One imposition is direct, the other is indirect. If you're affecting yourself in a private and secluded way, the broader results cease to matter. Individual rights trump social troubles that might arise from exercising those rights.

This is such a meaningless way of dismissing externalities though; why should I be able to impose costs on third parties, regardless of size, simply because of my setting?

Morality isn't tied to the broader implications of societal concerns, that's ethics.

That's not true. Ethics quite literally is moral philosophy. I have no idea why people think there is some fundamental divide between morality and ethics, or why ethics being about 'society' and morality being about the 'individual' is some substantial divide worth making. If your moral philosophy makes no consideration about society and how individuals impact and are impacted by society at large then it is a poor moral philosophy.

What you do to it is NO ONE'S decision but your own, period.

So let's say I want to mutilate myself in the middle of the high street. The emergency services have no ethical (and should have no legal) mandate to stop me? Despite my imposition on other individuals?

I'm also educated enough to know that they all failed not because of the nature of communism, but because of, as you put it, other exogenous causes.

To which I would point out that it's an incredibly large inherent flaw of communism that it apparently so readily succumbs to failure in the face of such exogenous causes.

Nevertheless, I think it's a difficult argument to make that the failure of China and Russia as 'communist' states is a result of politically exogenous factors. Otherwise, we have a huge anomaly in history since countries which were moving along relatively well prior to becoming 'communist' suddenly had to deal with these exogenous shocks as soon as they changed their model of government.

Not to say that such influences and difficulties don't exist, but they don't seem to have the same kind of explanatory power as a political or institutional explanation would.

but people who adhere to any type of socialist ideology have to deal with strawmen like that all the time.

Sure, but surely the best way to deal with a straw man is to say "That's a straw man". Not come up with arguments in defence of the straw man.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on January 30, 2016, 10:11:27 AM

I should just make another thread on why communism sucks, really.

Does the end result basically come down to technological stagnation unless there's a strong nationalistic pull involved?

Depends, for communism as an ideology or for countries like Russia which 'tried' communism?

Because, for Russia, you're almost correct. It comes down to technological stagnation combined with a large increase in both labour and capital.

If you want to attribute that to the nature of communism and not Russia's inability to grow good crops and Mao not understanding Biology, then yes.

Well it was more of a joke, than anything. . .

But if you want to critique it then I suppose it's only fair I point out that Russia was actually quite well-off agriculturally, at least in the Black Earth Region and during the reforms of Pyotr Stolypin in the decade or so prior to the Revolution. Lenin also has some blame to bear, given that he signed Brest-Litovsk and instituted policies like requisitioning that strongly disincentivised significant agricultural production. And then there's Stalin and his distribution policies, and Mao's distribution policies etc.

All of this, of course, while recognising that neither China nor the Soviet Union were meaningfully communist during this time period. . . So I find it disturbing that you need to defend their record by referring to exogenous causes as opposed to simply saying "I don't model my political beliefs on these people".

But, fuck it, whatever floats your collectively-owned boat.

Not great.

Currently trying to deal with an existential crisis, relapsing depression and borderline/low-level drug abuse.

Do you honestly believe that human beings are capable of being sated forever?

The question is irrelevant to my point; the hedonic treadmill is not some empirically codified law of neuroscience or psychology.

To answer your question though, I believe that there is a non-arbitrary basis for human experience. Given that this basis is non-arbitrary, it is manipulable. That's as far as my opinion on the potential to permanently remove suffering goes.

>pain is a good thing

Ender just stop, lol

Pain quite obviously can be a good thing. Anybody who denies this and makes sweeping claims about the (dis-)utility of suffering isn't as well-read as they think they are.

Just tuned in, how's it going?

I'm really just struggling to understand what kind of experiments you're even talking about

Like the non-voluntary testing of humans with either experimental medication or weaponry.

Note, I don't support the idea mentioned in the OP. It's just an interesting consideration.

How would you like to have the experiments the Nazi's were doing done to you or someone you care about?

But, it seems to me, if we're willing to accept some margin of error in pretty much any routine government function it's not particularly rational to consider how I would personally like it if I fell into the group poorly done-by due to said errors.

Unemployment is still really high.

No it isn't, it's only 20 basis points about the natural rate.

Well maybe not.

If it were non-arbitrary, it stands to reason that we cannot say anything epistemically meaningful about the state of human well-being.

How can you easily quantify the aggregate when it may take from one victim to hundreds to achieve a positive outcome.

Did you read the OP?

The usual paradigm of utility-maximisation seems to not apply here, or at least only apply very messily.

Of course, the entire point of experimentation is the discovery of previously unknown information. Given that constraint, it doesn't seem to be the case that my usual model of thinking about moral questions is all that useful. Which implies I either need to alter the model of come up with a sufficiently reductionist account of my argument that it is internally consistent.

[. . .]

If your moral basis is rational (as opposed to super-rational, such as religious modes of thinking), then it stands to reason that more information ultimately leads to a superior decision-making process. Therefore, on the margin, human experimentation is almost a necessary bug of advancing the frontiers of knowledge.

Not for slave owners or Stalin supporters.

consequentially bad for aggregate well-being.