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## [Politics] Castro: Cuban Model Doesn't Work...?

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mean_liar
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Post by mean_liar » Sat Sep 25, 2010 11:54 am

My point is not that indirect killing is somehow morally superior to direct killing, but that indirect killing is by definition the result of other factors and therefore simply not as bad within the context of long-duration post-facto calculations, such as embargoes on humanitarian goods.
To go back to your earlier analogy, it's not the question of a landmine in the corner v shooting someone directly, it's more: foregoing (perhaps critical) maintenance on your car and having it go out of control and killing someone v shooting someone. It was an indirect killing that happened for understandable decisions made without serious moral lapses.
You're discussing the key measure that I was discussing, which was essentially the probability that your actions will result in negative consequences. The embargo was an appropriate tit-for-tat, but at some point it was sustained past a point of reasonable retaliation and somewhere past that point it perhaps became an indirect killer - at which point, some X+10 years past it's inception, it begins to acquire a degree of immorality or at least disproportion equivalent to direct killing.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Sat Sep 25, 2010 7:01 pm

> mean_liar wrote:foregoing (perhaps critical) maintenance on your car and having it go out of control and killing someone v shooting someone. It was an indirect killing that happened for understandable decisions made without serious moral lapses.

It's a sliding scale in my opinion; going a week after your scheduled state inspection and killing someone when, say, your transmission randomly fails probably doesn't make you a killer. Driving a rusted-down car from your cousin's garage after 20 years of storage onto the highway probably does. make you responsible. Driving a car 10 years after storage between maintenance directly to the repair shop? Eh. Grey area again.
I personally like to set the sliding scale pretty high, since better a guilty man goes free than an innocent one gets imprisoned and all that.

> mean_liar wrote:The embargo was an appropriate tit-for-tat, but at some point it was sustained past a point of reasonable retaliation and somewhere past that point it perhaps became an indirect killer

I think that ironically by the time the embargo would've been sustained for the length that it would've caused harm it was detoothed anyway by the advances in trade and the world economy. Granted, it was rendered harmless for all of the wrong reasons, but hey. No harm no foul.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Sat Sep 25, 2010 7:17 pm

At the level of public policy it stops being a dangerous act and starts having consequences which are virtually guaranteed by statistics alone. If you do something dangerous that has a 1% chance of killing someone and you happen to kill someone, I'll bet you're willing to call that reckless endangerment coupled with a tragic accident. But if you do something that has a 1% chance of killing each person and there are 100 people, when one of them dies isn't that murder? You don't know who is going to get the lucky straw, and there's even a 37% chance that noone will die at all (and corresponding chances that your action will kill two or more people).
And when you start pulling bullshit antics that have a very tiny chance of killing each person in a nation of eleven million, you're looking at a small and random but entirely foreseeable and assured number of deaths. Whatever number it is (and The Lancet agrees that number may be hard to ascertain), it's still a number. A number of deaths that is caused by the choice to fine and imprison people who land on US shores after having traded in Cuba.
The bottom line is that when you are dealing with actions that affect millions of people instead of just the handful of people in your immediate vicinity, it stops being about a 0.1% chance that someone died. It starts being about the near certainty that 0.1% of the people died. And suddenly, a tenth of a percent isn't a negligible chance, it's eleven thousand people. Point of order: yes, 0.1% is possibly significantly higher than the percentage killed by the blockade - but it's been 37 years, so maybe not.
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Zinegata
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Post by Zinegata » Sat Sep 25, 2010 11:54 pm

The article Frank posted is, frankly, garbage.
The main point of this 1997 article is as follows:

> The USA provided food and medicines for up to a quarter of all Haitians at the height of that embargo. If an embargo is the right tool in the USA's fight against Cuba, then the USA should demonstrate that it is doing everything possible to limit collateral effects among the general population

The thing is, the US did offer humanitarian aid to Cuba. The Castro regime rejected this aid until later on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba#cite_ref-cmaj_68-1

> Castro's rule was severely tested in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse (known in Cuba as the Special Period), with effects such as food shortages.[69][70] The government did not accept American donations of food, medicines, and cash until 1993.

So, bluntly, the article Frank showed is garbage because it simply tries to pin all the blame on the US, without considering that the Cubans did, in fact, refuse such aid.
In fact, here's another nice snippet from the article:

> The only good news here is in the Cuban health system. Despite
> important increases in morbidity due to deteriorating living conditions and
> a striking decline in availability of imported medical supplies, infant,
> maternal, and general mortality are at their lowest rates ever.

Yes people. The article claims the embargo is hurting Cuba... in spite of Cuba now having its lowest mortality rate ever.
Maybe it has something to do with Cuba becoming a net exporter of medical products once they got out of the dead Soviet trade system and found new partners?
Based on general history, Cuba's problems after the Soviet collapse wasn't a lack of medicine or healthcare. It was food shortages. That's why Cuba developed trade relations with Canada after the Soviet shipments died out.
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mean_liar
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Post by mean_liar » Sun Sep 26, 2010 12:00 am

Yeah, but that still just boils down to numbers and bullshit. You need a moral framework to work with, otherwise even rational acts of national self-protection can become obviated: "the USSR refuses to respond to Nazi aggression because it will kill 20m of our people, as opposed to capitulation, which will only kill 5m."
It's the moral framework that lets you judge that cost-benefit analysis that's the important part, not the body count. Right now, you're dealing solely with the body count and that's unnecessarily myopic and limiting.
Frankly the scope is larger than all of that. You need a moral framework to measure all of that, or else a reliance on total consequentialism just tends to lead to complete pacifism, since rolling over and taking in the ass is almost always easier than risking taking it in the face.
That moral framework is the real crux, not consequentialism and a simple cost-benefit analysis.
EDIT - I crossposted with Zinegata. I'm responding to Frank general weighting of numbers of deaths as the prime arbiter of judgment.
I'm not surprised that there's a lot of bullshit about Cuban quality of life. They're a bit of a darling for anti-American "if only the Evil Empire wasn't just a bunch of cocks" crowd. Z Magazine and my abused trust, I'm looking at you.
Last edited by mean_liar on Sun Sep 26, 2010 12:03 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Sun Sep 26, 2010 2:27 am

> mean_liar wrote: Yeah, but that still just boils down to numbers and bullshit. You need a moral framework to work with, otherwise even rational acts of national self-protection can become obviated: "the USSR refuses to respond to Nazi aggression because it will kill 20m of our people, as opposed to capitulation, which will only kill 5m."

What kind of moral framework would you use besides utilitarianism though? Numbers and happiness (the latter of which is really hard to measure) are really the only thing that you have to cross-compare in most instances.
The biggest problem is that bullshit like nationalism places a priority on the kinds of lives saved in the first place when they shouldn't even really count. Trading 10 million lives of theirs to save 2 million lives of your own people is something only justified by that barbaric policy of tribalism.
That said, if the Soviets wanted to justify themselves they could've just pointed to the fact that the Nazis wanted to take over Europe/Africa and the rest of the world--and even if they saved 15m lives in the short term, in the long run that cost would've been astronomically higher because the Nazis would've been able to reinforce a front and have access to vast reserves of resources. In that case, they weren't really facing the option of losing 20m versus 5m, they were facing the option of losing 20m versus 100m+. Or even higher. Fighting against tyranny is almost always morally defensible.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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mean_liar
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Post by mean_liar » Sun Sep 26, 2010 3:11 am

Well, that's your moral framework then: achieving ultimate utility for the sake of all mankind... somehow. Emphasis on the somehow.
Under that framework as-presented, every minute of your life you spend on your own selfish desires is an affront to the global march towards perfection. Say, gaming instead of helping feed the homeless, or working instead of volunteering. So, maybe that's not really your measure in practice but your measure in large terms made on choices not involving you.
You draw a line somewhere, and the measures you use to draw that line are subjective and vital. That line is not based on consequentialism or utilitarianism: it is only described in those terms.
In real-time, you have to exercise your decisions based on incomplete information and your own measures of risk and reward. Simply putting it all down to a simple measure is almost certainly too simple to be considered anything but rote.
For example, instead of Russia v Nazi Germany, we can construct a hypothetical wherein the Nazis kill Hitler and get rid of Himmler yet maintain imperial ambition. So, no mass killings, but certainly despotic rule. Now you're not talking about 100M dead from pogroms and the like; you're talking about 5M from the cultural shift... and your resistance's justification melts away and you're again faced with absolute pacifism as the majority response to most forms of aggression.
Not only that, but a large weakness of utilitarianism is that it's forever backwards-looking. It's a methodology for second-guessing, since it takes manifestations of realized risk as a stand-in for risk itself, and that's not how decisions are actually made. They're made in a moment and only later can they be judged. Bad decisions made in good faith are learning experiences that you can use to then put extra steps in your decision-making flowchart, but ultimately that flowchart is chock-a-block full of non-empirical judgment calls to deal with your incomplete information: how many dead are worth, say, freedom to worship or not worship a deity? How much money is it worth to be able to sustain a quality of life of magnitude A (measured against another subjective metric) v magnitude B? Apples-to-apples considerations are needlessly reductive and lead to all sorts of conflicts with autonomy and reasonableness.
Saying, "the most good for the most people" is great, but it's also pablum. The real choices are in how to implement that platitude.
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Zinegata
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Post by Zinegata » Sun Sep 26, 2010 4:24 am

Mean_Liar->
I would also add that Lago's position is actually irrational.
It's irrational because it's based on a prediction regarding the future. Someone who says "It's okay if the Soviets killed 10 million, because the Nazis would have killed 100 million", doesn't really have any actual evidence to back up that claim.
Only hopes, predictions, and best guesses.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Sun Sep 26, 2010 8:16 am

> mean_liar wrote:Well, that's your moral framework then: achieving ultimate utility for the sake of all mankind... somehow. Emphasis on the somehow.

Every moral system tries to answer this question. Granted, some use different definitions of mankind and others don't agree on which values are more important, but it's not any more of a weakness of utilitarian systems as it is of tribalism/constitutionalism/etc..

> mean liar wrote:Under that framework as-presented, every minute of your life you spend on your own selfish desires is an affront to the global march towards perfection. Say, gaming instead of helping feed the homeless, or working instead of volunteering. So, maybe that's not really your measure in practice but your measure in large terms made on choices not involving you.

This doesn't really have anything to do with utilitarianism; as in, it does but pretty much every other moral framework system has it. Seriously, Christianity seriously flat-out tells you right NOW to sell all of your possessions and give it to the church. This is an argument to be used against any non-selfish belief system, but it's trotted out so often like a devastating masterstroke that we have a canned response to it.
These kind of moral questions shouldn't be placed on individual people. For one, it's massively unfair that Bill Gates gets to be a better person than a homeless guy because he can personally help 10,000 people for much less personal cost. For two, it's probably completely pointless if taken too far. For example, I could sell all of my possessions and live out on the street by donating all of my money to charity, but it'd probably only support about three families for a year. And then I'd be starving along with them again. Sigh. So how does a 'utilitarian' as you so quaintly put it deal with this issue of 'there are children starving in Africa and you're not selling your XBox 360 to get them food?! Why the fuck not?'?
Easy. The best way of dealing with this question is to divide the responsibility among as many people as possible of course. This is why things like national defense aren't left up to as few people as can support it. I don't need to devote all of my income in order to support the United States having a military to protect some family's children, I along with millions of other people need to devote only some of my income.
That's just the abstract answer, obviously. You can claim that we're not doing enough to create good in the world, but that's a different complaint from going that utilitarianism is impossible to implement without extreme measures in self-abasement.

> mean_liar wrote: For example, instead of Russia v Nazi Germany, we can construct a hypothetical wherein the Nazis kill Hitler and get rid of Himmler yet maintain imperial ambition. So, no mass killings, but certainly despotic rule. Now you're not talking about 100M dead from pogroms and the like; you're talking about 5M from the cultural shift... and your resistance's justification melts away and you're again faced with absolute pacifism as the majority response to most forms of aggression.

This is overly simplified as to verge on strawman. Despotism kills. Both directly and indirectly. Pacifism is in fact an extremely poor weapon to use against any kind of despotic government in the modern age, especially against entrenched, murderous regimes like NG's.
Utilitarianism/consequentialism is not the same thing as pacifism. It's actually extremely dumb to characterize it as backwards-looking, since the entire point of both is to use it as a way to judge the effects that past actions have on future ones.

> mean_liar wrote:Bad decisions made in good faith are learning experiences that you can use to then put extra steps in your decision-making flowchart,

This doesn't really have anything to do with your argument, but I personally believe in Grey's Law. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Is the Catholic's church stance against condoms just misguided idiocy or intentionally wanting to spread STDs? Who cares? Does it actually really matter when they're stubborn and earnest enough about their idiocy?
If you make a mistake 'in good faith' often enough or grievous enough it's really no worse than making a mistake in bad faith.

> mean_liar wrote: but ultimately that flowchart is chock-a-block full of non-empirical judgment calls to deal with your incomplete information: how many dead are worth, say, freedom to worship or not worship a deity?

This is the theme park version of utilitarianism, but basically as long as the amount of people made unhappy by this don't exceed the number of people made happy.

> mean_liar wrote:How much money is it worth to be able to sustain a quality of life of magnitude A (measured against another subjective metric) v magnitude B?

... of course happiness is extremely hard to measure and is not consistent, so utilitarians generally subscribe to the Hierarchy of Needs, with a 'hidden' base of 'being alive'. Since of course people disagree as to what extent the HoNs need to be fulfilled, almost all utilitarians believe in some form of democracy so that the people can continually redefine and outline their values over time. Since of course people tend to know what makes them happy more than people that are not them.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Sun Sep 26, 2010 8:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik » Sun Sep 26, 2010 4:20 pm

> mean_liar wrote:Not only that, but a large weakness of utilitarianism is that it's forever backwards-looking. It's a methodology for second-guessing, since it takes manifestations of realized risk as a stand-in for risk itself, and that's not how decisions are actually made.

WTF! No seriously. Utilitarinism is wrong because it tries to base our decisions on their possible consequences, but we don't have absolute knowledge of the future?
What the fuck moral system do you support? And if that system doesn't try to base decisions on projected outcomes of actions, what they fuck is wrong with you?

> DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?

The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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mean_liar
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Post by mean_liar » Sun Sep 26, 2010 6:08 pm

Kaelik, you should re-read what was written and perhaps try to let it sink in before just letting your natural desire to spasm into rage take over.
My point is not that utilitarianism is "wrong", but that as a criteria, it's necessarily incomplete. The real crux is in the judgments that you make in deciding how to move forward with incomplete information, not in the fact that you're trying to derive the greatest good for the greatest number.
As a general guide, it's good. So is the Golden Rule. So are a lot of trite little sayings. But that doesn't make them complete, either.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Sun Sep 26, 2010 7:54 pm

> mean_liar wrote:Kaelik, you should re-read what was written and perhaps try to let it sink in before just letting your natural desire to spasm into rage take over.
> My point is not that utilitarianism is "wrong", but that as a criteria, it's necessarily incomplete. The real crux is in the judgments that you make in deciding how to move forward with incomplete information, not in the fact that you're trying to derive the greatest good for the greatest number.
> As a general guide, it's good. So is the Golden Rule. So are a lot of trite little sayings. But that doesn't make them complete, either.

Wait... are you seriously saying that Inductive Empiricism is "incomplete" because it does not have the answers to all questions at a 100% confidence level? Is that seriously what you are saying?
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mean_liar
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Post by mean_liar » Sun Sep 26, 2010 10:38 pm

Oh, Frank, always looking for the dismissive way out. You silly goose.
No, what I am saying is that statements like, "I am a utilitarian!" are almost completely devoid of meaning. It's about as meaningful and predictive of behavior as, "I want to do good!" or "America should support liberty".
Meaning is derived from the comparative calculations and actions that follow the initial statement, not the statement itself.
Decisions are necessarily more complex than, "this plan A creates only ONE unit of goodness while this plan B creates TWO and therefore plan B is superior." Pretending that you can say, "I am a utilitarian" and have that mean anything more than, "suffering is bad" is just a total shortfall of intellectual rigor. Absent context it's just bullshit.
Lago's invocation of the Hierarchy of Needs is a step towards providing that rigor, but even that is nothing more than a framework convenient for labeling. Ultimately, when you get into the weeds of most of the sorts of daily questions and problems modern governments try to handle, trying to parboil it into actionable metrics is going to invoke some other value system(s) long before you get to the part where you can look at it and declare that happiness here is less than happiness there.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Sun Sep 26, 2010 11:56 pm

> mean_liar wrote: No, what I am saying is that statements like, "I am a utilitarian!" are almost completely devoid of meaning.

In a sane world it would be, but keep in mind that utilitarianism is actually a fringe belief system because tribalism/nationalism, fundamentalism, absolute morality, some fusion of the previous two, etc.. are much more entrenched. It should be a tautology, but believe it or not most people do NOT subscribe to 'the greatest good' school of morality. As amazing as it seems 'greatest good for greatest number' is not a glittering generality, as least when you push people on it--for example, even though it's been proven that eliminating sex ed classes increases sexually risky behavior, many fundamentalists still insist on abstinence-only education classes even though it runs counter to their goal of reducing sexually risky behavior.

> mean_liar wrote: Decisions are necessarily more complex than, "this plan A creates only ONE unit of goodness while this plan B creates TWO and therefore plan B is superior."

> mean_liar wrote:Ultimately, when you get into the weeds of most of the sorts of daily questions and problems modern governments try to handle, trying to parboil it into actionable metrics is going to invoke some other value system(s) long before you get to the part where you can look at it and declare that happiness here is less than happiness there.

No, they're not, not really. We can't measure happiness, which is generally the sticking point for most people, but we CAN measure the components of happiness (or unhappiness as it may be). For example, life expectancy. Or average caloric input. Or educational rates. Or stress. It depends on what you define as components of happiness--while there is still definitely some disagreement, people can at least agree on the broad categories. For example, while almost no one can agree how much free time people should get off, almost everyone in modern democracies can point to an 'unfair' workday. Like what we had in the Gilded Age.
This is not even getting into the fact that we can indirectly measure happiness, too. Such as polls. Or immigration rates. Or hell, voting patterns are actually a very reliable indicator of happiness.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Mon Sep 27, 2010 12:07 am, edited 1 time in total.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Mon Sep 27, 2010 12:03 am

Or to put it in another way, happiness is an inductive measurement. First you agree on as many components that you CAN measure that comprises it, cross-compare how they would change from a certain course of action, then based on that you can conclude if happiness would go down or not.
I won't blame you for thinking that it's very hard, because it is. A lot of components weren't even realized until very recently and it in fact can change. I mean most people would realize that literacy rates going down is a bad thing, but if we lived in some weird Wall-E future where it's not necessary does that hold true?
Also note that you can't attach numbers to some things. I mean it's pretty obvious that, say, the United States has more religious freedom than Saudi Arabia or Ireland. But which country has more religious freedom: France or the United Kingdom? You have to use your best judgment.
For example, some variables that you could measure:
Life expectancy
Workday
Religious Freedom
Housing space
Income Inequality
Birth rates
Etc..

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Zinegata
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Post by Zinegata » Mon Sep 27, 2010 1:31 am

Individual human happiness cannot be measured. It's because individual people have different things that make them happy.
Thus, any decision based on something as general as "What will make people happy" is ultimately a "best guess".
And anyone who claims otherwise is engaging in bullshit.
That's all that mean_liar is saying - using the new context Lago brought up. And mean_liar is totally correct.
Any case where you say "Destroy one life to save ten others" is more often than not ultimately a best guess - based on whatever information is available at the time.
Therefore, it's pretty useless to base your morality based on this sort of principle, because we don't have psychic hotlines to confirm whether or not we will really save ten people.
If you want to engage in "Sacrifice one life to save ten others" decisions, then you need to have a really specific context with a lot more data specific to those 11 people.
You cannot apply such decision-making to very general and motherhood statements like "It will make more people happy".
Last edited by Zinegata on Mon Sep 27, 2010 1:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
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mean_liar
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Post by mean_liar » Mon Sep 27, 2010 2:23 am

I'm not arguing that you can't measure happiness somehow - but in doing so, you're weighting, say, working hours per day against standard of living. It's a judgment call and there's no objective measure to use like, say, temperature.
As a thought experiment you can just dredge up a thread on alignment. Treat "the greatest good for the greatest number" as the description of alignment = Utilitarian and see how many ridiculous gyrations you can put it through.
For just one of countless examples, I doubt that many atheist utilitarians are going to count &#257;nanda (a Hindu measure of your realization of ultimate spiritual bliss) as a factor worth considering and probably aren't going to attribute much effort into forced asceticism.
I mean, that fundamentalist sex ed thing is good for illustration. A fundamentalist utilitarian is going to put weight on following (their version of) God's plan and (their interpretation of) the Bible and be able to say with a straight face that only by living righteously will a nation be happy since if you don't, God is going to (subtlety?) strike that nation down to rubble regardless of how many opinion polls say that the people are happy and your weighted measures of happiness (again, just another judgmental metric) show that it's a happy place. So they're going to say that the only way to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number is to accept that though abstinence doesn't put up the best STD results, it does ensure that the nation maintains a special place in God's eyes, and therefore it provides the greatest good for the greatest number.
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Post by Zinegata » Mon Sep 27, 2010 2:37 am

Ok, fine, let me restate: Individual human beings have different ways of measuring happiness.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Mon Sep 27, 2010 3:13 am

> mean_liar wrote:I'm not arguing that you can't measure happiness somehow - but in doing so, you're weighting, say, working hours per day against standard of living. It's a judgment call and there's no objective measure to use like, say, temperature.

You're right, there is no objective measurement. You don't even have an internally consistent subjective measure. Two cultures will have two different outlooks on which is better--I mean, you really can't say either way. I mean, sure, you can say that increasing HPD while decreasing SOL is bad (unless you introduce some third factor, like national defense) but if you can only increase one at the expense of the other, which one do you go with?
Answer: this is why a strong democracy is so very important. So that the people subject to this conundrum get a chance to express which way they want to go. Not only will some people within the government disagree, but people will change their minds over time. The best you can do is make the most people happy and make accommodations for the people who didn't quite get the vote--for example, price controls and collective bargaining.

> mean_liar wrote: For just one of countless examples, I doubt that many atheist utilitarians are going to count &#257;nanda (a Hindu measure of your realization of ultimate spiritual bliss) as a factor worth considering and probably aren't going to attribute much effort into forced asceticism.

Just because it's a religious tenant doesn't mean that it's a bad thing to implement--i.e. giving your money to the less fortunate and treating prisoners of war well.
Also note that making people do what they don't want to do increases stress, lowers social cohesion, and creates disgruntlement towards organized society. If you're going to make people do this it's a good idea that the benefit they get out of it makes up for what they're giving up.
So going back to your example, not everyone wants to follow forced asceticism. People being naturally religious creatures, it really makes people unhappy to follow religious tenants that they don't believe in--even moreso than secular decrees because people invariably see it as an attack on their faith. People would get more upset at being forced to donate their money to a church for, say, an interstate highway project than being taxed by a secular organization.
Moving on:
There's no such thing as a fundamentalist utilitarian. If you place 'greatest good' above what your dogma says, then you're not being fundamentalist. If you place dogma above 'greatest good' then you're not being utilitarian.
Yes, there are monotheist religions out there out there (like the UUC) that do in fact place utilitarianism over dogma, but it's a reeeeeaal stretch to state that religions like that even lean in the direction of fundamentalism.
But anyway you've also just shown why utilitarianism is invariably secular. Religious freedom aside, the things that utilitarianism advances has to be real and objective; otherwise it could claim anything that it wanted to--and then you'd be advancing a fundamentalist morality system, because once you start basing your morality system on something that can't be proven you can't stop doing so. Because otherwise why did you support it in the first place?

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Post by Username17 » Mon Sep 27, 2010 6:54 am

This is however a petty distraction from the main point: people who support ending the embargo of Cuba do not have to justify why in the big picture it is a bad thing to increase the cost of medicine in Cuba by 30%. The direct effects of that are obviously bad. People who support keeping the embargo have to justify why you would want to continue doing that to people.
While you can justify failed experiments as learning experiences in a Utilitarian model, that only works if you do in fact learn. If you just keep doing it after the cost of medicine goes up for the average person and no positive benefit can be identified, then it's completely unjustifiable. Even as a lesson, since you obviously did not learn anything from it.
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Post by Zinegata » Mon Sep 27, 2010 7:15 am

> FrankTrollman wrote:This is however a petty distraction from the main point: people who support ending the embargo of Cuba do not have to justify why in the big picture it is a bad thing to increase the cost of medicine in Cuba by 30%. The direct effects of that are obviously bad. People who support keeping the embargo have to justify why you would want to continue doing that to people.

The 30% figure is from the article Frank posted. The same article that said that Cuba, despite the alleged 30% increase in medicine costs (way back in 1997), had its lowest mortality rate ever.
There is something seriously fucking wrong with that article. Why would an increase in the price of medicine coincide with a decrease mortality? No matter how good your doctors are, you need medicine to help dying people.
Personally, I'm chalking this up to the article being outright garbage. It was written in 1997. They claim that Cuba has high medicine costs. But stats from a decade later show that Cuba is already an exporter of medicine. This means these guys probably completely failed to consider that Cuba - in addition to excellent doctors - manufactures medical products locally as well. And they became so good that it's now an export product.
Whether or not you think the embargo is morally good or not, saying outright falsehoods is not cool.
All it does is let the embargo-supporters to say "Hey, look, those who support lifting the embargo use false statistics!"
So seriously, all of these articles that whine about how America bullies Cuba? They don't help unless they do actually say something true.
Read the wiki instead. The embargo never really hurt, except when the Soviet Union collapsed, which resulted in food shortages. And when the US offered to help, Castro initially rejected the aid and waited until 1993 before accepting.
-----
Therefore, given that the 30% statistic is actually garbage, there's no reason to base any decisions on it regardless of your philosophy.
The sole exception being those whose philosophy is that "Cuba is always right!". Which is fucking retarded. Just ask the Ethiopians.
Last edited by Zinegata on Mon Sep 27, 2010 7:25 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Maj » Mon Sep 27, 2010 8:42 pm

> Zinegata wrote:Why would an increase in the price of medicine coincide with a decrease mortality?

Well, you know that calorie restriction correlates with increased longevity, right?

> Zinegata wrote:But stats from a decade later show that Cuba is already an exporter of medicine.

I would be interested in seeing what medicine Cuba needs versus what's produced.
On the actual subject of the embargo - to me, it's always just come off as petty. It's not like the US doesn't have dealings with other countries with ideological differences and less than stellar human rights.
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Post by Zinegata » Tue Sep 28, 2010 1:27 am

> Maj wrote:

> > Zinegata wrote:But stats from a decade later show that Cuba is already an exporter of medicine.

> I would be interested in seeing what medicine Cuba needs versus what's produced.

No idea here. The wiki only states medical products in general, but does not specify what types. It doesn't mention medical products in the major imports either - although it does mention food.
That being said, I kinda doubt you really need cutting-edge industry to produce medicine. India for instance is now one of the world's largest producers of cheap prescription medicine... and from what I understand they built that industry without the help of the West or the big drug companies.
What Cuba probably can't produce is advanced medical equipment (i.e. CAT Scans), but even that can be bought off Europe. The real problem in the 90s for Cuba was that it was just really short on cash regardless - because its economy had always been artificially bouyed by the Soviet Union. Today, with the re-aligned trade, there are still some adjustments to be made, but nothing as drastic as food shortages.

> On the actual subject of the embargo - to me, it's always just come off as petty. It's not like the US doesn't have dealings with other countries with ideological differences and less than stellar human rights.

Any objective person would indeed describe the embargo as petty - both in practical and moral terms.
And, really, the only reason it's being maintained isn't to force out the Castro regime (except for delusional Batista supporters). It's really just a diplomatic way of saying "Fuck you". I would bet that if Raul modifies his rhetoric to something similar to what Qadafi did ("Okay, the 50 year feud is getting old. How about we be friends now?"), Obama would probably be able to lift the embargo easily. Heck, even George W could have done it had Cuba made the appropriate noises back then.
It's less about human rights or anything. But more about not saying that America is the Evil Empire. China violates human rights to a far greater degree than Cuba, but you don't see China calling the United States the decadent heart of arrogant Western imperialism anymore.
(And because China more or less owns you now. I believe in Stephen Colbert )
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