OccultHawk

No matter what anyone says to you your response is 'defend your argument' then when you get an answer you say 'defend your argument' then when you get an answer you say 'defend your argument'. I give you succinct and reasonable replies everytime. If you want page after page of rambling bull s-- (and you obviously do) go read an intro to philosophy text. I'm done with you.

Dotoar

And no matter how many times I ask for you to back up your argument, you persist with repeating the same old hogwash. I want a serious discussion because I'm interested in the subject, and I believe that there are several others here that are as well, and in order to achieve that you have to reason with the aid of logical arguments and not just empty statements. Obviously you don't want a serious discussion. Thanks for playing. Please exit the area.

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Guybrush

I haven't responded to your post yet, Dotoar, because I simply have not had the time to do so. When I have had the time, I've spent it elsewhere. There's just a lot of paragraps to pick apart, so I'll do a more general reply.

A crucial argument you have is that the common good is hard to define. I don't really think it's that hard to define. For example, I think people want to be more resourceful. Since I've stated several times that I care about happiness in the long term, that means that f.ex sustainable management (when possible) of natural resources are good political decisions for the common good. F.ex rather than deplete a population of fish to feed 1 million people per year for 20 years, you can better maximize happiness/common good by sustainably feeding 500 000 people per year for 1000 years.

I see you believe that allowing people to spend money on what they want (vs. taxation) is the best way to ensure everyone's happiness. As you know, I don't agree because in such a society, I don't think people are very good at looking out for their long term happiness, either because they don't know how to or because they are not in a position to because they don't have the means/luxury to care about the long term because of the needs of the short term (ex. cheaper fish now). If everyone just pay for what they want, you get a system of winners and losers and you get a system which f.ex encourages selfishness and depletion of resources for larger short-term benefits - which is obviously not good for society's happiness in the long term.

I think in a well educated democracy, the majority will be able to make the best decisions for society; the common good. If a minority like fishers have to fish less and make less money so that we can feed more people in the future, then I think that can be a good decision if it maximizes happiness for the future. Proper management of resources and ways to avoid tragedies of the commons and so on will only become more important the way the world is headed. Ultimately, the way I see it, you're for a society with winners and losers while I'm for a society that maximizes the amount of winners, now and in the future.

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TheBig3

I hate to agree with Pedestrian, but he's right. In my experience, Anarchists are like people driving off of a cliff. The plans really great until there isn't anything left. Then you're ****ed.

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OccultHawk

If you would rather drive off the cliff than stay on the road you're on then it might be time to boogie down.

TheBig3

....right.

Well what I mean is, if you read up on what the 19th century anarchists believed, it was akin to communism with its unrealistic answers. Marx thought machines would do all the labor, and anarchists thought people would form communal foodstuffs to help out.

Theres no realistic position with either of them. It assumes human nature, like greed and sloth, would not exist but it doesn't explain why.

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OccultHawk

Yeah. I read a book of essays from those guys like Bakunin and all them. I don't care about that fantasyland communist dreamworld crap. By the way, what do you mean by communal foodstuffs? Is that like a Soylent Green thing?

TheBig3

Here, this is from the book I'm reading. I had to cut it off, and pick it up, somewhere so I'll provide the link at the bottom, but pre-WW1 there was a massive anarchist movement in the West. Heres a sample of how it went...

"The Proud Tower"

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Dotoar

Actually, the hardness to define the general happiness of a given population is not my main issue; it's more fundamental than that and we obviously disagree on at least three levels. The first is that I do not approve of the moral stance that it's legitimate to sacrifice any given individual, as in violating his/her fundamental right to life, freedom and property, in order to pursue any given goal that is not chosen by him/herself. The second is that I do not approve of the political stance that it is within the legitimate scope of the government to intervene with the doings of the civil society, regardless of intent, past the mere protection of the fundamental human rights as stated above. The third is that I do not approve of the practical stance that it is a legitimate objective of any government to act in the benefit of any given goal by any kind of means that violate the freedom of the people to achieve that same goal, even if I disregard my two former propositions.

But let's for the sake of discussion bypass all three of them, and consider it a desirable objective for the population P as a whole to pursue a certain level of happiness in a certain area, regardless of the means (and potential side effects, since we've managed to cover these in our calculations of the total yield of happiness). Now, if this alone was the issue it wouldn't really be an issue, since P would seek out for themselves which of the two fishing options they would execute. However, if there's a political implication (which it probably is since it's up for discussion in the first place) fuelled by your highly personal notion that we're facing a dual choice between C1 (feeding 1.000.000 people/year for 20 years) and C2 (feeding 500.000 people/year in 1000 years) and that the rational thing to do is C2, it's actually no longer a question of the happiness of the population P2 (the estimated number of people who will stall at an annual 500.000 in quantity), it's the happiness of exactly one person - you. Assuming that it's in the interest of all of P to choose C2 (including P-P2 who will be sacrified) leads to the conclusion that no governmental action is needed since everyone in P will agree upon C2. On the other hand, assuming that it's only in the interest of P2 to choose C2 leads to the conclusion that governmental action will be needed (since P-P2 will equal P1 who obviously are in favour of C1), and in addition it begs the question of why C2 is justified (and yes, the utilitarist will refer to the maximum yield of happiness, but he'll still have to explain why the happiness of P2 is more valued than P1, and moreover why the happiness of P2 is more valued than the whole of P, and all this while also explaining why the happiness is to be considered a value in itself by which C2 is to be justified at all).

And all this is yet still strictly theoretical, not at all considering such circumstances as the multitude of opinions and values among P as well as alternative food sources, the regrowth of fish and reallocation of fishing areas. If we are to look at the pragmatic prospects of governmental intervention by the best of intentions, we still see how people end up better off in a framework not of central-planned goals but of laws of non-aggression in which they pursue their own goals, albeit not intruding on others equal rights to pursue their own goals. In the case of fishing, if the fishing in a certain area was unregulated, the price for fish caught in that very area would rise as the supply would get more and more scarce, in turn leading the fishermen to other waters as well as motivate fish farmers to breed fish in tanks, or yet other food producers to tip in on the market with what they have to offer in the place of fish. All this happens as we speak with all sorts of commodoties, without any political planning and without any common intent to benefit the masses, but purely by the self-interest of the food producers, be they fishermen or farmers, because the only way for them to gain any personal winning is to satisfy the needs of the common people. And once again, the pricing system gives them information about such thing as the supply of the commodity in question, in this case fish.

All this also applies to your second point, about how people are assumed not to act rationally. That is indeed correct, and that is why I so strongly oppose a system which is so fundamentally dependent of a handful of people doing exactly the right thing, i.e. a big government state. See, what you're saying (and you're certainly not alone on this issue; it's a typically scandinavian notion) is that politicians do our job better than ourselves, which simply isn't true at all. Whenever there is power, there will be abuse of it and anyone who can tip in on the political fringes will do so. That is why we see large corporations spend so much time on lobbying in order to gain their own interests through governmental regulations and subsidies, and in the process stifle the free market. That's probably even more the case in the US, but even small countries like Sweden have their share of vast governmental control over areas which would function much more naturally had they been set free. (I have already given examples about the electricity market).

Furhtermore, it's a common notion among 'intellectuals' (as in supposedly well-read political philosophers, not seldom leaning to the far left) to underestimate the rationality of the common man, and thus leading them to think that they oughta be controlled by firm ideals. Well, any selected common man (or woman) may or may not be thoroughly rational, but one thing is for sure, and that is that he/she is the ultimate measure of his/her own well-being and not even the most elaborate politician will ever be able to fully satisfy, much less evaluate, the needs and fulfillments of that man/woman, especially when he/she is one in 9 millions. And if we go back to the issue of the maximized happiness among a certain population and wether or not it is a righteous ground for any given action (which I, as noted, don't think), the only way to approach such a goal is to set up a framework in which everyone is free to pursue their own happiness, and not by trying to set up a firm notion of the common good. Thus, I want a society in which everyone can be a winner, and you, however well-meaning your intentions, will end up with quite a bunch of losers, both intentional and unintentional, I'm sorry to say.

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Guybrush

I think it's rather naive to believe that supply and demand is all you need to best manage resources or education in society. I'll expand on the fishing example as I still believe it demonstrates how more management is needed and can demonstrate how a democracy benefits from better educated voters.

There are more problems with fishing. One is that our methods for fishing are highly effective and so uncontrolled fishing will generally be "easy" up until the point when the populations are severly reduced and may crash. When the fish has become hard to find, then the fish population may already take decades to recouperate and it may also cause a problem for other species and potential resources that ecologically interact with the fish you've taken out. You could have some kind of domino effect where taxation of one resource reduces the availability of another.

Furthermore, fishing is done with nets which are selective for size; larger fish are taken out while smaller may escape. This is intentional and a way to avoid bycatches, but it also introduces a selection pressure for fish in the taxed population to reach adulthood at a smaller size. If the major risk of death in the environment is being fished and only fish of a certain size are, then the adaptive benefit of being small should be appearant and so that's what happens, fish populations evolve to become smaller. The more you tax a population with nets, the stronger that selection pressure is and the faster you'll see the response which is smaller sized adult fish. To avoid fish populations from becoming smaller, you have to manage fishing in a way which somehow reduces this pressure. For a fish population to evolve back to the general adult size fish had before taxation may take a lot of time.

I'll mention some problems with management by supply and demand the way you suggest. First is that the supply becomes rare when the population crashes and the bulk of damage is already done. A modern day example could be the fishing crisis in Newfoundland where fishing was managed by supply and demand (there are still cod there though, just very small ones). The second is that even if fishermen tried to manage the fish better f.ex by taking out less, without a government which forces them to do so, you get an environment which would in short-term reward the fishermen who would not cooperate with the others. If you have 50 fishermen and 49 of them reduce their fishing in order to secure their jobs in the long term, that simply means more fish for the last guy who does not reduce fishing because he only cares about short-term benefits. Maybe he only plans to fish for a few more years before changing careers so for him, taxation of the population does not pose the same long-term risks. The kind of management suggested by you enables this guy to make money by screwing over the fishermen. Government control is needed to manage fish populations for maximum societal gain over time and in order to make society an environment where such "exploiters" like mentioned above don't thrive (I'd call him an exploiter because he exploits the efforts by the other fishermen to protect the resource by fishing less, but you're free to call him something else).

You write that I don't believe people can act rationally. I don't remember writing that. The reason I want to educate people is because in a democratic society, the people are the ones who ultimately govern and I believe a better common education makes them better suited for that task. Take the evolutionary size reduction of fish as an example - people can't govern fishing with that in mind unless they know about it and understand it when they hear about it. If they've never learned about evolution, they may not understand the problem and so a common education which makes the people understand the principles of evolution may help bettter management of fish resources.

Ultimately, however you feel, I am proposing a democracy which would perpetuate politics because they work and people generally feel happy. I'm not proposing keeping a political system by moral brainwashing or anything like that. If it didn't work and people didn't feel happy and felt there were better alternatives, then they would be free to try and change society in a different political direction.

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