Philosophy Discussion Forums

Catching up on some older points for which I didn't have time earlier:

G E Morton wrote:It would also be easier to stop drunk driving and barroom brawling by banning liquor (we tried that once), end traffic fatalities by banning automobiles, end identity theft and other computer crime by banning credit cards and computers, etc. That rationale leads to consequences free people are not willing to accept.

This is the slippery slope argument again.

As a general rule, I think it's self-evidently not a valid argument to take an extremely broad spectrum of possible activities and state that if a person supports activities at one end of that spectrum they must automatically support activities all along that spectrum to the other end, or that they give a rationale to other people who do support activities at the other end of the spectrum.

Life is full of continua - spectrums. For the purposes of binary decisions, such as those required for enforcing laws, we draw dividing lines which are, essentially, arbitrary.

One other example among many: the point at which a fertilized embryo in the womb is deemed to have become a human being (an agent) and is therefore regarded as having the right not to be harmed so long as/he she doesn't harm others. A slippery slope argument would say that either this right is fully conferred at the moment of conception or it is not conferred at all. It would say that if you confer rights on an 8 month old unborn baby then you have no defense against people who want to confer those same rights to single celled embryos. Clearly this is not what we do. Various people draw various dividing lines. There is no logical contradiction in doing so.

Returning to the spectrum of potentially harmful objects that we might consider banning: Since you (I presume) and almost everybody else are also on that spectrum, I could apply the same argument to you. If we place all forms of control of anything that could ever be harmful on the same spectrum and then apply the slippery slope argument, I could argue that the logic which is used to ban the general public ownership of, say, battlefield nuclear weapons must also be used to ban scissors. Clearly absurd.

Steve3007 wrote:I'm really talking about the general character of the environment in which we all have to exist. It goes back to the continuum I was talking about above, and the fact that some forms of harm are more direct and traceable, while others are indirect, and there's no simple "harm/no-harm" dividing line.

GE Morton wrote:Oh, I think that line is quite clear and sharp. Can you provide some examples of indirect or ambiguous harm?

I'll number them for clarity, in case you want to discuss any of them individually.

1. If we take the attitude that people's own health-related lifestyle choices are entirely their own business and we should not use any mechanism, such as targeted taxation, to try to reduce the incidences of such things as morbid obesity, diabetes and alcoholism would that result in anybody other than the unhealthy eaters themselves being harmed?

2. If I fail to wear a safety belt in a car or a crash helmet on a motorcycle, am I (potentially) harming anybody but myself?

3. If we, the people (via our government), decide not to fund, via taxation, any free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare services, would this cause any harm to anybody other than the people who can't afford to pay for health care/insurance?

4. If we remove all restrictions on all types of weapons, devices and substances and allow all people who haven't yet been clearly seen to show any propensity to violence to own absolutely anything that they want, for whatever private reasons they might have, will this harm anybody?

5. If we decide not to fund, via taxation, social programs for such things as drug and crime rehabilitation will this harm anybody other than the people who consume these services?

6. If we decide not to fund any welfare services such that people who can't or won't financially support themselves starve to death, would this harm anybody except those people?

7. If there are no limits to the amount of CO₂, and other not-immediately-harmful gases/substances, that can be emitted by vehicles and power stations and it is left entirely up to the free market to decide how to generate power or build vehicles, such that the only consideration is the immediate financial cost to the producer of generation per kW, does this harm anybody? Does it do anything other than benefit consumers by creating cheap power/desirable vehicles?

I suspect the answer from you and many people to all, or perhaps most, of these questions would be "no"? Many other people, including me, would disagree. They would be subject to debate.

This is related to a conversation we were having a while ago on another thread, here:

http://onlinephilosophyclub.com/forums/ ... 09#p297514

G E Morton wrote:You may be misrepresenting Trump's position somewhat.

No, I am not misrepresenting Trump's position. I said:

"...the suggestion by the US president, yesterday, that part of a solution ... is for teachers to carry guns."

That is what he said. He suggested that teachers carry guns. He didn't say all teachers and he didn't say they should be forced to carry guns. And I didn't say or imply that he did. This was, and still is, reported in the press in a similar way to the way in which I have described it above and, of course Trump tweeted that they were misrepresenting him - his familiar cry of "fake news". They were not.

G E Morton wrote:No teacher would have to carry a gun or have one handy, but public knowledge that some of them might, with no knowledge of who those might be, would probably have some value as a deterrent --- not much, but some. Many would-be shooters would simply choose different targets.

As a matter of interest: Do you personally consider this selective arming of school teachers to be the sensible next step in protecting children while upholding this idea of freedom from the government?

After the Las Vegas hotel shooting, some citizens who were carrying guns at the time were interviewed and said that they'd changed their minds about the general truth of the old dictum that "to stop a bad guy with a gun it takes a good guy with a gun". They would have had no idea where or who to shoot. More shooting, probably in a state of panic, would just have led to more innocent deaths.

It seems likely that if guns were kept in schools there would be a high probabaility of similar death by confusion and panic. In situations like this, it seems that confusion and panic genrally reign.

G E Morton wrote:Really? You think that people living in gated communities are less happy than those who don't? What is the basis for that belief?

Obviously it's difficult to assess how happy someone is. But the basis is that they are less free than they would be if they didn't feel that they have to live in those gated communities.

The fact that I feel I have to lock my door when I go to work in the morning makes me less free than if I didn't feel I had to do that. The greater the general risk of crime, the more we have to restrict our freedoms in order to reduce the risk that we will be victims of that crime. Measures which are likely to reduce crime will therefore increase this aspect of our freedom. There is of course a trade-off between the increase in freedom caused by these measures and the decrease in freedom caused by the taxation required to fund the measures and the restrictions on behaviour/ownership that those measures entail.

G E Morton wrote:Well, that is another topic, but your claim there is obviously false. Taking wealth from Alfie in order to bestow benefits on Bruno rarely, if ever, benefits Alfie. If Alfie cannot afford to send his kid to Stanford because the government has seized 30% of his wealth he will not count that as a benefit.

If Alfie cannot afford to send his kid to Stanford because he has been robbed by Bruno then I suspect he wouldn't see that as a benefit either. Of course, your answer would be: the government should punish Bruno, after the fact, in order to try to discourage future Brunos. Another answer, depending on the circumstances, would be social programs, funded by Alfie's (and Bruno's) taxes, which would make it less likely that Bruno would resort to robbery.

You may argue about the relative effectiveness of the two methods for improving Alfie's freedom, but you cannot reasonably claim this to be "obviously false". I think this claim stems from your generally lopsided view of freedom - that the only agents capable of reducing it are those that we refer to as governments. It seems to me that this view leads you to think that nothing except government actions, such as taxation, can reduce Alfie's freedom. As I've demonstrated, this is a logically inconsistent view of the concept of freedom.

G E Morton wrote:Actually it is an explanation for the phenomenon at issue in this thread, i.e., Why is the US crime rate higher than that in other developed countries? The explanation is that the US has a larger number of persons from a crime-prone ethnic group than other developed countries. Why crime is more common among that group is a separate question. Crime rates are also high in all other countries with large black populations.

(See bolded part) It is the original question that we were asking.

You are simply shifting the question of "why does the US have a high rate of gun crime?" to "why do US black people have a high rate of gun crime?"

Correlation is not necessarily cause. Sometimes there is a common underlying cause of two of more things that are not causally related to each other - there is a common cause. So one way to attempt to answer the question would be to ask what other characteristics have a tendency, in the US, to go along with having black skin.

A look at the demographics of particular types of gun crime might also be informative. The types of "spree killing" that we've been considering here might tend to be perpetrated, in general, by different ethnic groups than more "normal" acquisitive violent crimes.

I'll catch up with more recent comments later.

Greta wrote:Imagine just letting everyone over 18 drive without compulsory instruction, licensing or registration of vehicles. That risk, however, is deemed unacceptable and so people's freedom to drive is curtailed. When is a risk deemed unacceptable?

That question is, I think, one of the questions I've been arguing about with GE Morton. It's related to the question: Does an increase in risk, such as the one you've identified here, constitute a decrease in freedom? If we decided that it is unacceptable to reduce people's freedom by forcing them to learn how to use and register their ownership of their car or gun, does any resulting increase to my risk of being shot or run over mean that I am less free?

I would say yes. GE Morton appears to say no.

Catching up a little bit more:

Steve3007 wrote:The question then is: why do teacher's not have to do that where I live? Have we given up some kind of greater freedom in exchange for the short-sighted gain of not having guns in school classrooms?

GE Morton wrote:That is a good question; it amounts to the basic question: why are these incidents occurring, in this country in this era? Clearly the rate of gun ownership is not the reason, since that rate has always been high, but these random mass shootings are phenomena of the past two decades or so.

I don't know the exact statistics. There do seem to have been a lot recently but they go back before the last two decades.

GE Morton wrote:I'm confident that part of the reason is the advent of television and, more recently, the Internet. The publicity given these incidents makes them acceptable in some immature minds --- commonplace, routine, a kind of theater or perhaps a form of civil disobedience. It also makes celebrities of the perpetrators. Heinous crimes committed in earlier decades didn't inspire mimicry merely because few alienated teenage boys read newspapers. But they do watch television.

Given that television and the internet are equally available in a large number of countries with widely varying incidences of mass shootings, this cannot be the primary reason.

The same goes for the scapegoat that is currently being used by the president now that he has finished blaming mental illness and the failure of law enforcement: violent video games. Gun violence has existed in movies since they were first invented, but one of the key characteristics of that violence when viewed from a society without much of a gun culture is that it is utterly different from real life. It is cartoonish. This perhaps makes the distinction between real-life and fiction easier to maintain.

Greta wrote: ↑February 26th, 2018, 5:17 am
The schisms in the US are getting deeper because it is obviously wildly irrational and foolish to allow shopkeepers to sell lethal weapons to any old Joe without due care. Imagine just letting everyone over 18 drive without compulsory instruction, licensing or registration of vehicles. That risk, however, is deemed unacceptable and so people's freedom to drive is curtailed. When is a risk deemed unacceptable?

Well, Greta, you seem unwilling to acknowledge the facts which have been pointed out to you. Gun dealers are not allowed to sell weapons to "any old Joe without due care." They are required to perform background checks, and have been so required for 20 years. While prudent, that requirement, as predicted, has not solved the problem, because it only reaches sales by licensed dealers, and millions of guns are available on the black market. Licensing would be no more effective, for the same reason. A criminal who wants a gun will pay no more attention to a licensing law than he will to the laws against robbery and murder.

Criminals pay no attention to vehicle and driver licensing laws, either --- they steal cars, steal plates to slap on them, and drive without suspended licenses. But since driving a car on a public highway is a highly visible activity, they sometimes get caught. Guns, however, are easily concealed, and you won't be caught with your unlicensed gun unless you are arrested for something else.

The solutions you propose, other than banning all semi-auto weapons, which would be unconstitutional and politically impossible, have been debated endlessly in this country. Some have been enacted, others rejected because they would be a nuisance for honest gun buyers and utterly ineffective against criminals.

There is one step the US could take that would reduce gun crimes and all other crimes substantially: sentence criminals with multiple prior felony convictions to prison for life. About 75% of the street crimes committed every day are committed by persons with criminal histories who should not have been loose on the streets in the first place.

GE Morton wrote: ↑February 26th, 2018, 11:23 am

Greta wrote: ↑February 26th, 2018, 5:17 am
The schisms in the US are getting deeper because it is obviously wildly irrational and foolish to allow shopkeepers to sell lethal weapons to any old Joe without due care. Imagine just letting everyone over 18 drive without compulsory instruction, licensing or registration of vehicles. That risk, however, is deemed unacceptable and so people's freedom to drive is curtailed. When is a risk deemed unacceptable?

Well, Greta, you seem unwilling to acknowledge the facts which have been pointed out to you. Gun dealers are not allowed to sell weapons to "any old Joe without due care."

Well, GE, you seem unwilling to acknowledge facts per se. If guns are not being sold to any old Joe without due care, how does a teenager who is infamous for his violent tendencies buy himself an AK-15. I would certainly call that reckless supply, ignoring obvious risks.

Your "can buy them on the black market" argument is simply pathetic. Why make laws at all if the existence of a black market presents a problem? Trouble is, the US can't enforce any gun buyback policy because the nation is so damaged, fraught and brutalised by its own gun policies that even that small policy change would bring civil war.

The US is in deep trouble with its gun culture, which threatens the nation FAR more than any terrorist. The damage is entirely self inflicted through the consistent refusal of their citizens to consider any long term solutions to the problem, rejecting all suggestions for not being "magic bullet fixes".

Greta wrote: ↑February 26th, 2018, 6:11 pm
Well, GE, you seem unwilling to acknowledge facts per se. If guns are not being sold to any old Joe without due care, how does a teenager who is infamous for his violent tendencies buy himself an AK-15.

Cruz was able to buy the gun (AR-15, not "AK-15") because he was of legal age and did not appear on the the NCIS disqualified list, having never been convicted of a crime or committed to a mental institution. Nor was he under a restraining order. Being locally "infamous" or having posted "disturbing" comments on Internet chatrooms does not get you on that list. There is no mechanism for that. I would support a change that enabled local officials to seek "firearms restraining orders" for persons who have posted threats online or privately with credible witnesses. Issuance of such an order would put you on that list. Whether such a mechanism would have stopped Cruz is questionable. He purchased his rifle a year earlier, before the online threats were posted. And of course, had he not been able to purchase the weapon from a licensed dealer he would have sought one on the black market.

Your "can buy them on the black market" argument is simply pathetic. Why make laws at all if the existence of a black market presents a problem?

That is a question that has been asked for years with regard to drug laws. How well have those prohibitions worked?

Trouble is, the US can't enforce any gun buyback policy because the nation is so damaged, fraught and brutalised by its own gun policies that even that small policy change would bring civil war.

"Buyback policy"? That proposal is just silly. Those have been tried in several US cities. Typically what the police recover are rusty, non-functional weapons and deceased husband's guns from widows. None of those programs have had any effect on local gun homicide rates. No criminal is gonna sell his gun to the cops, unless they offer more than it's worth --- in which case he'll use the money to buy a better gun.

GE Morton wrote: ↑February 26th, 2018, 8:48 pmCruz was able to buy the gun (AR-15, not "AK-15") because he was of legal age and did not appear on the the NCIS disqualified list, having never been convicted of a crime or committed to a mental institution. Nor was he under a restraining order. Being locally "infamous" or having posted "disturbing" comments on Internet chatrooms does not get you on that list. There is no mechanism for that. I would support a change that enabled local officials to seek "firearms restraining orders" for persons who have posted threats online or privately with credible witnesses. Issuance of such an order would put you on that list.

Agreed. It's pretty obvious and logical. There would ideally be capacity to review the decision, knowing that teens can be volatile and soon grow out of their emotion and hormone-fuelled instability.

GE Morton wrote:

Your "can buy them on the black market" argument is simply pathetic. Why make laws at all if the existence of a black market presents a problem?

That is a question that has been asked for years with regard to drug laws. How well have those prohibitions worked?

Prohibition fails in democracies but regulation in all manner of areas has been highly successful in mitigating potentially problematic behaviours and products. No one is talking about banning guns, just creating some sensible limits on gun ownership.

GE Morton wrote:
"Buyback policy"? That proposal is just silly. Those have been tried in several US cities. Typically what the police recover are rusty, non-functional weapons and deceased husband's guns from widows. None of those programs have had any effect on local gun homicide rates. No criminal is gonna sell his gun to the cops, unless they offer more than it's worth --- in which case he'll use the money to buy a better gun.

That "silly" proposal worked brilliantly in Australia.

However, the US is another matter. It is too late for the US. This gun problem and mass murdering will simply continue to become worse and worse as weapons continue to become more efficient and deadly, and this will almost certainly increasingly fracture the society.

Economists would see guns in the US as a wicked problem. Something in US society must break for it to be solved. I'm just sweating on the situation because, if the US continues committing hari kuri then it will take Australia's economy down with it.

Steve3007 wrote: ↑February 26th, 2018, 9:35 am
As a general rule, I think it's self-evidently not a valid argument to take an extremely broad spectrum of possible activities and state that if a person supports activities at one end of that spectrum they must automatically support activities all along that spectrum to the other end, or that they give a rationale to other people who do support activities at the other end of the spectrum.

Yikes. Long comment. May split this response into 2 installments.

As I said, the advocate for A need not support B. But if B presents issues similar to those of A the advocate for A has supplied the advocate for B a rationale for his position --- whether he wished to or not.

One other example among many: the point at which a fertilized embryo in the womb is deemed to have become a human being (an agent) and is therefore regarded as having the right not to be harmed so long as/he she doesn't harm others. A slippery slope argument would say that either this right is fully conferred at the moment of conception or it is not conferred at all. It would say that if you confer rights on an 8 month old unborn baby then you have no defense against people who want to confer those same rights to single celled embryos. Clearly this is not what we do. Various people draw various dividing lines. There is no logical contradiction in doing so.

That is not actually a slippery slope problem. The slippery slope depends upon relevant similarities between A and B, such that an argument for A also supports B. Pointing out a crucial difference between A and B stops the slide. There is a highly relevant difference between a newborn and a day-old embryo, as pointed out by Mary Anne Warren in 1973:

https://philosophyintrocourse.com/phi-2 ... -abortion/

Returning to the spectrum of potentially harmful objects that we might consider banning: Since you (I presume) and almost everybody else are also on that spectrum, I could apply the same argument to you. If we place all forms of control of anything that could ever be harmful on the same spectrum and then apply the slippery slope argument, I could argue that the logic which is used to ban the general public ownership of, say, battlefield nuclear weapons must also be used to ban scissors. Clearly absurd.

I think we covered this in earlier posts (perhaps in another thread). A nuke, or even a hand grenade, poses grave risks to 3rd parties if ever used. Hence they cannot be used for any morally justifiable purpose short of warfare (assuming you consider wars to sometimes be justifiable). Hence banning them imposes no substantive loss or hardship on would-be owners. Personal weapons, on the other hand, have many substantive and morally justifiable uses that pose no risks to third parties.

Indeed, the slippery slope runs the other way: you are suggesting that innocently useful things be banned if they pose risks to third parties. And of course, thousands of innocently useful things pose risks to third parties, because they can be abused --- cars, knives, basball bats, electricity, all fuels, matches, fertilizers, prescription drugs, most tools, etc., etc. To stop this slippery slope you need to point out some crucial difference between firearms and other useful but potentially dangerous things. Of course, an argument amounting to, "Well, everybody 'needs'or uses electricity and fuels, but only a few paranoid sociopaths keep guns," is an ad hominem and invalid.

1. If we take the attitude that people's own health-related lifestyle choices are entirely their own business and we should not use any mechanism, such as targeted taxation, to try to reduce the incidences of such things as morbid obesity, diabetes and alcoholism would that result in anybody other than the unhealthy eaters themselves being harmed?

It might, if you consider grief and loss of support or consortium to be harms. Self-destructive behaviors do not, however, entail the violation of any third party rights --- there being no rights to contentment, companionship, consortium, etc. Losses of those do not constitute harms in the morally relevant sense. Taxing third parties --- especially parties at no risk of being harmed (even in the loose sense) by those behaviors does violate their rights. In general, Alfie is not responsible for Bruno's welfare, absent some sort of contract between them or debt owed to Bruno by Alfie.

2. If I fail to wear a safety belt in a car or a crash helmet on a motorcycle, am I (potentially) harming anybody but myself?

In the case of seat belts you might, because if you are dislodged from the driver's seat you may lose control of your vehicle and cause a worse collision. But traffic safety rules are of a different ilk than general laws --- they are conditional upon use of a public service or asset. The owners of an asset may impose any conditions for use they please. That is true even when the owner is "the public." A law which demanded that you wear a seatbelt while driving your tractor on your own farm would violate your rights --- your right to run whatever risks you choose to run. A law requiring you to wear one while driving on a public road does not --- because you have no right to drive on that road; you have only a conditional privilege and a vote, in common with all your joint owners, on what those conditions shall be.

3. If we, the people (via our government), decide not to fund, via taxation, any free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare services, would this cause any harm to anybody other than the people who can't afford to pay for health care/insurance?

Covered in #1, I think.

4. If we remove all restrictions on all types of weapons, devices and substances and allow all people who haven't yet been clearly seen to show any propensity to violence to own absolutely anything that they want, for whatever private reasons they might have, will this harm anybody?

Covered above.

5. If we decide not to fund, via taxation, social programs for such things as drug and crime rehabilitation will this harm anybody other than the people who consume these services?

6. If we decide not to fund any welfare services such that people who can't or won't financially support themselves starve to death, would this harm anybody except those people?

Neither would harm the people who consume those services, in the morally relevant sense, because they have no rights to those services in the first place. As indicated above, Alfie has no right to any services from Bruno, absent some contract between them or a debt owed due to some prior relationship between them. When there is no prior basis for such an obligation then forcing Alfie to support Bruno is an egregious violation of Alfie's rights.

(more tomorrow)

GE Morton wrote:Yikes. Long comment. May split this response into 2 installments.

No need to reply to all of it. I have a tendency to try to do that myself and sometimes I end up replying to things that were said several pages ago that have been superseded and not catching up with more recent comments. In fact, I suppose there wasn't really any need for me to reply to this particular point to this length. I think I'm just a bit anal.

As I said, the advocate for A need not support B. But if B presents issues similar to those of A the advocate for A has supplied the advocate for B a rationale for his position --- whether he wished to or not.

As I said, if it's just that A and B are on the same continuous spectrum I don't think that's necessarily true. Being on the same continuous spectrum doesn't, in any meaningful sense, necessarily make them similar.

Pointing out a crucial difference between A and B stops the slide.

If by "a crucial difference" you mean something that all rational, intellectually honest, clear-thinking people would have to accept as objectively true (as opposed to a matter of personal preference or taste) then I don't think that's necessarily possible. The divisions we place on many of these kinds of spectra are arbitrary in the sense that, at heart, they are our personal preferences.

The example I gave of another type of continuous spectrum - from embryo to human baby - illustrates that. I don't think that the article by Mary Anne Warren that you posted (interesting as it is) in any way changes that. She simply shifts the question of when an embryo becomes a person onto the question of when 5 characteristics (consciousness, reasoning etc) are deemed to be present. This is open to personal preference just as much. Her personal preference appears to be that an unborn baby, up until the moment it is actually born, has considerably less personhood/consciousness etc then a newborn baby:

Mary Anne Warren wrote:Thus it is clear that even though a seven- or eight-month fetus has features which make it apt to arouse in us almost the same powerful protective instinct as is commonly aroused by a small infant, nevertheless it is not significantly more personlike than is a very small embryo. It is somewhat more personlike; it can apparently feel and respond to pain, and it may even have a rudimentary form of consciousness, insofar as its brain is quite active. Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that it is not fully conscious, in the way that an infant of a few months is, and that it cannot reason, or communicate messages of indefinitely many sorts, does not engage in self-motivated activity, and has no self-awareness. Thus, in the relevant respects, a fetus, even a fully developed one, is considerably less personlike than is the average mature mammal, indeed the average fish.

Clearly many people would very strongly disagree, not least because of the absurdities that result from this view. The act of moving from inside the womb to outside, or of cutting the umbilical cord, doesn't suddenly cause a step-change in consciousness. The logical conclusion from her argument is that infanticide of newborns is morally acceptable. Almost everyone in our societies (although not in some past societies) would strongly disagree. She goes on to discuss this, but perhaps a more detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this thread.

So I still think that this example shows that there are spectra on which it is not possible to place an objective dividing line whose position is determined by arguments that all reasonable people would accept. Yet we have to place dividing lines on them anyway, for the purposes of legislation. And we do. Based on personal preferences which are often simply a result of our cultural background.

Returning to a more directly relevant example:

A nuke, or even a hand grenade, poses grave risks to 3rd parties if ever used. Hence they cannot be used for any morally justifiable purpose short of warfare (assuming you consider wars to sometimes be justifiable). Hence banning them imposes no substantive loss or hardship on would-be owners. Personal weapons, on the other hand, have many substantive and morally justifiable uses that pose no risks to third parties.

A nuke is at the extreme end of the spectrum. Hand grenade? A danger to third parties because, unlike a gun, it is non-directional? Exactly how directional must a weapon be in order not to be banned? I'm sure some people who own armouries of guns to protect them against the government and other bad guys could find justifications for owning hand grenades, even if other gun owners disagreed. There could be scenarios in which a bunch of several bad guys with weapons all need to be stopped at once, perhaps if they're attempting a home invasion. What right have we to stop people from owning such objects as hand-grenades when they have not yet shown any indication that they will use them to harm innocent people? They might just like hand-grenades.

Personal weapons almost always pose risks to third parties. If you read some accounts of past mass-shootings, the dominant impression is often one of complete panic and confusion. There is no clear, objective dividing line on the spectrum of weapons on one side of which there is no danger to third parties and on the other side of which there is.

Indeed, the slippery slope runs the other way: you are suggesting that innocently useful things be banned if they pose risks to third parties.

I'm not suggesting that. I'm pointing out the absurdity of the slippery slope argument.

And of course, thousands of innocently useful things pose risks to third parties, because they can be abused --- cars, knives, basball bats, electricity, all fuels, matches, fertilizers, prescription drugs, most tools, etc., etc. To stop this slippery slope you need to point out some crucial difference between firearms and other useful but potentially dangerous things. Of course, an argument amounting to, "Well, everybody 'needs'or uses electricity and fuels, but only a few paranoid sociopaths keep guns," is an ad hominem and invalid.

"...but only a few paranoid sociopaths keep guns" is a strawman. I suspect very few people say that. I know of nobody who does. I certainly don't. As you move along the continuous spectrum from scissors and fuel to hand grenades, the utility-to-danger ratio changes in a continuous way. The cost/benefit continuously changes. So, just as with the abortion debate, the point on that spectrum where you start to restrict ownership (or start to allow abortions) cannot be placed using an appeal to facts which all rational people would accept. It depends on your attitude to harm and personal freedom. Your views, like those of almost everyone else, are on that spectrum.


I'll leave it there for now and try to answer your earlier post in which you talk about the definition of the word "threat" later.

(continuing)

In the last sentence in the previous post Alfie's and Bruno's roles were switched. Ooops!

Steve3007 wrote: ↑February 26th, 2018, 9:35 am
7. If there are no limits to the amount of CO₂, and other not-immediately-harmful gases/substances, that can be emitted by vehicles and power stations and it is left entirely up to the free market to decide how to generate power or build vehicles, such that the only consideration is the immediate financial cost to the producer of generation per kW, does this harm anybody? Does it do anything other than benefit consumers by creating cheap power/desirable vehicles?

As I may have mentioned in previous posts, classically the raison d'etre for government was to protect citizens' rights. But there are a couple of additional functions which are morally justifiable and, arguably, necessary. They are, 1) managing natural commons, and 2) supplying certain public goods* in addition to police and defense services.

Without management natural commons are vulnerable to the "tragedy of the commons," to the detriment of all their users. Only government can impartially manage those commons (at least in principle). So regulations governing use of those resources are justifiable. Not all rules adopted will be wise or necessary, of course. But like public roads and all other public goods there is no equitable method choosing those regulations other than by the consent of their owners, by majority vote. The only moral constraints on those rules are that all users have an equal vote, and whatever rules are adopted apply equally to all users.

* A "public good" in economic jargon, is a good that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Only governments can supply those goods. Police, courts, and defense services are paradigm public goods, but there are others.

As a matter of interest: Do you personally consider this selective arming of school teachers to be the sensible next step in protecting children while upholding this idea of freedom from the government?

If carried out prudently it is a sensible step, though perhaps not the "next" sensible step. "Prudently" meaning that only teachers who are comfortable and competent with firearms, and willing to take on that responsibility, are armed. As I said earlier, once the possibility that some school staff may be armed becomes public knowledge it should have some deterrent effect, but it will be no "magic bullet."

After the Las Vegas hotel shooting, some citizens who were carrying guns at the time were interviewed and said that they'd changed their minds about the general truth of the old dictum that "to stop a bad guy with a gun it takes a good guy with a gun". They would have had no idea where or who to shoot. More shooting, probably in a state of panic, would just have led to more innocent deaths.

That is why training would be required. Cops face the same chaotic scenarios daily.

Obviously it's difficult to assess how happy someone is. But the basis is that they are less free than they would be if they didn't feel that they have to live in those gated communities.

The fact that I feel I have to lock my door when I go to work in the morning makes me less free than if I didn't feel I had to do that. The greater the general risk of crime, the more we have to restrict our freedoms in order to reduce the risk that we will be victims of that crime. Measures which are likely to reduce crime will therefore increase this aspect of our freedom. There is of course a trade-off between the increase in freedom caused by these measures and the decrease in freedom caused by the taxation required to fund the measures and the restrictions on behaviour/ownership that those measures entail.

I'll respond to this expansive notion of "freedom" of yours in a separate post.

If Alfie cannot afford to send his kid to Stanford because he has been robbed by Bruno then I suspect he wouldn't see that as a benefit either. Of course, your answer would be: the government should punish Bruno, after the fact, in order to try to discourage future Brunos. Another answer, depending on the circumstances, would be social programs, funded by Alfie's (and Bruno's) taxes, which would make it less likely that Bruno would resort to robbery.

Besides the fact that all manner of social programs have been in place in most Western countries for the last 50 years or so without significantly reducing crime, that solution amounts to merely replacing the mugger's gun with a government gun. The demand is the same: "Your money or your life." Alfie has no duty to support Bruno, either via a street robbery or a tax. As for the reduction in Alfie's risk, there is none. The risk he would face from the mugger is simply distributed among more victims. Instead of Alfie losing $100, 100 victims lose a dollar each. None of them should lose a cent.

(more later)

Re: Freedom

Steve3007 wrote: ↑February 26th, 2018, 9:35 am
The fact that I feel I have to lock my door when I go to work in the morning makes me less free than if I didn't feel I had to do that. The greater the general risk of crime, the more we have to restrict our freedoms in order to reduce the risk that we will be victims of that crime.

Your wording in the above quote reveals the issue. "Feeling free" is not the same as being free. That you are reluctant or hesitant to do X because you are uncertain of the consequences of doing X, does not mean than you are not free to do X. Nor are we unfree if "we restrict our freedoms;" we are only unfree if someone else, another moral agent, restricts our freedoms, physically or by threat (in the sense defined). Personal, internal
inhibitions, whether due to worries about the "general risk of crime" or any other source, do not constitute restraints on our freedom, in any morally relevant sense. Moral issues arise only when one moral agent violates the rights of another, or threatens to do so.

There is a "general risk of crime" in every community of 2 or more persons. We may not impose real restraints on the liberties of moral agents merely in order to prevent crimes they could conceivably or hypothetically commit, but are highly unlikely to commit and have indicated no intention of committing. As I said, the contrary principle, if taken to its logical conclusion, yields a police state.

So that's it then. Mass shootings will have to be a fact of life in the US. Generations of children will have to live with the fear of being torn apart by the bullet of a AK-15 because the cowards in Congress will refuse to act.

And all because the US government & shooting lobby refuse to ban semi-final automatic rifles which have no function but to tear limb from limb as many people as possible.

The selfish attitude of the shooting lobby & so called libertarians will doom generations of children to live in fear. They will just have to hope that someone near & dear to them doesn't pay the price for someone else's 'right's.

Rederic wrote: ↑March 1st, 2018, 12:23 pm So that's it then. Mass shootings will have to be a fact of life in the US. Generations of children will have to live with the fear of being torn apart by the bullet of a AK-15 because the cowards in Congress will refuse to act.

If they live in fear of being shot while at school, then they should certainly fear riding in an automobile, since their risk of being killed is 42 times greater (633 child auto deaths in 2015, vs 15 from school shootings). And they should fear going home, where their risk of dying in a house fire is 28 times greater (271 deaths in 2015).

Oops. The risk of dying in a house fire is 18 times greater, not 28.