“How can you be sure that allowing anyone to live is worth the attendent responsibilities though? Surely the crime rates, amount of suffering in the world, and general environmental cost suggest it is not”...
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Replying to @MattPirkowski @G_S_Bhogal
Point being, the only real way to approach the problem of malevolence is to better understand why these behavioral trends are increasing, and attempt to fix the actual causes of suffering, not merely alleviate their symptoms.
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Replying to @MattPirkowski
I agree, but in the mean time people must be protected from themselves, or else we become subject to the law of the jungle. Or would you allow everyone to own their own nuclear missile?
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Replying to @G_S_Bhogal
We live in the real world of constraints, in which—for a bevy of reasons—millions of Americans own guns and none will own nuclear missiles. And no, you teach people to live responsibly and punish them when they fail. “Protecting people from themselves” is a recipe for tyranny.
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Replying to @MattPirkowski
One could argue that teaching people to live responsibly and punishing them when they fail is protecting them from themselves.
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Replying to @MattPirkowski
Whatever you want to call it, it still requires the state's infringement of the individual's autonomy. So we both agree that violating autonomy is crucial to addressing this problem, we only disagree on the precise extent.
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Replying to @G_S_Bhogal
I think we disagree on the point at which violations of autonomy by state actors are warranted. I don’t think systems predicated upon the top-down management of human behavior works for the same reasons economies can’t be managed that way: it doesn’t scale and leads to tyranny.
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Replying to @MattPirkowski
But this is the thing: you advocate punishing people for not obeying laws, yet this is top-down management of behaviour. Freedom is essential to prosperity, but it isn't linear; there reaches a point at which it becomes zero-sum. And let's not forget, Nature is also a tyranny.
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Replying to @G_S_Bhogal @MattPirkowski
Before I jump into this, I gotta ask. Are you guys European? Canada and Australia/new Zealand are essentially European for this question.
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UK citizen.
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