ok thank you for conveying to me the creative explanation.

If you're just going to look at it from a marxist perspective then aren't all employers parasites? If he's a marxist or has that kind of weird perspective then sure he can have that interpretation but most average americans wouldn't call anyone who employs a maid a parasite. I don't even know what we're arguing here.

If this were actually real the rich guy has given that family a huge pay raise and probably taken them out of poverty. But nah he's a parasite.

They can't even wash dishes, they can't drive themselves, so they leech off the poor family's labor. So both are parasites."

Yeahhhh that seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Maybe there's a translational issue, but it's just not really making sense to me. It would imply that if I were, say, to pay you $500 to wash my dishes that I would be the parasite. "Parasite" isn't the same thing as useless or lazy.

It's an incredibly naive reading to think that 'parasite' refers only to the poor family, and not - perhaps especially so - the rich one too (to say nothing of the cellar dwellers).

In science, a parasitic relationship is one where one group lives off of another and it's harmful to that other group... there's not mutually beneficial. I don't quite understand how the rich family are parasites on the poor one. You'll need to explain that to me. I agree they were quite rude and classist at points, but I don't understand how they were parasites.

Alright its been a few months since I saw this film so I'll do my best to remember.

As far as I can remember, the downfall of the poor family began when they attempted to eliminate the other poor couple in the basement. They seemed to be doing fine up until then. In other words, there just wasn't unity with their socio-economic class. Once the infighting began, it all started to unravel. Additionally, the poor family is definitely craftier than the rich family. As mentioned, the rich dad in particular is condescending and especially with that remark about how poor people smell the rich really don't come off well. So yeah - if only class unity could have been established the proletariat could have reached their goals was the message that I remember believing the director was trying to convey.

I also left the movie unsympathetic for the poor family given all they did.

Just as with alcohol, drugs or automatic weapons, you can surely have them and use them, but is it legal or illegal depends on the sovereign state you are in. And that will have consequences.

I understand countries have policies towards bitcoin, but enforcement is an entirely different issue. Strictly speaking, bitcoin doesn't require governments to sign off on it. Someone can send a transaction from Pakistan to Nepal (despite both countries banning it) because the transaction never relies on the governments or banks or anything to "approve" or sign off on it. This is huge. The transaction cannot be reversed or intercepted either.

Governments can shut down bank accounts. They can de-bank you or limit where your money is allowed to flow. They can reverse transactions between bank accounts even if the transaction somehow went through. Governments can also shut down brokerage accounts and go after companies that provide these services.

Governments and corporations are made of people too. The real power of a government institutions comes from the fact that people also support them and obey the rules. And then "the people" aren't as unified as many want to depict them.

I am talking about the common good of humanity. If you support 24/7 surveillance and believe that "only wrong-doers need to be worried" then you're just not on the side of 'the people.' I understand that governments are made of people, but this isn't the sense that I mean it. I'm not speaking strictly literally.

I'd say that there are worrying phenomena, these kinds of vicious circles in society going around without a clear culprit or a designer / mastermind behind them. We can blame some actor for them and create this elaborate nefarious plan they have, but very seldom is there any kind of true conspiracy.

You're going to need to be a little more specific because I'm not sure what you're talking about here.

Actually, the middlemen are there. They aren't just so visibile. For example, you still need:

a) secure and reliable internet connections
b) a working global payment system
c) all agreements between sovereign states and laws that make the above possible.

In the 15th Century the Medici's and the Fuggers could handle international transactions simply by sending a family member to foreign countries to serve as the trustworthy banker there.

It actually is possible to send bitcoin without an internet connection. The technical side of it is beyond me, but people have sent bitcoin transactions through high frequency radios, mesh networks, and satellite. Bitcoin is the global payment system. It is a currency and a network. There is no agreement between governments that needs to make this possible.

Oh, you think there aren't equivalent investments anymore of need of similar centralization? Or think that the financial system will take care of it by itself?

You need to read what I was actually saying earlier. I never said that the era of all that is centralized is over. I didn't make that claim. I just said that in the past decade exciting opportunities involving decentralization are in development and some are in active use. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution society has been geared towards centralization, how could you not be excited for a new paradigm potentially emerging? I'm not saying everything is going to be decentralized, but lets just keep our minds open. Decentralization offers many advantages and acts as a hedge against totalitarianism.

I'm not sure we are swinging into decentralization. Might be the opposite.

We are potentially swinging into decentralization, but this is an ongoing battle as governments and corporations attempt to further centralize power and use technology to monitor citizens. I don't know who will win: maybe government, maybe corporations, or maybe the people.

Surveillance of the masses is now totally possible with ever more detail that was unheard of earlier.

Absolutely.

That of course leads to a society where you simply don't talk politics to anyone. Or perhaps only to your friends in a safe environment. Which is more or less the way it was in the Soviet Union.

I agree.

Interesting, that could be something which naturally tends to happen when there is a major war.

Yes, especially in the case of a war which poses an existential risk to the state.

Does that suggest they are essential figures in history or culturally?

I'm not entire sure what you mean by that, but Lincoln and FDR are among the most influential and favored Presidents in the US.

The issue is that when there isn't centralized power, the lack of this can have a lot of consequences.

Yes, and a lot of more small-gov't types are fine with the roads and some of that major infrastructure being left to the government. Of course centralization has played a huge role in the development of this country, but in modern times we're at a unique point where technology has developed to potentially give us better solutions.

For the past 10 years we've had a decentralized currency not tied to any state. The average lifespan of a currency is something like 27 years. It is immune from hyper-inflation (or even inflation) and it is impossible to seize/confiscate (of course you can always hold a gun to someone's head and do it but you can't just close their account like you could a bank and cut them off from their money.) You can send it to anyone else in the world and it's immune from interception.

We're seeing more tech like this. Our economy is increasingly becoming peer to peer with the rise of Uber and Airbnb, and with this tech we're pushing the envelope even further with the possibility of cutting out the company entirely and going directly peer to peer with basically no fees going to the middleman. We're really seeing a boom in this space and it's exciting.

I understand that in the 1950s we needed a centralizer to build the highways. But it's 2020 now. The world is increasingly digital, and governments and intelligence agencies are well aware of this and have used to it further centralize power and keep tabs on their citizens like never before. The banks and the intelligence communities here in the US work hand in hand so any debit or credit card you use has a data trail which does not belong to you, the user. Your own internet use belongs to your internet service provider which, again, is not yours.

We're just at a neat point in history where the pendulum is starting to swing the other way towards decentralization after around 150 years of it swinging towards centralization beginning with the industrial revolution.

Why desperately cling for the old ways?

I'm reading a book about primitive warfare right now and interestingly in many of these primitive societies, in particular the native americans, the warfare was necessary because it was how young men would advance in the society. Nobody would respect a man who hadn't been to war and he wouldn't be able to lead hunting parties or advance to positions of responsibility.

But, the point hereabouts seems to me to be about when is war justified?

That's a really difficult question that philosophers have been trying to answer for ages and I personally do not know.

So, what's left is cooperation, yes or what is (at least nowadays) most rational?

Well, the US is able to wage long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so I wouldn't call war "too expensive." Ideally everyone would cooperate but in real-world circumstances this just hasn't been the case or it hasn't been possible.

I am not saying that war is inherently rational. I'm just saying we need to judge its rationality in relation to some goal. Very often the stated goal is national security, but there's been so many wars in history that it's impossible to account for all of the leaders motivations. Often stated motivations can't be totally trusted or they're not the whole truth.

I feel like you're just using the economic definition of "rational" here which is concerned with, well, economics.

The philosophic notion of rationality is a little more elusive. One way of defining it would be something like "hey, if I want X then how do I achieve it?" and from there we can begin to give reasons or evidence. This would be called a hypothetical imperative and it's a more constricted sense in that reason/rationality is always considered in relation to an end. If someone doesn't share your end then it can be difficult to discussion rationality.

To put it more concretely, if someone just doesn't value peace or the life of an individual or happiness then war might make sense for them. If someone values, say, instilling military values in a generation of the youth or the expansion of an ethnic group then war might make perfect sense to them.

What I'm saying here is that you need to make a more expansive definition of rationality if you want to make your point stronger.

I'm not even a Democrat and I'd be a little outraged if Bloomberg managed to buy the Primary away from Sanders. Bloomberg seems to be climbing at least on betting sites where he's at around 25% in second place where Sanders stands at around 45%. It's amazing how much Biden has fallen.

If I had to give my best guess about this I'd have to go with love - at least with humanity. I would very much reject any purpose that hinged on rationality or grasping something intellectual.

Furthermore, I believe that Hitler was evil. As certainly the Jews do. Did the Nazis know they were evil?

People can actually knowingly commit evil, at least in the sense that they're fully under the impression that they're doing or about to do is wrong but they do it anyway.

I was just basically saying that the discussion on intersectionality which traditionally focuses on race, class, gender and sometimes disability could be broadened enormously. By only confining the conversation to those few factors we leave out other "oppressed" group traits. The reality is that basically everybody is oppressed on some front. I believe that even if we did have racial, gender, and economic justice we'd still have a very, very long way to go given none of nature's injustice have been "corrected." The world would still be ridiculously unfair.

On the other side, economic conservative argument assumes that people have an almost boundless potential for abilities, making the correct decisions economically, and that circumstances of one's background doesn't make much of a difference if one CHOOSES to be in the correct areas to make money. For example, if people value doctors and financial brokers, then that is where one should be to get the money. Not doing so is simply not choosing correctly.

I'm an economic conservative and this isn't what I believe. If someone argued this I'd think they were naive. Not everyone can be a doctor or a broker. Life is unfair no matter what kind of society you grow up in and not many people have that kind of "boundless potential." You need to make the best of what you've got, and if we're talking about climbing the economic ladder I believe from a pragmatic standpoint that'll often be done over the course of generations and gradually. Only a completely absurd person would declare that someone born poor and someone born into an affluent family have the same possibility to achieve, say, $5M or $10M net worth.

EDIT: Tagged.

You're gonna have to explain that one to me.

I was just trying to broaden the discussion beyond the usual race, class, and gender topics. I don't see any harm in doing that. I mentioned height, charisma, and looks.

I always loved Harrison Bergeron. It was one of the inspirations for the thread, but the topic of the thread moved onto "what else should be included into intersectionality?" basically in a subtle attempt to boil intersectionality down to the individual.

I'm generally not in favor of giving power figures "free reign" even inside a functioning democracy like the US, and I think things generally work better if everyone just stays in their lane. I'm personally more a small government, classical liberal kind of guy. That said, at critical events in US history like the Civil War or the Depression/WWII these "power figures" (in a more modified American sense) or "centralizers" did step up and expand the state and we generally look upon Lincoln and FDR favorably even though they were undoubtedly centralizers who took considerable executive privilege.

Are you really a psychologist, Isaac? That's cool, what area do you work in?

You were testing your convictions on your surroundings, trying to validate them. The benefit you were seeking seems obvious to me, even if you may not be convinced yourself.

I would say that I was living out my principles at the time, which were moral nihilism. I do believe a true moral nihilist - one who actually lives their ideology - is someone to be very careful of. A true moral nihilist would believe that those inbuilt moral ideas are basically illusions either put in place by society or evolution or whatnot.

I believe so too. Which I why I do not agree with the notion that humans are naturally evil.

I do not believe that humans are naturally evil either. I would describe myself as someone who's a little more cynical about human nature, but I definitely wouldn't describe humans as naturally evil. I'd be more inclined to say that humans are inherently more self-interested or maybe self-focused and morally probably more neutral. I definitely wouldn't say that humans are inherently good either.

I also consider one's views towards humanity to be a foundational belief. And by that I mean foundational in the sense that it influences or impacts many other beliefs.

Did Bundy's actions made him a happier person?

Well, we can't look into the man's head, but I'll wager an educated guess that he was probably deeply unhappy.

We're now experiencing difficulty at this notion of "happiness."

From what I understand about a really evil guy like Carl Panzram is that he may have reached this "happy" state if the entire universe burst into flames.

I feel like you're pushing a different notion of happiness though. I feel like you're pushing one that's a little more universal, maybe something more in line with Eudaimonia? I thought I suggested this idea to you earlier but you shot it down.

Happiness is a difficult subject though. Something might make you happy in the short term, or it could be unpleasant in the moment but form a good long-term memory. I would usually view happiness/content as a subjective thing, but I'm not totally closed off to the notion of some sort of Eudaimonic happiness either.

I don't think it is that simple.

A lot of psychopathic behavior can be directly linked to abuses people have endured when they were children, for example.

It's fine, you can doubt this. I've personally experienced this and I make that link when I hear the description of others but neither us have direct access to their mental states; we only have direct access to our own. Especially when I was a moral nihilist in my teens I would just do things because "fuck it" - there was no standard of morality present that I could even ever meaningfully violate.

I do believe that the vast majority of men, in their hearts, know that certain things are absolutely wrong but they just choose to ignore it or deliberately violate it.

I'm well aware that abuse and maltreatment plays a huge role, but ultimately one's troubles are their own.

But he too derived sexual pleasure from his acts, leading us back to the person always pursuing what they think benefit them and deluded perception.

Why is that a deluded perception? It did benefit him. He got off, sexually.

I can respond to the rest later if need be, I just want to focus the discussion.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that article. I enjoy reading Kissinger, his book Diplomacy is one of - if not the greatest - work on the history of diplomacy ever written.

There's a lot I could respond to in your post. I'll just focus on the last question to keep things focused.

My point here is that I’m looking at the idea of power figures within a democratic process. Can they achieve things in that system, does it work against them, and can they destroy and usurp it?

Democracy can absolutely be destroyed and usurped. In the case of Hitler he took power through democratic means, but he used the Constitution to basically exploit a loophole and placed Germany in a state or emergency or a "state of exception" if we're going by the German translation from 1933-1945. There are plenty of other examples throughout history but this one strikes me probably the most blatant in modern memory. Hitler basically hacked Democracy.

There's plenty of other examples. If an activist judge doesn't consider or isn't concerned with legal precedent in establishing their rulings and instead pass down a ruling based on personal judgment or beliefs I think that's basically an act of power.

Putin and Medvedev switch on and off between President and Prime Minister because of some rule on term limits intended to curb the use of individual power but they've found a way to get around it and are now just working on changing that law.

I would generally say that "power" involves going outside of codified institutional norms and this can still be accomplished in a democracy because those rules can either be hacked or worked around or interpreted strangely so we always need to be on guard for this.

EDIT: In terms of declaring a "state of emergency" or a "state of exception" it's a difficult area because it seems to escape legal precedent or established procedures.... It's not a matter of whether there's "really" a threat facing us, only that a threat is perceived. Someone could declare a state of emergency on account of climate change if that clause was still in a Constitution. With Hitler, if it wasn't the Communists it could have been the Jews or bolshevist cosmopolitanism or whatever. If you don't recognize the threat that's on you.

Such as?

Other motivations or drives would be jealousy, hate, a sexual motive, or just the implicit recognition that the life of the victim doesn't matter and that murder could be convenient. I honestly believe the choice to murder in some cases is essentially just someone saying "fuck it" to the universe and moral instruction. I honestly believe that to be the case. They are choosing to turn their back on that. I have had this thought process but obviously on a much smaller scale.

Don't you find it telling that you need to go to the extremest of examples in order to find a fault in my argument?

Most psychologically healthy people conduct their lives in a way that they pursue what they believe to be best for them. However, we are talk about evil here. Lately I have seen a number of interviews from convicted murderers so if you want to talk about evil that seems like a good resource. Most of us just don't encounter evil in everyday, civilized life.... so yes, on some level I am talk about "the exception."

I do think it's a grave mistake to chalk up all evil to ignorance. It would imply to me that you could sit in front of, say, Ted Bundy and explain to him "well if only you knew the wonders of Philosophy and...."

What’s the point of the strength and autonomy of the individual if power isn’t going to be part of it. If individuals can’t rise up through the masses, to aspire to all sorts of unknown potential, then what’s the point of believing in the individual.

I think we can both agree that it is reasonable to be fearful of power. It is also reasonable to fearful of very large power imbalances.

Centralized power residing in, say, a government or a tribe can work out well especially in times of war.That's not really in dispute. But there is always an enormous risk inherent in that. What happens after the threat is gone? What happens after the reforms have been done? Who is there to check them?

There's nothing wrong with people seeking, say, positions of power insofar as they wish to govern fairly and recognize that their actions have serious consequences. If someone is just seeking power for the sake of imposing their will that person is dangerous and not ready to lead.

This is not about Trump but about power and whether we should look at how it works more closely and overcome our fear of it, about whether power can be wielded morally or whether there are benefits in the idea of power.

Good OP - broad topic. There's a lot we can say about power.

The older I get the more I tend to see power as something personal, or more like the assertion of one's personal will over, say, systemic rules or procedure. A very clear example of this would be when Hitler declared a state of emergency upon being elected and suspended the Constitution because there was some supposed existential threat facing the state and in turn he destroyed the institutional, democratic procedures present under the Weimar Republic that would have constrained executive power.

It can also be more crafty and subtle, like when FDR interpreted the neutrality acts in kind of his own personal, unusual way to allow the US to fund China against Japanese aggression by not defining the conflict as a "war." Here FDR didn't destroy the system like Hitler did, but his interpretation of the neutrality acts was basically just him pushing his agenda within a democracy.

It's important not to confuse "power" with simply it's enforcement. For instance, in the US military an enlisted member is required to salute an officer. If he does not, the officer is required to reprimand him. An outsider might see an officer reprimanding an enlisted individual and see it as the officer imposing power, when the officer in reality is required by procedure to do what he is doing. No one is free in this interaction.

Centralized power is always something to be feared, at least on some level. The more centralized and powerful it is the more you should fear it.

Feel free to get a discussion going here and offer your feedback or ask something else. There wasn't much I staunchly disagreed with in your OP so I just thought I'd add a few points.

If, in that moment, he was not convinced his actions would be good for him, why would he have committed his crime?

Glad you asked: I've seen plenty of interviews with murderers and these explanations a couple of the more recent ones were "my mind blanked" and "I just did it" or claiming to be scared or surprised... I believe it's rage in some them and for the very worse they derive enormous pleasure is causing people pain but I haven't too many interviews with these tier of killer. The explanations are varied. One of the last interviews I watched I'd guess the guy had an IQ of around 75 and at that level it just seems like they don't do very much thinking in general. Neither of us inhabit that worldview of having an IQ of like 70-75.

I've only heard a few say that their action was good. Of course an action could be beneficial for someone (say, if they rob and murder someone), but most murderers won't think that action is Good. If a criminal genuinely cannot tell the difference between right and wrong he could plead the insanity defense.

If you're interested there's an interview with Richard Kuklinski on youtube and plenty of material about Ted Bundy on netflix recently.

Why couldn't a serial killer be guided by a flawed perception?

Okay, lets be clear here:
-Everybody has flawed perceptions.
-By "guided" I'm taking that term to be motivated... some killers do seem to be guided by flawed perceptions, but this isn't the case for all of them. In the case of a more evil killer he might sexually get off to his action and he just doesn't care about his victim. That's his motivation - not a flawed perception.

The person you describe doesn't seem like a happy person, nor does he seem to make decisions that would turn him into one. It seems to me he is hopelessly lost.

It's okay to call him "lost" but I would also call him evil.

I am, however, making an educated guess that the persons you describe are unhappy people. I also think I'm correct in that regard.

This is fair to say in, I think the vast majority of cases. I sometimes wonder about Ted Bundy though who was just a severe narcisisst.

It seems like you interpreted the quote I shared earlier as 'every person desires to be a morally good person', but that is not what the quote says and not how I explained it.

Would you care to explain it again? Is it just every person does what they perceive to be good for themselves?

In sum, I'm just saying it's just not right to let rationality (or someone lack of) take center stage when other motivations or drives of action take a much bigger role. I feel like this is such a "philosophy" thing to do - to let rationality take center stage especially when it comes to motivation which is much broader. I feel like we should first and foremost be considering the evidence and then maybe consider the dead 2000+ year old philosopher. Not the other way around. America has a very, very comprehensive body of knowledge when it comes to killers and especially serial killers.

Did the fellow not have some desire to do all those things, thinking it must make him wealthier/happier, etc? Was he not ignorant of the fact that none of his actions contributed to his happiness?

I don't know his exact brain state at the time of the killing. I don't know. He murdered his own grandmother with a baseball bat.... I think it was over $300 which he used to get high. I suppose it's possible he could have been thinking "I am doing this in pursuit of the Good" but I think that's extremely unlikely in view of other factors.

I just don't find it helpful at all to be like "oh well if he only knew eudamonia or whatever or was aware of the existence of, I don't know, higher pleasures.... I'm sorry but it's just babble.

Read about Carl Panzram if you want serious psychological insight into a sadistic serial killer. He wrote a book detailing his thoughts. The man fundamentally hated humanity. He hated the universe and he had a deep-seeded rage. Understanding this misanthropy and rage will take you much further in terms of understanding evil than someone misunderstanding rationality.

I also think it's very questionable to give any sort of universal prescription for what 'happiness' amounts to as if it were just the same for every human being.

The problem is that people's perceptions are hopelessly deluded, ....

The guy knew exactly what he was doing. Not all evil is the result of ignorance.

In the words of Plato; All men desire the Good.

Yesterday I was watching a true crime documentary where a man, after a history of robbing gas stations and stealing from money from his family, beat his loving 80 year old grandmother to death with a baseball bat because she wouldn't give him more money for drugs and then he baldly lied and blamed it on his friend for years.

He wasn't mentally ill and he seemed of at least average intelligence. He mentioned that while he was stealing and robbing gas stations that he will well aware of the path he was going down and continued.

I use to think what you thought.

No they're not. If I held a gun to your head and said "build me a house" I suspect you would do so, regardless of whether the market demanded it. You're treating 'market forces' as if they were some kind of Law of Nature, they're just the result of the economic institutions we've set up. It's perfectly feasible to build houses for all sorts of reasons.

Yes, but this isn't how houses get built in a free society. If you're putting a gun to someone's head or threatening construction crews with jail time you're pretty screwed as a society.

I didn't say you couldn't have an opinion. You've got to realise the gravity of what you're suggesting. There's a man on the street living under a cardboard box - no home, no job, no healthcare. He's starving hungry, probably ill (both physically and mentally) and ten times more likely to die than average. You're telling him that he can't have a little help from the man buying his second yacht because you 'reckon' in your completely lay interpretation of complex economics, that it would probably be a bad idea in the long run. This despite there existing perfectly well-educated experts who think it would be fine. You've decided to just let the man starve and side with the naysayers because you just 'reckon' they have it right. I'm trying to establish why - given that you're not sufficiently expert to decide, given that alternative , expert opinions are available, given the very high stakes, you've chosen the side you have.

I mean, if you're wrong (and we do nothing), people suffer miserably for no reason. If you're right, but we increase welfare nonetheless, the economy takes a dive (which is does periodically anyway). given that either could be the case, why err on the side of the wealthy?

This really gets to the heart of the matter in your view, and I'm glad you're laying it out it out on the table. I'm being serious here: I like that you're laying it out on the table and in direct way.

If you're just going to point to this man in the cardboard box and say "how could society allow this? "How dare you ignore this in a wealthy society such as the US!" then I don't know if I have an immediate rebuttal to your appeal. You're declaring something an emergency and emergencies shouldn't be questioned they should be solved.

It seems a human rights issue that the government must immediately save them and provide them with hot meals 3x a day + a warm shower and continued maintenance to ensure their house is a-ok and throw in food, support whatever children they have, I mean why not it's for the well-fare of society and billionaires and millionaires have plenty of money.

I'm guessing you're young. I would guess between 18-22, maybe 23.

In reality - and I know you're not to listen because this man's existence constitutes an immediate emergency that must be solved by whatever means necessary - the issue is much, much complex. We need to ask ourselves a number of questions:

1. Why is this man homeless? Where is his family? Why isn't his family accepting him?
2. Is he a drug user? Will he be able to function around other homeless people without being a danger to them?
3. Does he have any pertinent mental health issues that may make him for the time being unfit to live around others?
4. Can he be trusted to keep a home clean and maintain it? Does he have a criminal history?
5. Has he chosen to live on the street because of the freedom it provides and the panhandling opportunities that come with it?
6. What is his previous experience with homeless shelters? What is his previous living history?

I know it sounds cruel, but ask yourself this: Would you take him in? If you worked hard to finally own a house would you trust a few homeless people in your house or would you be okay leaving them unsupervised? If you wouldn't take the risk, is it fair to ask a community to take the same risk?

I don't understand your appeal to autonomy in this one area.

I don't really feel like arguing this one. If you're comparing having to pay for groceries with forcing people into manual labor there isn't a point in me going on about this point and we can drop it. I'm just glad that you're honest about the implications of your argument and you're able to accept the honest consequences. Cool beans - no need for a response here.

no, i go by the majority, straight-forward view described in the stanford article you linked. this is going to me my last post before i go to bed, by the way.

i suspect that religious, law-bound morality and virtue ethics are actually compatible to an extent; they occupy different territory. law-bound religious morality dictates in absolute rules, while virtue theory only seeks to mold people into decent individuals with good moral character. i think anscombe is trying to promote virtue ethics and its development and can do so without it impugning her own religious views.

on the other hand, one can not be a utilitarian or a kantian and a religious christian.... not a serious one, at least.

That's the modus tollens reading. While you may be right - she is obtuse enough to have argued in favour of law-bound morality by on the face of it arguing against it - I think we need to get the modus ponens reading right before we give this more consideration.

just to clarify, if by "law-bound morality" we're referencing that kind of "thou shalt not" morality which has its roots in the old testament then she is definitely not rejecting that. i'm familiar with her theological work and she is definitely not rejecting that. she probably only rejects their secular manifestations.

I read her as rejecting law-bound morality in favour of developing virtue. SO the attack - pp. 2-3 - her antecedents is an attack on the very notion of doing ethics by examining what is good; the section you cite is arguing that "should," "needs," "ought," "must" have been taken out of their usual place in our discourse and forced into an unnatural alliance with words such as "obligation"... And again this harks back to Wittgenstein's warnings about philosophers using words in peculiar ways.

yes, she does reject secular moral systems like utilitarianism and kantian deontology, but she is a catholic so I don't think she rejects all law-bound morality because that would include biblical morality. it's been years since i've read this essay but i remember gleaning it from it that the greeks (originators of virtue ethics) considered the project of morality in a much different sense than later thinkers like kant or mill or like how we consider it today. morality was more about cultivating the right virtue and finding, say, the golden mean between cowardice and rash action in regard to bravery. the greeks held a teleological worldview which christian thinkers would incorporate quite nicely into christian thought in the middle ages.

I always interpreted that teeth-mashing quote you mentioned earlier as just the disjointment in the way ethics was discussed between these two eras (greeks versus modern conception) but my reading could be wrong and again... it's been like a decade.

You're not an expert on these matters, neither am I. So it's absolutely pointless us trying to work out if there are undesirable consequences, or if they outweigh the desirable ones.

So you can't have an opinion on an issue unless you're an expert in it. Okay.

Our job as citizens is not to bash out the evidence (we don't have all the data) it's to decide what to do in the face of the uncertainty.

You're flying in the face of modern philosophy and science here: One of the key premises is that anyone is able to bring evidence and doubts, and that truth doesn't just lie in an appeal to experts.

And why would I? All you've presented is the distinction. No argument at all about why that distinction matters.

Lets start with the duty/slavery idea I mentioned earlier. In the right to life, your duty is just not to kill others. In the right to housing and everything along with it, your duty is now to take care of everyone's home. What if you don't want to? What if you're the only mechanic for miles?

This is just on the practical part, I'll respond to the rest later:

Yes, but there's no shortage of housing which means presumably there's no shortage of people who've chosen to build houses of their own free will. If suddenly no one wants to build houses then we might all have to muck in, but so far there's no evidence that this might be a problem, so why even raise the issue?

Construction functions in regard to market conditions. Houses don't just spring up spontaneously they are built according to demand.

Pfforest mentioned that there was no shortage of homes nation-wide. He mentioned that there were more homes than there are homeless people. This is probably true. The obvious wrench in the plan of putting the homeless in these homes is that these homes are probably owned by somebody. All of the land in the US has been claimed - it is owned by somebody, and very often but not always the owner of the land is the owner of the property. At the very least the land belongs to someone.

It's just not the case that there are open pastures of free, unoccupied and unowned homes out there. If this happened to be the case then I don't really care if homeless people decided to homestead in them. However, the local community probably would because it would plummet their home prices and they'd be faced with a ton of new domestic issues due to this influex of the homeless.

I'm not talking about shelters, I'm talking about housing (and jobs, and decent wages and healthcare etc).

So what are they entitled to? A dorm? A house? Plenty of homeless are either rejected from the shelters due to drugs/mental health or just refuse to live there in the first place because they have to be around other homeless people who, surprise surprise, aren't the most pleasant crowd. What is your solution to these people?

And in another installment of the never ending argument....

Why don't they have a choice in it? Where did I suggest we get slave labour to build houses?

Because rights entail duties. A duty must be fulfilled.

The right to housing or warm water or ventilation or heating entails that there must be someone to do that work, unless you want to add the exception "unless they don't want to."

So which one is it. If you want to add that qualification it's now just a matter of free choice.

There's all sorts of qualifications we can put on rights without abandoning them.

Yeah and we all have a right to a ferrari assuming we can afford one.

You do realize that we have homeless shelters?

No, the topic is 'small government'.

I realize that's the topic of the thread but the topic of our conversation is the nature of rights. We were focusing on housing and sufficient income, but last post you brought up like 8 other different rights that may or may not exist. I'm happy to discuss them individually when I have the time, but we're still sort of on this topic because I feel there's a disconnect.

you cannot simply dismiss these claims on the basis of a simple philosophical position, you're now having to demonstrate that each claim is unsustainable on its own merits.

This is a perfectly valid way to go out it, if you're going to pitch an idea I'm going to try to press you for specifics and when you can't provide those specifics or the details result in undesirable consequences that makes everything worse then maybe, just maybe, you should take that into consideration.

The point is that you've agreed these claims are not denied the status of 'rights' on some categorical philosophical basis.

My go-to argument is concrete examples because it's more straight-forward. I have presented a philosophical distinction between positive and negative rights but you didn't really care. Nonetheless, I'd say that the "duties/slavery" argument that I'm presenting now is a little more abstract in that it's not dealing strictly with implementation.

We agreed that harm to society resulting from satisfying these claims is the only reason to dismiss them. Seeing as the harm to society these claims may cause is still a moot point among experts, that should be the end of it.

When you place the material well-being of society above fairness or free choice you will fail.

This essay is one of my favorites in moral philosophy but it's been years since I've read it. I'm not a catholic - I don't agree with Anscombe on everything - but man that woman was sharp. I highly recommend Human Life, Action, and Ethics which is a compilation of her essays on a variety of topics. I'm pretty sure diving into Anscombe was what boosted my philosophy GPA by like a full number.

I'd be happy to discuss the essay although it's been some time since I've read it and she makes multiple different point throughout the essay. If I remember correctly this paper had a hand in the revival of virtue ethics.

but my point is that at this time there not being enough homes to go around isn’t a problem. There are more than enough homes to go around, if only their ownership were somehow distributed differently.

Yeah, the issue is complicated. I do feel bad for the homeless. Ultimately, though, if a home belongs to someone then the homeless can't just have free-range on it. We also need to keep in mind that drug addiction and mental health issues are rife among the homeless and shelters will turn people away who aren't clean or safe to be around. It's just a very tough issue. Would you be willing to let the homeless into your home? Would you trust them when you're not around?