrary level of abstraction (that of the human being) is irrational.

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The components that compose an individual don't act though--they aren't purposeful creatures using means to attain ends. I am not trying to sidestep the fact that individuals, too, are collections of chemicals, atoms, etc--but it isn't relevant when discussing action (i.e., purposeful behavior). When discussing motives, ethics, goals, etc, individuals (and not the components that compose them, nor the collectives that the individuals compose) are the primary actors.

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The components most certainly do act. In what way is a white blood cell attacking a foreign body, or a nerve cell contracting a muscle cell any less purposeful than anything a human does? Perhaps you'd like to illuminate your definition of "purposeful".

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This is only really true if the most rigid biological determinism holds. Is that really the argument you want to make?

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Um, yes? I'm actually surprised that people on this forum would deny such an obvious fact and resort to mysticism.

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The difference is that white blood cells don't have any choice or will. They do things, but they don't ACT. Act, as they are using it, carries an implicit moral component. White cells dont act any more than rocks act to fall down a hill. Some people think people are different than this.

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Some people are silly.

Free will and choice are nothing more than artifacts of abstraction. A human being has free will only when we look at it as a black box, when we look at just the inputs and outputs, and declare whatever is inside to be making choices and deciding. Once you go down a layer of abstraction, and consider all the organs and tissues and cells, there is no will on the part of the human. Only outputs caused by the interactions of the internals. The same is true for a cell or for a collective. When you look at it from the appropriate level of abstraction, it has a will and can act.

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I don't necessarily disagree, but I think your argument isn't very conducive to discussion. It renders the result of every argument: "...because they cannot do otherwise." Which sort of makes things dull.

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That would only be true if you for some reason insisted on always considering only the systems barest components. It is perfectly valid to consider the system at different levels of abstraction. For example, consider a chess-playing computer program. In the context of treating the program as a whole entity, it makes perfect sense to talk about the program having a will and deciding between different moves to make. Just as when considering a white blood cell as an entity, it makes sense to talk about it deciding whether or not a virus is something that needs to be attacked and then acting on that decision.

[GMontag]

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If it's so obvious, it should be easy to point out the actual difference. As far as I can tell, there is none. Both are acting. The only reason you see a difference is because you are abstracting the human to a black box, but are arbitrarily refusing to do so for the cell.

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Well, some obvious differences are free will and purposeful behavior (which humans have but eg blood cells don't) but from reading your above response you regard free will as somehow "mystical", so, as I said, I don't think there is anything I could say that you would find convincing.

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I didn't say free will was mystical, quite the contrary. However, the belief that some magical force separate from physical determinism imbues humans and humans alone with free will *is* mystical. It is equivalent to postulating the existence of a soul.

However, I still cannot figure out why you insist that a blood cell's actions are not purposeful. It takes an action towards an end, how can that be anything *but* purposeful?