It seems strange for you to criticize the state on grounds of the moral matters of the NAP/murder if you do not think there is an objective component to morality, because someone else could argue that the morality of the state/statists is simply different from yours
Just because there isn't an objective morality doesn't mean I lack moral character. Other people argue all the time for Statist bullshit. I call statism evil and by my definitions it is. That doesn't make my definitions objectively correct.
Government inefficiency is a valid concern
All bureaucracies are inefficient firms included.
You observe all cultures. Restricting it to just Amazons or just Westerns would be a bad sampling of humanity, don’t you think?
I concur, the reason I keep brining it up is that it seems like you've narrowed what you're willing to consider to the industrialized West.
Multiple, competing moral systems must exist, and we must be able to observe them and question them all in order to make more accurate analyses.
I believe that there will be multiple moral systems practiced in a stateless society. Of course that's speculation. But it makes sense that the religious assholes would live in communities full of other religious assholes and that these assholes might make homosexuality illegal and they may even punish it with death. I wouldn't live in such a community but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't exist. I seriously doubt anarchy will be an all or nothing event for the globe.
If every student gives a different answer on a test, it DOES NOT MEAN there is no answer to the question.
People are wrong all the time, just because there's a question doesn't mean it has one answer.
You’ve admitted in a past post that you don’t believe popular support for an idea validates or invalidates it, so why are you switching that now?
To point out that there is alot of dissent over this kind of thing.
Besides, every time I ask a state-supporter if they agree with the NAP they say yes – they just don’t understand that they are violating it by supporting the state.
Have you heard people advocating glassing the middle east? I have, anyone who thinks that's consistent with the NAP is too stupid to be worth talking to. So there seem to be two options here, either these people don't agree with the NAP or they're stupid beyond hope. I suspect that reality holds a little of column A and a little of column B.
In fact, most people refer to the state/taxation as a “necessary evil,” meaning that they understand the immorality behind the institution – they just have trouble imagining how anything else could actually work, which is why we need to do a better job talking to people with these sorts of concerns.
They also like to refer to their favourite candidate as "the lesser of two evils" and then extrapolate that this makes them somehow not evil. People are stupid and you can't convince them of anything. I'm
still removing the shackles put on my mind by religion and the State and I'm
still finding assumptions that I hold to be true to be unfounded
and these assumptions that I'm shaking have been pointed out to me by people before. People have to want to change, and I don't think many do.
By best I just meant the system that will create the greatest prosperity for the individuals involved
That is my criterion for "best" as well. I agree that given this goal the NAP is the way to go to achieve. But not everyone holds this criterion with any regard. There are those that want to be the boss of others and to them the NAP
is not central to their ethics. Some people are just evil, and evil people rarely consider themselves such.
My claim is that the Vikings would be among the many people around the world who were logically incorrect
This supposes that the Vikings had the same goals as you and I. I don't think they did. They're religion dictated that they had to die in battle to go to the gods.
the NAP is the most logical means of arriving at them, for it creates a path in which you don’t have to deal with the inefficiencies and negative, costly results of extended violence to obtain all of your desires. Of course this all would require a much longer discussion in its own right.
I agree that the NAP provides an egalitarian playing field by which we can all strive to improve ourselves. But I don't think everyone wants to improve themselves and some people just want to be parasites.
but because people are fallible.
They are, and I have my reasons for believing what I do. The NAP is the best option for me, my goals, and how I want to live my life. But I just don't care about what other people do, I used to but I was angry all the time... I gave up trying to save them from themselves. I too think the NAP is the best option, that doesn't mean it is. I'm just as fallible as the next asshole.
We are distinctly different in our reasoning abilities than chimpanzees/bonobos (when chimps figure out how to split an atom or discuss philosophy, I’ll consider taking their advice).
That's what people keep saying but seeing how homo sapien sapien continues to display large amounts of ineptitude I'm questioning whether or not this is true.
While studying them is valuable for numerous reasons, it only informs so much, and there comes a point when you have to deal with humans as what they are: human, and not chimps.
I don't think the distinction is as large as people think. We claim to be intelligent because we've developed extraordinary efficient ways to kill each other. I don't think that's smart I think that's broken. There's been alot of good too, but a good deed doesn't wash out a bad one nor a bad a good.
I'm a bit concerned that this conversation isn't progressing... In each of your responses, you've presented variants of the same rebuttal - "but X disagrees with that morality/property claim" - but don't seem to see why I find this irrelevant.
I think I'm gaining a better understanding of where you come from. It reminds me of Ayn Rand which is where I got my start. I don't think one forum conversation is going to change my mind either, I once thought morality an objective thing I didn't change over night.
I find your claim that the variance is irrelevant, irrelevant do to the fact that goals vary from person to person, and ethics can only be rooted in a goal. When goals vary ethics vary. Given our goals the logical ethics system is one based upon the NAP. But even that isn't a thing that's universal. There are those who arrived at market anarchism, voluntarism, anarcho capitalism (whatever you want to call it) with out thinking of the ethics of it. They're utilitarians.