Apologists for the state claim it is an organic whole, each of us is but a cell in its grand functioning. Gillis and co. call bullshit on that. Conflating the state with society is a partisan con.
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Replying to @kaleidic
I don't doubt the sincerity of your statement, but could you rephrase it without moral emotions? Do you think that there is a stable social equilibrium without a state monopoly on violence, and it works better? If so, is there any empirical evidence or game theoretic proof?
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Replying to @Plinz
Thank you for this request. I did get my start in this area from ethical incentives and Gillis is explicit about ethics being central. I have, however, shifted to far greater concern with systematics, incentive structures, economics, etc.
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The predominance of the state is a fact, but a contingent one. You seem aware that its potency is closely tied with firearms. This tie suggests a couple things.
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First, that it's somewhat novel. (500 years max.) Second, that it's to large degree a product of technological breakthroughs. These sink both the notion that it can be done away with on whim, and also the idea that the modern state is an indefinitely stable pattern.
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Perhaps there are no game-theoretic mega-systems that will have the features you are curious about. To my eye it's too early to tell, but we can discern between people who yearn for something like that and people who pretty much don't.
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Replying to @kaleidic
Humans are a species of chimp. Our emotional yearnings are largely the result of the evolution that made us who we are. The moral preferences even of majorities don't indicate what's true.
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Replying to @Plinz
Moral preferences are among the important facts, however. They are not disjoint from the set of consequential facts.
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Replying to @kaleidic
The fact that you have moral preferences is a fact about how a brain is wired up as a consequence of innate traits and indoctrination. It is not different from believing in the Holy Trinity. But is it indicative about how society or other parts of the physical universe work?
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Replying to @Plinz
Society's arrangements are not infinitely plastic to human choice, nor do ideas as to the nature of society constrain its actual properties.
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Exactly. Social order may be modeled as several stable dynamic equilibria among which one might choose if a transition path can be found, but in practice history is a rollercoaster through a strange attractor.
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