Illicit fried chicken and criminal travel. Thank god for the brave men and women of the Auckland Stasi for protecting everyone’s lives.

A police spokesperson told the BBC that officers made the arrest after they noticed a suspicious looking vehicle travelling on a gravel road on the outskirts of the city.

"Upon seeing the police car, the vehicle did a u-turn and sped off trying to evade police," they said. "The vehicle was searched and police located the cash, alongside empty ounce bags and a large amount of takeaways."

Police photos showed at least three buckets of chicken, about 10 cups of coleslaw, a large package of fries, and four large bags containing other KFC items.

They also seized NZ$100,000 (US$70,000; £51,000) in cash.

It is unclear whether the men intended to sell the food or if they hoped to use it as a distraction if they were to be pulled over.

New Zealand Covid: Men caught smuggling KFC into lockdown-hit Auckland

I don’t get it. Am I stopping someone from giving birth into a lava pit?

A newborn does exist.

Parents do not control the activity of the spermatozoa, ovum, and their subsequent forms. Surely they can affect gestation, but they cannot make gestation occur through will alone.

Well yes it is immoral to birth your baby into a lava pit.

No one is being harmed by not having a child just as no one is being harmed by having one.

It may be weird and cheeky but it at least considers extant things and activities, and isn’t a false analogy like pulling the trigger of a gun. The sperm travels to the ovary by flagellating its tail. It breaks through the ovary wall. It fertilizes the egg. It becomes a zygote, a fetus, a newborn, and so on. The only way a parent might stop the efforts of your genetic material is to intervene, or otherwise “force” it to stop without any consideration of the consent of those involved, no?

Anyways, it makes sense to me that “moral actions that affect [a person] make no difference as long as the person doesn't exist at time X” simply because there is no person to affect with the moral action. I just cannot follow your reasoning when I can see your conclusion in the premises. It becomes difficult to follow when these thought experiments always treat nothings as somethings, potential people as people, possible scenarios as extant ones. Would your evil villain be guilty of forcing someone into a game if there was no man to nab from the couch? if there was no one to force? Conversely, are the parents guilty of not seeking consent when there is no one to seek consent from? I don’t see how they can.

There is no will to substitute. There is no person to force. We might look upon our birth with regret and sorrow and lament our parent’s decision, but it is all retroactive. Looking at it, there is no act in conception, pregnancy and birth that should have required our consent, whereas in your evil demon scenario there is.

Besides, parents merely set the conditions within which pregnancy might occur. The worst that could be said of them is that they had intercourse. Your genetic material travelled, fertilized, and formed by its own efforts. You threw yourself in the game.

1) What counts as "forcing" people into a game? Certainly the villain is doing this, but how is birth not any different besides the fact that prior to the birth, the person didn't exist? Does that really matter when the outcome is the same (the person plays the game of life?)

I prefer the idea that “forcing” is when you attempt to subvert and substitute another’s will with your own. But with birth and child rearing you are creating and nurturing a will.

2) What counts as "freedom"? I mean the villain's game, and life's game (after the expansion) is pretty much identical. But many people might still say what the villain did was wrong, whereas the life game is not. How so? It is almost if not exactly the same in terms of amount of choices allotted (play the game, or die of depredation, suicide, and poverty.

In most cases there is no villain, but a loving parent.

3) Are the contestants like the "happy slave" that might not mind the game (being a slave in the slave's case), but don't realize their options are more limited than they think? What makes life itself so different? Life itself doesn't offer much beyond it's own game, homelessness, and suicide.

In fact, life offers everything. It is only you that limits it.

The consequentialist engages in a form of fantasy, immediately confining his morality to weighing a limited variety of possible consequences (never all possible consequences) with their probabilities. So it is not so much about right action as it is about having the right thoughts before acting.

By “weighing” I don’t mean he uses any real unit of measure. There isn’t any. For while “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” implies that happiness is measurable, no unit of measure has been presented, and the consequentialist invents it ad hoc in order to appraise which course of action will lead the greater sum total of this or that human good (happiness, utility, pleasure, etc). None of that matters anyways because “the greater good” has no reference to the world or to flesh-and-blood human beings.

Worse than all that, the consequentialist can justify cruelty and injustice if such actions are required to satisfy his teleological desires. Better to do Justice though the heavens fall, in my mind.

If the state fears an overloaded healthcare system maybe it should improve the healthcare system. But that’s too much work. Better to utilize its power to control the population’s livelihoods than to try harder at what is essentially its job. After all, authoritarianism is the only species of ethics available to @Banno’s collectivist posturing.

Government policy is government interest, not communal interests. The community didn’t devise, implement, and enforce lockdown policies.

The case that governments impose lockdowns because they are merely imposing the community’s interests is fraught with statist deceit. For one, without inquiring with each community member, they do not nor could they know what the community’s interests are. Second, if they did know, they would never find one single “communal interest”, but myriad interests. This is because only individuals, not communities, have interests.

If lockdown was indeed the interest of the community at large, there would be no reason to implement it with policy and enforce it with coercion. But “communal interest” is fabricated, made up, assumed, then sold as something it isn’t. It’s the interest of those in power. And in the case of lockdowns, it is forced upon the actual community, overriding each member’s interests no matter what they are.

That drone strike we were told averted an ISIS car bomb during Biden’s Afghanistan debacle did in fact kill an innocent family, most of them children.

The Pentagon had said the Aug. 29 strike targeted an Islamic State suicide bomber who posed an imminent threat to U.S.-led troops at the airport as they completed the last stages of their withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Even as reports of civilian casualties emerged, the top U.S. general had described the attack as "righteous".

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/us-military-says-10-civilians-killed-kabul-drone-strike-last-month-2021-09-17/

No one was fired or resigned or court-martialed for the murder, gross stupidity, and lies to the public.

I agree.

“Lockdown” is a revealing term. It’s prison jargon. The same consequentialist fears about some impending scenario, whether it happens or not, can be used to justify restricting people to real prisons. Consequentialism is basically a sort of racket in this sense: the fear-mongering absolves the consequentialist from the consequences of his actions.

Those who are not infected with the virus cannot spread the virus. So the only reason one would restrict the healthy is ignorance, and whether through laziness or an impulsive fear, rather than change his ignorance he chooses the most sweeping measures to make up for it. There is no ethics behind it at all.

The beauty of jargon is that it usually constrains itself to its own specialization. Just navigating the “discourse domain” of academic philosophy leaves one thinking that philosophy is merely the carrion for so many scavengers.

Oh dear. Wrong again.

When in doubt, play identity politics.

Yesterday the vaccine passports came into effect where I live. I now find myself in the privileged tier of a two-tiered society. This day only proves to me how quickly a mental apartheid, born of fear and hatred, can become a real one. Now around 30% of our population is denied access to much of the province’s economy.

If one is vaccinated he can download a QR code from the government’s website. Some poor hostess-turned-state-enforcer will scan it along with government ID whenever entering a compliant premises. I’m not sure what this means for those without smartphones, computers, internet, and government identification, but one way or another they must find a way to show this code and identify themselves before entry. Perhaps they should sew it to their lapel and be done with it.

It’s easy enough for the government to contract out a fancy new website and generate QR codes. The burden, however, falls upon the citizen, the business owner, the worker, who must now enforce discriminatory policies at the doorstep of their business. A friend of mine who runs a dumpling restaurant now finds herself in the situation where her largely unvaccinated staff will be serving her vaccinated customers. A false sense of security, it seems, is at least a kind of security.

I’m not sure what percentage of people must be vaccinated before the government ends its discriminatory program, but I suspect it will be with us for some time. My only hope is that it collapses beneath its own stupidity before it begets acts of resentment and retribution, which will no doubt affect the innocent, vaccinated or not.

Though we generally use possessive determiners to refer to the body, none of it means we are not our body. Just point to yourself and see whether your finger lands on mind or body.

None of that matters to me. I don’t care if the vaccine cures every disease in human history. If someone doesn’t want to put it in their body they shouldn’t be forced to do so, and for the same reasons that they shouldn’t be refused a vaccine—they are responsible for their own medical decisions. If they refuse the vaccine they accept that risk.

We’ve seen what happens when we give the state the power to make our medical decisions, to violate our medical privacy, to override the doctor/patient relationship, to enforce discriminatory social policies, to regulate our personal decisions, what we put in our body, who we can let in our shops, who can travel, who can gather, and so on. History is replete with examples of why a certain subset of mammals should not be given the power to do any of this. Not only do we lose this power for the time being, but it is unlikely we will get any of it back. But it’s the perennial faith of mankind: while every day records another failure, every day the belief that it needs an act of government to fix everything reappears.

Yes, the vaccinated can spread the disease, and according to an Israeli study for example, have less protection than natural immunity. Maybe there should be natural immunity passports.

The whole “burden on the healthcare system” has so far been a canard. We’ve been hearing it from the beginning, but even when field hospitals were implemented to offset this, they had to stand down, most of them without treating a single covid patient.

Imagine needing state officials to decide your health and safety. You will never leave the tit at this rate, forever unweaned.

Medical science also recommended the Tuskegee experiments, experimentation on Jews, slaves, deliberately infecting Guatemalans with syphillis, transplanting the testicles of young men into older ones, or radiated prisoners to see the effects of radiation, and on and on. I’m not sure the fact that some policy is recommended by medical science is a good enough reason to enact them, especially given that the the area of expertise for medical scientists is medical science, not ethics or political science.

It’s also practical to weld people into their homes or round up the infected and put them into concentration camps. It would be much easier and cost effective to round up the infected and gun them down where they stand. But to me, the practicality or success rate of any given policy isn’t a good enough reason to enforce it.

Anyways, if you are vaccinated, what is there to fear from the unvaccinated?

That’s right; the “interests of society” are whatever Xtrix says they are.

Society is a collection of atoms? Wow.

Who says the interests of society is health and safety?

I am fully vaccinated and I listen to the advice of my doctor. How does that square with your little caricature?

Your obedience is to government officials, not “science”. Rather than working to falsify any theory, apply the scientific method, you merely work to perpetuate government edicts. It’s so servile and obsequious as to be laughable.

Is society not composed of individuals?

I’d love to hear what you think the “interests of society” are.

Somehow I’ve always known that those who pretended to fight against dictatorship, authoritarianism, discrimination, executive power, state capitalism, and government over-reach during the last administration would help usher in all of the above during the next.

And here we are. Biden, the POTATUS, stumbling over the words on his teleprompter, just gave license to corporate America to enforce his pro-pharma agenda.

I accept that in principle the government and private individuals can restrict me from denying the freedom and rights of others. The unvaccinated do not deny others their rights and freedoms by virtue of them being unvaccinated. Restrictions against them are a step too far in that sense, and not only that, but unnecessary given that the vaccinated are protected from them.

The infected can spread the disease. Absent voluntary quarantine and isolation, I think more forceful measure would have to be taken and is justified. It’s a tough question. Typhoid Mary is a good ethical case study.

Alright. Though I’m not the topic, I do not believe in “unrestricted self-autonomy” and am not a full-on anarchist. I would prefer to end someone’s autonomy the moment he attempts to end mine, for example.

Though I do speak of fundamental rights, I do not believe in natural rights. All rights are or ought to be afforded by human beings, not nature.

Sorry, now that I read back on it it isn’t clear. What I mean by it isn’t “stated somewhere” is that it isn’t a matter of what we “must” do. It’s a choice. Plenty of countries choose not have such mandates. It’s a matter of authoritarianism.

Right, there are things we can't do and things we must do. And nowhere does it state that we have to mandate people to take a vaccine and deny them access to society if they do not. There is nothing unfeasible about it.

I don’t see how it is reasonable to discriminate against the unvaccinated, especially when natural immunity can offer better protection than some vaccines, and the vaccinated are not immune from spreading the disease. It seems more reasonable and justifiable to discriminate against those infected with the virus, the only people capable of spreading the disease.

I’m not one for the supernatural either. And nowhere does it state that we have to mandate people to take a vaccine and deny them access to society if they do not. It’s a simple moral decision.

Society’s interest is its own continuation…I must have missed the memo because there is no other way beyond sheer projection to verify such an interest. But no, I did not describe the proverbial war against all, or an eternal battle royal, only that some individuals are trying to impose their will on other individuals, which is closer to the spirit of war than any defense of fundamental rights.

That is at least a practical view. But I must reject it. Society is composed of individuals. The interests of the individual is the interest of society at large.

My concern is that no one, including the state, can know what “the interest of society” is. If we are to mean the interest of every individual involved, then there is a vast variety of sometimes common and sometimes competing interests. If we are to mean the common interest of some group, then that is not the interest of society.

That’s what we’re dealing with here: the interest of some group, in this case the interest of the state and those who seek to gain from the exercise of state power. There is no collective “we” making these decisions, willing to sacrifice our own and our neighbor’s autonomy, willing to deny medical privacy, willing to endorse mass discrimination, all to appease our subjective, consequentialist desires.

The ends do not justify the means, in this case.

It's a straw man. Not an argument.

If you want to make choices that harm no one else, fine. Do what you want. But, again, sorry to remind you, but we live in a society.

It’s not a straw man. It’s just an argument you cannot address.

“We live in a society”. And? Such a fact is meaningless when it comes to imposing your will on others. That fact of being in a majority does not justify you imposing your will on a minority.

We do know, because we know how viruses spread.

Fear and ignorance is on your side -- fear of, and ignorance of, vaccines. That's all this boils down to: sheer ignorance on your part. Like with almost everything you discuss.

Straw man. I fear vaccine mandates, hence why I am arguing against “vaccine mandates”, which is obvious by what I wrote. Not only fear, not only ignorance, but lies as well.

Straw man.

It’s my argument, not a breakdown of yours. So maybe you can dispute it.

If you live in society, you are. We do know. Which is why we mandate vaccines in schools and many workplaces.

Yours is an idiotic and inconsistent view. But I expect nothing else from you.

You don’t know. You’re ignorant. You’re scared. Fear and ignorance is the premise you use to justify denying bodily autonomy.

If you don’t own anyone’s body, what gives you the right to force vaccines upon them, make medical decisions for them, or otherwise attempt to assert your will with theirs? Nothing.

The problem is you don’t know whether I’m affecting people or not. You are just proposing to deny my bodily autonomy based on your fear-ridden and morally bankrupt precognition.

Yes, the government doesn’t own anyone’s body. The legitimacy of government authority over someone’s body has never been justified. It’s as simple as that.

We don’t need to pretend that mandating vaccination is somehow equivalent to stopping people from banging their heads against a brick wall to maintain that you should not force others to inject or ingest biological agents they do not want to. Perhaps you can argue why a government official should be given the power to make your medical decisions for you.

The fact that the policy maker doesn’t buy into my view doesn’t afford him any right to inject things into my body against my wishes, anymore than a policy maker who doesn’t buy into your view can deny you the right to inject all the vaccines you want. We can’t just surrender that power because, for the time being, it only affects people we disagree with.

Assuming that people should be able to make their own health decisions, should be able to decide what they don’t want to inject into their body, the problem with vaccine mandates is that it forces or coerces people into putting biological agents into their body that they otherwise might not want to. I think parents ought to decide how to protect their children when it comes to vaccination. I don’t think the government should.

It’s no surprise you’d bring up the fatuous “fire in a crowded theater” cliché, used as it was to justify jailing a man for speaking out against the draft. Anyone with “the ability to understand nuance and think analytically” knows the phrase is meaningless, not legally binding, and the underlying case was overturned back in ‘69.

If you don’t believe in the fundamental right to bodily autonomy just say it. Tell everyone, “I want to trade your will with my own”. Let them know that you and the government should decide what to put in their body. You’ll feel better when you let it out: “I want to exclude you from society because you refuse to do what I want you to”. Honesty would at least dissolve the cloud of pretence that follows you.