Morality questions (from a slave's point of view)

[Liberal]

@Malacandra

Hi. I see the debate’s not been standing still, but I got here as quick as I could, and I’ll post what I’ve written for now. Btw Lib I should add that I’m enjoying the discussion very much. A good argument sharpens the wits, and I’m sure you’ll not deny that I can use the exercise.

Your modesty is charming, but I do not believe you are stupid.

Lib, I don’t believe I did perpetrate an ad hominem argument. I said only that I found an argument of yours to be tiresome nitpickery. You, on the other hand, implied that I was incapable of a high-quality intellectual argument. Perhaps that is not an ad hom but only an insult pure and simple. Still, I’m fairly clear on what an ad hom is; and had I said “I choose to ignore your argument, as it has been advanced by a pretentious fathead”, you’d have a case. (Of course, I would also be in violation of the rules of this forum; you have the right not to be called a pretentious fathead in GD, as you do not in the Pit – thanks not to anything accruing to propriety but to how the keepers of order hereabouts mandate that the place shall be run.) You can easily look back and see that I did nothing of the sort.

As I said already, I am willing to drop the matter.

I disagree with your intepretation of the location of the line between where a nation may be considered an active agent and where it may not. Would you respond to Isaiah’s famous prophecy “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation” by harrumphing crustily and saying “What nonsense! A nation cannot lift up a sword nor have one lifted up against it. The logical fallacy makes a mockery of the whole statement”? I doubt it. (Though if you would, you are at least consistent.) But I think that when you say you are arguing from consequences.

But a metaphor is not an argument. Hypostatization invalidates a logical inference, not a poem.

Pace von Mises, if “The worst enemy of clear thinking is the propensity to hypostatize”, I should say it had a close contender in the propensity to drag in over-analysis of simple and rather incidental points. As long as I was discussing the consequences of certain aspects of human rights either being framed or not being framed in the laws of a nation, we might as well have passed over the angel-on-a-pinhead point about whether the nation, or only the nation’s lawmakers, were responsible for the law. This is what I find tiresome and why I protest.

And I protest being overlooked as an individual. Your individuality might not be important to you, but I value mine. Nevertheless, since you insist on framing it in ethical, rather than epistemological terms, I don’t see why I should have to be a part of your nation if I cannot speak for it any more than you can. I mean, why you and not I? Why can I not declare the premises, while you sit quietly and listen? I propose instead that we assign the responsibility for engaging in human praxes to, well, humans.

Thus for a right that guarantees nothing.

But that doesn’t explain why rights ought to guarantee anything. It is a deontic question. I mean, why not thus for a coffee cup that guarantees nothing? Or thus for a sore knee that guarantees nothing?

And as to property, we’re agreed that I have the right to enjoy possession of and title to my wristwatch, and he who takes it from me is a common thief. Or a duly authorised bailiff seizing it from me in payment of debt. Or an agent of the rightful owner restoring it to him after I have (let us hope, in good faith) purchased stolen property. Or a warder relieving me of my personal possessions on my admission to gaol. The rights that accrue to propriety do not trump the right of the State to deprive me of my property under certain circumstances defined by the proper legislative bodies; and the State is also able to do some things with my body, without my leave or even against my will.

But not every seizure of property (rights) is theft. Only initial force or deception is coercive. Responsive and defensive force and fraud are not coercive. You have the right to take back your trinket if you are its owner. Just because a thief has hidden it in his closet does not make him the owner. But if you have coerced another man, then you have in that coercion waived your rights. By usurping his, you have signaled that you have more interest in his than in your own. Therefore, you freely and volitionaly devalue yours.

It seems to me therefore that we have decided what kind of girl we are, and we’re only arguing about the price (or possibly about what kind of girl we should have been).

I do not follow that analogy.

[Napier]

>You are a slave presumably because it was an alternative to being killed. Having accepted slavery as the price of preserving your life, you are morally bound to uphold your end of the bargain.

What?!? Jesus, can you mean this? Any legal system will recognize that an agreed-upon “bargain” has to be reasonably fair and not coerced, and mass enslavements or being born into slavery cannot be reasonably considered “acceptance”.