1) All reality is subjective...thus morality is subjective.
Don't quite agree with the seemingly solipsistic nature of the former part, but am glad to hear the latter part.
To be more specific, I have no problem with epistemological solipsism, but I think metaphysical solipsism goes too far.
So, would it be fair to say that everything you say is your subjective opinion that you happily give out to others in the hope that others will adopt it because that makes for a better world from your perspective, even though you realize that people having a view of how the world should be organized that is different than your own is just as legitimate as your views on how the world should be organized? I suppose I should define legitimate then. If you're a metaphysical solipsist, perhaps you can say only your views are legitimate. If you are not and you also agree morals are subjective, then I think it should be fair to say the legitimacy of each person's views are on equal footing (they are all equally illegitimate, objectively speaking). In either case, the end result is that the legitimacy of your views and morals are irrelevant. What is relevant is that which is physically possible to achieve in the universe as you perceive it and which is best aligned to the way you wish to experience the universe.
But you are just one person and you depend on others for your survival not to mention other more sophisticated pursuits and desires. So people need to come together to form societies and need to come to a consensus on the rules by which these societies operate. But different minds think differently, so the consensus will need to be a compromise from your ideals, otherwise consensus will be practically impossible. So I would say the argument has been reduced to the question of what is the subjective limit that you are not willing to compromise past. A lack of will to compromise can be understood in multiple ways: a willingness to spend considerable time and effort speaking out and educating others to adopt your philosophy (and maybe building technology and tools to make the adoption by others easier) until the compromise becomes acceptable to you; a willingness to use violence or coercion to avoid an unacceptable compromise. The different tactics obviously would be in response to different subjective limits of the compromise. For example, a disagreement with taxation policy might result in some people using the first tactic (complying with law but working hard to change it). However, some people might take a disagreement with another policy (say government officials seizing one's house while citing authority from some dubious law that the homeowner thinks is morally corrupt) as justification for armed resistance. I'm less interested in learning your limits for the second tactic (though that is always fun to learn) but rather more for the first tactic.
My understanding is that your limits are the use of violence and the lack of respect of property rights as you understand them. But I think this is too simplistic of an answer since the world is far more nuanced than that. That is the reason for my fourth and fifth questions in the list of five questions I asked. You say you don't want to be harmed even if you harm others as a justification for why people should never harm other people. But if your goal is to not be harmed, what is the proper thing to do if a policy of not harming people leads to many more people being harmed (including you) compared to the case where the policy was more nuanced rather than so black and white? Certainly wrongful imprisonment is a great horror that should be avoided (and I agree that the balance in the current system is biased towards erring on the side of prison), but there is surely a delicate balance between false positives and false negatives that leads to a more optimal society than erring on the side of no one should go to jail, is there not? And even if the solution is not jail but ostracization, how is that any more fair? An innocent person being unjustly ostracized from all of civilized society is also messed up. It is essentially sentencing them to death since they are unlikely to be able to survive for very long in the wilderness. Property and property rights are also very complicated. How are the commons managed? What is a violation of property rights? Is carcinogenic smoke emitted from my property that is blown into my neighbors property a violation of their property rights? What about greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere that can cause great damage to human lives a long time from now (lives that may not even exist today)? How are decisions regarding these issues determined? If we do have a way of coming to a consensus on these issues, how do we enforce them? Isn't the enforcement of these consensus property rights, which by the way may be different than how a particular individual views their property rights, equivalent to the situation we have today where people complain about the government violating their property rights? What really is the difference between this hypothetical system enforcing the people's global consensus of what property rights are specifically and what we call "government"? Can the enforcement truly be accomplished without any violence or the threat of violence? If the violence is only justified as self-defense against an actor at the moment the actor is violating the property or human rights of a victim, is it not just for the victim to delegate the violence to a third party, who is better trained for the task, to act on their behalf? Does this not just lead back to a system similar to law enforcement agents?
I could go on, but I have already gone on for too long. My point is that things are not black and white and everyone has disagreements about the specifics. I don't disagree that the way society is structured could be much much better than it is today, but I don't think it is as simple as saying the state is the source of all problems and if only we could get rid of it we would be living in a utopia (or even that the world would necessarily be a much better place than it is today). The governments we have today are an emergent phenomena that arise because of the ways humans think. And its not even just because of humans thinking with a utilitarian "greater good" ethical philosophy. Many people who are thinking individualistically, just concerned about making their own lives better, see personal value in organizing society in a way that resembles what we call a state/government. You obviously don't see things this way and envision a society that you think is both more desirable and a system that does not resemble what we would today call a state/government. It is definitely great to keep letting people know what this society you envision is like and how it meets those two criteria. I don't think moral justifications are the best way to change people's minds, since they likely have their subjective morals fairly rigidly set as adults. I think the better way is: point out logical contradictions in their views given their own stated beliefs and values; show how the society you envision could plausibly be more desirable to them given their values; and explain how the system could practically work and how it is different and better than the current system we live under.
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Topic: VOTE DAC Just Got More Interesting (Read 47753 times)
