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.

For some reason I can't reply to MugaSofer's response, so I'll just put this here...

that would seem to imply that infertile women are not female. Do you use a similar definition for male, or consider all non-females "male"?

It would seem to imply nothing of the sort.

Here's an example of how badly you dropped the logical ball:

Saying

• "people who write things like you just wrote, are making really stupid rookie errors in logic and calling their capacity for argument into question"

is qualitatively not related to saying

• "people who write things other than what you wrote never make really stupid rookie errors in logic and their capacity for argument cannot be questioned".

Related: If A implies B, that does not mean that NotA implies NotB.

I'm not sure if I should be using scare quotes for "female" :-\

Seems a lot of folks here are conflating the idea of female with the idea of woman. Female is a term of science, not socio-waffle: woman is (latterly) some idea about how one feels within one's own skin. A female may identify as a man, and a male may identify as a woman. (Note also: I am perfectly aware that the etymology of "female" is said to be the Latin femina, which means woman: words do not mean what their roots mean).

It's really not that hard.

EDIT: Why the SOTL quote?

To make you think "Why the SOTL quote? [Does this guy hate women?]"

What was the title of the post? Something about tolerance, if I'm not mistaken.

As to your 'secondly' point... I absolutely agree with the statement that "most people cannot, by definition, be in a better position to judge on certain issues than most other people" (emphasis mine - in fact I would extend that to say on most issues of more than minimal complexity).

Absolutely key point to bear in mind is that if you harangue someone about a problem when you're not in a better position to judge on that particular issue, you're being an asshat. That's why I tend to limit my haranguing to matters of (deep breath)...

• Economics (in which I have a double-major First, with firsts in Public Finance, Macro, Micro, Quantitative Economic Policy, International Economics, Econometric Theory and Applied Econometrics) and
• Econometrics (and the statistical theory underpinning it) for which I took straight Firsts at Masters;
• Quantitative analysis of economic policy (and economic modelling generally). which I did for a living for half a decade and taught to undergraduates (3rd year and Honours).

I babble with muted authority on

• expectations (having published on, and having been asked to advise my nation's Treasury on, modelling them in financial markets within macroeconometric models), and
• the modelling paradigm in general (having worked for almost a decade at one of the world's premier economic modelling think tanks, and having dabbled in a [still-incomplete] PhD in stochastic simulation using a computable general-equilibrium model).

And yet I constantly find myself being told things about economics, utility maximisation, agency problems, and so forth, by autodidacts who think persentio ergo rectum is a research methodology.

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).

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.

Let's just say that if it is capable of gestating a foetus (of its own species) to 'maturity' (i.e., birth) internally, it's female, irrespective of what nonsense it claims in its 'self identification'.

It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again.

I can think of another 3 reasons to explain Bayes theorem in terms of mammograms (or "mammographies" if you prefer) - boobs, torture and the mathematical ignorance of physicians.

Tolerance is over-rated (although it's a Masonic virtue so I'm supposed to like it): to me, the word has supercilious connotations - kind of "I'm going to permit you to persist in error, unmolested, coz I'm just that awesome".

I prefer acceptance: after you have harangued someone with everything that's wrong with their view of the problem, give up and accept that they're idiots.

And in the US there's the whole North-Korea style pledging of allegiance to a piece of coloured cloth. So no shock then that USAans seem to run to "heavily indoctrinated" (and hence woo-girls, laugh-tracks, zinger comedy, etc) - and also no shock that in a Pew Poll of US adults in 2007, 68% of respondents said that they believed that angels and demons intervene in their everyday lives. (Presumably a lot of those people attended school at some stage, and yet managed to get to adulthood believe in the equivalent of the easter bunny).

Outside of your borders, all of that freaks us civilised folks out.