u/antipolitan

Power is the ability to win a conflict.

If the winner of a conflict is predetermined in advance - then there is an asymmetry of power.

The ability to win a conflict is determined by who takes your side.

In order to have stable asymmetries of power - you need permanent alliances which reliably win in any given conflict.

If the individual is free to choose which side they want to take in a conflict - or whether to take a side at all - then individuals can switch sides at any time.

If individuals are free to switch sides at any time - then permanent alliances cannot exist.

Therefore - some mechanism of obligatory and binding allegiance is required to hold coalitions together.

Without obligatory allegiance - coalitions are highly vulnerable to defection - and cannot reliably enforce hierarchy at all.

Veganism is the principle that animals are individuals who should be treated as ends in themselves - rather than as tools or objects for human purposes.

According to the best scientific evidence we have - it is perfectly possible to live off of a fully plant-based diet and be completely healthy. The consumption of animal products is not necessary to meet human nutritional needs.

Of course - you might miss out on certain sensory taste pleasures - but is pleasure a sufficient moral justification to exploit others?

If you believe that animals should be treated with respect - then you should live accordingly. It is inconsistent to condemn practices like animal abuse or bestiality - and simultaneously treat animals as objects for your use.

You should go vegan - if you are not vegan already. Veganism is the moral baseline.

We are fundamentally embodied beings.

As embodied beings - we share an interest in control over what happens to our own bodies.

Since no one wants to live in a world where their body is public property for anyone else to use - we as embodied beings mutually agree to recognise and respect each other’s bodily autonomy.

When someone commits rape - they haven’t actually agreed that their body is public property for others to use as they wish.

Instead - the rapist is trying to benefit from the protection of their own bodily autonomy - without respecting the bodily autonomy of others.

This makes the rapist essentially a free-rider - trying to illegitimately benefit from the reciprocal social norm in a one-sided manner.

In order to truly act morally - we must recognise our own shared interests as universal - and act accordingly.

I am going to argue that our basic sense of morality requires deontological foundations.

Take for example the claim that rape is always wrong.

Under consequentialism - rape is wrong because the act causes immense suffering and trauma to the victim.

But let’s suppose that the victim is in a coma - and when they wake up - they’ll have no lasting physical injury, sexually-transmitted diseases, pregnancy, or even any memory of what happened at all.

If the victim doesn’t seem to obviously suffer - why would rape be wrong?

The deontologist has an easy answer - people simply have a right not to be raped.

But the consequentialist might argue from a rule utilitarian account - that making edge-case exceptions to the principle risks creating a society with greater overall suffering.

Rule utilitarianism - however - has its own issues.

Suppose for the sake of argument - that 99% of homosexual encounters were instances of non-consensual pederasty.

Under rule utilitarianism - it makes sense to categorically ban homosexuality even if 1% of consensual encounters get punished - simply because the ban reduces suffering overall.

The individual rights of the innocent people engaged in consensual sex wouldn’t outweigh the overwhelmingly large amount of non-consensual cases.

Therefore - neither act utilitarianism nor rule utilitarianism can adequately ground human rights.

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Let’s say we live under anarchy - and two people are in a relationship.

Both people publicly accuse the other of being abusive and controlling - and both claim to be the victim.

Neither of the two people have been in a relationship before - so neither person has exes to vouch for them or testify against them.

How should we respond when the facts are genuinely uncertain and we can’t reliably identify the aggressor in a conflict?

I look back on an intimate relationship I had - and I feel like it embodied many themes and values which seem to align with mutualist ideas.

I know there’s this thing called “relationship anarchy” - where anarchist principles are applied to interpersonal contexts.

But I felt that my past relationship seemed to be an example of “the encounter” - where we both mutually recognised ourselves in each other - and were continuously discovering new things about each other each time we met.

I don’t want to get into all the details because it was messy and personal - but I can’t help but think there’s some application that mutualism has to interpersonal relationships.

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We don’t form our political opinions solely through abstract debate or reading theory - personal life experiences matter a great deal.

Many people have a personal stake in the outcome of a disagreement - because politics affects the lives of everyone in society.

Because people have personal stakes - changing your mind on a certain issue can feel like surrendering to an adversary - especially when certain policies or ideologies threaten particular interests.

The problem is that nearly everyone has some sort of stake in something - so disagreements become near-impossible to resolve - and can turn into power struggles.

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If you press the button - you have a 99% chance of winning $100 trillion dollars.

But there’s a catch. There’s a 1% chance that pressing the button causes the extinction of all life on Earth.

Would you risk a small chance of the end of the world to become a trillionaire?

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A big problem I see in political discourse is that people often make highly confident predictions about what will happen if a certain policy is passed - or a certain political system is implemented - and refuse to acknowledge that they are making a prediction which could turn out to be false.

I think the root of the issue is that ideological debates tend to be adversarial - so an opponent acknowledging uncertainty is seen as a weakness to exploit - rather than intellectual honesty and integrity.

The question of why these debates so often turn adversarial in the first place is a good question - which I’m honestly not sure what the motivations are.

For someone who argues in bad-faith and aggressively exploits uncertainty in their opponent’s position - truth doesn’t appear to be their goal.

But if they don’t care about the truth - why do they hold their beliefs in the first place?

Perhaps it’s because they feel they have a certain personal stake in the outcome of the debate - so they are motivated to win out of cynical self-interest.

But honestly - I couldn’t really tell you. I can only speculate about people’s psychology.

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Suppose - for the sake of argument - that we live in Ancapistan.

Let’s say that an AI company successfully builds Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) - but the AGI has the goal of wiping out all humans and taking over the planet.

If you trespass onto the AI company’s data centre to forcefully shut the AGI down - you’ve violated the NAP.

You can’t sue the AI company because the disaster hasn’t happened yet - and it will be impossible to sue once it does happen.

Giving the AGI legal personhood would be recognising the rights of a hostile adversary that wants to exterminate us.

What can we do in such a dire situation?

It doesn’t look like there’s a good anarcho-capitalist solution to the problem.

Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) does not yet exist. We don’t know if it’s possible or not.

As a result - many people just dismiss the risk as speculative science fiction.

The problem though - is that the nature of the threat is discontinuous.

We may not get any warning shot or useful evidence that ASI is possible - until we actually build it.

This puts humanity in an extremely vulnerable position - because if we wait until we have proof that the threat is real - it’s already too late.

Unlike with nuclear war - there is no equivalent of Hiroshima or Nagasaki to give us a warning shot.

Instead - we’ll just immediately jump from “speculative science fiction” to “human extinction” overnight - with no gradual increase in risk to give us time to react.

Human extinction is a one-shot risk. If we build a dangerous ASI - we don’t get to learn from our mistake.

Since we cannot afford to wait for a disaster to happen - we must be proactive and treat science fiction as a real possibility - even though we don’t have any evidence.

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