Again ArisKatsaris - the "correct-line-ometer" prevents me from responding directly to your comment (way to stifle the ability to respond, site-designers!). So I'ma put it here...

In short your description of what morality entails isn't sufficient, isn't complete

It was a comment - not a thesis, not a manifesto, not a monograph, and certainly not a "description of what morality entails".

To assert otherwise is to be dishonest, or to be sufficiently stupid as to expect a commenter's entire view on an important aspect of moral philosophy to be able to be transmitted in (roughly) 21 words (the bold bit at the end). Or to be a bit of both, I guess - if you expect that it will advance your ends, maybe that suffices.

Here's something to print out and sticky-tape to your monitor: if ever I decide to give a complete, sufficient explanation of what I think is a "description of what morality entails", it will be identified as such, will be significantly longer than 21 words, and will not have anything to do with programming an AI (on which: as a first step, and having only thought about this once since 1995, it seems to me that it would make sense to build in the concept of utility-interdependence, the notion of economic efficiency, and an understanding of what happens to tyrants in repeated, many-player dynamic games.)

Really? You went straight for a baby right off the bat? A baby is an actor which is specifically not free to do as it wishes, for a large range of very sensible reasons - including but not limited to the fact that it is extremely reliant on third parties (parents or some other adult) to take care of it.

I'm not of the school that a baby is not self-owning, which is to say that it is rightly the property of its parents (but it is certainly not the property of uninvolved third parties, and most certainly not property of the State): I believe that babies have agency, but it is not full agency because babies do not have the capacity to rationally determine what will cause them harm.

Individuals with full agency should be permitted to self-harm - it is the ultimate expression of self-ownership (regardless of how squeamish we might be about it: it imposes psychic costs on others and is maybe self-centred, but to deny an individual free action on the basis that it might make those nearby feel a bit sad, is a perfect justification for not freeing slaves).

Babies are like retards (real retards, not internet retards [99% of whom are within epsilon of normal]): it is rational to deny them full liberty. Babies do not get to do as they will. (But let's not let the State decide who is a retard or mentally ill - anybody familiar with the term 'drapetomania' will immediately see why).

Yeah, so I'll just leave this here... (since in the best tradition of correct-line-ism, mention of 'correct line' cultism perpetrated the morally-omniscient Aris Katsaris results in... ad hoc penalisation by the aforementioned Islamophonbe and scared "China and Russia will divide and conquer Europe" irrational fearmonger).

Not only are you an economic ignoramus (evidenced by the fact that you had no idea what transitivity of preferences even MEANT until late December 2012) but you're also as dishonest as the numbskull who is the front-man for Scientology.

If you can't read English, then remedial language study is indicated: apart from that you're just some dilettante who thinks that he doesn't have to read the key literature in ANY discipline before waffling about it ("I haven't read Coase"... "I haven't read Rand"... "I haven't read anything on existentialism"... "Can someone on this forum tell me if intransitive preferences implies irrationality?").

You're a living, breathing advertisement for Dunning-Kruger.

Wait - don't tell me... you aren't aware of their work. Google it.

Here's the thing: if I was as dishonest as you are, I would get together 6 mates and drive your 'net' Karma to zero in two days. It is so stupidly easy that nobody who's not a retard thinks it's worth doing.

And the big problem you face is that I don't give a toss what number my 'karma' winds up at: this is the internet.

I've been on the web for a decade longer than you (since the WANK hack, if that means anything to you, which I doubt): I know this stuff back to front. I've been dealing with bloviating self-regarding retards like you since you were in middle-school (or the Greek equivalent).

You do NOT want this war: you're not up to it, as evidenced by the fact that you think that all you need to do outside of your narrow disciplline (programming, no) is bloviate. Intellectual battles are not won or lost by resorting to stupid debating tactics: they are won by the people who do the groundwork in the relevant discipline. You're a lightweight who does not read core material in disciplines on which you pontificate, which makes you sound like a pompous windbag anywhere other than this site.

You would be better off spending your time masturbating over Harry Potter (which is to literature what L Ron Hubbard is to theology) or hentai... and writing turgid pretentious self-absorbed fan fiction.

Ga Muti. (or Ka muti if you prefer a hard gamma).

Then morality would be about letting babies eat pieces of broken glass,

Babies are people and a lacerated oesophagus is a cost. You need a better example.

Plus your idea is even more vulnerable to utility monsters than utilitarianism since it only requires people with moderate unusual or nosy preferences ...snip...

That might be what you imagine "my" idea to involve, but it isn't.

There is a perfectly sensible, rational way to determine if people's supposed hurt feelings impose actual costs: ask them to pay to ameliorate them. Dislike watching gay folks kiss? Pay them not to. (I dislike watching anybody kiss - that's just me - but not enough to be prepared to pay to reduce the incidence of public displays of affection).

What's that? There are folks who are genuinely harmed, but don't have the budget to pay for amelioration? That's too bad - and it's certainly not a basis for permitting the creation of (or continued existence of) an entity whose purposes have - always and everywhere - been captured and perverted, and ruined every economic system in history.

And not for nothin'... it's all fine and dandy to blithely declare that "high powered people cannot necessarily step lightly" as if that disposes of 500 years worth of academic literature criticising the theoretical basis for the State: at this point in time no State is raining death on your neighbourhood (but yours is probably using your taxes - plus debt written in your name - to rain death on others).

Let's by all means have a discussion on the idea that the non-initiation of force is 'unworkable' - that's the same line of reasoning that declared that without the Church holding a monopoly to furnish moral guidance, we would all descend to amoral barbarism. These days churches are voluntary (and Popes still live in palaces) - and violent crime is on a secular downtrend that has lasted the best part of a century. And so it will be when the State goes away.

The problem has been 'solved' only to the extent that people accept 2nd-year Public Finance as it's taught to 3rd years economics students (which stops short of two of the most critical problems with the theory - bureaucratic capture/corruption, and war - and a third... the general equilibrium effects of a very large budget-insensitive actor in goods and factor markets).

The basic Pub Fi model is that the existence of publicness characteristics in some goods means that some markets (health, education, defence) are underexpanded, and some (pollution, nuisance) are over-expanded, due to social benefits and costs not being taken into account... which - on a purely utilitarian basis - are to be resolved by .gov... from there you learn that diminishing marginal utility of money means that it imposes the lowest "excess burden" on society if you tax income progressively. The nyou add up all the little Harberger (welfare) triangles and declare that the State serves a utility-optimising function.

HUGE problem (which I would have thought any rational individual would have spotted) is that the moment you introduce a '.gov', you set on the table a giant pot of money and power. In democracies you then say "OK, this pot of money and power is open for competition: all you have to do is convince 30% of the voting public, which is roughly the proportion of the population who can't read the instructions on a tin of beans (read any LISS/ALSS survey)... and if you lie your head off in doing so, no biggie because nobody will punish you for it."

Who gets attracted by that set of incentives? Sociopaths... and they're the wrong people to have in charge of the instrument that decides which things "are of utility to everyone" (and more to the point, decides how much of these 'things' will be produced... or more accurately how much will be spent on them).

Others' education is not of utility to me, beyond basic literacy (which the State is really bad at teaching, especially if you look at value for money) - and yet States operate high schools and universities, the value of which is entirely captured by higher lifetime incomes (i.e., it's a private benefit).

Others' health is not of utility to me, except (perhaps) for downstream effects from vaccination and some minimal level of acute care- and yet States run hospitals with cardiac units (again, things with solely private benefits).

And State-furnished money is specifically and deliberately of lower utility year on year (it is not a store of constant value).

You seem to think that in the absence of a State, the things you mention will 'go to zero' - that's not what "public goods" implies. It simply implies that the amount produced of those goods will be lower than a perfectly informed agent (with no power in or effect on factor markets) would choose - that is, that the level of production that actually occurs will be sub-optimal, not that it will be zero. And always in utils - i.e., based on the assumption that taking a util from a sickly child and giving it to Warren Buffet, is net-social-utility-neutral.

Also... what do States do intertemporally? Due to the tendency of bureaucracies to grow, States always and everywhere grow outside of the bounds of their "defensible" spheres of action. Taxes rise, output quality falls (as usual for coercive monopolies), debts accumulate. Cronies are enriched.

And then there's war: modern, industrial scale, baby-killing. All of those Harberger triangles that were accumulated by 'optimally' expanding the public goods are blown to smithereens by wasting them on cruise missiles and travelling bands of State sociopaths.

There is a vast literature on the optimality of furnishing all 'critical' State functions by competitive processes - courts, defence, policing etc - Rothbard, Hoppe and others in that space make it abundantly clear that the State is a net negative, even if you use the (ludicrously simplistic) utilitarian framework to analyse it.

So yeah... the problem has been solved: just not in the way you think it has.

Kratoklastes, your arguments are clumsy, incoherent, borderline unreadable. Your being downvoted has nothing to do with "correct lines" or not, since we have a goodly number of libertarians in here (and in fact this site has been accused of being a plutocrat's libertarian conspiracy in the past), it has to do with your basic inability to form coherent arguments or to address the points that other people are making. And also your overall tone, which is constantly rude as if that would earn you points - it doesn't.

As to 'hiring thugs to beat up people who engage in' [insert behaviour here]... well, that seems a perfect analysis of what the State does to people who disagree with it: since I advocate the non-aggression principle, I would certainly never support such a thing

And yet your argument DOES support it: You argued that someone can prove that a cost is incurred on them by being willing to pay money to stop such behaviour. You've argued that morality is about letting people do as they will as long as they aren't incurring costs on others.

Can you really not see how these two statements fit together so that your argument ends up excusing all that state violence which you decry? The theocratic Iranian state after all is composed of people, which prove that sinners are incurring costs against them by being willing to pay money (e.g. morality police wages) to stop such sinful behavior.

That's your argument, though you didn't realize you make it -- because you just never seem to realize the precise meaning and consequences of your words.

And as for your babble about Coase, I never mentioned Coase, I've never read Coase, and that whole paragraph is just a further example of your incohererence.