Nate T.
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Posts posted by Nate T.
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How is pi() a standalone, completed "number"? i.e. a finished result? Mathematically pi() represents, as you said, a series. Not just any series, but one for which we can always write an additional term. So pi() represents an operation, something that hasn't been done yet. Specifically what hasn't been done yet is adding in the nth term in the series. So we work with the symbol pi() until we're ready to get a finished result, at which point we finally calculate a number and replace pi() with it.
If you really want to know, formally pi is treated is the set of all equivalence classes of equivalent Cauchy sequences of numbers-- in effect pi is defined to be *all possible sequences of rational numbers* which converge to it. As such, I guess if you like you could choose a representative sequence like (3, 3.1, 3.14, 3.141, ...) and view it as a mapping from the natural numbers into the rationals. You could do the same where the nth term of the sequence is filled by the rational number you get when you approximate pi using inscribed/circumscribed regular polygons of n + 3 sides, and these two sequences would be regarded as "the same number" since the difference between them tends to zero as you look at terms further and further along (but don't ask me to prove that for you on the spot).
The class of all such sequences are regarded mentally as the number pi. You can then add, multiply, etc., these sequences by adding and multiplying their representatives term by term. This is what I mean by pi being treated as a completed object. So treated in this way you can "add" pi and sqrt(2) fine.
Notice I say you can "treat" pi this way, i.e., regard it formally this way. None of this sequence business invalidates your other point that we eventually need to work with a rational approximation of pi to actually get an idea of its value, which I agree with completely. You may also object to manipulating sequences as manipulating "completed infinities", which I certainly sympathize with. But in effect the value of such a formalism is to assure us that no matter how close of an approximation we want, we can always handle manipulating real numbers as though they were rational numbers once and for all. Also this conception of the real numbers lets us talk about topology, but never mind that.
You cannot manipulate that which is indefinite, undetermined, or neverending. Manipulations of pi() in algebraic equations and so forth are founded on the tacit assumption that pi will be converted into a number at the end, so we can say that we were just dealing with that number all along.Sure; I have no problem with treating pi as a variable that you eventually substitute a suitable rational number into after a certain point. But we weren't really dealing with 3.14 all along-- we were dealing with *pi* all along. This is important since otherwise we'd have to do the same calculation over again if we wanted to work with 3.14159. That'd be the frozen abstraction fallacy.
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Irrationals such as pi are not actually numbers, but processes (operators). Pi expresses an operation such as making successively high order polygons. The term "irrational number" is a misnomer. Pi invokes the *concept* of a circle, i.e. the concept of incessantly making a higher and higher order polygon. This is different than O, which is an object many would call a circle.
I think we're saying the same thing here, but IMO it would be strange to say that an irrational number is a process in mathematical formalism, since we can treat them along with the rationals as stand-alone "completed" numbers just fine, i.e., they form an ordered field, you can manipulate them in algebraic equations, and so forth. You are correct that to really say what pi is, you need some kind of construction like inscribed/circumscribed polygons about a circle, or the Leibniz series 4 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + ... that can be made as precise as you like in principle, whether people actually ever get around to calculating the bajillionth digit of pi or not.
However, when you're done with your calculation arising from a physical problem and end up getting sqrt(2)pi/7 as your answer, you round to a decimal approximation that's appropriate to the context of your problem. In this sense real numbers are concepts of method and are not to be applied literally to physical measurements.
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How, if infinity is disallowed, can something have range and domain over the real numbers? If we're talking about pure mathematics, a real number can always be expressed as an infinite sequence of digits in any base. Furthermore, there are more real numbers than integers in a very fundamental way. If we're talking about practical application, how many measurements would it take to verify that the length of two rulers were EXACTLY the same qua real numbers?
You can't, because it would take infinitely many-- for physical measurements we're stuck with the rational numbers. That's just because to specify a real number always requires some infinite process of completion (like regarding them as infinite decimals, Cauchy sequences or Dedekind cuts) that can't actually be performed with physical measurement, as whatever you're measuring with has nonzero length and hence some error associated to it, and you can't make infinitely many measurements. So real numbers are concepts of method; applying them as lengths of physical objects is improper. This, of course, doesn't make real numbers any less important in mathematics.
These measurements are contextual anyway, so infinite measurements really wouldn't be of much use. The ruler that you'd like to verify has length exactly pi is at some microscopic level a ragged collection of atoms anyway. But that's what sigfigs are for.
The section "Exact Measurement and Continuity" in ItOE is a really good exploration of the issues.
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Strictly speaking, the boundary is never open or closed--the figure is open or closed. But anyway, you don't have evidence that the objects around you right now are not open, and I don't see any reason to suppose that it's impossible to tell.
It's impossible to tell since it requires infinitely precise measurements to tell. Since we can't measure infinitely precisely we probably shouldn't worry about classifying objects this way.
Just point-sized objects. That is, having no extension.Similar problem here-- smaller than any positive volume. Can't really show this one exists either-- here you can say a material object has some nontrivial extension. I think the closest result in this direction for elementary particles is the electron, and that they only have to within 10^-22 meters or so.
What would be the problem? I've had conversations with people more mathematically educated than I am, and they've never expressed knowledge of such problems.Well a representation of an object wouldn't be unique in any meaningful sense if you allow general homeomorphisms, for one. If you just have bijections you could "represent" a three dimensional object by a line segment, for another. Point being your correspondence can't just be a bijection, you need some fairly strong degree of continuity.
What infinite precision problem do I have? I just need verifiability, like with atoms.Such a verification would presuppose infinitely precise measurement; you'd need to show that the map sends convergence sequences to convergent sequences.
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That doesn't preclude it from the concept of existence. Just from physical existence.
We're talking about the possibility of a material object existing. In what sense other than physical existence would a material object exist?
There was never a contradiction in the caloric theory of heat.Doesn't it contradict conservation of mass (friction created large amounts of heat that didn't flow in from elsewhere)? Certainly not something an actual fluid ought to do. I know its abandoned nowadays since it has no predictive power and the kinetic theory gives a causal account of heat.
In any case, even if caloric theory was discarded as being arbitrary instead of contradictory, that doesn't change my objection against a material open sphere. Before the kinetic theory was developed caloric was a perfectly reasonable assumption, since we knew a lot about how heat and fluids both behaved. I've never seen anything with an "open boundary" running around, and it's impossible to tell whether a material object even has one, let alone the properties differentiating it from objects with "closed boundary".
It's not that mathematical points exist in the supposed entity, but that a function describes the physical points in the entity. That is, there is an isomorphism. For every mathematical point, there is a physical point; for every ordering of the mathematical points there is an equivalent ordering of the physical points. Again, there is no need for infinitely precise measurement, as has been established above.I don't know what you mean by "physical points." But granting them for the moment, you can't just have a bijection of mathematical points and physical points, since that would run up against all kinds of paradoxes involving cardinality being ill-behaved with regard to other measures of size and shape, as I'm sure someone with your screen name is familiar. You'd need at least the continuity of your isomorphism in order to capture what you're getting at, and then you have the same infinite precision problem that you did before.
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The difference is that we could live in a universe where there is a class of things which are physically possible, which would be a subclass of the metaphysically possible things. Metaphysics studies the general principles of existence, while physics studies the principles of things that happen to exist. One is a matter of conceptual analysis and the other is not, though it depends on conceptual analysis (as does everything else, since all studies depend on concepts). So while there is nothing in the concept of existence that precludes the caloric theory of heat--nor does it contradict the concept of existence today, when we know that heat is actually mechanical--and so it is metaphysically possible.
This is very much analytic/synthetic flavor-- you want to tease out the implications of "existence" via pure conceptual analysis without the "messy" details of what the physical facts happen to be. You want to discover what is true in all possible words, so to speak? That which precludes the caloric theory of heat from the concept of existence is simply that caloric has not been shown to exist. The fact that such was not known at one point in time merely means that we as humans are able to imagine materials having properties which contradict each other in certain circumstances (where the contradiction is not explicit either due to ignorance or context-dropping), not that the imagined substance in question is "metaphysically possible."
Not exactly. It would mean that the boundary of any given material object should be described by a continuous function [or functions] (i.e., be described by a function [or functions] which is identical to its limit at all points).Does such a conception not run against the same objection I've been raising in this thread? An appeal to an object "containing all of its limit points" is a positive claim that such an object can be known to exist, which it cannot due to the impossibility of infinitely precise measurement.
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I'm willing to stipulate that, if something exists metaphysically, then it exists physically. That doesn't rule out a difference between metaphysical possibility and physical possibility, nor does the distinction imply Platonism.
Then what is the distinction between a metaphysical possibility and a physical possibility? Why not just stick with the idea of possibility if you have evidence that a certain kind of entity may exist?
I don't see why you couldn't use previous observations about matter to then come up with different predictions based on whether matter were continuous or discrete. We know matter exerts gravitational force, it bounces of of other matter, etc. That behavior might be different under the different hypotheses of continuity and discrete boundaries.What does it mean for matter to be continuous-- infinitely divisible? Also I still don't know what you mean by discrete vs. continuous boundary.
The fact that you can't see an atom matters, since it's an example of something you don't have to investigate each microscopic detail to then conclude a fact about the whole--like in continuity and discrete boundary questions. But we seem to have laid that issue to rest now.What do you mean by atom here? Do you mean a literal point particle, or just "that which cannot be divided further"?
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@aleph_0:
I do accept the distinction, and it probably does ultimately hinge on it, but you presumably take the distinction between metaphysics and physics to be a genuine one (otherwise you would be in the position of thinking that the metaphysics forum should be full of physics formulae and experimental data, which I doubt you want).In the context of this discussion we are taking about a physically existing object, the study of the properties of which is the science of physics. If a material object exists metaphysically, it exists physically, and you want to talk about a perfect "Platonic" boundary of a physical object you must explain what you mean by it.
Again, the contest between the caloric theory and the mechanical theory of heat was won not by proving what was metaphysically impossible, but by experimentation, and so caloric theory is still metaphysically possible. It is for this reason that scientists were ever able to describe the caloric theory, and to make predictions about what would be true if heat were caloric rather than mechanical. And it is through knowledge of what caloric theory implies (even though the theory describes, as you call it, the null set) that we were able to disprove its reality.Yes, treating heat as a fluid contradicts the facts of how heat is known to behave, and so the caloric theory was discarded; this is because we knew enough about how both heat and fluids behave. If one were to treat atoms, say, as open spheres, one would need to give a reason why one would suspect that atoms should be modeled in this way, just as scientists observed some of the properties of heat and concluded that it behaved somewhat like a fluid. But this would require you to know how open spheres behave when they interact, and I thought we agreed before that deriving physical behavior from pure mathematical models is inappropriate. So I still think that using open spheres to model physical objects is inappropriate in a way that the caloric or the ether is not.
I don’t see why you insist on this. You don’t need to see each atom of a thing to know that it’s made up of atoms. In fact, it is impossible to see an atom, regardless of the technology you use to visualize it. You must deduce their existence through a theory which implies them.The fact that we can't see atoms doesn't matter-- it still wouldn't make sense to talk about a literal metaphysically existing boundary of an atom, in the mathematical sense.
@altonhare:
I do not "verify" that this keyboard has a boundary. What kind of sense can it make to prove that *this* keyboard is an object, or to "verify" that it has (or doesn't have) a boundary?...
Again, what do physical measurements have to do with whether *this* keyboard exists? If someone says "X exists" s/he simply has to point at it. If s/he cannot then s/he can show us what they are visualizing, and we must assume it exists for the purposes of the ensuing discussion. So the more serious issue is that this entity "open sphere" has not been pointed to or illustrated. The entire discussion is non sequitur because "open sphere" is still a placeholder, an arbitrary set of symbols that refer to a set of equations. These equations do not describe objects but rather the motion of objects, they tell us the relative location of one or more object(s) as they traverse a defined path.
I agree; this is why I object to defining perceptually evident entities using abstract topological descriptions. The notion of an "open sphere" as a literally existing object is arbitrary, much as God is because of his supposed property of omniscience. Someone talking about an object in the shape of a sphere with no boundary is making the positive claim that it has such a property, which as I mentioned before would require infinitely precise measurements to check. So because the property of being "open" is arbitrary I would go further and ask why talking about objects with open boundaries is useful at all.
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"What is an Entity? A Topological Definition"
http://progressofliberty.today.com/2008/11...t-is-an-entity/
This makes the same error, I think. In order to show that entities really fit this description one would have to show that it is "closed", which requires showing that it contains its limit points, requiring infinitely precise measurement. Moreover, it allows aleph_0 to object (correctly) that something like a table is in fact a collection of disconnected atoms and so leads to the absurd conclusion that a table is not an entity. Requiring entities to be compact and path connected would effectively involve omniscience about certain aspects of an entity.
The problem behind both of these is that entities and concepts like the boundary of an entity are contextual. A table has a well defined boundary at the macroscopic level of human sense perception, but not so much at the atomic level, and that's OK provided we define our terms correctly.
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The point against this, though, is that we want to consider what is metaphysically possible, not just physically possible.
I don't understand the distinction-- what is an example of a metaphysically possible object which is not physically possible? This kind of thing usually leads to an analytic/synthetic type of distinction, which I don't accept.
And so we want an answer to whether we can, by conceptual analysis, rule out the possibility of an object being an open surface, and if not, then what should happen when they approach each other at a constant rate of speed with no repulsive forces?The danger of considering objects introduced by stipulating certain properties (such as a physical open sphere, or a unicorn) is that you may in fact be talking about the empty set. You must show that some objects of the kind you consider actually exist, or you aren't really taking about anything at all. Conceptual analysis is pointless if you don't know whether your concepts have referents.
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@aleph_0:
I'm not sure it has to be homogeneous, but I see no reason why it couldn't.True, this would be a simplifying assumption, but I thought I'd assume it without loss of generality.
More importantly, though, I don't mean just a region of space-time but an object. (So the notion of "filling" the space is not quite the point.)Yes, my description was trying to get at an object composed of some material whose shape was given by the description in my last post. If that isn't what you meant by "open sphere" I'd need to know what you meant by such a thing.
I'm not so sure. I could very well imagine that an object the boundary of which is discrete should move differently than an object the boundary of which is continuous, and that our theory would be able to predict which behavior belongs to which. So we would not need to have infinitely precise measurements, but merely some way to distinguish what we should expect from physical action involving continuous objects and what we should expect from discrete ones.I need you to define your terms before I can comment. What distinguishes "discrete" boundaries from "continuous" boundaries? Even from a purely mathematical standpoint, the boundary of a set is determined by the set, and doesn't obey special rules as the set changes in time-- if you want to stipulate special rules, fine, but unless you're modeling observed phenomenon you're really just making stuff up, and you aren't really saying things about physical objects.
In any case, my broader point was to object to reasoning about physical objects by assuming that they have some kind of reified mathematical boundary (discrete or continuous) and deriving case conclusions as you did earlier in this thread. Moreover, I believe that speaking about "continuous objects" is vulnerable to the same kinds of objections as "exact measurement" is.
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An open sphere is an open sphere. How does infinity violate the law of identity, when it is defined appropriately? It has a shape defined by a precise equation over the real numbers. It just cannot touch--but then, we never touch tables or rocks, since we only have repuslive forces between the atoms that keep our hands from passing through solid objects. Pretty neat question, huh?
By "open sphere" I take it you mean here a region in three dimensional space of the form {x : |x - a| < r} filled with some homogeneous material?
To talk about such an object, you would need to verify that it has no boundary. To do so would require infinitely precise measurements to demonstrate that your object is really open since one would need more and more precise units of measurement to verify that the sphere consists of material any arbitrary distance less than r away from a, but not exactly equal. It's that "exactly" that gets you into trouble. Since you can never actually verify that it has no boundary it's not a useful thing to consider.
Put differently, other poster here are correct in asserting that an open sphere cannot literally exist as a physical object in reality-- that it has a well defined mathematical description is neither here nor there, since objects like open spheres are concepts of method. Since the law of identity prohibits infinitely precise physical measurements it is inappropriate to use these open spheres rationalistically to gain knowledge about reality. You can't derive knowledge about how things touch from pure mathematics alone without reference to reality.
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That right, replace Eq. (1) in to Eq. (2) is unpossible for derivation, because V don’t change, so m must be don’t change too. And this derivation must be equal to zero!!! That the formula E = mc2has never been proven ???
Einstein fail physics? That's unpossible!
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As someone reading the Ominous Parallels right now, blurbs like this from the Executive branch aren't helping me sleep at night...
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I'm not sure how you arrived at the definition of "promote", but since the founding fathers did not more clearly define what they meant, it is open to interpretation. I suppose they could have been more explicit, but it looks like they wanted to allow future generations to think for themselves a little bit. Luckily they bring it up again, using the language that you say authorizes the welfare state. Section 8 of Article one reads in part: "The Congress shall have Power To...provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States..."
Jefferson did have an opinion as to the interpretation of "general welfare." I found this quote here:
"Our tenet ever was... that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated, and that, as it was never meant that they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action; consequently, that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for which they may raise money." --Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 1817. ME 15:133 -
@brian0918,
If you have a couple bucks to drop on a supplemental text in your study of Rand's ethics, I can't recommend Tara Smith's "Viable Values" enough as a guide to Rand's metaethics. Not only does it have an entire chapter on intrinsic values, but many of the other common objections to Rand's metaethics are disposed of. A cursory perusal of the critique you linked to suggests it'll answer most of these objections, too.
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Ah, cheers! It's not quite as bad as this guy high up in the Department of Philosophy here. He does the reverse - he holds anything highly possible to be the exact same thing as true (I mean, he doesn't just say, "Well it's as good as true", he means it's literally true). Likewise, he thinks anything highly unlikely is false, so that if he enters the lottery, he 'knows' he's going to lose.
Um ... wow. Any chance he's the one in your sig?
But yeah, I don't think my prof was actually trying to argue that we should cast things in terms of, e.g., "the probability that Newton's laws are valid"-- it's just that we wasted a whole class discussing that article based on the idea when no one couldn't even tell me what it meant; I think that's what left a big impression on me.
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Nate, could you expand on exactly what this professor was claiming this article showed? Do you have any sort of link to the article?
I'm afraid not-- that was several moves ago and I don't remember most of the other details of the article. I believe the article was about Bayesianism, though, if you're looking for substantiated instances of people abusing probability in the way I mentioned.
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I was wondering, given [this discussion of Pascal's Wager], does anybody know of some published material that talks about the difference between conceivability and possibility in just this way?
I assume, since this is an Objectivist forum, that you're interested in sources from the Objectivist corpus. Peikoff's article "The Analytic/Synthetic Dichotomy," printed in the second edition of ITOE, discusses the notion of concievability versus possibility (albeit in a slightly different context). Specifically, the section "Logic vs. Experience" has a nice discussion of why conceiving a proproposition does not constitute evidence of that proposition-- it contains his pithy summary: "Fantasy is not a form of cognition."
Personally, it's a pet peeve of mine when people start misapplying the theory of probability in contexts like this. The first time I ran into it was in a philosophy of science class, where a professor gave us an article discussing at length the notion of "the probability that the theory of evolution is true." I never received an answer as to what that meant or how to calculate it as a number that wasn't ultimately picked out of the air or an implicit postulation of some sort of useless metaphysical "many-worlds" hypothesis.
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Oops! Sorry. It helps me to better make my point with fewer words. I'll try to cut this post down to what I think are the essential points.
I mean to include myself in that, too!
In any case, since the term is starting I'm going to have to bow out from significant contribution here. If I could make a suggestion, I think the sticking point here is really understanding the term "threat of force" as applying to law, since it seems to be what's causing the difficulty. I suspect the use of the term "threat" in this context may just be confusing things.
In any case, I hope you resolve this dilemma; it's been fruitful for me to think about these issues, so thanks!
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Ugh, too much fisking
Let's see:My problem with labeling law as a threat for any case, even if it is just a threat to those who would violate its edicts, is that it becomes initiatory force. Logically, it could be no other kind of force. Coercion is force, threats are force, and since laws come before the crime is committed, if laws are threats to anyone then they are initiatory force.I agree with the first part of this, but not the second. If "(law) is just a threat to those who would violate its edicts", no force or even threat of force is being used until after the lawbreaker initiated force on his own, in the case of proper law. That's why distinguishing between proper and improper law is important here. That is, when a businessman receives inside information about a company and acts on it, and the SEC fines him, the government was the one who initiates force right then, since the businessman didn't actually violate anyone's rights in breaking the bad law.
In my example, they want to murder, but decide against it after considering all the consequences, including possible legal punishment. Was it the law which convinced them? Perhaps. If so, can the law be said to have coerced them? Was it a threat which caused them to abandon their mind for another's, or did they use their own mind in considering the consequences?Their personal reasons for deciding not to murder me are irrelevant to the question of whether murder is permissible in civil society. They would only be substituting their mind for another's if they used their mind in the first place to conclude that murder was warranted, which they weren't since it never is.
With proper, objective law the force would come after another initiates force. The force the government would use can only come into play if someone else initiated force, and is therefore retributive force. Law could be initiatory force, not because it's a threat - it is not, but because the government's force comes into play even though the accused did not initiate force.Sounds good-- so what's the problem here? Is it the use of the term "threat" to describe possible negative repercussions of laws? I'd be more than happy to use this new terminology of "coming into play" if you're more comfortable with that-- the idea is essentially the same.
Edit: Thinking about what analogies to use to describe this situation about the relationship between laws and force in society, the analogy
umpire : rules : players : : government : laws : citizens
seems to be enlightening.
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You said the following things in your last reply:
(1) If it (a law) is force, then it must necessarily be initiatory force because it comes before any other force is applied....
(2) ... simply having laws is not force. A law is not force by virtue of simply being a law. When a law is enforced, that is when force is applied.
Which, in your view, is the case? Is the existence of a law (1) a blanket threat of force to all immediately on ratification, or (2) is force used only when the law is upheld? It's either/or. Also, I still don't know what you mean when you say "If a law is force." See my last comments below.
I am using threat as "an expression of intention to inflict injury or damage," but I disagree that law is a threat of retribution against rights violations. I would never kill another human who has not initiated force against me, therefore a law against murder is no threat to me. It can't be an expression of intention to inflict injury or damage to me because it would never apply to me. If my doctor told me, "You're at risk for getting uterine cancer," I would surmise he is insane and get a new doctor. Such a statement would have no bearing on my mind, and could not cause me to abandon my mind for my doctor's, because it's completely impossible.I was speaking offhandedly-- literally, "a threat of retribution against rights violations" ought to read "a threat of retribution against those who violate the rights of others." Since it only directly threatens those who violate its edicts, this should answer your objection.
But now it seems you've taken the position that a law does not threaten a person unless they violate its edicts, which I thought was the crux of your dilemma in the first place. That would be in contradiction to (1) above.
But what of others who might kill another human? Is the law a threat to them? Is it force? Again, I don't think so. If they actually do commit murder, then clearly they did not abandon their mind to another's. If they really want to, if their mind is to commit murder, but they don't, was it the law which really changed their mind? Again, I say no because they haven't really abandoned their mind. They didn't commit murder not because someone had better thinking on the issue; their own thinking is correct. They considered the consequences of their actions, which includes possible death for them, and chose to not commit murder. Just as the sun doesn't threaten me, doesn't express an intention to inflict injury, doesn't force me to abandon my mind, when I choose not to sit out naked all day on the beach, a knowledge of consequences can't be construed as force, or a threat.The sun isn't a moral agent, and a mugger is, so that analogy isn't helpful. Other than that I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. I will say that if someone comes to a conclusion that they ought to murder, this isn't "correct thinking," and is a rights violation regardless of how they rationalize it.
The first part of your statement is what I mean, but I'm not arguing this makes these laws okay. Remember, I haven't yet arrived at what makes laws just or unjust, proper or improper. Would a law against selling marijuana be a threat, and therefore force? I don't think so, and I outlined my thinking above with the example of murder. In both cases, the law simply makes explicit what consequences might occur if a particular action is taken.As I write, I'm beginning to feel this argument is weak, but I'm not sure why.
Well, for one thing, the mugger's declaration is another such explication of consequences as well, but we agree that his ultimatum is an initiation of force, so something's wrong here.
What I was arguing in the quote you used was that simply having laws is not force. A law is not force by virtue of simply being a law. When a law is enforced, that is when force is applied. The force would be retributive in cases where individual rights have been violated, but it would be initiatory in cases where no individual rights have been violated.Certainly: if in a society no one is breaking any laws, then the government need not use force. This emphasizes the fact that laws aren't literally force, they instead use force in certain circumstances.
Would you mind expounding on this a little?Either you are arguing that "laws are force" in the primary literal sense, which is a category error since laws are declarations, not actual uses of force, or that the application of law does not use force, merely "states consequences" or "makes explicit cause and effect", which is false or beside the point, since we have no examples of laws that do not carry penalties ultimately reducible to physical force.
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JeffS,
Good point. But this would imply laws are force. If the government is making a threat of retributive force, or any other kind of force, it's still making a threat - which would mean it's using a form of force regardless of what you do. That would be initiatory force.The source of our disagreement may be something that softwareNerd suggested earlier: we're using "force" in different ways. People offhandedly describe an unjust law as force since it is in fact an initiation of force by the government, and they don't call proper laws force since the government isn't behaving like a mugger when it upholds proper law. However, technically speaking, all laws prescribe force (in the sense of ultimately prescribing force at the primary, physical level) in certain circumstances, and the bad ones merely prescribe force that violate individual rights instead of protecting them.
Similarly, people generally use the term "threat" in a legal context in cases like the mugger, who is giving an expression of intending to violate your rights. But if threat means "an expression of intention to inflict injury or damage", then it's true that the government is "threatening" retribution against rights violations; however, labeling such retribution as a "threat" has no bearing on the propriety of the law.
I can't give you an example. I think the proper answer to my question is: laws are never force, nor coercion, nor threats. Like laws of physics, or chemistry, laws merely describe causes and effects. They codify what is considered intolerable in society and prescribe what force will be used as punishment. Since laws are not force, or coercion, or threats, the government can never be said to be initiating force, or regulating, or interfering with the free-market for just having laws.No law simply describes cause and effect like a physical law-- literally this would mean that the a law is a rule that carries itself out automatically. Just because the declaration by a government to use force is institutionalized, public and impersonal does not make it any less man-made and chosen by those who craft it and carry it out. The actual police officers making the arrest for murder are choosing to do so, and are using force. Conversely, by your reasoning one could just as easily say that the mugger's demand is merely his way of letting you know what will cause him to act in one way or another. The difference is the purpose behind using the force.
If by "cause and effect" here you simply mean that laws comprise a list of actions which the government stipulates to be "initiation of force" and whose violation will result in force being taken against you, and this objective listing and carrying out process makes these laws okay, I can think of lots of improper laws that bar perfectly rightful actions in advance, for example: laws against selling marijuana.
In summary, I agree with the conclusion but disagree with the method. It is true that the existence of laws is not necessarily an initiation of force. My objection is your method of arriving at that conclusion by arguing that laws "aren't" force at all, which depending on how you want to read this is either a category error or clearly false.
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JeffS,
A mugger on the street really gives no choice in how you act - both choices, your money or your life, are not actions a rational person, under normal (natural?) conditions could expect to have to choose between. The mugger forces you to make a decision. But a law not to murder, or not to defraud, or not to lie, doesn't have the same force aspect. The law doesn't force you into choosing between murder and a death sentence, or fraud and freedom, or a lie and freedom, nor does it force you to make any other decision. It simply gives you information as to what might happen if you choose to murder, defraud, or lie.What difference does it make if the government "might" catch you or not-- how does this make the threat of retributive force any less of a threat? The mugger also "might" kill you in that you might disable him first, or you might run away and he might miss. The important thing is the existence of the threat of force, not when it is ultimately carried out. In the end, both agents are stipulating you a choice: behave in a certain way or you will pay a price. The difference is in the behavior they want to elicit. I don't think their ability to carry out their threats is essential here.
We can agree on the murder example, but fraud might have another component to it. Rand describes fraud as having a physical component of force in that the person committing fraud, in order to commit fraud, would have to hold onto the money AND the goods. In this case, physical force is being used because the fraudster has taken property from another just as surely as a thief takes property. She might argue (and this pure conjecture) that a company withholding information about a product's possibly fatal side effect would have to actively hide that information - much like a person has to work to hide a lie. This too would require some physical application of force.I think you're right about the fraud example-- it's not particularly illustrative, and insofar as you've reduced fraud to physical force you're correct. I'm not so sure about the "withholding information" example, since an irrational company could simply decide to be stupid and go ahead with rolling out the product with no warning label. Any unfortunate person who uses that product was not placed in a dilemma to use it by the company, but the company nonetheless initiated force against that person.
I'm more interested in what you think of the third example, that of the employer "forcing" the man to decide between a badly-paying job and starvation. If the man decides that working under those conditions would damage his life and the only alternative is starvation, is the man being placed by the employer into a "false choice" that constitutes force?
I think before we can determine whether or not law is a proper use of force, we must first decide if law is force. I'm beginning to think law, properly made, is not force. It may prescribe force, but if it starts as being force then I can't see any way of getting around the fact that it is initiatory force since it must exist before any other force is used. If we determine law is force, and that it is initiatory force, we can then discuss whether it's a proper use of initiatory force. I agree, that discussion would hinge upon individual rights.I don't understand at all this notion of law being force. A law is a declaration by a government stating that if certain actions are carried out, the government will apply force; laws are descriptions about how the government uses force. Depending on whether the law is just or not, the force then used will be either retributive or initiative. I mean, can you give me an example of a law which does not ultimately threaten force if some conditions are not met?
Objectivist Mereology
in Metaphysics and Epistemology
Posted
Correct, cheerfully withdrawn.