Originally posted by Omega Vision
I fail to see how libertarianism's stance on individuals refutes my metaphor...
That's because you're looking in my post for something to refute it when that was never my purpose or point.
Just because a comparison is bad doesn't mean your actual point is lost. Unlike half of the GDF-ers around here, I don't pretend like your point was actually wrong just to argue semantics.
To make it even more clear: I understood what you were trying to convey with your metaphor, but you should definitely not use a symbolic individual as representative (in the metaphor) for how a state should act when trying to point out a flaw in some forms of libertarianism...specially "Paulian libertarianism."
Originally posted by Omega Vision
The way people think is irrelevant to morality unless you're talking subjective morality. I don't take you for a subjectivist.
I am a huge moral relativist. There is a limit to how relative morals can get, imo, but to test my theory we would have to conduct extremely unethical studies. So, sure, I believe there is a limit but morals are fairly relative. If you think about it, any Mormon should come to the same conclusion as I have since we are strongly "urged" to teach proper morals to our families else they develop poor morals. If that's not a "god" argument for moral relativism, I don't know what is (as far as christian teachings go).
Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
The group vs individual[b]s thing always make me laugh. When it's people they dislike (taxes) individuals are getting hurt when it's something they like (mass murder) suddenly only a group is getting hurt so they don't have to care. As if, somehow, you can harm the group without harming the constituent parts (at a minimum by preventing them from working together).Shoot one person in a crowd. This is immoral because it hurts an individual.
Kill the whole crowd. This is morally neutral because it only harmed a group.
What a very sane and consistent system of morality (and before someone cries strawman I've had this debate with Libertarians before and been told that bombing an inhabited city or releasing life threatening pollution is morally neutral for exactly that reason). I like to call it Timothy McVeigh morality. [/B]
There's a fundemental flaw with your reasoning: the individuals make the group. Harm the group, you harm the individual. The individual's freedom is then restricted. So that's wrong.
Harm the individual, your harm the individual. So that's a restriction of the individual's freedom. So that's wrong, too.
So if they are both wrong from a bland libertarian perspective, how can you conclude that the "group" is magically some other entity with no individuals?
To keep the thread on topic, we should direct it to Paul's particular brand of libertarianism. He's about the individual maximizing freedom without harming others: do drugs in your own home, own land with proper but not excessive regulations, allow the states to vote on abortion (but ban the federal government from enacting a law on it), and so forth.
Now paying for your own police in a city rather than paying taxes and then the government pays the police? Paul is for the former. Do we have a system like that in the US and does it work? I don't know. How does that relate to group versus individual? Simple: you have shifted the group's freedom from the municipal government more directly into the hands of the people and the people get to vote directly who they want policing them with their money. Corruption screams at me in that type of system...but it would literally be the same type of corruption we already have in place.
Does that make more sense or do you want me to explain groups and individuals, more? I can but I feel like I'm going on and on at this point.