Is there a reason for the mocking tone? Did I mock you somehow?
That aside, how exactly did I set up a straw man?
[quoteuser=“Autolykos”]
Did I mock you somehow?
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No, but you are being a weenie.
[quoteuser=“Autolykos”]
That aside, how exactly did I set up a straw man?
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By typing words out on a computer. In all seriousness, by morphing this,
[quoteuser=“Jackson LaRose”]
If I want some of your stuff, I have to be able to “outcompete” you for that stuff. Otherwise, you just wouldn’t listen to me. If I have the ability to outcompete you (power), than I can successfully appropriate your claimed items.
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into this,
[quoteuser=“Autolykos”]
How does a certain amount of money or other wealth necessarily constitute the ability to “outcompete” *anyone?
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*
That is definitely a non-sequitur which you seem eager to fight with, hence, the straw man.
Really now? How so? And even assuming arguendo that I am being a “weenie”, how does that justify mockery on your part?
So you weren’t claiming that holding a certain amount of money or other wealth necessarily constitutes the ability to “outcompete” someone over his stuff? Then what were you claiming, exactly?
There are other types of power besides economic power. I’m claiming that in a world of scarcity, competition for resources takes place, and that “power” equates to competitive advantage, or rather, the means to achieve a competitive advantage.
“I’m saying that is how the current system operates. Of course, I can’t envision an alternative, but that may be my limitation.”
How is it that in any system might can make right happen when right is a subjective phenomenon? Might can make right happen, but it cannot make right as such. The value judgements surrounding a murder remain the same regardless of whether or not the murderer is actually able to go through with his plan or not. This is one area where I believe that Stirner was very mistaken.
Neodoxy,
I am treating “might makes right” as a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive statement. It’s akin to staing,
“History is written by the victors.”
I’m not sure this is ever mentioned by Stirner, although you could gleen this position from his philosophy in general.
I’ll restate the question, even though it shouldn’t need to be asked, to get the thread back track, because whatever it’s on now is going nowhere.
So, as the original question, why is coercion bad?
Well, is coercion good?
I think I’d lead more to a utilitarian choice than a moral one, does coercion produce anything of substance?
My point was to challenge the very notion of “economic power”. That’s why I focused on it. In retrospect, I understand now why you took that as a straw man - I should’ve been explicit that I was singling out just one kind of what you call “power”. Hope this helps.
I’ll just pop in here to quickly reply to the criticism levelled at my natural law position.
Boniek, your reply mostly consisted of restatements of your own position, e.g. “I do think that right and wrong objectively exist - as our subjective feelings”, “I believe that ‘all ethics are subjective’”. Assuming what you need to prove is hardly a rebuttal.
How does the fact that you can do contrary to “consensus” prove ethical subjectivism? It would only do so if you presupposed that morality was determined by consensus, which was not my position.
Perhaps I was unclear when I wrote that “all values are equal.” Clearly, if no value judgement are objectively better than any others, then they are equally without value. You also completely dodged my argument for ultimate goals.
Jackson LaRose’s reply caricatured me. boniek failed to account for the Aristotelian possibility of a natural end for man. He didn’t address a very old and well-known philosophical position, meaning his argumentation was lacking. Clearly, this inadequacy can be answered, namely by addressing it.
It’s not me who misuses the term “law”, but rather you who misues the term “ethical law”. The point of natural law inquiry is to discover those rules that ought to govern mankind. By the same token, “ethical laws” are those virtues which we should cultivate if we want to achieve “the art of living”, in Aristotelian terms. I repeat, ethical law does not stipulate that you can do no wrong (what would be the point of morality in that case?) and there is no analogue between it and the laws of physics. Asserting that it does is a complete caricature.
Depends on how you define “morals”. I use the word the way it was used by Ayn Rand, namely the way in which you should conduct yourself if you want to survive in the long run. Clearly, on that definition, even Crusoe has a use for morality.
I don’t really get the relevance of existentialism and yoga, which you go on to mention. Again, I will repeat my challenge, which I don’t think any of the ethical subjectivists on this board has addressed.
The ethical relativist denies that any values are superior to others. But by engaging in argumentation, surely the relativist has made a value judgement — that it would be preferable to argue than not. How could he have accomplished this if all values are equal?
The obvious reply to this is that ethical relativism does not maintain that value judgements are impossible — for that would indeed be a self-refuting and hopeless position — but rather that whatever standard of value is employed in making such judgements is necessarily subjective and relative to the individual. That is to say, nothing has value without someone to place a value on it. True enough, but by what standard of value were those values adopted? By virtue of what goal are our goals pursued? And how could any standard of value in the long run be adopted at all if none possess any apparent superiorities?
Of course, they have subjective superiorities in the eyes of human beings, but this begs the question. By what standard of value was the standard of value “I will do that which seems to me superior” adopted?
As Aristotle notes in the Nichomachean Ethics, all human ends are typically justified only by reference to other ends. As a result, like the incessant inquiring of a child, one can pose the question "Why?’ in the face of every human endeavour and after a while seemingly tear away the basis for all motivation. Replying “because I want to” or invoking Humean “passions” is no answer, for the decision to obey one’s passions and urges is itself a choice that demands higher-order justification.
To cease the infinite regress of ends, there must be some self-justifying end-in-itself that makes it possible to evaluate that acting to gain and/or keep any value, any goal, is preferable to not, and which allows the rise of a chain of means and ends in the first place. This ultimate goal cannot be subjectively chosen (for that would beg the question) but is objectively determined by the facts of reality and necessarily beyond one’s choice.
“Why?” → To avoid pain and experience pleasure.
No infinite regress there; if you don’t want to avoid pain nor experience pleasure, we can simply avoid discussing this further.
What if you find pleasure in struggling through and/or experiencing pain?
That just means you get more pleasure out of it than pain, so it’s pursuing pleasure. In fact I can scarcely think of any way of pursuing pleasure that is not similarly roundabout.
@AJ - someone brought up this objection in another thread I was in. Human beings aim at satisfaction and avoid dissatisfaction, according to this position, which is a common one with those trained in economics and I understand why people hold it.
The problem is that “satisfaction” or “pleasure” are not in themselves goals, but rather only states of affairs in which one’s goals are achieved. The specific contents of “satisfaction” are determined in advance by the valuations of the agent. So saying human beings aim at pleasure is essentially saying, “I aim to achieve the achievement of my aims”, perhaps useful for economic analysis but a pointless tautology in ethics, which sets out to prescribe exactly what it is that should satisfy you in the first place.
Well now you’ve changed the goal entirely, and we are back to asking what you mean by “should”? Most pointedly, should for what purpose?
It seems to me, unless you define ethics otherwise, that ethics would be about how to maximize long-term pleasure (and minimize long-term pain).
Are you asking me what I think the ultimate goal of human beings is? I take the Randian position, that man is by nature an acting being involved in a struggle for survival that in itself makes it necessary to act and pursue goals. So man’s life qua survival is his ultimate end.
So if you were to ask, by “what standard of value did you decide to pursue life”, I would say that in order to pursue any standards of value at all, I must pursue life, and in order to pursue life, I must have standards of value. (Life’s basic requirement is goal-directed action.) Life is the ultimate end because the ultimate means. This is why it is a self-justifying goal.
(And self-affirming: the only alternative to pursuing life is pursuing death, which cannot be an ultimate goal and give rise to values because death is merely the absence of all values and all action. So for someone who commits suicide, their immediate goal is a positive existential state where they have a knife in their chest or are breathing carbon monoxide fumes, but their ultimate goal is still necessarily life, otherwise they couldn’t have acted to attain their death. Of course, human beings can err – as well as be ignorant of their natural end – which is what has happened in the case of the person who kills themself. He is a hypocrite who is basically saying, “I want my natural end, but I won’t do what is necessary to attain it.” If you don’t want to train for the race, why bother running it?)
This isn’t merely “survival” in the short-run sense though, because that would also run into the means-end regression problem. Namely, supposing your natural death is at time t, by what standard of value did you decide that you would prefer to die at time t-1? Rather, life as a goal is, in Irfan Khawaja’s words, the pursuit of optimal conditions for the operation of your essence. This goal cannot be boxed into a time frame, since it includes trying to extend your lifespan (perhaps through hobbies, fruitful relationships, diet & exercise, etc.), and so involves long-run as well as short-run calculations.
That’s part of it. Of course, the other part is determining what should constitute pleasure to begin with. Should you be satisfied by torturing animals? Or, if you are, should you take action to change that?
I’m asking for your definition of “should.”
Why invoke a more complicated word than necessary? I would not like to be satisfied by torturing animals, and if I were, I would would probably not like the fact that I got satisfaction from such an activity. In other words, such a preference would likely reduce my long-term happiness (Long version: I’d be less happy due to nagging guilt, and if I could eliminate the guilt I would have a harder time socializing, and if I could satisfy myself with being an animal-torturing hermit I would probably by then be so far removed from what we have evolved to enjoy that there seems very little chance I would get more net satisfaction out of life living that way no matter what else I did).
Why do you want me to define “should”? “Should” means whatever you ought to do. If you are asking me what it is that I think human beings ought to do, I would direct you to my previous answer.
Ah, but human beings will only feel guilty if they are already convinced some injustice has taken place. You are already convinced you shouldn’t torture animals, so you feel guilty and it hampers the satisfaction you get out of life. But what about someone who is totally okay with it? Is there any rational justification for going up to him and saying, “You are doing something immoral and you should stop”, or would we just be blowing smoke?
My answer would be that deriving pleasure from torturing animals is usually a sign of severe psychological problems, and so engaging in it is nurturing a mental state of ill-health that will hamper your ability to survive in the long run (as well as distract from more worthwhile pursuits). So torturing animals is “wrong” (although I am not yet convinced of the existence of such a thing as “animal rights”). And if you asked me why you should care about surviving, I would point out that you already do, or else you would not exist as a living, acting being.
Note: the following is written a bit stream-of-consciousness. I don’t really need your definition of “should” if, as I’m surmising, your final paragraph contains it. I leave the opening comments as is just in case I surmised incorrectly. Otherwise, skip to the bottom for the tl;dr.
Haven’t you realized that there are at least 20 common definitions of “should” and “ought to”? We cannot have a discussion about your claims if you won’t indicate which of those definitions you are using (or give your own).
I’m left to guess at your definition, but from this context I can assume “I shouldn’t do X” = “I would feel guilty if I did X.” Is that accurate, or is there more to it?
From this additional context, I further infer that your definition of “I shouldn’t do X” or “It is immoral to do X” is one of the following:
- “I would feel guilty if I did X, or if I let you do X”
- “I would feel guilty if I did X, and you would feel guilty if you did X”
- Something else
If you clarified that you meant 1, he’d probably not care, or maybe he’d stop because he feels sad that he’s making you feel guilty. If 2, your claim would be contradictory, because you just finished saying he does not feel guilty about it. If 3, what is your definition?
Now there’s a definition I can agree with, except I would remove the part about survival and change it to “it is nurturing a mental state of ill-health that will distract from more worthwhile (read: long-term pleasurable) pursuits.” Long-term pleasure already includes survival as a prerequisite, and mere survival is sufficient to ensure happiness, so I don’t understand the Randian focus on survival in particular.
Note, though, that this is just life advice, self-help, or whatever, so I don’t see any need to call it “ethics.”
“It seems to me, unless you define ethics otherwise, that ethics would be about how to maximize long-term pleasure (and minimize long-term pain).”
Only if you have some pretty opportunistic definitions of pain and pleasure. It’s not at all impossible to conceive of something that is subjectively right and painful. If we tack on that the pleasure the person derives is the same thing as knowing they did the right thing, then you’re right. But knowing you did the right thing or feeling like you acted morally does not necessarly imply that it’s pleasurable.