If we claim that words don't influence action, we can allow a teacher to have indecent conversation with underage students and if they end up having sex, we shouldn't blame the teacher right ? Consent is recognized as a speech act so it also falls under free speech.

@Terrapin Station: so are you in favor of eliminated speed limits?, perhaps leaving them as recommendations. Does this extend to age restrictions? things like the age one can get a driver's licence - or, as I mull it over, getting rid of licences at all, since these are statistical protection - or buy a whisky shot at a bar or give consent to sex. — Coben

Good questions. Here is one thought-train, offered as another example: unconstrained freedom of speech gives us the freedom to insult and provoke. The freedom to own guns allows this to progress easily to violence and murder. Empirical observation confirms that this is a path humans are likely to follow, unless they are discouraged or prevented. Yes? Too many unconstrained freedoms lead to unacceptable results (unjustified violence) in some cases; far too may cases to ignore, I think.

Would you allow a speech act which states
" Let's ban free speech " and if it gets implemented, you won't have free speech anymore.

Good questions. Here is one thought-train, offered as another example: unconstrained freedom of speech gives us the freedom to insult and provoke. The freedom to own guns allows this to progress easily to violence and murder. Empirical observation confirms that this is a path humans are likely to follow, unless they are discouraged or prevented. Yes? Too many unconstrained freedoms lead to unacceptable results (unjustified violence) in some cases; far too may cases to ignore, I think

What is wrong with violence and murder, despite the fact that we don't like to be involved in it. We have created such social constructs to be safe but does that make if right or wrong ? :naughty: :naughty:

If one allows for all speech and this includes in situations where there is a power differential or an authority relation, then yes, that first part is a result. This is what I am probing Terrapin around.

We have created such social constructs to be safe but does that make it right ? — Wittgenstein

The fact that we (i.e. our society) did it makes it "right". There is no external ('objective') Law that covers such decisions. "Right" is what we say it is, so our prohibition of hate speech, and of murder, is right because we say it is. [ I intend this not as an assertion, but as a pragmatic acceptance of what is. ]

I have trouble coming up with a rule or set of rules. I am probing Terrapin because fortunately, I think, for this discussion, he is an absolutist (at least so far) so that helps us understand what this entails. But honestly I don't have any easy answer here. I'd go into gun control but it would be a tangent. I hate gun culture. On the other hand with the militarization of law enforcement, the increasing centralization of power in the US and also centralization of media, the changes via executive order in the ways martial law and use of troops on american soil and a bunch of other trends I find menacing, I am also glad that there are a lot of armed citizens. It would make a direct shift over the full on open fascism - as opposed to the oligarchy that pretends to be a democracy - much easier if we took away those guns.

I find anyone who thinks any of this simple and clear to have something I don't have.

So nazi Germany beliefs and ideas were okay because all of them thought so. People in the past, agreed on a global level that slavery was okay. We don't always progress towards improving our morality, but we can try to correlate better morals with better living conditions in a society.
:wink:

... I am also glad that there are a lot of armed citizens. — Coben

Just as a complete aside... Don't you live in a democracy? Why would you be concerned about the direction the democratically elected government is taking, but relived by the arming of the very demos that elected them in the first place. Seemed incongruous enough to pique my curiosity.

Personally, based solely on the evidence that they freely elected President Trump, the thought that such a population might also be armed terrifies me.

so are you in favor of eliminated speed limits?, perhaps leaving them as recommendations. — Coben

Yes. And while I'm not saying it's like this everywhere, in my experience this seems to be how police have treated speed limits for quite some time. People only seem to get pulled over if they're driving recklessly, not because they're speeding.

Does this extend to age restrictions? things like the age one can get a driver's licence - or, as I mull it over, getting rid of licences at all, since these are statistical protection - or buy a whisky shot at a bar or give consent to sex. — Coben

I'm in favor of basing that stuff on ability (to consent in a standard way), not age.

Just as a complete aside... Don't you live in a democracy? Why would you be concerned about the direction the democratically elected government is taking, but relived by the arming of the very demos that elected them in the first place. Seemed incongruous enough to pique my curiosity. — Isaac

I don't think I live in a democracy. I think the demos, as you call them, get to choose between approved candidates the oligarchy puts in front of them.

Would you allow a speech act which states
" Let's ban free speech " — Wittgenstein

Yes, of course.

and if it gets implemented, you won't have free speech anymore.

"Getting implemented" isn't speech.

Yes. And while I'm not saying it's like this everywhere, in my experience this seems to be how police have treated speed limits for quite some time. People only seem to get pulled over if they're driving recklessly, not because they're speeding. — Terrapin Station

That's not my experience. You do get to go up to five over on the highway, but above that, you can be driving just peachy and get pulled over. And I've been pulled over for things that don't affect safety like an outdated registration sticker. Heck, I've been pulled over for not looking right, which may have some correlation with driving poorly, but I wasn't exhibiting the latter.

I'm in favor of basing that stuff on ability (to consent in a standard way), not age. — Terrapin Station

So there would have to be some kind of psychological evaluation in cases where children were purported to have given consent to adults?

have trouble coming up with a rule or set of rules. I am probing Terrapin because fortunately, I think, for this discussion, he is an absolutist (at least so far) so that helps us understand what this entails. But honestly I don't have any easy answer here. I'd go into gun control but it would be a tangent. I hate gun culture. On the other hand with the militarization of law enforcement, the increasing centralization of power in the US and also centralization of media, the changes via executive order in the ways martial law and use of troops on american soil and a bunch of other trends I find menacing, I am also glad that there are a lot of armed citizens. It would make a direct shift over the full on open fascism - as opposed to the oligarchy that pretends to be a democracy - much easier if we took away those guns.

Let's take this thought experiment for clearing the problem on gun control. If the USA government suddenly turns into a fascist regime or a dictatorship, the people won't win the battle against an armed force, this isn't the old civil war. The technology that is in dispose of army is vastly superior to what the common public has and l doubt that anyone country in the world would try to liberate America if such events happen to take place.
Gun control is a positive move, military type rifles that are only required in warfare shouldn't be legal. There should be a greater restriction on what types of arms people can have to defend themselves and feel secure.

I don't think I live in a democracy. I think the demos, as you call them, get to choose between approved candidates the oligarchy puts in front of them. — Coben

Yes, but still.. Given even a limited choice, they made a really bad one. But this is off topic, I shouldn't have started it.

I've thought for a bit of bringing up the issue somewhere implicit in this that you must have a parsimony position on laws. IOW if we can't decide if something is causal, then we don't make a law. We keep laws to a minimum. I say this because it would be hard for you to argue, given your ideas about cause, that for example a hate speech law would cause bad thing to happen.

But then it seems that even arguing in favor of parsimony would normally entail saying it's better that way, and that this would be justified using effects. The negative effects of not being parsimonius.

Or?

That's not my experience. You do get to go up to five over on the highway, but above that, you can be driving just peachy and get pulled over. And I've been pulled over for things that don't affect safety like an outdated registration sticker. Heck, I've been pulled over for not looking right, which may have some correlation with driving poorly, but I wasn't exhibiting the latter. — Coben

I didn't mean people don't get pulled over for any other reason. I meant in my experience people tend to get pulled over for speeding, just for driving recklessly. The places where I drive, it's not unusual for almost everyone to be going 15-20 mph over the speed limit (when possible--sometimes it's not possible due to congestion).

This is just an aside, but an interesting thing about New York City (and the immediately surrounding areas) is that a lot of roads--not highways, but streets in the city, are really rough/uneven, and the city is in no hurry to fix most of them, I think because it provides a "natural deterrent" to racing down city streets--it will tear the shit out of your car. Kind of sucks for trying to bike on those streets, though.

So there would have to be some kind of psychological evaluation in cases where children were purported to have given consent to adults? — Coben

If there were a claim of a consent violation, part of what we'd investigate is whether the person was even capable of consenting. (And this goes for adults, too.)

They thought they were managing to make a choice outside the approved ones. Or at least, I think that was a big factor. I don't like the guy and I think he's like a black sheep of the family, but still family to the oligarchy, so, yeah, they messed up. Though I think Clinton would have had us in Syria in much more volatile ways. She is definitely on the neo-con bandwagon. We might have missed something even worse than what Trump has so far managed. The real loss was Sanders who Clinton and the Dems fucked over.

to claim that something like speech is causal to behavior in others, it's required, at least on my view of what counts as causality, that we claim that people do not actually have free will, at least in the scenario at hand. — Terrapin Station

This is nonsense. We've just agreed (I thought) that for a thing to be causal it only need to be one cause among others. What (in a world of free will, which I don't subscribe to at all by the way) would prevent the action of the speech on the brain (whatever effect speech has) from being one of the causes, a free will decision being the other?

Are you suggesting that free will must be considered entirely unaffected by other factors in order to be 'free'?

So nazi Germany beliefs and ideas were okay because all of them thought so. People in the past, agreed on a global level that slavery was okay. We don't always progress towards improving our morality, but we can try to correlate better morals with better living conditions in a society. — Wittgenstein

We of the present day nearly always consider that we do everything better, and in a more sophisticated and enlightened way, than our historical predecessors. We see news reports of bad things in our societies, and we dismiss them because they happened 20 years ago, which is more or less prehistory, and besides, we don't do this any more. :chin: The truth is that we get things wrong, we have always got things wrong, and we will continue to get things wrong, as far as we can see. Well probably also get some things right.... :chin:

But you are creating little straw men out of my words. :sad: Nazi "beliefs and ideas" were not "okay". They were adopted and pursued by mid-twentieth-century Germans. We can assume, I suppose, that they did what they thought was right, but that's irrelevant. We can only observe that they did what they did. An observation does not communicate agreement or disagreement, so my own observations do not consider what happened in Germany to be "okay" or not "okay", but only that these things happened, and they weren't accidental. The German people decided what to do, and then did it, as all societies do. But acceptance does not constitute agreement.

Why is free speech an important human right, and above the right to life ? In my opinion, both views are okay as long as the society works well and if the society tends towards anarchy and disorder, we will have to change certain laws or perish.

This is just an aside, but an interesting thing about New York City (and the immediately surrounding areas) is that a lot of roads--not highways, but streets in the city, are really rough/uneven, and the city is in no hurry to fix most of them, I think because it provides a "natural deterrent" to racing down city streets--it will tear the shit out of your car. Kind of sucks for trying to bike on those streets, though. — Terrapin Station

Yes, I recently saw a short doc on a solution to a dangerous part of town for pedestrians was to eliminate all signs and lights. Drivers got nervous and slowed down, and they have stayed slowed down. Eveyrone has to negotiate all their interactions, eye contact, checking around, no one entitled by clear rules. The number of deaths and accidents radically decreased. Me, I'd keep cars out of Manhattan and give the handicapped tiny little tricycle car-lings. That might strike a libertarian as taking away freedom, but I don't think people would actually be less free and I'd be freer.

If there were a claim of a consent violation, part of what we'd investigate is whether the person was even capable of consenting. (And this goes for adults, too.) — Terrapin Station

It's hard for me to imagine this not leading to a lot more children who much later realize they were traumatized having sex 'willingly'.

I've thought for a bit of bringing up the issue somewhere implicit in this that you must have a parsimony position on laws. IOW if we can't decide if something is causal, then we don't make a law. We keep laws to a minimum. I say this because it would be hard for you to argue, given your ideas about cause, that for example a hate speech law would cause bad thing to happen.

But then it seems that even arguing in favor of parsimony would normally entail saying it's better that way, and that this would be justified using effects. The negative effects of not being parsimonius. — Coben

Yeah, that's all part of being a minarchist libertarian--we're characterized by wanting to minimize laws.

I've often said that politicians should be given bonuses for smartly eliminating laws, not creating more of them. The way things are set up now, there's an incentive for creating more and more laws--otherwise constituencies think that the people they elected are "not doing anything."

And not that this is characteristic of minarchist libertarianism, but I'm also very against our current prison culture. I think it's necessary to separate violent people, for example, from the main population, especially when there's good reason to believe that they'd be violent again, but I think that the way we do that via prisons, the way that prisons are typically managed, etc., is not justifiable in my view. The ideal would be to separate them geographically--like on an island or something, and let them manage themselves for the most part (not prohibiting assistance, trade, etc.), while simply prohibiting travel from the geographic area while they serve out their sentence.

It's hard for me to imagine this not leading to a lot more children who much later realize they were traumatized having sex 'willingly'. — Coben

From experience elsewhere, I'm not about to focus on the can of worms that's talking about sex in this regard. We can focus on a bunch of other stuff, like driving, drinking, signing contracts, etc.

Why is free speech an important human right, and above the right to life ? — Wittgenstein

I don't typically think about anything in "rights" terms, aside from what we've legally stipulated as rights. At any rate, speech has nothing to do with "the right to life." Speech can't kill anyone (well, aside from something like a device that's triggered by sound--"Alexa, fire the gun" or whatever).

We've just agreed (I thought) that for a thing to be causal it only need to be one cause among others. — Isaac

Sure. And to know this, we need to be able to show that it's a cause.

You're on a philosophy board. You're familiar with epistemology, right?

I've had this argument a number of times on the internet and I think there are some problematic assumptions in your position. That transition will not be instantaneous and there will be people in law enforcement and the military who will be wary about what is happening and skeptical that whatever martial law measures are justified. An armed population slows down the transition and also will led to more civilian deaths as pockets and individuals resist. EVeyr time law enforcement and soldiers kill civilians it will raise questions and doubts and will cause people to shift sides. It will also affect people high up, iow people in commande of regiments or troops or a tank here or a plane there. I cannot prove that this delay, extra violence, longer resistence will be enough, but it leaves open a door. And we have seen just how effective asymmetrical warfare can be in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and here the people being killed were not the fellow citizens of the invading force. Suddnely the resistence to fascism will not fall along left/right lines and this will include the reactions of people in the military and law enforcement. You mention the types of force the US gov has at its disposal. Absolutely. But then, it can't use a lot of that or it will deal with even more resistance. Any delays allow for more information to come out to counter official justifications for the martial law. They are not going to announce themselves as fascists, they will have a story. And that story will be vulnerable the longer the take over is held off. The greater the resistance and violence dealing with the resistance, the more problematic the transition is for those in power. They will have to watch their generals and police chiefs and National guard leaders very carefully, becaues given the nature of the US, there will be resistance or an openness to sympathizing with the resistance and civilian casualities will up the ante odan all that. We've seen again and again that the most powerful military in the world can get messed over by much more poorly armed guerilla style resistance. The reasons the US has been restrained in using certain military measures will only be stronger against US citizens, who can also blend in better. As I said, I can't prove this would win the day, which would mean that the coup or oligarchy shift to more open control policy loses support over time and fails. But I think it increases the chances and I know for sure that any government moving in that direction would prefer a population that is as well armed as, say Britains over the US's.

FAir enough.

Yeah, that's all part of being a minarchist libertarian--we're characterized by wanting to minimize laws.

I've often said that politicians should be given bonuses for smartly eliminating laws, not creating more of them. The way things are set up now, there's an incentive for creating more and more laws--otherwise constituencies think that the people they elected are "not doing anything." — Terrapin Station

But it would be very hard to argue, for you I mean, that there is a problem with more laws. That these cause problems. It would be such a hard scientific experiment to set up,where we limit the variable and compare the outcome of two very similar societies, one with more laws and one with less, the latter having a parsimony attitude the former thinking laws are proactive.

I think it would be hard to even show correlation, let alone cause.

I take back my argument if it undermined your stance but l do see a problem with your idea that the sole deciding power of morality lies in the general consensus of society. If you disagree with germans beliefs and morals in nazi Germany, you will have to judge him by our present standards, not their standards but l think it is an unfair move on our part. We cannot judge a standard of morals by itself and to me it appears that we don't have tools to decide which system is better, other than feelings and common culture which are not in any sense reliable.

The truth is that we get things wrong, we have always got things wrong, and we will continue to get things wrong, as far as we can see. Well probably also get some things right.... :chin:

But how can we get something wrong in a system if it is act according to it and there is no objective criterion for deciding which system is better ? :smile: