Contraversial AC Related Thread (TL;PR)

[foal]

I've been busy, but I'll try to get back to addressing some of this stuff now. TBH this thread was getting to be a bit much to deal with, with both pvn and ALawPoker both attacking my arguments for completely different reasons AND both attacking my character for different reasons. pvn comes off malicious. ALaw preachy. both are persistent.
= head explosion.

here I go...

[ALawPoker]

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AND both attacking my character for different reasons

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No one's attacking your character. It's just your posting habits. You seem to think I do this just to be mean or something. Eventually the discussion reaches the point where there's really nothing else to say -- where, for example, really anyone in his right mind should just say "OK, I see what you mean, stopping a drunk driver is not an act of aggression." It was a pretty simple point that you didn't want to let go of because you thought it might point to some hole in our arguments, so you talked about maybe nobody owning the roads and there not being rules against drunk driving. It's a habit of yours to take the conversation in a direction that is counterintuitive to the way humans actually behave, and so it is irrelevant. So sometimes there really is nothing to address other than the fact that your arguments are off point and don't mean anything other than that you have a good imagination. Don't take it personally.

[wtfsvi]

Physically stopping a drunk driver is clearly an act of aggression. Be it justified aggression or not. Do you suggest it's an act of passiveness?

[foal]

ALaw,

I take back what I said about you running out of counter-examples in a different thread. I was getting testy.

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when we make it clear you'll rebut it with the inane idea of no one owning the roads people drive on and there not being rules against drunk driving. That's just not the way humans behave, but you enter it into the discussion as if it's viable just because you said it. If you want to be semantical and nitty, you need to make your hypotheticals less sloppy. That's my biggest problem with what you do.

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First, don’t say “we” as if pvn was making the same argument as you. You said you were trying to clarify his logic, but I think you were making a completely different point.
Second, when dealing with absolutist claims, all examples are fair game, since they apply to all situations.
Third, when I said “what if no one owns the roads?” I was just asking you if you think stopping a drunk driver would be “justified” in that scenario. I never said asking that question proved anything. Though your answer did highlight a difference between our ways of thinking.

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What could I do? It's not my road..

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You could decide that stopping him would do more good than harm (like me).

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If poison burgers or authorized drunk driving would exist in the absence of government, then I would probably be a tyranist.

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I’m not trying to say “this would happen under anarchism, therefore anarchism is bad”! I’m not talking about that at all. I’m trying to discuss the concepts of justification, force and ownership. My original disagreement was that imposing your will on someone does not mean you think you own them, nor does it mean you ‘subscribe to might makes right’.

[ALawPoker]

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Physically stopping a drunk driver is clearly an act of aggression. Be it justified aggression or not. Do you suggest it's an act of passiveness?

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Yes, I already clarified that by "act of aggression" I mean "justified aggression."

Like I already said, sacking a quarterback is an act of literal aggression too, but it has nothing to do with what we mean by "aggression" as it relates to property rights.

[foal]

nietzreznor,

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The goodness of music is relative just like the "right"ness of actions is relative. There's nothing precarious about it. It's just like "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". You can disagree, but you'll have to come up with an objective standard of beauty, which I'll tell you right now is impossible.

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How would it be 'impossible'? You might want to give supporting reasons why this must be so, since there are lots of people who would say that, in fact, Mozart's music is objectively better than, say, Madonna's.

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If I prefer listening to Madonna than Mozart and I make the claim that she’s better how can you prove me wrong?

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Which is the position of a) claiming that there is no 'objective truth', and that what each individual perceives to be true is true for them,

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I didn’t say everything is relative and I didn’t say there’s no objective truth. But certain things are necessarily relative and that includes right and wrong, good and bad, hot and cold, beautiful and ugly, etc. For instance if I man walks into a 25 degree Celsius room and says “it’s hot in here” then the true or falseness of his statement is relative to what sort of temperatures he’s used to, what the temperature outside is, what temperatures he’s most comfortable in and so on. If I say Mozart is good it’s relative to my taste, or what I consider to be good (some people are quite fond of “noise” music).

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The existence of gravity is very strongly supported by evidence. You cannot provide objective evidence for something like "Picasso is a great painter"

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umm... really? I think most people who know anything about art would beg to differ.

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Can you provide evidence for it?

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Look, I'm not making this stuff up. Take a course in formal logic--statements are either true or false, otherwise they aren't statements.

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Ok. I probably wasn’t familiar with the definition of ‘statement’. My bad, I guess.

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You get the idea. Wrong is obviously a relative term. It's relative to what your set of morals happens to be.

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But you still haven't provided any evidence for this claim--it certainly isn't 'obvious' to anyone that has done any serious philosophical study, and the 'wrong' in 'theft is wrong' seems quite compatible with def #3.

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To decide something is right or wrong you need a standard of judgment. That’s what I mean by relative. It’s right or wrong relative to your standard of judgment. If you say “theft is wrong” and I say “why” and you say “because x” it will reveal something about your standard of judgment.

[foal]

Pvn,

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Let's just start all over.

For this thread, we'll just take as a given that:

* right and wrong is subjective

* morals are subjective

* legitimacy is subjective

* anything else you want to stipulate is subjective

Let's assume that all of the above subjectiveness is objective. There's NO DEBATE over whether that stuff is subjective or not. It's a FACT that these things are subjective.

Sound good so far?

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Yes.

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With these assumptions, the only way an interaction between two people can be "legitimate" or "right" or "moral" is if both of those people agree.

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Yes, if both of them have agreed to the same standard of legitimacy. This will often be the case since concepts of legitimacy are socially constructed and often become social norms.

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What follows from here should be fairly intuitive.

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Can you tell me what you mean by this?

[wtfsvi]

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Physically stopping a drunk driver is clearly an act of aggression. Be it justified aggression or not. Do you suggest it's an act of passiveness?

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Yes, I already clarified that by "act of aggression" I mean "justified aggression."

Like I already said, sacking a quarterback is an act of literal aggression too, but it has nothing to do with what we mean by "aggression" as it relates to property rights.

[/ QUOTE ] The matter up for discussion is if this is a justified act of aggression or not, and why it's justified if it is. Then you answer "it's not an act of aggression at all!" because you believe it's justified aggression and therefore you don't like that foal calls it aggression. It doesn't answer the question and it obfuscates the matter.

It's easy to answer why tackling a quarterback is justified aggression, if we stipulate that he owns himself and is allowed to make deals and decisions about himself.

[ALawPoker]

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Physically stopping a drunk driver is clearly an act of aggression. Be it justified aggression or not. Do you suggest it's an act of passiveness?

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Yes, I already clarified that by "act of aggression" I mean "justified aggression."

Like I already said, sacking a quarterback is an act of literal aggression too, but it has nothing to do with what we mean by "aggression" as it relates to property rights.

[/ QUOTE ] The matter up for discussion is if this is a justified act of aggression or not, and why it's justified if it is. Then you answer "it's not an act of aggression at all!" because you believe it's justified aggression and therefore you don't like that foal calls it aggression. It doesn't answer the question and it obfuscates the matter.

It's easy to answer why tackling a quarterback is justified aggression, if we stipulate that he owns himself and is allowed to make deals and decisions about himself.

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It's easy to answer why the drunk driver thing is justified too. Because when you stop him you're assuming that he'd want it if he was in a condition to know what was best for him.

I'm amazed that has to be explained. That's what I was getting at with the scenario of the person, when sober, telling you to never intervene.

If that is the case, then the only legitimate action is letting the person who owns the road deal with it.

[foal]

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No one's attacking your character. It's just your posting habits.

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“You really don't understand the position you love to argue against. (Or at least, you pretend not to because you refuse to concede a point.)” –ALawPoker
“Shameless. Caught red handed, and you continue on.” –pvn

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. You seem to think I do this just to be mean or something.

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I don’t think you’re “mean”, I think you’re preachy and condescending (when you get frustrated).

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where, for example, really anyone in his right mind should just say "OK, I see what you mean, stopping a drunk driver is not an act of aggression." It was a pretty simple point that you didn't want to let go of

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“ALL I said was "you have an odd concept of force." That's my opinion. I didn't say incorrect concept of force. Just odd. I understand it now. Ok? I was giving my personal opinion. And pvn, who I was originally talking to never claimed that stopping the drunk driver wasn't force or aggression, so I've been assuming he considers that it is.” –foal

I already addressed that. Sorry you didn’t understand (or missed it)?