> Would you kill one unwilling person to save a million? a billion? I would not.
Yes, in an instant.
I find your perspective completely self-defeating here. The cost of your way of thinking is a billion lives, minus one. What is the benefit? A sense of self-righteousness? What thing of value are you preserving here, that is worth more than a billion living people?
> [China] is not able to generate important innovations on its own.
Can you cite a source on this? China has (for example) a huge and very productive tech industry. I don't accept the unilateral assertion that they're doing all of this without innovation. If you contend that innovation comes from the market, China agrees. That's why their policy, post-Deng, has been very market-forward. You seem to be asserting that the world must conform to your beliefs, rather than conforming your beliefs to the world. China is plenty innovative, as far as I can tell.
> If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power.
You've got this backwards. Corporations express their power through regulatory capture. The less government there is, the more that corporations fill the power vacuum left in its absence. A corporation can arrest you. It simply lobbies to have the police do it on their behalf. The only way to prevent this is either for the government to have the backbone to keep corporations in their place, or for the government to dissolve entirely—at which point law enforcement is replaced by independent security contractors, and a corporation really CAN arrest you.
> The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power.
I invite you to revisit the history of the Gilded Age, where Pinkertons brutalized union organizers and robber barons had the US Army drop munitions on striking coal miners. Capital tends to exert power through subtler means today, but don't let it fool you. Capitalists still call the shots.
> Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree.
Certainly it's worth picking your battles, especially when the stakes are low. However, the stakes are high when it comes to violence, incarceration, social hierarchy, poverty, etc. I won't concede to let evil happen simply out of respect for someone else's belief that evil things are actually good.
> This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance
I feel like you completely missed my spiel about the flexibility of the concept freedom-based rights. Again, what about the right to freedom from treatable illness? You seem to be starting from the position of "single-payer healthcare shouldn't happen" and working back to a set of "natural" rights which will allow you to justify that.
> Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility.
Now, this is a PERFECT example. Consider lung cancer. While, yes, getting lung cancer is a consequence of the personal choice to smoke, let's consider for a moment why people choose to smoke at all. For one, an extensive campaign of misinformation on the part of tobacco companies to suppress evidence of the harm of smoking. For another, high-stress circumstances tend to push people towards substance use. If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs, and then you went on to use drugs, it would be absurd of me to blame you for that. Similarly, given that poverty (which can be ameliorated through policy) is a significant cause of substance abuse issues, blaming poor people for using substances is another way to deflect blame in service of promoting public inaction.
On top of this, many health issues cannot be prevented at all by lifestyle choices, which in and of itself debunks the idea that health is a "personal responsibility," but we'll set that aside. Even purely through the lens of lifestyle health, the claim that "health is a personal responsibility" is extremely suspect. People ultimately do not always have the power to live a healthy lifestyle. Nobody wants to get sick; everyone tries their best. It's in their best interest, after all. However, corporations and the state do not try their best to ensure people lead health lives. Neither group is nearly so incentivized to look out for the health of individual citizens. In fact, insurance companies profit by withholding treatment, and the insurance lobby is very powerful.
So when I see you sculpting a careful set of "freedom-based rights" designed to specifically protect insurance companies and high-bracket taxpayers at the expense of the most vulnerable people in society—the poor and sick—I gotta say, I grow extremely cynical as to the motivations behind your philosophy. As far as I'm concerned, natural rights theory is the purview of sophists. I'm sure there are some Kantians somewhere in the depths of academia who have put together a rigorous and consistent system of rights-based analysis, but I haven't met them. I tend to only see rights invoked as excuses to permit evil and turn a blind eye.
> What is the benefit? A sense of self-righteousness?
The benefit is adhering to a set of principles that guard against committing atrocities that have already cost countless millions of lives. Unprincipled people driven by utilitarian objectives have done by far the most harm in human history. The Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, the Holodomor, the Great Purge, the Cambodian genocide, on and on the list goes.
There is no mechanism to constrain authority so concentrated. It always goes horribly wrong. Democracies elect genocidal dictators. The only solution that has been proven to work in the medium term is a regard for individual autonomy as sacrosanct and inviolable. I'm concerned at the erosion of this principle.
I would rather have a thousand robber barons and school shooters than one Cultural Revolution. If you're preparing kill an innocent person, no matter your motivation, you're always the bad guy. The ends do not justify the means.
> China is plenty innovative, as far as I can tell.
What ground-breaking innovations that changed the shape of the world originated in China? Usable smart phones? Social media? Ride hailing? Online shopping? Mass-market electric vehicles? Self-landing rockets? That's all just California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou... This isn't a coincidence.
> where Pinkertons brutalized union organizers and robber barons had the US Army drop munitions on striking coal miners
You're citing cases where the state failed to intervene to protect the physical safety it guarantees. Where it failed to uphold the very principles it espouses. These errors are far easier to correct than trying to convince some maniac that their utilitarian calculation is wrong. Also, the harm done by these failures is immeasurably less than the aforementioned genocides.
> I won't concede to let evil happen simply out of respect for someone else's belief that evil things are actually good.
You have to define evil though. Would you care to suggest a definition? It's not a synonym of suffering.
> what about the right to freedom from treatable illness?
What is the source of this right? Why is your right to be treated more important than a doctor's right to choose whom to treat? Does it just stem from some back-of-the-envelope calculation that we're all better off if we use a bit of force to compel others to pay for your care? Can't you use the same sort of math to demand a kidney transplant from an unwilling donor? Or to euthanize the mentally ill? Or those who disagree with you? Where does it stop?
> a consequence of the personal choice to smoke
> poverty is a significant cause of substance abuse issues
These are incompatible statements. People have agency, and the responsibility for an action lies wholly with the agent who took it. The difference between forcing someone to do something and convincing them is of kind (categorical), not of degree.
> People ultimately do not always have the power to live a healthy lifestyle
I agree, but I'm saying that your good luck to be born into a healthy body, with a capable mind, or into a stable family, belongs to you. It is no more within the purview of authority to redistribute than your kidney.
> "freedom-based rights" designed to specifically protect insurance companies and high-bracket taxpayers
They are designed to protect the capable and the fortunate, who exist in all tax brackets, from the shackles you would impose on them. In doing so we safeguard against the disastrous consequences of the concentration of power, and create an environment that fosters the innovation which has benefitted us all.
> The benefit is adhering to a set of principles that guard against committing atrocities that have already cost countless millions of lives.
If your ideology would permit the preventable death of a billion people, I'd say it's very bad at preventing atrocities.
> Unprincipled people driven by utilitarian objectives have done by far the most harm in human history. The Holocaust, [...]
I don't know where you got the idea that the Nazis were utilitarians, but you're completely mistaken. They did not consider the lives of the people they exterminated to have value. If they did, they would not have exterminated them.
In fact, if you examine the actual justifications the Nazis espoused for their crimes, you'll find that they were much more in line with rights theory. Nazis believed that Aryans collectively held certain natural entitlements; that their race had the right and a duty to look out for its own interests above and beyond those of other races. Hence the argument in favour of, for instance, German Lebensaraum. Nazis had plenty of rhetoric justifying the idea that nature had endowed Aryans with a destiny which they were entitled and obliged to fight for, but made no arguments that the Holocaust was somehow intended to minimize net suffering across all of humanity.
> What ground-breaking innovations that changed the shape of the world originated in China?
Rideshare apps aren't a "ground-breaking innovation"; they're a way to squeeze profit from bad independent contracting laws. If you think self-landing rockets are a big leap of innovation, just wait until you hear which country was the first to put a satellite in orbit. And right now, Chinese social media is more innovative than American social media. WeChat is what Elon Musk wishes X could be. TikTok is a cultural juggernaut. Your argument here is weak; innovation can't be measured by "number of domestically famous apps."
As far as Nobel prizes go, China's disproportionate lack of awards is fairly well-studied, and is generally attributed to a particular set of cultural practices in their scientific institutions which conservatively reward and empirical advancements over theoretical ones. I think it'd be a mistake to overgeneralize that. China has put itself at the centre of the global economy; to argue that they must be an economic paper tiger because a lack of Nobel prizes proves they aren't innovative is frankly just denying reality via cherrypicking.
> You're citing cases where the state failed to intervene to protect the physical safety it guarantees.
I'm citing cases where powerful capitalists exerted power to get what they want through violence, either using the state or circumventing it. You can frame that as "the state failing to intervene" if you'd like, but it still proves my point. The people in power call the shots.
> These errors are far easier to correct than trying to convince some maniac that their utilitarian calculation is wrong.
I really don't know where you got this "utilitarian maniac" idea from. People in power don't make decisions according to some set of ethical rules. They act in their own interest and in the interests of their backers. Leaders don't have values—they have power bases. This is a universal constant in democracies, dictatorships, juntas, kingdoms, corporations—every form of organization that exists.
> You have to define evil though. Would you care to suggest a definition?
Sure. Anything that creates a substantial deviation from the greatest possible net amount of well-being in the world. But that's just my opinion.
> What is the source of this right?
I'm not a rights theorist; I don't assert that we have any essential moral rights. But if I were, I'd say that it comes from the categorical imperative, or from my interpretation of nature's intent, or wherever you say rights come from.
> Can't you use the same sort of math to demand a kidney transplant from an unwilling donor?
No, because the math bears out that this is a net negative. Can you imagine the harm that would arise in a society where the state permits people to be abducted and have their kidneys stolen? Society would collapse!
These utilitarian "gotcha" hypotheticals tend to have massively negative utility once you take into account the consequences that such policy would have on society more broadly.
> People have agency and the responsibility for an action lies wholly with the agent who took it
You're dancing right past my argument! Let's backtrack and revisit my injection scenario: If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs, and then you went on to use drugs, it would be absurd of me to blame you for that. Here, I'm chemically affecting your decision-making process. Do you have agency? Sure, in a sense. But I'm still unarguably causing your drug addiction. Because of this, "agency" is not a useful concept in ethical analysis. It's a way to exonerate the actor in question from the consequences of their actions. I caused you to use drugs. If I hadn't acted, you wouldn't be on drugs. My actions caused preventable harm. Given that my choice is the one being scrutinized, your agency does not change any of this.
Similarly, we can't let the fact that people have agency exonerate the state from putting them in positions where they're highly likely to make decisions that are harmful. This is still harmful policy. "Agency" and "responsibility" are ways of obfuscating that.
> They are designed to protect the capable and the fortunate, who exist in all tax brackets, from the shackles you would impose on them. In doing so we safeguard against the disastrous consequences of the concentration of power, and create an environment that fosters the innovation which has benefited us all.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this reads to me as an admission that you're working backwards from a predetermined conclusion and finding principles which support it. You want to preserve the current status quo (because of its perceived propensity to create innovation, which you believe is responsible for prosperity). You attribute the existence of the capitalist status quo to the freedom of "the capable and fortunate" (i.e. capitalists) to conduct business without government intervention in the market. You contrive a set of "natural" rights which permits them to do this and which does not permit anyone to get in their way; a set of freedoms which concentrates power in the hands of capital owners at the expense of the general public.
Also I find it funny that a bump in the top marginal tax rate is considered an "unjust shackle" while denying coverage to people dying of cancer is simply a tragic sacrifice which must be made in the name of freedom. Surely the wealthy could "tragically sacrifice" some pocket change instead.
Not every event that results in a lot of death is an atrocity. An earthquake is not an atrocity. Your ideology already has resulted in atrocities. Who was the last libertarian that perpetrated a genocide?
> I don't know where you got the idea that the Nazis were utilitarians
You missed the rest of the genocides. Are you going to argue that the Cultural Revolution also wasn't utilitarian? What happened to all the sparrows?
Regarding Nazis, their ideology was complicated, but let's take a clear example of medical experiments. Nazi medical experiments are a pure distillation utilitarian ideals. Having united society in a common hatred of a relatively dispensable minority, they proceeded to use this minority as subjects for the most horrific variety of medical experiments. They had good doctors. Many of the outcomes of these experiments have advanced the state of the art, and benefited society as a result.
Nazi society didn't collapse in fear that people would be abducted. It was only Jews, gypsies and other undesirable minorities who were subject to such horrors. Germans were content in the knowledge that their society would benefit, at the small cost of a few Jews. How would you construct an argument that unequivocally refutes this?
> Rideshare apps aren't a "ground-breaking innovation"
Because of them me and countless others haven't bought a car they otherwise would almost certainly have. I'd say that's a pretty big difference.
> Chinese social media is more innovative than American social media
Sure, but who invented social media? I'm not arguing that smaller iterative innovations happen everywhere. I'm arguing that paradigm shifts come from disproportionality few places.
> [China] must be an economic paper tiger
I never argued this. I argued they're an innovative nonstarter. Yes being the world's factory has economic benefits, obviously. You've also not addressed their one-child policy or COVID response.
> powerful capitalists exerted power to get what they want through violence
Yes, and where they were able to do that the state had failed. And our systems of governance should correct for this. This is their primary and only function.
> this "utilitarian maniac" idea from
Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, etc. All of these people were in pursuit of the greater good. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> the consequences that such policy would have on society more broadly.
Only if you keep things simple. If your kidney transplant victims are a minority for whom you hatred has been cultivated, your society will be just fine. The banality of evil.
> If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs
Presumably without my consent, you've already violated the core principle I'm defending. I thought this was apparent. So of course you are responsible - you are an agent, and you used force. This example would not apply if you only suggested, or convinced me to use the drugs. In that case it would be me that is fully responsible.
Do you have a hypothetical that doesn't start with the use of force? As I've said, it's a categorical difference.
> Anything that creates a substantial deviation from the greatest possible net amount of well-being in the world
How do you quantify wellbeing? Is a nuclear accident that kills 1000 just as evil as a nuclear bomb that does the same?
> I don't assert that we have any essential moral rights.
I don't either, exactly. I only assert that we are all moral equals, and each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid. What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?
> an admission that you're working backwards from a predetermined conclusion
I'm working from a 1700s definition of liberty. It was clearly not universally or justly applied in the 1700s, but the definition was good. You owe nothing to no one. You exchange/associate with others on a voluntary basis. Disputes are resolved via due process. Violence is prohibited. I'm all for expanding who is entitled to be thus free. I'm vehemently against eroding the definition.
> the capitalist status quo
Capitalism is just a byproduct of freedom as above described and the right to personal property. I'm not coming out in particular defence of special status for corporations, or even limited liability as a concept. These subjects are, while interesting in their own right, unrelated to individual liberty.
> bump in the top marginal tax rate is considered an "unjust shackle"
It's not about the rate, it's about what the government is permitted to spend it on. Before US v. Butler (1936) the power given to the government to tax and spend on the "general welfare" of the people was limited to what was explicitly written elsewhere in the constitution. After, the government could basically do whatever it wanted as long as it could be construed to be in the interest of the "general welfare". This was the turning point at which our liberty began to erode, and erode it has. If there is one decision I would reverse, this would be it.
Earthquakes aren't preventable. If you could stop an earthquake and you chose not to, that would be an atrocity.
> Who was the last libertarian that perpetrated a genocide?
Augusto Pinochet was a neoliberal, and he committed all kinds of atrocities. The US genocided the Native Americans, and continued to enact genocidal policies up through the 20th century.
And anyway, which atrocities has my ideology—progressive leftism—been responsible for? The USSR was a conservative authoritarian autocracy, not a progressive democracy, so don't go citing the Soviet Union again. I don't know why you're so fixated on them; you bring them up constantly.
> Nazi medical experiments are a pure distillation utilitarian ideals.
Yeah because the Nazi death camps which made them possible generated so much net well-being. No, this is a half-baked caricature of utilitarianism. Consequentialist ethics assesses the goodness of an action based on its consequences, and the consequences of the policies responsible for Josef Mengele's experiments are a massive net negative.
> Because of them me and countless others haven't bought a car
It's just a taxi subsidized by VC money. The fact that it benefits you does not make it an innovation.
> Sure, but who invented social media? I'm not arguing that smaller iterative innovations happen everywhere. I'm arguing that paradigm shifts come from disproportionality few places.
Then why are you citing marginal innovations like "what if we reused rocket boosters" or "what if you could order a taxi with an app instead of a phone call" or "what if electric cars had better marketing"?
Besides, social media wasn't a singular invention; it was the product of a shifting communication ecosystem. The internet led to BBSes, which led to forums and blogs, which led to shared software frameworks for these things, which led to hosted solutions for these things, like Geocities, MySpace, and eventually Facebook. Paradigm shifts ARE smaller innovative iterations. You fail to understand how technological progress happens.
> You've also not addressed their one-child policy or COVID response.
What's to address? They have some bad policies? America has some bad policies too. I'm not here to defend every choice China has ever made; only to debunk the claim that liberal administrations are inherently successful while non-liberal ones are inherently not so.
> Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, etc. All of these people were in pursuit of the greater good.
Literally everyone claims to pursue the greater good. Even you're justifying your case based on the need to create prosperity and prevent atrocities. That doesn't mean they're principled utilitarians.
"Oh you want to stop people from getting hurt? You know who else wanted that? Stalin!" No he didn't. This is a plainly unserious position.
> If your kidney transplant victims are a minority for whom you hatred has been cultivated, your society will be just fine.
Setting aside that a society would have to be doing much better than "just fine" to offset the harm caused by the mass slaughter of minority groups, what's your go-to example of the "just fine" society where minorities are butchered for their organs?
No, this is a sophistic parody of utilitarianism where you just assert that some nominal benefit outweighs the consequences of whatever harm you want to justify. Any ethical system can be twisted in bad faith to justify bad things; the question is whether such bad-faith analyses can be distinguished from proper rigorous ethical analysis. This is the case here: Your supposed utilitarian argument for organ harvesting doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
> Do you have a hypothetical that doesn't start with the use of force?
Sure. Maybe my factory produces a polluting smog that affects your propensity to make whatever choices. Maybe I've bought up all the property in your province except for land next to a toxic swamp that emits mind-affecting gas. Maybe I'm the only corporation who created a vaccine for a deadly new disease, and I choose to add the mind-affecting chemicals to the vaccine because it suits my interests to affect your decisions. There are countless ways that I can push you into making a particular choice without using force.
> I don't either, exactly. I only assert that we are all moral equals, and each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid. What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?
Then how can you condemn a serial killer? His idea of good and evil is just as valid as yours, and apparently you aren't entitled to privilege your own morals.
> I'm working from a 1700s definition of liberty. It was clearly not universally or justly applied in the 1700s, but the definition was good.
The reason this definition was created in the 1700s was because the 1700s was the period where middle-class capital owners were beginning to compete for power with the aristocracy, and they needed an ideology which would justify the consolidation of power in capitalist hands.
> Capitalism is just a byproduct of freedom
Exactly backwards. Your 1700s definition of freedom is a byproduct of capitalism, in the same way that the divine right of kings is an ideological byproduct of feudalism. Capitalism arose because of the shifts in power caused by mercantile imperialism and the industrial revolution. Capitalists created an ideology to justify their own newfound power, and that ideology is liberalism. Power doesn't actually follow ethical rules. Ethics is a toy which philosophers play with to critique society. Power is self-justifying; whoever rules, rules, and the ideology of a ruler is just a set of excuses explaining why they are entitled to have the things they have already taken.
Pinochet may have implemented neoliberal economic policy, but he did not support individual rights. The atrocities themselves are evidence of that. Violent suppression of your critics is hardly liberal. Also Chile was a resource economy. None of the ideas I have advanced preclude state ownership of natural resources. They would only preclude state seizure of resources already owned by citizens.
> The US genocided the Native Americans
Right, American liberty did not extend to native populations. Those rights were reserved for white male citizens. As I've stated, I agree that everyone (adult) should have equal rights. I only disagree with watering down what those rights are.
> Consequentialist ethics assesses the goodness of an action based on its consequences
Isn't this precluded on the ability to predict the future? How do you choose a course of action? How do you weigh the consequences? How do you untangle the medical experiments (which have in fact done a lot of good) from broader Nazi policy? Who do you entrust to make these decisions?
> what if you could order a taxi with an app
As I've said, if it were just taxis a la 2000 I'd have bought a car. My not having bought one is a pretty substantial change to my day-to-day life. Same goes for Tesla. Strictly because of their company millions of people drive electric cars that otherwise would not. They get credit for that.
> They have some bad policies? America has some bad policies too.
Again, since the US state has less power the consequences of its poor choices are less impactful. No one was locking sick Americans in cages during COVID. It would not have been possible without facing armed resistance. The US government also does not have the power to limit the birth rate. Such a suggestion would be career-ending for any politician.
In this whole discussion you've avoided the question: In your world of centralized authority targeting utilitarian interventions, who gets to choose the policy? Who gets to wield the power?
> what's your go-to example of the "just fine" society where minorities are butchered for their organs
Again China, where organs are harvested from Uyghur and Falun Gong routinely. Aside the obvious lack of individual rights protecting these people, how do you figure that there it's impossible to construe a policy which violates an individual's rights that may be a net utilitarian benefit?
For your argument to be sound, you need to prove that its impossible to construct such a policy under any circumstances. For my argument to be sound all I need to do is prove one case where extrajudicially murdering someone is a net good.
You've actually already conceded this, when you suggested that killing one unwilling person to save a million is a good trade. From here it's just a matter of price. How many individuals would you murder to save a million? Two? Two hundred? Two hundred thousand? How do you measure the harm that such policies cause? The Nazis very nearly won the war, they were surely a functional society.
> Literally everyone claims to pursue the greater good
No, that's the whole point. I'm not claiming to pursue any greater good, only create an ecosystem where each person can pursue their own good in peace. Thinking you know the greater good is the pinnacle of hubris.
> Oh you want to stop people from getting hurt? You know who else wanted that? Stalin!
No it's "Oh, you think you know what's best for everyone? And you're willing to use force to get there?"
> polluting smog
Again with the natural rights violations.
> There are countless ways that I can push you into making a particular choice without using force.
Aye, but in all of those cases there are ways to opt out. I can refuse to sell you my non-toxic land. I can refuse to take your vaccine. Offering people more choices is never a constraint.
> Then how can you condemn a serial killer?
Based on his actions? I'd never condemn anyone who simply daydreamed of serial killing. Nor would I condemn someone who killed a willing victim. The evil comes from violating consent.
> 1700s was the period where middle-class capital owners were beginning to compete
Or maybe that oppressed people, longing to be free came to a new world unburdened by existing hierarchies, and created a system founded on their equality?
> Your 1700s definition of freedom is a byproduct of capitalism
Capitalism has been practiced since the dawn of agriculture. If you go fishing and trade your fish for cloth you're practicing capitalism. If you're skilled and lucky enough to accumulate wealth, maybe you'll buy a second and a third fishing boat and hire a crew. On the snowball rolls. All of this is possible only when power, however it derives legitimacy, is used to ensure this process can happen peacefully, and restrains itself to a reasonable tax for this service. Such capitalism has occurred since ancient times.
> Pinochet may have implemented neoliberal economic policy, but he did not support individual rights. [...] Violent suppression of your critics is hardly liberal.
America has often suppressed critics. Take McCarthyism. Take the killing of Fred Hampton. I dunno what to tell you. The touted ethics of liberalism are a flourish to disguise the underlying power structure of capitalism. I've been saying this all along.
> Right, American liberty did not extend to native populations. Those rights were reserved for white male citizens.
The striking minors who were shot at Blair Mountain were white men.
Here's my point: You claim that the ideology of the Soviet Union is inherently bad while the ideology of America is inherently good, but atrocities committed by America are always flaws in an inherently just attempt to aspire to a noble ideological goal, while atrocities committed by the Soviet Union always reveal the inherently ignoble underbelly of their ideology. What you fail to understand is that they are the same. Neither nation is/was an ideological project. They are pragmatic exercises in the management of power by a ruling class.
> In this whole discussion you've avoided the question: In your world of centralized authority targeting utilitarian interventions, who gets to choose the policy? Who gets to wield the power?
You think I'm arguing in favour of centralized authority, but that's backwards. I find that capitalism centralizes authority too much. It concentrates power in the hands of the wealthy. It's undemocratic.
Who do I think should wield power? The public, through democratic means, balanced between local and federal governments and trade unions and mass organizations, unhindered by the unilateral amassed power of wealthy capitalists and police-state dictators alike.
> I'm not claiming to pursue any greater good, only create an ecosystem where each person can pursue their own good in peace.
Then why have you tried to justify your ideology on the basis that it prevents atrocities? If you really don't care about the greater good, you should be able to say, "I don't care if atrocities happen. Preventing mass human suffering isn't my priority."
> Again, since the US state has less power the consequences of its poor choices are less impactful.
The US government cedes power to the private sector. The "death panels" which fearmongers claimed would result from public health care already exist in the form of private insurance assessors.
> The US government also does not have the power to limit the birth rate. Such a suggestion would be career-ending for any politician.
Do they have the power to send people to jail for having miscarriages as part of a push to ban abortion and raise the birth rate? Clearly they do, and Republican voters love it.
> As I've said, if it were just taxis a la 2000 I'd have bought a car.
It IS just taxis, only cheaper, because it was subsidized by VC money.
> Again China, where organs are harvested from Uyghur and Falun Gong routinely.
China is not "just fine." They ethnically cleansed their Uyghur population. They massively suppress political dissent. Authoritarianism is not beneficial to citizens, even if the supply of organs is slightly higher. Besides, murdering healthy people to give their organs to sick people doesn't exactly sound like a way to reduce mortality in your healthcare system.
> No it's "Oh, you think you know what's best for everyone? And you're willing to use force to get there?"
You're willing to use force to support your ideology too. Or do you not believe the use of police force to prevent property crimes is justified?
> how do you figure that there it's impossible to construe a policy which violates an individual's rights that may be a net utilitarian benefit?
I don't. I strongly support violating what you consider to be essential property rights in favour of reducing suffering. Rights are not a cornerstone of my ethics.
> How do you measure the harm that such policies cause?
How do you predict the impact of a policy? With political science, of course.
> The Nazis very nearly won the war, they were surely a functional society.
Nazi leadership was a hot mess. Their nation would have fractured very quickly even if they'd won. And when I say "just fine," I don't mean functional. I mean good. I've already argued through my China point that a functioning society is not necessarily a morally upstanding one.
> Again with the natural rights violations.
If you think disruption of the natural world in ways that harm human life are violations of rights that justify state intervention, surely you must support massive state intervention to stop climate change, right?
> Aye, but in all of those cases there are ways to opt out. I can refuse to sell you my non-toxic land. Offering people more choices is never a constraint.
Choices often take place in constraining ecosystems. Who's to say you have non-toxic land? Maybe you grew up here, and the rent is too high anywhere else to leave. This is how ghettos form. In theory, it's possible to leave the ghetto. In practice, it's so difficult that many people cannot.
> (How can you condemn a serial killer?) Based on his actions? The evil comes from violating consent.
But you said "each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid." In his conception, there's nothing wrong with violating consent. "What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?"
If you take morality seriously, you have to privilege your own morality over other people's. Otherwise you have no standing to condemn and combat evil.
> Or maybe that oppressed people, longing to be free came to a new world unburdened by existing hierarchies, and created a system founded on their equality?
ahaha that's a good one
Yeah existing hierarchies never touched the new world. No indentured servants, no slaves, no poor or rich men. No women. No white or black or indigenous people. Come on.
> Capitalism has been practiced since the dawn of agriculture. If you go fishing and trade your fish for cloth you're practicing capitalism.
No, capitalism is not simply the existence of trade. Or rather, I guess you can define it that way, but then you lose any ability to understand how our society works and how it differs from the societies of centuries past.
In our society, capitalists constitute a ruling class. They derive their power from ownership of assets traded on capital markets. This distinguishes them from aristocratic ruling classes, which owned hereditary assets. Liberal ideology sprang up around the time the industrial revolution was shifting power from hereditary aristocrats to new-money capitalists, and it was created to justify this shift in power.
When I say "created," bear in mind that I don't mean the people who thought it up did so cynically. But all sorts of people come up with all sorts of ideas. The reason liberalism caught on was because it suited the interests of powerful people, and they used their power to magnify the idea. This mirrors how Eastern Bloc dictatorships used communist ideas as propaganda to justify their own legitimacy. Regardless of whether the people who originally thought up the ideas were acting in good faith, those ideas were then used as tools by the ruling classes of particular societies.
This pattern happens all throughout history. One big reason why Protestantism got big was because Martin Luther provided a religious justification for kings to oppose the authority of the pope. The birth of Anglicanism is the clearest example of this pattern, created by Henry VIII simply because he wanted to divorce his wife.
> All of this is possible only when power, however it derives legitimacy, is used to ensure this process can happen peacefully
The "legitimacy" of power is an interesting concept. All power considers itself legitimate. What happens when I declare the power of the American state to be illegitimate? Nothing. It would only matter if I had the firepower to overthrow the state. And at that point, the collapse of the state has nothing to do with legitimacy and everything to do with military might.
And what does "peacefully" mean? Are cops being peaceful when they beat and arrest a criminal?
Yes, in an instant.
I find your perspective completely self-defeating here. The cost of your way of thinking is a billion lives, minus one. What is the benefit? A sense of self-righteousness? What thing of value are you preserving here, that is worth more than a billion living people?
> [China] is not able to generate important innovations on its own.
Can you cite a source on this? China has (for example) a huge and very productive tech industry. I don't accept the unilateral assertion that they're doing all of this without innovation. If you contend that innovation comes from the market, China agrees. That's why their policy, post-Deng, has been very market-forward. You seem to be asserting that the world must conform to your beliefs, rather than conforming your beliefs to the world. China is plenty innovative, as far as I can tell.
> If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power.
You've got this backwards. Corporations express their power through regulatory capture. The less government there is, the more that corporations fill the power vacuum left in its absence. A corporation can arrest you. It simply lobbies to have the police do it on their behalf. The only way to prevent this is either for the government to have the backbone to keep corporations in their place, or for the government to dissolve entirely—at which point law enforcement is replaced by independent security contractors, and a corporation really CAN arrest you.
> The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power.
I invite you to revisit the history of the Gilded Age, where Pinkertons brutalized union organizers and robber barons had the US Army drop munitions on striking coal miners. Capital tends to exert power through subtler means today, but don't let it fool you. Capitalists still call the shots.
> Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree.
Certainly it's worth picking your battles, especially when the stakes are low. However, the stakes are high when it comes to violence, incarceration, social hierarchy, poverty, etc. I won't concede to let evil happen simply out of respect for someone else's belief that evil things are actually good.
> This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance
I feel like you completely missed my spiel about the flexibility of the concept freedom-based rights. Again, what about the right to freedom from treatable illness? You seem to be starting from the position of "single-payer healthcare shouldn't happen" and working back to a set of "natural" rights which will allow you to justify that.
> Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility.
Now, this is a PERFECT example. Consider lung cancer. While, yes, getting lung cancer is a consequence of the personal choice to smoke, let's consider for a moment why people choose to smoke at all. For one, an extensive campaign of misinformation on the part of tobacco companies to suppress evidence of the harm of smoking. For another, high-stress circumstances tend to push people towards substance use. If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs, and then you went on to use drugs, it would be absurd of me to blame you for that. Similarly, given that poverty (which can be ameliorated through policy) is a significant cause of substance abuse issues, blaming poor people for using substances is another way to deflect blame in service of promoting public inaction.
On top of this, many health issues cannot be prevented at all by lifestyle choices, which in and of itself debunks the idea that health is a "personal responsibility," but we'll set that aside. Even purely through the lens of lifestyle health, the claim that "health is a personal responsibility" is extremely suspect. People ultimately do not always have the power to live a healthy lifestyle. Nobody wants to get sick; everyone tries their best. It's in their best interest, after all. However, corporations and the state do not try their best to ensure people lead health lives. Neither group is nearly so incentivized to look out for the health of individual citizens. In fact, insurance companies profit by withholding treatment, and the insurance lobby is very powerful.
So when I see you sculpting a careful set of "freedom-based rights" designed to specifically protect insurance companies and high-bracket taxpayers at the expense of the most vulnerable people in society—the poor and sick—I gotta say, I grow extremely cynical as to the motivations behind your philosophy. As far as I'm concerned, natural rights theory is the purview of sophists. I'm sure there are some Kantians somewhere in the depths of academia who have put together a rigorous and consistent system of rights-based analysis, but I haven't met them. I tend to only see rights invoked as excuses to permit evil and turn a blind eye.