Glypt wrote:

Repaired proposition from above: What does being born have to do with deserving acts?

Rationalised proposition from above: How is personal existence justified?

IMHO, those individuals who would put the clock back to a time when justice did not exist, to a state of nature where only might was right, exhibit a petty egoism and an impoverished teleological model for the human race.

Dispositional/personal centres have the capacity to recognise and respect the intrinsic value of another life; the capacity for personal sacrifice in a just cause, and the formation of allegiances in the interests of others ...they recognise deonological demands as mutual respect... such human existence is well deserved and is made possible only through the many instances of association that is generically called human society from which political systems have been refined and for which many individuals have dedicated or given up their life .

keda wrote:
Some people do not deserve to be born. Even abortion is too lenient for them.

keda wrote:
I guess you are right in that we live in a world of grace, but I would not say that grace and justice are mutually exclusive.

keda wrote:
In terms of debt I could pay back what it cost to give me birth, but I did nothing to buy it in the first place.

keda wrote:
Justice hower is not the notion of paying back but that of retaliation, eye for an eye. In that sense grace is proportioned, not according to debt, but according to worthiness. The difference between mercy, which is not getting what you deserve (not what you have earned, but are worth) and grace, is that the latter while not earned, can be deserved.

Glypt wrote:

I repaired the original expression so that it could make sense. Your interpretation is carrying the same strange semantics. Reconsider the structure of your sentence and I'm sure you will recognise that it expresses a non-sensical proposition.

You are equivocating between being a creature, an organism, and being a human being. If you are telling me that debt cannot obtain with regard to being an organism that’s one thing, although I notice you argue the contingency of the enviroment. But I would hope that you regard yourself as a human being, a person who is part of the human race with all the cultural and sociological trappings that entails

So you owe nothing to civilisation at all? Everything you are is down to you?

What distinguishes you from being just 'a creature'?

What allows you to perceive intrinsic value?

What allows laws to be to be invented?

What has enabled you to think and express that thought through language?

All the latter require the associations, the civilisation, … the society...from which you emerge so that you are more than just a creature but a human being…a socially contingent person whose very psychological state is derived from other people, past and present.

cortes wrote:

But they clearly are, at least going by the concept of justice that socialists put forward. If the universe were just we would not exist and making the universe just must surely entail removing us from it if the concept were applied with any honest consistency.

But this presuposes two things:

1) That you have a debt in the first place. If life is a gift then it is both undeserved and debt free. Why assume a debt when there is no debt collector and no deliquency notices?

2) That you are able to repay the debt, were it such. This is also questionable, with what do you repay? You have nothng but what was given to you in the first place. And the nature of time is such that you have no way to grab hold of the past and give it to anyone.

Well, that is one notion of it. Retaliation is an attempt to balance some imaginary scale of harms. You harm me, I harm you, there, we're even. This is also the nature of socialism.

I got a gift of this, you got a gift of that. You look over at my gift and whine that my gift is bigger than your gift so you try to balance the gift scale by redistributing the gifts.

No, justice is, at best, a local phenomenon. We can create islands of balance within the universe of imbalance, like gardens of order in a universe of chaos. The problem is that maintaining such gardens requires enormous efforts. Essentially, people like Kwalish Kid regard me as evil for refusing to help them maintain their gardens.

keda wrote:
I was speaking hypothetically; I do agree with that birth is a gift. As for your second remark, it could be questioned, but I still suppose you can refine the things you were given thereby adding value to them.

keda wrote:
I would not say that. The socialist consider it fair to redistribute what was given to me, that I would consider harm.

keda wrote:
Justice in the sense I'm using is however a cause worth pursuing, unless you are don't have morals. In a world (I am not speaking of statuory laws of a society here) without justice you would be better off taking the dirty way. You and I may not want to live in a socialist garden, but any free society is constantly under attack from enslaved ones, so whether you like it or not it is ecroaching on our gardens.

You also recognise the intrinsic worth in other people and acknowledge that you would not exist without intelligence and language and reason, all of which you need to conceive of the intrinsic worth of persons and all of which you derive from association with others. However, you do not believe you have a duty towards others because all these things which constitute you were either given or stolen by you.

keda wrote:
The difference between a communist utopia and a libertarian utopia is that latter specifies what means are allowed, and since the communists usually don't care what they do as long as they get to their utopia, even if they are well meaning, it is with a certain inevitably some tyrant is going to turn it into a dystopia. So if you hold on to the idea that ends don't justify the means, but rather that utopia should only be achieved through consent, then you can see something more than just an island of justice.

keda wrote:
The proper ordering concerns the distribution of things to rational beings. In a might makes right approach, the things should belong to whoever can keep them, however this approach is brutal and ineffective, which is why civilization was invented to establish peace, and so the land was divided among the people and people who took land or things derived from it from others were brought to justice. The criminals were punished with the justification of equalizing harm, while where there are more efficient way of preventing such things from happening, that is by more severe punishments, such would itself be a breach of the social contract that presupposed an agreed upon distribution, and would thus be tyrannical. The proper distribution however extends further than the juridical sphere, into the sphere of grace, that is what is given, and so the question becomes, how should we exercise charity? And as such there is no correct answer, but charity is not without an end to guide it. The proper distribution points to the answer; reason gives that the distribution should be in proportion to worthiness, that is we give to those we think deserve it (and that does not mean earn it, just being a morally upright person is deserving) as giving tothe undeserving would only encourage evil in the world.

keda wrote:

Let me try to rephrase it then. I do recieve something in being born, beyond just existing e.g. inherited talents. What did you do to earn them?

keda wrote:

That is true without doubt, but I suppose our disagreements are rather about how this is related to our obligations. How can I be in debt if I never agreed to pay anything back?

keda wrote:

…if you want to say that I have it (language/reason) because my parents had it, then yes, it is a gift, but it is not an association.

keda wrote:
I do believe we have duties toward one another, since we as rational beings have intrinsic worth

keda wrote:
these sort of duties cannot be legislated, with statuory laws, because they relate to an end of our actions that one should try to achieve rather than particular actions that one should or shouldn't do, and thus no particular action could be said to violate a duty of virtue and any act that is commanded to further that end could be acted upon without accepting the end.

keda wrote:
How can I be in debt if I never agreed to pay anything back? … I do believe we have duties toward one another,

The man shouts back "Well please save my daughter at least, she's still young and has so much to give to the world, please don't deny her the same opportunities in life that you now have, have you no sense of duty?"

cortes wrote:

Wow, you are confused. Go read up on some Philosophy of Science. I don't want to waste time educating you on this here.

Determinism is an assumption of science, a very practical one, and one which has borne fruit in many (but not all) areas, but hardly one supported by "cold facts". The belief that there is a cause for everything is not established science. In fact, indeterminism (which is not free will but not determinism either) has been gaining support in physics.

You really have to go through some pretty extreme contortions to construct a concept of "fairness" that reflects the world as it is. Maybe some sort of naturalism. But otherwise, every concept of "fairness" is a reflection of how people wish the world worked, not how it actually works.

As someone who believes in individualism, I do not believe that we should attempt to design and model a large social system based on those social structures that we observe forming organically and naturally in men freely going about their business. By definition, such a system must be imposed from above.

To quote Hayek on the matter: What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only so far as it is free. In so far it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it.

The system should be designed only in so far as we set out the basic principles by which individuals may, as far is possible, go about pursuing their own goals.