Doug Morris

Even if we can quickly expand ICU capacity as needed, needing to do so indicates that we have exceeded the cutoff point. ICU's are not magic. Some of the people in ICU's will die. Others will have serious long-term damage to their bodies.

Or I could tell them "I would rather catch COVID-19 than be ruled by you."

That takes time.

Everyone is under threat to some extent. Even if only one person were under threat, it would be initiation of physical force to unnecessarily endanger that person. I'm not sure how well you understand the situation. You need to explain this more fully. It is not workable to apply individual liability to COVID-19 because we don't know which person(s) infected which. Also, I am trying to forbid the initiation of physical force rather than address it after it takes place. Invading Mexico would be a gross overreaction unless we were dealing with a zombie apocalypse and so many Mexicans had become zombies that the government had collapsed.

I haven't pinned down the exact cutoff point. But if ICU's are overflowing, we must have exceeded it.

Not wearing an ankle bracelet does not in any way endanger anyone. There is no justification for requiring everyone to wear one. The only legitimate use for an ankle bracelet is to enforce a legitimate court order for a particular person to limit their movements.

Defining specific initiations of physical force and providing fines (probably sufficient in this case) or incarceration for violations does not constitute giving the government unlimited power. All I'm saying is that failure to mask or to vaccinate increases the risk of spread of the disease, and that this can rise to the level of an initiation of physical force. No. Voluntary behavior is helpful and desirable, but we should not always rely on it exclusively. It is a very good thing that most people voluntarily refrain from murder, rape, robbery, and arson. If the reverse were true, very few people would survive. But we should not rely exclusively on voluntary behavior to avoid murder, rape, robbery, and arson.

Killing someone for being sick with COVID-19 would be murder. Any government employee or official involved should be fired or removed from office and put on trial for murder. They should have no immunity.

You misrepresent what I said. I was not making an analogy between the smuggling and infection. I was making the point that there is a limit to our right to control what we put in our bodies. Those reports do not provide as clear-cut a picture as you claim. I have never spoken of "defeating" the virus or of the virus as an "enemy". I have spoken of limiting risk and of the virus as a physical danger. What I advocate does not amount to making war on anyone. The discord was already present in our society. The virus was just a new topic for it to spread to.

She was at risk until she survived COVID-19, and even now is at a little bit of risk. I have never said that "we" can suffer. I have said that each individual is at risk. I have never advocated giving government unlimited powers. I was trying to explain why this statement is irrelevant. We need to be rational about how to react to any given situation. Your scenario might be an appropriate reaction to a zombie apocalypse, if we read "sick" as "zombified", but would be a gross overreaction to COVID-19. I would prefer the word "each", not "all".

I would prefer telling such a person "You're grossly overreacting, and I don't care how outraged you are."

We don't know ahead of time which, so everyone is at risk. Even if we can prove ahead of time that some people are not at risk, we still have physical force against those that are. Anyone can become a carrier at any time.

I should have made clear that acting physically in a way that increases physical risk constitutes physical force. Holding views that may lead a person to use force does not itself constitute force. A person who does or is something that may provoke someone else to initiate physical force against them is not engaging in force. The increased risk from not tying shoes can be handled by a combination of after the fact liability and property rights rather than by criminal law, if it needs to be handled at all. Failure to mask or to vaccinate increases risk for individual people. It is these individual risks that make it force, not some collectivist nonsense such as you suggest.

We must also consider creating risk of harm. If secondhand smoke is as dangerous as they say, a smoker's smoke can amount to physical force against a person exposed to it. It is probably possible to handle this by a combination of after the fact liability and property rights rather than by criminal law. When pollution physically harms or endangers a person or their property, that is physical force. How to deal with this is a more complicated issue than with smoking. Simply being a racist, sexist, ageist, or whatever or a follower of Islam, Christianity, or whatever does not constitute physical force. We need to deal appropriately with people who actually commit, assist, or incite the initiation of physical force, even if they claim to be upholding Objectivism.

Would you agree that a fundamental disagreement is in implementing "requirement" via (one size fits all) prior restraint vs. after the fact liability? The disagreement is in where to draw the line between these two. We have to have a constitutional system to determine what laws will be passed. The current constitution has room for improvement by the amendment process. Simply being wisest does not entitle anyone, morally or constitutionally, to issue mandates. Morally, no one has the right to issue mandates in disregard of the moral principles involved. Constitutionally, no one has the right to issue mandates in disregard of the constitution. The questions are, what exactly constitutes an initiation of physical force and how exactly should any given initiation of physical force be handled. I have been expressing definite views on the first question. The second question raises technical issues.

Landlords should be required to maintain their rental property, especially when failure to do so physically endangers tenants or their property. Even without direct danger, failure to maintain can easily rise to the level of fraud or breach of contract. Owners and drivers of vehicles and owners and carriers of guns should be required to maintain their vehicles and guns to a sufficient extent to avoid wrongfully endangering people. Owners of dogs and cats should be required to vaccinate them against rabies. Guilt and innocence here lie not in carrying versus not carrying but in wrongly increasing risk versus not doing so.

Suppose someone is smuggling sarin nerve gas, ebola virus, or ingredients which make a high explosive when combined, and they do it by putting the material into balloons which they swallow. They are both endangering people during the carrying phase and taking part in a very serious physical aggression. No excuse if they don't want to know how it will be used. I maintain they do not have the right to put those loaded balloons into their bodies.

As I have stated before, they are analogous to someone firing a gun without knowing whether it is loaded with blanks or live rounds. Yes, it should.

There may be some people who feel deep outrage because they want control, and they may be making a lot of noise. That is not where I am coming from. Yes, throughout this thread, throughout this site, and throughout my life.

I have discussed this extensively in another thread. The initiation of force lies in increasing the risk of spread, not in specific untraceable results.

It is not a pretext, as I have explained elsewhere. You are becoming tiresome.

That seems to be at the core of the argument, right? No, the core of the argument is that increasing the risk of the spread of disease is physical force. Anyone who initiates physical force of any kind is at the very least mistaken or misguided. In many cases, they are irrational. Arguing for the restraint of such actions does not constitute saying that all or most people are irrational or flawed. Carrying your argument out consistently would imply that we shouldn't define any crimes at all, not even murder.

If the police use tear gas, and one person is highly allergic to it and dies, the rarity of that should not give the police or the government immunity. In my argument, the issue of physical force is crucial, as I have already explained. No to all of these, because failure to do any or all of these things does not constitute physical force.

We have gone over this before.

So I disagree with John Stossel on this. So what?