Intervention to stop genoicde & bloodshed

[liberty_student]

@EvilSocialistFellow

But as stated before, some values are subjective. They can also be objectively determined though; a country’s economic output can be measured by its total Gross Domestic Product. The brutality of a fascist regime can be measured by the number of lives lost. The aggression required to dip your hands into the pocket of Person C is arguably less than the aggression that is being committed against that fellow being tortured every day of his life. But you have a point, and it sticks with me.

Those are measurements, not values. How you value that measurement is subjective.

@EvilSocialistFellow

My point is that it is hard to base an entire economic theorem based on a normative premise that is wrong.

You have to understand what economics is and is not. It is not a social theory.

@EvilSocialistFellow

If the state were to be abolished today, would it be worth the violence if the state was re-established tommorow?

The people who can make that determination are the individuals who have to pay the cost. You cannot figure out “worth” objectively, and the sooner you give up trying to, the sooner you will understand where many of us are coming from. All you are doing is imposing YOUR VALUES on a situation or circumstance. They are not objectively the right or shared values for everyone.

[Micah71381]

@EvilSocialistFellow

But as stated before, some values are subjective. They can also be objectively determined though; a country’s economic output can be measured by its total Gross Domestic Product. The brutality of a fascist regime can be measured by the number of lives lost. The aggression required to dip your hands into the pocket of Person C is arguably less than the aggression that is being committed against that fellow being tortured every day of his life.

Not only does this require objective morality (being able to define in an absolute sense what is more “wrong”) but it also reaquires you to be able to measure the losses in either case which isn’t realistic. The example of tax money that could have gone to cancer treatment is a good example of how these numbers are incalculable and the cost of lives on either side isn’t a number you can come up with. How many people will die because of a war? How many people would have died if the country is just left alone? How many people will still die even though the libertarian country went in and overthrough the dictator? How many people in the libertarian country will die because their economy is suffering? How much money will be redirected from cancer and heart disease research into war money.

The last point is something that never ceses to amaze me. The top killers in the world are heart disease and cancer by far but people are always quicker to put a very disproportionate amount of money into preventing other types of death (murder, war, car accidents, etc.) at the cost of research into preventing those two things. I would assume that this is because people have come to just accept cancer and heart disease as part of life whereas the other things aren’t “part of life” but it bugs me when this happens none the less.

[DrewBrando]

@micah71381

The top killers in the world are heart disease and cancer

And old age.

[Micah71381]

Old age doesn’t actually kill anyone, you just become more susceptible to heart disease and cancer (and everything else). None the less, it all falls into the category of death from health reasons which is defeated by scientific research and not anything that an army or the police can solve.