Last I checked I’m a part of society. Restricting my rights does not benefit me. It benefits you personally.

A justice system requires that we punish the guilty and protect the innocent. But you would see them restrict my rights when I have done nothing to deserve it.

The same motives with the categories broadened. A compliant populace and safety from the unvirtuous inheres in both, I’m afraid.

So long as he abides by the rules you’ve set out for him. That you get to set the rules and I don’t only fuels the paranoia, because someone will take the same power, using the same mechanisms, and take them away almost entirely, like a vast majority of the nations in the world. The idea that this will never happen is far more ridiculous than believing it will.

The racist roots of American gun control extends even to today. Like segregated governments and their KKK enforcers, confiscation of weapons is above board, so long as it happens to those whom they deem not virtuous and civilized enough to have them. Meanwhile, they would prefer the right remains in the hands of the elected nobility and their enforces, while the rest of us should twiddle our thumbs when threats appear in our streets and neighborhoods. This kind of furtive boot-licking has somehow gained a moral flavor.

Collective defense and individual defense are one and the same. What you are speaking of is the monopoly on violence, which is hardly collective or individual. This sort of violence is exclusive to someone like you and me.

The pure anarchism of the world government permits that a nation can defend its own borders, but while the government class gets to claim this right and abuse it to all ends, they refuse to extend that right to their own citizens. Why do the chosen nobility and their armies get to defend their borders but a single man cannot? So much for collective defense. This is the defense of state interest and nothing more.

People with guns protect you. Is that so difficult to admit? I guess one can be proud of this privilege and sleep soundly while others defend you while you sleep, but in any case, call Uber Eats and the police and see who reaches you first.

The reason most countries can afford to disarm their populace and claim moral victory is because American weaponry protects them while they sleep. A country like Ukraine, on the other hand, who does not find itself under the umbrella of American protection in any legal sense, has to beg western countries for the weaponry to defend itself. They reversed on their gun control, of course, handing out guns to the public on the eve of war. Now all they need is an ID card in order to get a gun. I guess it’s never too late.

That’s the ironic part about your position and all this huff and bluster about disarming your fellow citizens. You can afford not to be paranoid because other people have guns, because others have the will to defend you wherever you yourself refuse to. Should they ever need your help, though, I have a good idea how helpful you will be.

I agree and would add that it is not just guns but a "gun culture" that promotes the idea that guns are the solution to two major threats, the government and criminals.

Both of whom have guns and other weapons. How would you defend yourself and your family from these threats?

And I cannot abide by the claim that you being able to own a gun is more important than a child being safer from gun violence.

I never made that claim, I'm afraid. But I wager that for anyone who would murder a child, with a gun or otherwise, such an injustice is worth the utilitarian benefit.

I'm only saying that I think Tzeentch was writing about school shootings in particular, if his initial post is any indication. If so, his claims aren't that misleading.

But that the shooter chose a softer target than one of higher security shows that she at least thought twice about it, I think.

I believe he was talking about school shooters in particular.

"Records show 70% of school shootings since 1999 have been carried out by people under 18: report"

https://www.insider.com/seven-ten-us-school-shooters-known-ages-children-under-18-2022-5

I don't think it's likely that someone would start shooting if he knew that everyone else would start shooting back.

I think it far more likely that the collateral damage might become great enough for you to rethink the whole thing. No one would be safe. You cannot protect against a hail of bullets coming from every direction with a gun.

Perhaps. But I doubt if everyone owned a gun people would start shooting each other.

So injustice is beneficial so long as it suits your concerns. I cannot abide by that, myself.

I doubt I could muster enough conceit to find any desire to control your's or anyone else's life.

Then why don’t you put everyone in prison? You’ll eliminate violence entirely.

I think murderers and criminals will think twice about harming others if they know everyone is packing. So I think the world I want to live in is a peaceful one.

That’s why utilitarianism is unjust. You’ll punish people for things they haven’t done.

That is what I am going through right now. After a mass shooting the state moved to restrict more guns. In this country I am no longer able to purchase a handgun, though I already own one. I don’t think any group of men should possess the absolute monopoly on violence; I believe I have a right to defend myself, with weapons if necessary; and am a responsible owner of guns. Yes it’s unjust to punish me and others for crimes none of us committed.

Yes I believe I ought to be able to defend myself with whatever I want.

If someone has the motive and desire to run people over they will do so. If they don’t, they won’t. The same is with guns or any other object that can be used as a weapon.

Is this a quiz? I am entitled to my guns because I own them. I have a basic human right to defend my life, liberty, and property, and owning weapons extends from this right.

It’s unjust because they are mine, I am entitled to them, and I have done nothing to justify taking them away.

Everyone should carry a weapon as soon as they are competent enough to do so, in my opinion.

It’s unjust to ban my weapons if I didn’t shoot anyone or do not intend to.

Why can I not own a firearm if I didn’t shoot anyone or do not intend to?

It’s meant to be faulty. Guns and cars don’t just go out and start killing people. It leaves out the motives and reasons why one would pick up a gun and shoot someone in the first place.

Utilitarian concerns don’t mean much to me wherever we are speaking about basic human rights. Banning cars would be unjust. Banning guns is unjust.

Sure it can. Before that it was car accidents. Maybe we should ban cars.

There should be armed guards at schools in the US, perhaps even teachers, in my opinion. The most recent shooter picked one target over the other due to lack of security.

I thought the shooter was a male. I was wrong. It was indeed a female. So it is uncharacteristic after all.

What do you mean?

Most mass shooters are male.

A transgender shooter. It might not be as uncharacteristic as we’d like to admit.

Well said.

Our periphery is quite limited, so one can at least understand the indirect realist’s skepticism. The body is no doubt a mystery for any organism that cannot see its own ears, let alone what occurs beneath the epidermis. Introspection and wondering could never penetrate its own depths. But I think we’ve taken enough looks inside to realize there are no spirits pulling on strings in there.

As for animals, their bodies are different. What else is there to say? We can say a dog has different perceptions, experiences, phenomena, fine, but that’s multiplying zeroes. Their bodies are the only thing that differs from us. Their relationship to everything else can be described in the exact same manner as ours: direct, without any specious intervening factors.

The so-called directness of perception is useful only to contrast with the indirectness of perception, as it is put forward by indirect realists. It has no other use and is rather redundant otherwise. We usually don’t need to mention that, yes, we can perceive other things.

Indirect realism implies that we cannot see past our ourselves. It implies we hinder and hamstring ourselves from accessing the rest of the world, when it is the other way about. The rest of the world is wholly accessible to us. It’s true; we cannot apprehend all of something all at once, as if we ought to know about the backside of something by looking at it from the front, but with a little time and effort we can come to understand things a little better by perceiving them instead of doubting ourselves.

It does, I’m afraid, much to the chagrin subjectivists. Their “hard problems” and other efforts are little more than an attempt to muddy the waters, perhaps in an attempt to rescue the spirit from the ever-encroaching domain of the physical.

The idea that biological activity is accompanied by experience—by anything—is question begging. The only problem is that we haven’t come up with an ethical means to prove to the subjectivist that he is wrong, for any such procedure would invariably be dangerously invasive. So rather than breaking our oath not to harm another it’s better to just dismiss the hard problem as hot air.

My guess is you need to expand your Self to the surface of your being, your skin. Note the following argument which you presented:

Solipsistic Fact: Unless you literally internally experience of an external agent, such as random voices or God (in which case, you should connect with a therapist or pastor quickly!), you, like me and other “normal” “humans”, receive 100% of their information only from their own sensory inputs. Therefore, everything experiential is part of an internally simulated model of externality set forth by and from the brain/mind.

It assumes that you are a mind or brain, experiencing the outputs of your senses, which is contrary to fact. You are also your senses, muscles, skeleton, skin, etc. and there is nothing between you and the rest of the world. See “the homunculus fallacy” and the “Cartesian theater” for what is problematic about the argument.

I would suggest going out and being a thing for a while. Go bump around with other things, do what things do, and so on.

Yes it does. It’s what differs between the experience of the colour blind man and the typical man. It’s the seeing differently. We’re not just behavioural machines that respond to stimulus. There’s an inner quality to experience, a “what it is it like to be” aspect that distinguishes us from p-zombies.

Again, we know what is different about the color-blind man and the man who is not. These causes are biological. The “inner quality” is the biology. What it is like to be color-blind is what it is like to have the biology conducive to color blindness. We don’t need to insert sense-data, experience, qualia, and other figments between perceiver and perceived to account for these differences.

Just to be precise, no, their biology is different. This conforms to the relationship and the facts of biology. The “character of their experience” is not different because no such property exists, biologically or otherwise.

I don't understand what you are asking. Do you or do you not accept that some people are colour-blind; that the colours they see things to be are not the colours that you see things to be? If so then you accept that direct realism fails; it cannot be the case that both you and the colour blind person directly see the apple's "real" colour and that you see different colours.

That's exactly the point. The structure of your experience is one thing, the mind-independent nature of the world is another thing, and it's the structure of your experience that informs you, not the mind-independent nature of the world. You can't bypass your blurry vision to see the mind-independent nature of the world around you.

It’s easy to maintain direct realism with your scenario because the relationship between person and the apple is direct. X perceives Y. Working with this scenario, we can assume the difference in the experience lies either in X or Y or both. We know that the color-blind person sees it differently because his biology is different. We needn’t assume that something about the apple is different. Simple. Direct realism is maintained.

Unfortunately, the indirect realist likes to insert other variables. X no longer perceives Y. He perceives something else, in this case colors or experiences. It’s not just that X is different, but that these other variables are different as well. So they are inserted into the relationship as if they had their own existence apart from X and Y. It’s all too confusing and the indirect realist is guilty of confusing things. He alters the relationship where it ought not to be altered and it leads him to strange conclusions, like sense-data and representationalism. Indirect realism has failed, and adding qualifiers such as “mind-independent” does little to disguise this failure.

It’s not in all-caps.