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Morals obviously exist to you. But I personally dunno who is going to ultimately enforce them. Maybe you can. But then you have a problem because you won’t be around forever. Someone else will have to be convinced morals need upholding and then carry on your job. And then you have yourself a religion. Other than moral objections, is there any other reason why the military is so unappealing to you?
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Yes absolutely. But I can’t say with any kind of certainty whether I would regret joining or not. I also cannot say for sure that if I did regret joining, what my reasons for regretting joining would actually be. I mean…there are so many possibilities. There is also the possibility it would be a terrific place for me where I would excel and find a sense of purpose. I don’t know what the odds of that happening are though. Obviously, I don’t feel they are very significant or else I would have joined. But then again, I still think of joining all the time.
Nobody enforces morals. Morals tell you what is right and what is wrong, and you are free to choose. Or maybe you, like any other moral agent, always know what is right and what is wrong…and choose. Anyway, this is probably overphilosophizing…
Excep that they stand for everything I strongly disapprove of, there are no other reasons =]
Not merely joining. What you may regret is doing what soldiers in a war do…after you did it and can’t undone it.
If violence is in defense against, or in retribution for, aggression, then it is not itself aggression (again, by definition).
Morality is indeed a matter of subjectivity, but not of whim. Anyone who witnesses a killing over, for example, professional jealousy who doesn’t reflexively deem that act as wrong is either rationalizing or has a clinical condition. Anyone who witnesses a man killing another in retaliation for the rape and killing of his daughter will similarly reflexively deem that act as right. That gut instinct is ingrained in our psyche. Since lies within us, it is subjective. But since it is involuntary and intrinsic, it is also natural and more “true” than any other rationalized system of right and wrong one’s reason might come up with.
What I’m asking is: Why should THEY obey YOUR ideal of “efficiency and effectiveness”?
No, for morality to matter, there need only be one’s own natural and involuntary sense of right and wrong, and the inner strength to follow it. People are generally pretty good at following right and wrong (not committing aggression, and punishing aggression when necessary) UNLESS they think they’re in an emergency situation. The state has convinced most of humanity (through public school and mainstream media indoctrination) that society is in a perpetual “lifeboat situation” in which a great many “necessary evils” must be committed by the state, else the “lifeboat” of society will keel over and everybody will drown. Again, this is a lie. More consistent adherence to inner morality would emerge should this lie be exposed.
An optimal situation for efficiency and effectiveness may be self-evident, but would not be self-evident WHY the individual should follow your guidelines.
Morals don’t lead back to God. They lead back to Darwin.
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Morals may tell me one thing and you another thing. I don’t rely on morals to make decisions. Mainly because I don’t think they matter. When I make decisions I try to ask myself “Is this necessary?” “Will it work?” “Is this the most effective and efficient way of achieving my goal?” “If I fail, what are the consequences going to be?” In this way, I am able to usually sidestep the subjective quagmire that is moral reasoning.
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Well, the military isn’t for everyone. And that’s ok.
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Killing, in my mind, is just an action. Now it’s a pretty intense action. It’s an action with serious consequences. But…I don’t think it would be the killing that would give me the most trouble in war (although it certainly wouldn’t always be an easy choice.) I think the hard thing would be…if I got my legs blown off or something and I had to live the rest of my life in a chair. Any kind of serious dismemberment or…who knows what could happen to me. These are often the thoughts that make me feel I would regret joining. But yeah…I’ve killed spiders, I felt nothing. If I could learn to see an adversary as a pest that needed to be dispatched post haste, I’m relatively certain that I wouldn’t feel regret or shame for my actions, as I don’t feel regret or shame for killing a bug. But you never know. If I thought it were a necessary action and the most effective and efficient way to get what I wanted (which would simply be to survive) I think I’d pull the trigger with no problem. The real problem is someone is going to be pointing a gun at me thinking the same damn thing.
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What if an act of aggression is necessary to prevent a future threat?
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Your two examples are very extreme. And so it’s obvious which actions were optimal choices and which were not. For instance, it’s obvious to me that there are many ways to destroy someone’s life besides killing them. Perhaps destroying them psychologically would be a more efficient tool of vengeance. That murderer is not wrong because he killed out of jealousy, but because there were better options open to him that he chose to forsake. And as far as the killing in defense of a loved one, I propose that this action is a sort of extension of self defense and because not as many options were open in terms of how to defend the loved one, it’s obvious that the most effective choice was simply to kill. In other words, killing is meaningless except for the circumstances in which it was committed. And perhaps, by judging one murder to be morally right and another to be morally wrong, you are…avoiding the reality that your values reflect your own personal understanding that one person had a choice and the other less of one.
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No, maybe they wouldn’t. But over time they would be undone by their own ineffectiveness, because that which is ineffective and inefficient eventually fails.
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Again, I think you are assuming that everyone experiences decisions the same way you do. I don’t rely on my emotions to make all my decisions for me. I think that morals are proxies for calculation in much the same way emotions are. I try to be deliberate about my choices. But morality is not a force in my life. I do things because I either feel they will work in my favor or won’t. Usually, my choices tend to mirror the same “moral choices” you would probably make, except that my decisions were arrived at by a different set of calculations. I will admit though, that I have often acted out of emotion, and that usually led me down a road that was not in my favor. Morals just don’t cut it in terms of enforceability and objectively measurable standards and outcomes.
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That’s true, but I think humans are very good self optimizers and as such, they will eventually see that the choices paved by questions of efficiency and effectiveness get them what they want more often than morals do. Now…what they want…is a totally different question.
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Darwin was trying to avoid being hung on the crucifix by the church when he published his findings. Now, I’ve seen Michael Shermer make his argument for morality being a naturally ingrained human instinct also. But then he goes on to say the emotions are calculation proxies. Proxies that basically try to determine what is and is not in the interest of the one experiencing the emotion. So…since the way you describe morality sounds a lot like the way one might describe emotion, I am led to believe that in fact morals and emotions are part of the same internal decision making process that serves to facilitate decisions that are optimal for survival. So, in other words, the real considerations are ones of effectiveness and efficiency, but they appear, for the sake of expedience, as something other than what they are. The problem with morals and emotions, however, is that they are entirely subjective. And so I still maintain that the true calculation of logic and of cause and effect which I think of in terms of efficiency and effectiveness are not only the superior means of calculation, but also the level of calculation residing over morals and emotions.
Well, yes. That’s a serious risk in exchange for zero returns. The downside is mutilation or death…the upside is ? But I wasn’t focusing in self-preservation.
So did I. But you can’t be seriously thinking that killing spiders is similar to killing people…Just like drinking a pint of water in 3 seconds is different from drinking a pint of vodka in 3 seconds.
Maybe. Or perhaps, some time after you killed your adversaries, or people who actually were not your adversaries, you’d start to think that what you did was a oh-not-so-great idea.
Fine. But that’s an external threat. You may find that you do have a conscience but only after you do something you regret. And your own conscience is not something you can easily get rid of by shooting it dead…
I’m just sayin’
It is only moral if heading off a clear and present threat. Anything else doesn’t pass the disgust test.
For all you know, there wasn’t.
If that were true, statism would have already been consumed by its own inefficiencies long ago.
Yes you do. You use your reason to decide the means; but your emotions decide the ultimate ends of all your decisions for you. How else could it be? You use your reason to discern “I want A because it will get me B” and “I want B because it will get me C”. But when this process comes down to your ultimate goals, of what use is your reason? Is your reason going to help you decide, “I want this ultimate goal, because it will get me this other thing”? Then it’s not an ultimate goal. Like David Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions. Some passions are less hot than others; but they are passions nonetheless. I’ll take your word for it that you are as conscience-free as you profess (I don’t know, maybe you have Aspberger’s, like the other moral nihilist I debated here). But most people do have consciences. The moral choices those people make are indeed ultimately motivated by a passion. However, your own striving for “effectiveness” is just as much ultimately motivated by a passion as its ultimate end: a primal urge for self-preservation and self-promotion.
Can you produce it, I have never seen or signed anything of the sort…
This goes back to my philospohy on freedom, you are free or NOT, there is no mostly, if you mostly control your property you have some functioning body with the reserve right to take it, if this is the case you do not own your property…
The problem is when the militiary I pay for is used for something I do not like, I am not allowed to pull my financial support from it, hence coercion…
Now you advocate Democracy too? You are turning very socialist Jacob, you want protection welfare, and a democratic majority to justify it…
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I think of myself as having signed the contract by agreeing to live here. So, what you’re basically saying is that you’re special and the rules don’t apply to you.
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Life is not ones and zeros. It’s percentages. Mostly free implies that you own and control most of your property but not all. Like, say, 90 percent would be good enough for me. Right now, it feels like we only control about 40 percent, what with all the taxes and regulations and what not. So…reduce the income tax, get rid of other taxes. That would be fine for me. If it’s not ok with you, then fine. But I’m not gonna fight for your extra ten percent. You have to do that yourself.
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Then leave the country if you hate it so much. Or just accept that…you’re not special and if everyone else wants something…dammit they’re gonna get it and they will note your disagreement, but clearly you were not in the majority.
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Ofcourse I advocate democracy. Just like I advocate capitalism. Capitalist economies are democracies. Because the individual players get a little say in how everything is run. With enough individual players thinking and doing the same thing, you’ve got serious power. You don’t understand socialism very well so I will tell you how it works. With socialism, instead of having each individual player matter, you now just have a centralized planning board that regulates producers and consumers by determining arbitrarily who gets what. It’s nothing like a democracy. Now, democracies can hand over the keys to a socialist regime but a democratic government can never also be a socialist government. The problem with this anarchist philosophy is that it supposes that the people who don’t want what the majority wants are so special that they deserve special treatment. I don’t just want a publicly funded military, so do most people. And I am a big believer in markets, I see the same majority forces working in markets to determine which companies are good and which companies suck. If you can’t see the parallels then…I think you’re a fool.
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So now we get to define clear and present danger.
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In the example you gave, there definitely was another choice.
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Exactly, so clearly “statism” or some mild form of it is not entirely ineffective.
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I think you’ve got it backwards. First I have emotions…then those go away and I reason things out. Effectiveness is not a question of passions. It is a question of, as you said “what is ultimately going to happen here and is this in my interest?” Morals don’t ask those questions. They simply say “right” or “wrong” which are poor substitutes for deliberated, calm, patient reasoning.
It’s not that I am conscience free. It’s that almost everything I do is totally intentional, so I don’t feel guilty or regret for things I’ve calmly and patiently decided to do. Guilt is something people feel when they think what they did was unnecessary or ineffective. I rarely feel that way at all. I do sometimes feel shame when I fail. But not guilt.
I do think you’re right when you say we’re all pulled along by primal urges. But why make a primal urge like morals and emotions the foundation of your personal philosophy? Why not make it the higher level of dispassionate reasoning only humans are capable of. Animals have emotions, they even, some of them, show signs of what you might call morality. But no animal, besides humans, can reason at our level. At least not that I know of.
so your daydreams are relevant how?
you mean, “leave your property if you hate thieves that steal from your property so much”. you say this because saying things is easy, and thinking requires just too much effort…
p.s. capitalist economies are not democracies, and you are a fool, no debate, its not something we vote on.
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The upside is a sense of purpose, belonging, the feeling of having proudly served my country, the knowledge that I overcame an obstacle that not everyone tries to overcome, being in peak conditioning, being capable of dispatching human life at a whim…that’s real power. There are lots of upsides to military service.
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Killing is killing is killing. You are extinguishing life. Now…I can relate better to another human being better than I can a spider, so when I see another human die, I imagine myself dying and this causes me to feel emotions like sadness or anxiety or whatever. But death is a universal phenomenon whereby that which once moved no longer does. We are not the only thing that dies.
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I know an adversary when I see one. And if I were deployed in Iraq right now, I’d have to be on my toes because anyone can be an adversary. I mean…I read this thing about these officers who got court martialed for murdering a family or something. And I couldn’t believe it. How can you send these guys in there and expect them to tell non-combatant from combatant in a totally chaotic mess?? If I felt bad, I would ask myself “was it necessary?” If they were going to kill me if I didn’t kill them, it was necessary in my book.
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See, I do have a conscience. But if I made the choice to go fight, I must have reasoned out what I was getting myself into. I’m not going to go over into a battlefield without having made up my mind that if I have to kill, I’ll do it without hesitation. I mean…I know how to choke people to death now. I actually feel more comfortable that I have that knowledge and if I ever have to kill someone with a choke, I’ll do it. But only if I think it’s necessary. How can I feel guilty for doing something that was necessary? The answer is “I can’t.”
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Because I’m part of the same group you’re part of. Or maybe not since you think you’re special.
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I’m just saying why don’t you think your ideas of anarchy never happen? Because no one really wants it. If people wanted it to happen, it would’ve happened by now. And if you really really wanted it, you would’ve left this country that you see as just being totally fascistic and socialistic and whatever else.
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I think they are. Lol, you’re entitled to your opinion.
jacob, why are you so strident when it is clear you are clueless?
Explain your accusation.
i thought it was pretty simple, im calling you a moron. go and research the topics youre arguing before forming your opinion, because reading you repeat the same shite arguments as every uneducated tool is tedious.
How so, I am claiming property ownership, you are claiming cooperative ownership of property, between the individual and the state, this implied contract you are talking about is a falsehood…
I am not asking you to fight for me, hell I am not asking a multi billion dollar miliraty to either, I am asking to be left alone on my property, because it is MINE, I do not see how a majority has some special claim over my property, can you explain this? The majority did not pay for my property, I did, where is the legitimacy of the claim you make?
We are back at point one, where is the legitimacy over my property that you claim the government has…
What you are claiming amounts to me kicking your door in, as my neighbor and eating your food, saying you agreed to this because you live next to me…
Prove it, I contend that they are not, a free market economy (to quote Liberty Student) is a panarchy in Pudyt’s proposal…
Majorities do not make or break firms…
I will paraphrase the founders, I do nto remember which…
When the people learn they can vote for the largest benefit of the public purse freedom will die…
Socialism is the product of democracy…
The problem with anyone that wants government is they do not care about individual liberty when it comes to getting what they want, you do not care if someone is bled dry to pay for your military, so long as you have it, regardless if it is robbery, you can advocate it as necessity…
I do not want special treatment, I do not want my money stolen from me for something I do not benefit from…
Since you cannot see where your parallel fails I will help you…
In a free market there is always an option, the free market does not say, if you do not like the only grocery store we have, you must leave the market, it says create your own store, invest in someone who will or grow your own food, the fallacy of your argument is leaving is the option, government is the monopoly and you cannot own your land in the area our government holds jurisdiction over, lest you will be subject to our arbitrary rules on how you live your life. Back to the grocery store, if we are talking in reference to a town, your argument mounts up to claim, if you want to eat you have to shop at our grocery store, if you do not want to shop at our grocery store, sell your home and leave town, or we will imprison you…
Well, I think you’re a moron and to be honest, if Austrian economics inevitably descends into anarchy, I might reconsider recommending this school of thought to anyone because it clearly will lead to abstract moralistic thinking that is just about as practical as anarchy is. I came on here expecting to be enlightened. Instead, I am disgusted.
You do need me to fight for you because without a majority of people who believe Austrian economics makes sense, YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO GET THE CHANGES YOU WANT. And so far, not only have you done a very poor job of convincing me your ideas are right, you’ve actually done the opposite and convinced me austrian economics descends into anarchy where everyone thinks they own everything they pay for and where they have this right to not participate in any shape or form in productive society. And…to be honest, seriously, I’m totally heartbroken because when I read Economics in One Lesson, I thought it was genius. Hazlitt never said anything about anarchy. He just said that markets need to be free. Now you think people need to be totally free. Totally free to do whatever they want without consequence of fear of reprisal. I’m…beyond words right now, this is totally disconcerting. I am almost ashamed to admit that I was going to try to figure out how to go to a school where I was going to get to be a part of austrian economics. But I don’t want people thinking I’m an anarchist.
why are you strawmanning austrian economics? youre pathetic.