From there everything else is near trivial to demonstrate. — boethius

Sir, you exaggerate!

I haven't finished a first skim, but it is a heroic effort. I find myself largely in agreement with your conclusions, though I arrive at them in other ways sometimes. Give me a couple of days to read more slowly, and have a think, and I will come back with some questions and thoughts.

Meanwhile, I think you could do with a bit of editing here and there - Your English is excellent but there are one or two places where the meaning could be more clear. I could make some suggestions on that level at some stage if you would like.

First the commitment to non-contradiction, to both avoid contradicting oneself in belief — boethius

Do you mean blocking the ability to see both sides of an issue? Give some examples please. I don't read lengthy essays.

Do you mean blocking the ability to see both sides of an issue? Give some examples please. I don't read lengthy essays. — jgill

If I understand correctly you are a mathematician, so the meaning of avoiding contradiction here is just in the basic sense as appears in mathematics of not believing something and it's negation simultaneously.

In my belief system here this principle is assumed to be true. Of course, it can't be proven as the principle of non contradiction needs to be assumed to prove anything.

Which is of course a pretty common, if not standard, starting point for logic and philosophizing. Where I then depart this common starting point is arguing that this principle of non contradiction is an ethical commitment. It's functionally a should statement, "I shouldn't contradict myself", and requires some effort to implement (i.e. putting in the effort to resolve contradictions when one realizes, intuits or then has some measure of doubt about things).

Someone with your skills I think can easily see this argument as the principle of non-contradiction reducing the configuration space of acceptable actions and beliefs (to remove contradictory ones) and an ethical theory meaning any restricting of this space whatsoever.

Point of all of this is to "boot-up", so to speak, an ethical purpose which is to avoid contradiction and search for the truth. Finding truth is then further restriction on all possible actions and beliefs. Again, the search for truth is a pretty common, if not standard, starting point for philosophical enquiry, but what seems obvious to me, but does not seem standard and common, is that it is clearly an ethical doctrine.

This whole point of view is summarized (for someone with your advanced knowledge of logic) by viewing is statements as also should statements.

If I argue to you that something "is" I am at the same time arguing that "you should believe it".

Sir, you exaggerate! — unenlightened

I'm just trying to keep with the tradition set forth by Kant and Wittgenstein and most of our philosophical forebears of continuously claiming that everything argued is both trivially true and they've also essentially completed the philosophical project for all intents and purposes. I'm pretty traditional at the end of the day (using conventional languages rather than made up ones and doing many conventional things like sitting rather than standing on chairs).

I haven't finished a first skim, but it is a heroic effort. I find myself largely in agreement with your conclusions, though I arrive at them in other ways sometimes. Give me a couple of days to read more slowly, and have a think, and I will come back with some questions and thoughts. — unenlightened

I am deeply humbled by your interest.

And yes, nearly all of my conclusions are really common beliefs, that mostly go without needing to argue, such as "avoid contradiction" and "don't torture children for fun", and the point of the work is mainly to answer why exactly do I believe such things.

The point is not so much that others, such as yourself, would need to believe the have the same philosophical foundation to arrive at the same conclusions, but could perhaps appreciate that I have mine and you have yours. "Feeling strongly these are good things" in a spiritual sense I would view as equally legitimate foundation for things like don't murder children for fun.

An analogy would be that you don't need set theory or category theory or some other logical foundation for numbers in order to count, and you can also argue that counting is what's fundamental and you can't actually do any logic at all without counting to begin with (how do you count braces to be sure squiggly brackets are closed if you don't know how to count yet?), so these foundations of numbers and counting are actually going in a circle (in this case we start with the idea we shouldn't torture babies to death for fun and then get back to the same place).

So criticism from this sort of angle I would view as perfectly fair.

That being said, having a logical foundation for counting and numbers, such as set theory, we can both appreciate that such things do exist but they are also needed to solve certain complicated problems (far beyond addition and multiplication of finite numbers).

For my purposes in The Cromulomicon, these certain complicated things are political coalition building.

I have my beliefs set out here and you have similar beliefs for different reasons, can we therefore form a coalition? To what end and to what extent.

Meanwhile, I think you could do with a bit of editing here and there - Your English is excellent but there are one or two places where the meaning could be more clear. I could make some suggestions on that level at some stage if you would like. — unenlightened

Again thanks for appreciation and definitely there's a lot of mistakes.

I originally published this essay in a rush because I discovered I had all this international money laundering evidence and believed I could be murdered at anytime.

Feel very welcome to send me corrections either just posting here, maybe in big blocks, or PM me if you think it would just clutter the space here.

Fixing all the mistakes is on my list of things to do.

What's the solution to the Trolley Problem? What's your take on abortion? Should the state compel me to save the life of a drowning child, if I can do so with no risk to myself?

↪boethius What's the solution to the Trolley Problem? What's your take on abortion? Should the state compel me to save the life of a drowning child, if I can do so with no risk to myself? — RogueAI

The point of the first volume, The Book of Croms, as the name suggests, is focused on proposing a foundation for political action and coordination, such a foundation being a proposed ethical theory upon which to form agreement.

To continue with the mathematical analogy above, The Book of Croms is essentially an existence proof that answers to political questions can have a coherent and unique answer. There need only be one such unique answer to form the basis of political collaboration, such as avoiding the destruction of the entire planet, and that is essentially the only specific moral dilemma taken up in The Book of Croms. If we can agree on that then presumably we should ensure we have taken measures to avoid that happening, but it also stands to reason coherent and unique answers may exist to other political questions as well and so, at the outset we can presumably further agree to try to find such answers to those, or any, political dilemma.

The writing plan here being subsequent volumes devoted to more and more specific political problems and proposed solutions. Volumes with hopefully equally self-explanatory names: Vol.2 - The Nonage Works, Vol.3 - Cromulous the Destroyer, Vol. 4 - Crombobbolous, Vol.5 - The Garden of Crombo, and then finally the final Vol.6 - Cromtography.

The issues you raise would be dealt with in Cromtography, which aims to place all such moral landmarks on the map, so to speak.

So, I'd of course prefer to wait until Cromtography is complete to discuss the answers to your queries, but as that may be a far way off I am happy to satisfy you now.

The short answer to your question is of course, "well people would need to vote on these things", as, as an anarchist, I am mostly concerned about equality of effective power over the political process, and not so much dictating to people wha they should vote for, much less believe. So once anarchy is achieved the results are not necessarily predictable. The Cromulomicon is more about that more fundamental level of appropriating state power to oneself in a collective mission to distribute it as widely as possible, and not a list of dictums of what the state should do.

For, the state is corrupt! There is no much point in arguing endlessly what the state should do as if it was unaffected by corruption and had some coherent third party relationship with the individual that can be parsed out mechanically what is fair and just.

So, to start with you question about the state compelling you to save the life of a drowning child, the Cromulomicon resolution to the problem would be that the community you live in will need to decide what to do with you. It will depend very much on the specific circumstances. If you're in a position of explicit or implied guardianship over the child then letting the child drown is then likely murder. If there are extenuating circumstances, then those would obviously need to be considered. However, let's say you make no such defence, but explicitly say you let the child drown on purpose when you could have easily saved the child. Then definitely my vote, at a community quorum of some sort or then a jury trial in a process of justice decided by the community, would definitely be murdered as all adults have implied guardianship over all children of the community. The most fundamental responsibility of the community being the protection of children.

Of course, what exactly is the definition of a community and how to conceive of a community of communities and what they may do, and how to create that, is what the previous Volumes are about.

As for the trolley problem. The first thing to note about moral ambiguities is that their existence does not somehow retroactively affect, much less erase, prior moral certainties. As with any body of knowledge we may get to finer and finer questions of which we have no resolution. The existence of unsolved math problems does not somehow make problems that have solution somehow no longer have a solution or then less of a solution. There's problems we've solved and there's problems we haven't solved.

The second thing to consider is that in the case of the trolley problem, is that the actual problem is not the trolley scenario, in which case the solution of seeking the end result with a minimum of harms (such as with any accident or natural disaster or what have you) is a perfectly acceptable answer to the problem.

The actual problems in the dilemma are first that a ethical-political theory is needed answer any moral dilemma whatsoever and so if one is not already agreed on then really the problem is just begging the question of what are moral truths generally speaking upon which we can answer any moral question whatsoever. The second actual problem is then making a false analogy between minimizing harm in the case of an unstoppable trolley and things like forced organ harvesting.

For example, if we make instead an analogy to an actually analogous situation of an airplane losing power and going to crash and we ask the question of whether the pilot should stop intervening on the controls and allow the jet to crash into a crowd of people or then try to fly the aircraft into a more sparsely populated field, the obvious answer is to avoid the crowd. Unless the pilots goal was to kill as many people as possible there is not a pilot on the planet that would argue letting things take their course and ceasing to intervene on the controls is the moral thing to do even if you're heading straight to a dense crowd.

The difference with forced organ harvesting is that there is no accident or force of nature occurring in which people can have the intention to do no harm at all and given unfortunate circumstances outside their control seek the pathway that reduces harm. With forced organ harvesting you need to capture, torture and murder people against their will.

An entirely new category of harm is introduced into the situation and there is no direct analogy with the trolley problem. The deontological answer is simply that people are not means to ends but ends in themselves with their own moral autonomy, so there is a difference between seeking a minimum of harm in a disaster (whether a pilot trying to avoid a dense crowd in a crash or a doctor triaging care) and using people as unwilling tools to help other people. If people get killed by the jet crashing into the least populated area to crash in, those people were not used as tools but the deaths are accidental.

However, we can go further also, in that the goal of society is not simply to minimize short term harms in all cases. If we are concerned about the welfare of society as a whole then we are concerned about the younger generations and generations to come and we want to preserve a healthy society and not simply as extend the lives of as many present individuals as possible. Sacrificing one healthy person to save numerous unhealthy ones therefore is not as natural a choice as a fighter pilot avoiding a dense crowd during a crash. So the analogy is not directly comparable in this respect as well.

Of course, even accepting a healthy individual is more valuable to society than a sick one and it makes no senes to sacrifice one healthy person to simply extend the life a terminally ill person, one could of course argue that this logic requires a weighting, as the sick person therefore does not have zero value just not equal value. So, if we say these five sick people have each a third the value of a healthy person, then we can start arguing the human sacrifice is going to result in greater value.

We then must weigh that calculation against the value of bodily autonomy, and the debate can continue. The ultimate solution is then democracy. We (at least here in Finland) have no problem scarfing conscripts on the battlefield if we claim the conscription system has democratic legitimacy. So we could have the same system when it comes to forced organ harvesting and the debate really ends here because we all know almost no one would vote for such a system, which is why no such system exists in any democratic country (not to say it exists in non-democratic countries, just to make the point no vote has ever past in any democratic quorum of any kind in favour of forced organ harvesting).

So it's really not a dilemma at all, only a fallacy of false-analogy. We have no problem voting for air traffic control regulations that instruct pilots to avoid dense crowds during a crash and have equally zero problem not passing regulation forcing people into organ harvesting if the weighted outcome of comparative health is positive.

Now, we could of course imagine a scenario in which people start changing their minds due to extreme circumstances that humanity would perish as a whole without forced organ harvesting. In such a case it would simply become comparable to conscription and the legitimacy a reflection of the legitimacy of governance as a whole. That would of course not end the debate; the moral legitimacy, of forced conscription, whether democratic or not, as we see in Ukraine today, is of course debatable. The point here being we already today have states that force people into sacrifice for the common good and the difference with forced organ harvesting is simply that there does not seem a comparable utility for it. If there was (such as the population would go extinct without forced organ harvesting for some reason) then the debate would be very different.

Lastly, to deal with abortion, again the primary goal is equal (as equal as possible) effective power into the governing process, and there are a wide range of abortion policy options.

What is clear is that unwanted pregnancy is, by definition, better to avoid, so a healthy society would have few unwanted pregnancies, in particular unwanted due to a lack of resources to properly care for the would-be-child. So the first thing to consider is all the obvious ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies and then the less obvious ways that would need to be figured out, and that anyone arguing against abortion but not for a healthy society that cares for all the children within it, we can note is a hypocrite.

Of course making a healthy society would not reduce abortions to zero, the case of wanted pregnancies but unwanted fetus due to potential handicap of some sort (aka. fetal eugenics), and even if abortion were reduced to zero by healthy policies that would not remove the issue as a policy question as obviously there's no guarantee that the situation would not arise in the future.

The issue has been argued every possible way and even pro-choice countries rarely allow third trimester or full-term abortions. I'm also not a woman so I'd vote for a system where women vote on the issue, if also the issue of forced male conscription is only voted on by men. Obviously plenty of society's exist with plenty of different abortion policies, so if the process to arrive at the policy represents equal effective power of the individuals in that society, including voting on whether to have women vote on the issue, then I would accept the outcome.

Which is not a way of avoiding the moral question, as I would still have my position and would vote both in a vote on who should vote on it and then a vote directly on the policy if I'm then invited to vote on it, and I can of course elaborate my position, but it is already a political position whether different policies are liveable or not. Simply because people vote for everyone to torture their children to death does not mean I'd go along with it, but in that case would consider myself at war with whoever voted for such a thing.

Simply wanting equal effective power (as equal as feasible) in decision making does not mean all decisions that follow are therefore acceptable. People could literally vote that we'll all worship satan and human sacrifice everyone.

So, to say the outcome of a vote on the policy would be accepted requires some serious reflection.

As with many policy issues where there are clearly different sides that have a lot of people, voting is the answer to formulating the policy, and therefore as equal effective power in the political process to render those votes as legitimate as possible.

That being said, my own position is that abortion is immoral unless it is indeed a trolley problem kind of scenario where there is not enough resources and the goal is to minimize harm. However, bodily sovereignty, which is also important that nearly everyone always votes for (myself included outside some extreme circumstances, potentially) their own bodily sovereignty as we saw with the forced organ harvesting, then abortion is a crime but that takes place in a different country and the political body I'm apart can't practically do anything about it (other than as many policies to ensure we take care of children, unwanted pregnancies avoided in the first place, of which education is the main factor, etc.). This of course changes in late term abortion where the community can keep alive the new individual once it has been deported.

Of course, as mentioned, the content of the entire Cromulomicon would be required to really develop the concepts of community and effective power and the more fundamental things than any given policy decision, but I hope the above does answer your questions to your satisfaction given the philosophical tools presently in hand.

In my belief system here this principle is assumed to be true. Of course, it can't be proven as the principle of non contradiction needs to be assumed to prove anything. — boethius

@jgill has a point above. You appear to be confusing categorical with rhetorical logic. Two different animals. In the subject matter rhetoric is concerned with, contradictories are very much in play. "Should we attack at dawn? Yes? No?" "Should we buy gold? Maybe." And so it goes.