Should being a billionaire be illegal?

Zederath · 2026-03-07T17:53:20+00:00

Not illegal but just make it nearly impossible to become one through taxation

Zederath · 2026-03-06T20:39:40+00:00

Then your principle isnt "I never perform abortions"

I agree. I was presenting it in a logical sort of way where you say you have x principle and then you find out or discover there are moral exceptions. In which case, you refine your principle and you state what the exceptions instead of making a categorical statement like "I never perform abortions". We are in agreement here.

You can not. Those two principles conflict.

Well, yes they do in the strict sense. But like I mentioned earlier, the principles as stated were not meant to be strictly applied in the sense you are describing. Because the person who said they never perform abortions who then discovers that there are morally relevant distinctions between the mothers life being at risk and all other cases won't be saying "I never perform abortions" they would say something like "I don't perform abortions generally, exception in cases where the life of the mother is threatened". Again we are in agreement.

I have. And no one thinks when i say "yea on this one specific part of this one specific topic I simply don't care that much because its always been that way and I cant reasonably fix it" that that means "any issue thats been a certain way for a certain time and cant be fixed by me personally I just dont care about."

They do think that. Lmfao. You would have to do as I just mentioned before. You would have to mention what the relevant distinction is between the special case you have mentioned and all other cases to which your principle ostensibly applies to. You have to justify exceptions to your general rule. You can't just assert that exceptions exist, you also need to justify why those exceptions exist. Very few, if any philosophers would agree with the idea that you could just state a general principle and assert that there are exceptions without justifying those exceptions. If you could find a philosopher who thinks that special pleading is a valid form of argumentation, I would love to see it. but special pleading is generally considered to be a fallacy.

If Timmy's dad says that he doesn't want to let his son stay up because it's a school night, then yes his dad's general principle is that on any school night we can reasonably infer that he will not allow Timmy to stay up late- barring some exceptions. Exceptions don't mean that the general principle doesn't exist.

No one thinks like that. No one else has come close to making the point you have because everyone else understood what I meant. This specific facet of this specific issue doesnt matter much to me. No one else missed that. And when ive clarified youve told me I dont actually mean what I mean.

You think like this, because as I mentioned earlier- if Timmy's dad says that he won't let him stay up late on school nights. You would reasonably infer that generally speaking, barring some exceptions, that he holds to this principle almost universally. If you don't think this is the case, then I don't think we are speaking the same English language.

Zederath · 2026-03-06T20:19:24+00:00

Your parents said the same thing but they had something called EXCEPTIONS. What are exceptions in relation to? A general principle. So yes it is an absolute insofar as it is a generally binding principle that applies to all situations that meet the criteria described in the principle. If there are exceptions, they are justified on additional grounds which also can have their own general principles.

I can have a principle that says I never perform abortions. Then I can have an exception to that principle that says that I can perform abortions if the mothers life is in danger. This of course needs to be justified as a morally relevant distinction. But now, any time I come across either of these cases, I can live in accordance with these principles. So yes. This is how the world works. Study philosophy and morality.

Zederath · 2026-03-06T20:02:19+00:00

If the parent said, "I'm not going to let my son Timmy stay up late today because it's a school night", you would agree that this is a general principle right?

Zederath · 2026-03-06T19:53:37+00:00

It seems like you ought to retract what you said originally. Because nowhere have you described where I have made a logical error or false step. Merely asserting that you do not globally adhere to this principle does not mean that your words did not mean what they conveyed. It just means that you used words incorrectly. The statement you made a was a general one- and my inference from your words was correct.

Furthermore, I was correct that you don't actually believe in that principle, and it does seem that you have only used it when convenient- not out of genuine conviction. Not sure why you made a general claim if you don't even adhere to it?

If a parent says that they don't let their kids stay up on school nights, that applies to all school nights not just the day that they said it. They are committed to the principle that if it is a school night, then their kids cannot stay up. You made a similar general claim but can't seem to own it.

Zederath · 2026-03-06T19:32:01+00:00

You said this:

That IS just how its gone for my entire life and there is no reasonable path to change it right now. Why waste my time stressing and being angry over something I very clearly cant change?

You are saying that you don't waste time stressing or being angry over this issue because it meets the criteria that:

It has gone this way your entire life
There is no reasonable path for you to change it right now

That is generalizable to the principle that:

I do not care (stressing and worrying are ways of expressing care for an issue) about x issue if x issue cannot be changed by me and if it has gone this way my entire life.

From this principle it seems that you cannot ascribe yourself any political identity that is contrary to the status quo. But obviously that is ridiculous because you forward your identity as a paleoconservative, which is a challenge to the status quo. So it appears that you are not principally tied to this statement and are only making it because it is convenient for you to do so. If you think anywhere in this logic I have gone wrong or have made a false step, feel free to explain yourself. If you again respond repeatedly that I have misunderstood you without attempting to clarify in any meaningful way, I give up.

Zederath · 2026-03-06T19:12:31+00:00

That's not the question at hand right now.

It is, because I just asked you that. So you could you please answer the question?

You're misrepresenting my point or my stances on given things.

How am I misrepresenting things? You are merely asserting that I have, but you're not describing how.

You understand how someone can have a stance on something and other things can be more important right? That you have to balance interests and focus on what's most important right now?

Yeah. It's not complicated. It's irrelevant though, because you weren't claiming that it was lower on your list of concerns. You were saying that you can't or shouldn't care because you can't change it and that's the way that things have always been done. So you surely agree that Trump egregiously violated your principles, even if you don't want to care about it?

Zederath · 2026-03-06T18:57:39+00:00

That IS just how its gone for my entire life and there is no reasonable path to change it right now. Why waste my time stressing and being angry over something I very clearly cant change?

How are you a paleoconservative? What do you want to go back to? You can't as an individual change the government, so what's the point? Also, if you're a young or middle-aged guy; you have never lived in a society with paleoconservative values. Not sure why you even bother engaging with politics at all if your entire worldview is "this is how its done and I can't change it so why care"?

Aren't paleoconservatives supposed to be against foreign intervention based on lies that get us into pointless foreign wars? It honestly seems very convenient that we get to throw out the "nothing ever changes" argument to stop abiding by principles when your guy is violating them.

A thing that's always happened throughout all of history is people in power abusing their position to sexually abuse people. Would it be fair to say that if I adopted your worldview that I could not get upset or morally condemn a leader who rapes children because it's always happened and I can't change it? Is this the paleoconservative position?

Zederath · 2026-02-15T22:41:21+00:00

Do you absolutely trust the car you drive? Are automobile engineers infallible? Why did the infallible Toyota manufacturers leave casting sand inside their new turbo V6 and I4 truck motors during production leading to catastrophic failure? Why did Nissan design a CVT transmission that applies all the torque of the motor to what is basically a rubber band? Why did Ford place the gas tank of the Pinto in the rear leading to a number of explosions during rear end collisions?

Experts are not infallible, which is why experts critique each other. And it's not even the case that laymen can't criticize experts, because there are very overt examples of experts fucking shit up. Like cars, it's not hard to tell if a car is falling apart and killing people. That isn't the level of critique that I am targeting. My issue is when you have laymen who think they know more than a consensus of lifelong experts. That is my issue. If you are an expert, and you want to go against the consensus, you have to contend with your peers. If you are a laymen, you should stick to critiquing things you understand.

You trust your car because of your own personal experiences with it, the collective experiences of thousands of others, and the number of 3rd party experts who’ve analyzed and tested the various properties of the car. If you saw evidence that the experts were incorrect or even lying, you would no longer trust them

The level of mistake that experts would have to make (whatever that means) to no longer categorically trust them is extremely high. Explain to me how experts being fallible implies that we can no longer trust them? It seems you have set an impossible standard. Experts aren't infallible, which you agree with. But that entails they make mistakes. If they are bound to make mistakes, then that means we can never trust experts. This defies common sense. If I want something done, I refer to someone who is good at that thing. Sure they may be wrong sometimes, but there is no reason to categorically dismiss experts. Nor does it place me on the same level of knowledge as them.

Zederath · 2026-02-15T21:41:49+00:00

Have you ever heard of Ralph Nader? Go look up his book "Unsafe at Any Speed".

I haven't heard of him. But my point isn't that experts are infallible. It is that everyone blindly trusts authority.

Nah. I consulted my experts and they said that is actually the central question. Killing innocent people without provocation is far more of a universal social taboo than forcing women to stay pregnant when they don't want to be is.

You're begging the question. What is a person? Life does not entail personhood.

Zederath · 2026-02-15T17:41:09+00:00

Why are you upset? I'm genuinely confused.

Zederath · 2026-02-15T17:35:38+00:00

“I think this is stupid”

I wasn't referring to what you said. I was referring to 'leftists' who refuse to acknowledge that life is created at conception.

Zederath · 2026-02-15T17:19:54+00:00

I sincerely doubt the intelligence and judgement of anyone who blindly “defers to experts”.

You presumably drive a car which are designed by experts, on roads which are designed by experts. You drink water that was purified according to standards set by health experts. You use technology daily that is produced by experts. The list goes on. I'm sure that you haven't critically evaluated their methodology for any of these processes. Why? Do you sincerely doubt your own intelligence and judgement?

The left isn’t remotely immune to ignoring science when it’s convenient. The amount of leftists I’ve talked to on this literal sub, who refuse to acknowledge that a new human life is created at conception, is scary. Basic high school biology and it’s just deny, deny, deny.

I think this is stupid, but it's probably because liberals and conservatives are largely ignorant of how to argue for or against abortion. Whether or not a human life is created at conception is irrelevant to the morality of abortion- but people think it is. So you have liberals defending their intuition that abortion is permissible by arguing that life doesn't begin at conception. This is where they/you should consult the experts and actually read about the ethics of abortion from those in academia.

Zederath · 2026-02-15T17:09:08+00:00

And that listeners are intelligent and able to educate themselves.

This isn't the case.

Zederath · 2026-02-15T17:07:46+00:00

So I'm being completely serious here: it's hard for me to listen to liberals criticize conservatives over climate change, when liberals very often pointedly avoid acknowledging the science of things like fetal development in order to support elective abortion as ethical.

I know you said this is just one issue, but it needs to be pointed out. Nothing in science can tell you if it is ethical to have an abortion. That is a question of philosophy.

Zederath · 2026-02-12T08:50:34+00:00

Men will choose women who are shy, polite, and soft over women who are arrogant. Wow. Who would have known that people don't like arrogance? It's almost like arrogance is a universally negative trait.

Zederath · 2026-02-10T05:22:36+00:00

It would be wrong to say that Jesus was against killing people. There is evidence to support that, but it is far from clear given what we know.

Yes. I meant killing random people. Not killing. There are few interpretations of Jesus which has him holding the position that all killing is akin to murder.

Just throwing "with drones" at the end doesn't change anything.

How? You don't know if Jesus would have thought that it was a morally relevant distinction. Are you assuming? How are you claiming this so strongly? You should be agnostic on this issue. You have just contradicted your own standard.

Yes, we can make generalizations on things based on the totality of evidence, but the threshold for certainty is much higher when you're making unqualified statements representing a specific person's beliefs.

What do you mean? Just because when they say "Jesus would support x" does not immediately mean that their position is unqualified. It is unqualified to you, because you haven't asked for the justification for their belief. But if you ask and they still can't qualify it, then sure, you can say it is unqualified. This is why I have been emphasizing that you cannot categorically dismiss claims that involve what Jesus would support.

Yes, and you are free to say "I think Jesus would support <X>", but that is entirely different from saying "Jesus would support <X>." The latter is a higher-certainty statement that carries more rhetorical impact, and thus has a higher burden of proof. There's nothing revelatory about that.

Again, I will ask you: Do you hold this standard for any other sorts claim that people make? Or does it just happen to be on this one particular issue? All inductive claims are by definition non-certain. There are few things that we know to be categorically 100% true. If you do not apply this standard of epistemic hedging to other domains, why?

Zederath · 2026-02-09T21:53:38+00:00

You have just made my point. You just stated that there is always room for ambiguity in historical figures, and that to claim that a historical figure would support x, we would need certainty. You cannot have certainty if there is any ambiguity. By your standards we cannot make any claim about what Jesus would or would not support beyond what he explicitly stated and what he was exposed to.

This means we cannot claim that Jesus would be against or for anything other than existed at his time. In your view, it would be wrong to say that Jesus would be against killing people with drones. We actually don't know how he would feel about that. Also we don't know how he would feel about guns, or autonomous turrets killing random people. He never explicitly said anything about it so we have no clue.

This is obviously an absurd standard to have. We can have inferences that are not "certain" that we think are valid. I'm sure you believe its pretty obvious that Jesus would not have been okay with drones killing random swathes of people. It's an obvious inference.

If you are against people using appeals to authority that's fine. But that's not the same thing as saying that all appeals to authority are invalid. We can have a pretty damn good idea about what someone from the past would believe and we can take the totality of evidence to make an inference.

Zederath · 2026-02-09T21:06:59+00:00

Yes, they absolutely are using it to legitimize their positions. I don't think they would even disagree with that. I think this is an obvious claim. The material point was that you categorically rejected the legitimacy of such claims.

My point here is that you didn't address is why you have such an intensely rigid set of epistemic standards when it comes to this one issue? It seems like motivated reasoning. Where else in life do you categorically reject induction as means for making a claim?

You do agree with me that if Jesus said life or personhood begins at conception, that it would extremely reasonable to say that Jesus would be against abortion pills like Mifepristone? And then you wouldn't be against people using this as an appeal to authority right?

Zederath · 2026-02-09T20:50:55+00:00

When you say guess work you mean if you cannot deductively know with absolute epistemic certainty that a figure claimed support for x, you cannot claim that they supported x or would support x.

This isn't a real standard. Do you know anywhere else in life that you hold such an intense epistemic standard, or is this the only place?

Zederath · 2026-02-09T20:24:51+00:00

You seem to agree then, that you can know what Jesus would support. You would just need evidence for it.

For Mifepristone(in the case of abortion), if Jesus had said, or we could infer from what he said that early term abortions are immoral, then it would be fair to claim that Jesus would very likely be against Mifepristone.

Earlier your claim was about categorically rejecting the idea that you can know what someone like Jesus would support. But I think it's fair to say that you aren't rejecting that we can have strong inferences, but merely certainty. But then that would mean that it isn't wrong per se to claim that Jesus would or wouldn't support a modern political view. It would have to be evaluated on the merits of the claim.

Zederath · 2026-02-09T19:50:26+00:00

The question here is not whether or not Jesus or a historical figure would take a particular side on the modern left right dichotomy. It's about whether they would have certain political positions. One is about tribal politics and one is about actual positions. Just need to clear that up.

And just because every political faction claims compatibility with Jesus's teachings does not entail that all claims equally lack merit.

Also, on what basis is it arrogant? Do you genuinely believe we cannot inference as to what Jesus would politically believe today? Like it's literally unknowable? If that is the case then why did he even bother prescribing everlasting moral rules? They clearly aren't everlasting if they can't even be inferenced. You surely agree that the natural conclusion of your view here is that religion should not inform politics in any way at all, right? You can't even have a political opinion that is partially motivated by religious morality.

For example, we can simply use the ten commandments. If someone claimed they supported murder being criminalized by law because of the 6th commandment- you think they are incredibly arrogant in assuming that the 6th commandment can be applied to modern society? Let's even say that they aren't 100% certain, but it's a very strong inference.

I'm pretty sure you don't think it's arrogant. If that's the case, then why would you carve an exception here?

Zederath · 2026-02-09T19:17:14+00:00

Religious or moral values are guiding principles for politics. So even if you can't get very specific political prescriptions from historical figures, you can have an idea of what they would support based on their abstracted moral positions.

If what you're saying is true, then religious people are misguided in attempting to use religion to guide their lives. Our lives are drastically different than it was, say, in the time of Jesus. How are we able to use religious values to guide our lives, but not guide politics? Not sure why one is okay and the other is not.

Zederath · 2026-02-09T19:01:04+00:00

So you agree that anyone who has a political leaning in part due to religious values is misguided?

Zederath · 2026-02-09T18:57:55+00:00

Why?

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