"Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe

David Stockhoff · 01 May 2011, 23:30 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Sun, 01 May 2011 19:30:37 -0400
Subject: (urth) "Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe
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On 5/1/2011 7:13 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>> I see. But that's a practical matter, not a theoretical one.
> If you agree that we as an actual society cannot practice abstention from
> exploitation, why are you maintaining that the irreducible minimum of
> exploitation can still be morally wrong in a relevant sense? Should we
> dissolve our societies?
Not at all. The minimum is quite acceptable, as long as all the players 
are roughly equal under the law. Eliminating things like slave labor at 
gunpoint in the extraction industries (say, diamonds, which have no 
intrinsic value anyway but never mind) hardly means eliminating the 
relatively tiny advantages buyers and sellers may exercise over one 
another in the short term. Investing in bombs and getting dividends in 
oil, however, should be eliminated by the conditions below.
>
>> it's a problem, but if the conditions of horizontal and vertical
>> nonexclusive democracy are met, then theoretically, why should not the
>> worst excesses of strong arms (excess mortality, morbidity, deformities,
>> poverty) be avoided?
>
> Because you can't get the democracy to agree on a uniform ranking of which
> excesses are worse than others. Not even murder is a universally agreed
> upon excess in democracies; as late as 1970, cuckoldry was allowed as a
> defense in Texas.
Nonsense. Your very example of Texas proves that democratic states can 
get along without worrying about such details. But mass murder, 
poisoning, and starvation, for examples, are clearly ruled out by all 
international norms, with zero disagreement. And any society that 
actually prefers genocide to cuckoldry will never survive to adopt a 
stable, nonexclusive democracy anyway (but even Pakistan will do so 
eventually, because they do not prefer genocide).
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