| Are you, personally, harmed by someone having an abortion? Are you, personally, harmed by someone watching porn? Maybe it makes society as a whole weaker compared to other societies but that doesn't mean your society actually loses anything. Countries have nuclear weapons and multi-national defense pacts now. Just because China has several times the population of the US and could win a conventional war, doesn't mean it's gonna invade. We don't live in tribes of a few hundred people who are constantly on the brink of starvation and/or genocide anymore. But many people are still governed by instincts from that environment. |
| |
| ▲ | JoshTriplett 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The dangerous thing is that there are some busybodies who will believe they are harmed by such things, and so you have to take the argument a step further and precisely define harm to confirm that they have no case. It would be easier if people had a common definition of "if it doesn't involve you then it's not your business". And the difficult thing about that is that externalities do exist for some things. Pollution affects everyone, for instance, and those externalities need to be accounted for. It's not a trivial definitional problem to distinguish valid externalities from spurious/invalid claims, unfortunately. | | |
| ▲ | martin-t 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Both points are true. I chose these examples in response because they are relatively simple, clear cut examples of "not your business", yet people still try to dictate other people's lives around them. These people are on one end of the authoritarian spectrum. The other are anarchists, usually ancaps in places I frequent, and they are just as wrong because they are ignoring how people in the real world will actually behave. Negative externalities are precisely the thing that they ignore, minimize, or try to redirect your attention by linking you to a 2 hour video which is supposed to address it but doesn't. Well, at least they do generally get out of other people's lives though. But it's a system which doesn't work and when it fails, leads to the rise of authoritarians. I wish people were able to understand that policy is a multi-dimensional spectrum and extremes on any one axis are unlikely to lead to stability. |
| |
| ▲ | Saline9515 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The issues you are talking about are not "society-wide" issues requiring compliance of others. A better example would be to consider that pre-op transgender people, namely MtF, can share the same spaces that were reserved to biological women. For instance in sport. If I'm a woman and now I have to compete with a biological man in MMA because society chose that it's the new normal, yes, I'm going to suffer from it. If society decides that it's fair to feed Tiktok to toddlers who end up having their neurons fried, I'm going to suffer from it as well when they grew up as they won't be able to do their job well. If society decides that it's fair to allow CSAM everywhere, I guess that a few children are going to suffer as it becomes mainstream. We don't live in a vacuum. | | |
| ▲ | martin-t 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I agree with the trans example because 1) it's a great example of one individual being allowed to do something that directly harms another individual; 2) it's fairly easy to prove that someone who grew up with male bone and muscle structure does not suddenly get the female structure because of a reassignment surgery or hormones. I am all for letting people do what they want with their bodies but their freedom stops at interacting with other people's bodies. I cannot agree with the toddlers example: 1) it's possible it does some damage but as I said, to even consider it, we need proof; 2) even if they are bad at life, it doesn't automatically harm another individual - don't hire incompetents and they won't harm your business. They might harm society in general but society does not IMO have any right to force people to optimize for society's goals. The balance might change if this was true and happened on such a scale that society measurably declined but then I am still of the opinion that we should have mechanisms how a group of people should be able to get together separate themselves from others. We have no right to force the Amish to start using modern tech, even if a few more able bodies would probably be beneficial on some scale. Similarly, if the majority feed TikTok to their toddlers and a minority does not, they should be able and allowed to form their own society with its own rules, as long as everyone participates willingly. | | |
| ▲ | Saline9515 6 days ago | parent [-] | | The problem with this kind of pure hedonistic thinking is that it negates that societies exist because of cooperation of individuals and not just as an aggregate of humans. According to your thinking, no one can "force" medical faculties to say that now anyone can buy a surgical doctor degree for 10$, that said if you have to get urgent surgery you'll pay for the consequences as the "doctor" who'll operate won't be qualified. This is why we need basic rules, norms and constraints that allows us to reach a better optimum than the free-for-all that you recommend. It's also a question of personal values: I value more living in a CSAM-free society, than one where pedos can watch it freely. Amishes value being in a highly religious and low-tech society than giving birth without pain or having air conditioning. I agree that leaving the society should be possible (emigration, for instance, as the Amishes did). But each society has its local optimum, so you'll have to choose with different constraints. You can for instance go to Russia where it's legal to own and watch CSAM, but with other constraints. | | |
| ▲ | martin-t 6 days ago | parent [-] | | > According to your thinking, no one can "force" medical faculties to say that now anyone can buy a surgical doctor degree for 10$, that said if you have to get urgent surgery you'll pay for the consequences as the "doctor" who'll operate won't be qualified. I have trouble parsing that sentence, did you mean "prevent" instead of "force"? If yes, then it doesn't follow from my thinking at all. Lying is an offensive action by which the liar gains an advantage at someone else's expense. There are expectations of minimum quality standards for doctors, both informal (people's expectations) and formal (state exams / certification). Somebody claiming to be a doctor without fulfilling these expectations is clearly directly harming other people (whether actual harm is done - even if he somehow through sheer luck managed to perform one surgery successfully, the expected outcome is still harm and expected outcome should absolutely factor into his punishment). > This is why we need basic rules, norms and constraints I never said we didn't. I said we only need them when other people are harmed provably and directly; not when somebody thinks he "knows better". |
|
|
|
|
