Savant

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1. Savant

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Those jokes are rarely good - men are disposable, whereas women are responsible for the furtherance of any society. So male rape has always been taken less seriously than female rape

Even if I buy the first part, we're talking about rape and not murder, so what does it have to do with whether or not the victims are "disposable"? I don't think the problem people have with rape is that it stops people from furthering society, it's that it's done without consent and can be traumatic.

Also I disagree with the first part. Men don't have wombs, but they are much less disposable as far as labor is concerned. And furthering society only matters is we care about what happens to people in society, so no one is really disposable.

those prices show that now poor people are less able to afford house, college, car or bread

But if they're better able to afford most things in general, it's a net gain.

Poor people dont receive median wage by definition

They also earn increasingly more than the minimum wage. The median wage at least represents the common man, and poor people are a subset of that. If wages are getting better generally, then the standard for what is a low wage is getting higher. You were the one who brought up the distinction between wages and assets as separating the rich and poor in the first place. The point is that things are getting better for wage earners.

Now, as for houses being bigger or colleges being better, it is not of great importance to poor person who cant afford them

But they can rent or buy condos. And when they do save up to get a house, it will be higher-quality than it would be in the past. Houses aren't much more expensive per square foot today compared to CPI (which wages are keeping up with), and they have superior energy efficiency and safer materials. If you really control for all of that, the same house might even be cheaper today.

So anyone who works for under 20$ per hour is by logical necessity poorer than person working for 3 dollars in 1980.

Sure, but there are less people working for the minimum wage today, so poor by today's standards is significantly better than $20 an hour, whereas poor by 1980 standards was closer to the minimum wage and a lower standard of living.

We are talking about poor people, which median has nothing to do with

But the minimum wage doesn't really measure it either, because poor people can make more without the minimum wage increasing.

Why are you looking at those items specifically instead of the Consumer Price Index? And at minimum wage instead of the median wage? Also, it's not really a fair comparison, because the value of houses and college education is changing. Houses today are bigger than in the past.

Homes aren't the only thing people buy. You can cherry pick things that get cheaper too.

there are also those who dont, or those who earn close to minimum wage.

Yeah but that's cherry picking as well. You can cherry pick people who are doing better as well. That's why it's best to use the median.

the problem is that poor people usually lack education to do that

Maybe, but then inflation doesn't punish the poor as much as it punishes the uneducated. And there could be some correlation there, but who hasn't heard of index funds? It might require some education but not much. Inflation also guards against deflation, which is also pretty bad for the poor, so it's still a net benefit.

today, minimum wage is on level where it was in 1950 when adjusted for inflation

Most people earn above the minimum wage.

Also, your own link shows that actual value of wage was lower for much longer time than it was higher. Only if you pick first and last point would you see a small increase. Everything from 1980 to 2014 is basically mostly decrease in value of wage, even by those measurements which fail to account for a lot of things.

Real wages actually went up in the period from 1980 to 2014 if you look at the graph. And I'm looking at the long-term trend. Obviously you can look at short-term periods where real wages decreased, but we're talking about overall, right?

It takes a certain education to be good at that.

Just invest in an index fund.

Even if you increase the wage, inflation still doesnt benefit the poor but reduces his increased wage.

But a good deal of the wage increase is due to inflation in the first place.

Poor person, who is a wage slave, earns money. His money loses value when inflation happens, so he can buy less.

Only if he has a bunch of money stuffed away in a mattress or something, in which case they could just invest in stocks. Median wages have generally outpaced inflation, so if they're living paycheck to paycheck it's not as big of an effect since their pay keeps going up.

while the decision eventually came to impact the colonists as a whole, the original impact was local and so they weren't taken into consideration

So if they weren't anticipating a full scale war that affected all the colonies, how could they expect to occupy prominent positions? It only had positive effects for them because of the war.

For the vast, vast majority of people, being self-interested is all the justification they need

Then they're no better than King George.

Even if the Crown had acquiesced on some small point, as long as they had no voice in Parliament they would renege on this as soon as they felt that they had the upper hand or felt that some problem

Yeah but there were advantages to living in the colonies despite lack of representation, and most colonists were fine with the arrangement minus some small grievances. Taxation was not unique in being without representation, a big complaint was on internal vs external taxation which Britain actually acquiesced to to some extent. Most of the colonists preferred to work their grievances out without war until the Intolerable Acts. Note that Canada got its independence without war.

Better for whom?

For the colonists as a whole, including the teens who were sent to die because of the war.

Many of the Boston mercantile & professional classes who participated in the riot eventually came to occupy prominent positions.

So they were self-interested, that doesn't equate to being justified.

If that sort of sacrifice wasn't 'worth it' in the long run everyone would surrender rather than go to war.

No, there are plenty of good reasons to go to war. Like the Intolerable Acts. But the taxes issue could have been worked out without war.

the international system isn't something that we can fiddle with and set the rules for to optimize it. It's an anarchic environment with multiple actors pursuing their own interests

But you can still make good decisions and bad decisions. Like, if I go shoot 100 people that will probably have bad consequences, no? The fact that you can identify bad decisions means that some decisions are better than others.

I don't think even the greatest supercomputer could predict the counterfactuals surround the Boston Tea Party rolling out several centuries to any degree of accuracy

Well then look at what the people doing the protest could have logically anticipated. Something like the Intolerable Acts? Possibly. America becoming an empire? Pretty hard to predict, and the power structure of the world could easily have been set up better without a war most people didn't want.

That's the problem with it - because it's about predicting the actions of other people, you eventually get into game theory/wifom

Yeah but there are still "optimal moves" even in game theory, just like a really complicated game of chess. And even though chess itself is complicated, it is possible to identify obviously bad moves. And I don't think we need to understand all of game theory to identify that the Boston Tea Party was strategically bad.

the more predictable they become to one another

Predictability is actually pretty useful if we want stable international relations. Hard to trade or plan for the future if the government is gonna act in a totally random way.

the more 'breaking the rules' and acting in an illogical matter presents a way to upset opponents

Except in the examples we're discussing, breaking the rules was counterproductive.

None of that makes the irrational response justified, it just means that Britain did a greater share of unjustified things.

This is the trouble with consequentialist ethics - it assumes rationality.

No, consequentialist ethics says you ought to anticipate the consequences of your actions, it does not assume people will. Is and ought are different things. If anything, a consequentialist would condemn the Tea Party precisely because it provoked an irrational response from Britain.

it was either fight or be destroyed

I think I've been clear that not all forms of fighting back are bad, just certain poor decisions that were made. Once the Intolerable Acts happened, the colonists were pushed into a tighter corner, but those could have been avoided without the Tea Party.

destroying the tea was a protest against extractive economic practices by destroying the property of a corrupt monopoly

Sure, but the effects of the protests were bad for the colonists, and I don't see what positive effects they could have been anticipating. So it was still needless destruction of property.

attempts by the Chinese to destroy the Sassoon Opium empire, which also had the military protection of Britain and was openly extractive and exploitative

A lot of morally questionable decisions were made by China there, like preventing the sale of food to the British, leading to the Opium Wars (which were bad for China). So I accept it as a parallel but it largely proves my point.

Whenever terrorists or rioters are criticized for destroying property, someone will inevitably respond, "Well, what about the Boston Tea Party? Those people were terrorists who destroyed property and they were justified." Now, as a disclaimer, I don't think that justifying the Boston Tea Party automatically justifies all destruction of property, but that will mostly be irrelevant in this post. My main thesis is that the Boston Tea Party itself was not justified.

The main supposed justification for destruction of property would be that it helped the colonies. You could also argue that it was just inherently justified to do anything that taught Britain a lesson, but I'll stick to consequentialist ethics here, since the goal of a protest is typically to help whatever people the protestors are protesting for. The immediate effects of the Boston Tea Party were the Intolerable Acts: closing Boston Harbor, replacing Massachusetts' government, and the Quartering Act, among other things. All these immediate effects were bad for the colonies.

However, those policies also led to the Revolutionary War. So was the protest was justified because it led indirectly to American independence? This gets into a political theory called "accelerationism" which basically argues that we should try to make things get bad faster so that people will protest and overthrow the oppressive system. But I have several issues with this approach. First, it would imply that the Intolerable Acts themselves were justified because they led to revolution. Basically, anyone involved in passing the acts and violating the colonists' rights was actually doing a good thing, because it led to the American Revolution. And at best, you will get lucky with this strategy, because it's easy to predict "this will lead to punitive measures" but hard to predict "this will lead to American independence." The colonies could have easily lost the war, and most colonists didn't even want to fight it until the Intolerable Acts were passed.

So at best, the Boston Tea Party was a way of twisting the colonists' arms into fighting a war for independence (which would end up involving child soldiers), when most of the colonists had wanted to avoid war altogether. A good chunk of the colonists fighting for reforms condemned the Tea Party anyway, with Benjamin Franklin offering to pay for the tea that was destroyed. Many of the grievances with the British government might have been solved without war, and the Intolerable Acts themselves were certainly avoidable.

Now you could say that the people behind the Tea Party weren't responsible for what Britain did, but the goal of a protest is to send a message and influence behavior, so I think protestors (particularly those destroying property) have at least some responsibility not to cause needless destruction.

Is abortion worse than murdering a 30 year old? Or an 80 year old? When we assume more lifespan is better?

Prima facie yeah, although there could obviously be exceptions where the 30 year old is about to cure cancer or the fetus has a lower estimated lifespan due to health issues.

Oh sorry my comment wasn't related to your post, I was testing something else.

So should not reproducing be punished by extra taxes then, or treated as basically worse than murder?

I think I already mentioned earlier in the thread I'm not 100% utilitarian in all circumstances. Not reproducing is not the same as abortion, it's more along the lines of not extending someone's lifespan. If you want to discuss the morality of abortion more broadly maybe that merits another discussion, but I thought we were talking about wants.

test

originally talking of 7 year old dying from cancer, would he prefer being aborted

Which is still 7 years of life, and

loss in terms of not having a want, rather than having want and not achieving it (which is a greater loss).

I dispute that's a greater loss. If someone has never heard of money and I scam them out of their inheritance, that's pretty much just as bad as stealing money directly.

Same applies to any other wish. You could say people who choose to not to give birth and not reproduce and who choose to keep lack of reproduction legal only do so after being born (so they are guaranteed not to be "not born").

Yes that's true, but as I said I'm not 100% utilitarian in all circumstances, we are just discussing this from a utilitarian perspective. I think the benefit of being born outweighs the convenience of not reproducing, typically speaking.

And there are cases where abortion is obvious gain for fetus too, such as cases where fetus would live very short after birth, and in great pain so giving birth in that case is just doing torture.

Those are a vast minority and not really what we were originally talking about though.

Majority of people (including future unborn) want abortion to be legal

But only after they have been born and are guaranteed not to be aborted; it's a perverse incentive. Also it's pretty easy to measure the loss and gain from pregnancy vs. dying. Account for how much people want each thing, which can typically be approximated for how much they will pay for certain things. Human life has been valued at several billion dollars based on what people will pay for safety features in cars and stuff, and pregnancy only lasts a fraction of a life typically.

Well, having a body to own requires actually being born/not killed in utero, so from a utilitarian lens the right to not be aborted is more important than the right to end a pregnancy. I do think the utilitarian lens is a bit reductive for the issue as a whole, but it's kind of what my dispute with SatanLucy was over.

A and B aren't absolutely true, but they are necessary proxies given that we don't have a better way to measure wants.

Most people support abortion being legal

But they are not at risk of being aborted and generally have less to gain from abortion than someone has to lose by being aborted.

a lot of people who commit suicide

A lot more who take significant steps every day to not die. Working out/going to the doctor/getting health insurance, etc. And those people tend to be in a much more rational mental state than the ones who kill themselves.

people who say their life is horrible

Yet more of them go to the doctor than kill themselves. Horrible means below average, not worse than nonexistence.

Those are just numbers you made up though. Even among those wanting to die there's a lot of hesitation; the desire to live tends to be much stronger and people fight tooth and nail to not die.

if you assume wants of most outweighs wants of few in all possible cases...if person has "do not revive" writing with them

No, we're discussing a case where we have no idea what the individual would want and we have to guess (unborn child, kid with cancer who has not expressed a desire to die).