Equal work should NOT mean equal pay

In that case I receive no remuneration because my employer is only paying me to further his own purposes.


Ownership is durable control. If some of your income is being taken from you each year, you are being durably controlled for that proportion of your labour time by another.

Morals are just preferences held by humans about what they and other humans should do.

Ownership is not durable control. Possession can be simplified to durable control (roughly), but ownership is entirely different. Also, do I sense you're about to make a 'tax is theft' argument next? If so, I suggest you take it to the ancap lunatics who won't laugh at it.

Once again, you're confusing morals and ethics. The phrase 'my morality' is an oxymoron.

I define ownership as durable control over a physical object.

Possession is not durable control. If I pinch your wallet I am still in possession of it even if a policeman has seen what I have done and is levelling his gun at me. I do not however own it, because my control of the wallet is not durable.

Perhaps you are using some specific definition; if so, I do not intend to argue definitions, and will accept yours so that the discussion can proceed, but I am not certain what it is. If your definition is on the lines of, "Morals are correct ethics.", then I deny that morality exists, and consider it a religious concept, even then only a characteristic of certain religions. If the definition is different, please let me know what it is, so that I can make a more precise and accurate statement concerning what you consider morals.

If I have a thousand year lease over land, I possess it, and that possession is durable in any meaningful sense of the word, but I do not own the land.

If we define morality as 'preference' it ceases to hold useful meaning. It's fine to say it doesn't exist, but then you lose the ability to make normative statements meaningfully.

I don't agree - you own it for a thousand years, or you own the lease. Your ownership isn't indefinite but it's durable. This is categorically different to living in a region filled with bandits, who might take your land at any time or might never take your land. In that situation, you would not own the land, even though it's well possible you will have control of it indefinitely.

Fine, but I haven't make any normative statements. Norms are elements of a religion. I have a religion, of course, as do you, but I haven't argued that mine is the One True Faith, and am not going to.

I mean, you're just using a definition of ownership which is factually wrong. Ownership is a legal concept; we must look to the law for its definition.

I'm not saying I'm correct; I'm saying that I'm more likely to be correct than your nihilism.

I don't agree; ownership is objective. "Smith owns this box." is not a statement about what the law says about who ought to control the box, it's a statement about who actually controls the box, and who can reasonably expect to continue controlling it into the future. I can say this because, if the law said Smith owned the box, but he actually had no control over it nor any reasonable expectation of regaining control over it, then what that says is that the law isn't the law, at least as the law pertains to the box. If this is the case for most objects, then the law isn't the law: states that cannot enforce their laws cease to be states and their law ceases to be law. Enforcement is primary and defines ownership; law is an emergent concept that seeks to label who owns what and in what circumstances ownership changes.

You are saying that morals are correct ethics and you are saying that morals exist, so you are either saying that you are correct or you have ethics that you believe are wrong.

Ownership doesn't exist outside of the law.

My ethics are more likely than not to be wrong, but I believe they are less likely to be wrong than any other set of ethics.

If I am alone on a desert island, the only person in the universe, I own the island even if I do not choose to write down laws. On the other hand, if there is someone else many miles away on a second island, who cannot reach mine, it does not matter if he writes down a law saying he owns my island, or if I write down a law saying that I own his.

Law formalises ownership, but does not create or destroy it. Rather, we decide what is law based on what formal description of ownership most closely coincides with reality. English law is English law because who English law says owns what in England closely (but not exactly) coincides with who actually does. Roman law used to, but no longer does, so is no longer law. English law has no greater claim to legitimacy than Roman law - the law of a state only overthrown by violence - other than this.

I think proving the existence of morals/the One True Faith is similar to proving the existence of God. Perhaps actually identical.

In fact ethics are arbitrary preferences - they can be anything - and the coherent patterns we see are simply shaped by Darwinian selection.

I can say that equalism tends toward decay in the capability of a society, by reducing selection pressure for capable people and introducing new selection pressure for incapable people (objective claim), which ultimately leads to the conquest or destruction of that society, or to revolution within it (objective claim).

But that doesn't say that equalism is bad (normative claim), only that it is unlikely to be more than a temporary aberration from an unstoppable evolutionary trend toward other ethical systems (objective claim).

Your first paragraph is simply untrue. In that case, neither person owns either island, unless they establish a legal system (although it is difficult to conceive of a legal system without multiple people in it). This is because ownership is fundamentally a right, and the only possible source of rights (i.e. invulnerable, absolute claims) is the law itself. All other claims are not absolute.

It's not especially similar, since proving the existence of a divine being attempts to establish an is, rather than an ought. I agree ethics are arbitrary preferences: that is what distinguishes ethics from morals.

Equalism, as you term it, is difficult to maintain in the absence of authoritarianism, which is difficult to establish in the first place, I agree.

One can simply define property as what is written in law. Then how does one define the law? I argue that the law cannot be meaningfully defined except by its correspondence with a primary concept of property, which makes this definition of property circular and meaningless. Therefore property exists before law.

Morality - the one correct system of ethics - is an "is" as well as an "ought".


That's not what I said (not that I necessarily disagree).

...I don't understand where you're going here, how can the law be dependent on property? Property is just a small element of the law.

I'm saying that one likely exists, not that any given system is the one correct system. That's why it's significantly more likely than the existence of God. Furthermore, there is no evidence which would seem to be contrary to many core tenets of most systems like there is with religion.

ALL legal questions are questions of property. Not all, of course, are "property law", but, for instance, "health and safety law" is about who owns workers and who owns companies (answer: not who "property law" says owns them, at least not entirely). Again, ownership of property is durable control. All legal questions are about who controls what, when.

I see no reason whatsoever to believe that and you have provided none. I define Moralism as a non-interventionist deistic religion. I shall call it Moraltheism. I am an Evolutionist.

The law is about organisation, not property. The tort of trespass against the person, for instance, clearly has nothing to do with property, since a living human is incapable of being owned.

However, at this point, I suspect we're just making statements rather than arguing: yours is certainly an extremely unconventional view of property and the law, so I'd be interested in reading more about it - care to recommend a book or something?

Morality is just the question of what any human should do at any decision point. There is no basis for saying that anything is 'good', 'bad', 'right' or 'wrong' without morality.

And I'm not sure there is such a basis.

I think peoples' ethical systems are better viewed as strategies in the game of life. Strategies can be more or less successful, for various definitions of success. That's all.

Morality - the One True Faith - is a religious belief. Belief in morality is probably adaptive on a group level, as it tends to reduce self-destructive fighting about correct ethics by making people more likely to believe that socially dominant ethics are "correct", but morality itself does not actually exist.

I am afraid that the world is largely mechanical, including the living world.

Given you seem to deny the existence of morality in general then, how do you hold the ethical beliefs that you (presumably) hold - I assume you would hold the murder of someone dear to you to be 'wrong'?

As for strategies... I think they're more criteria for assessment of the success of a strategy, not a strategy in themselves (I'm not certain ethical beliefs are voluntary, or changeable at will).

I thought the expression was panties? Anyway I didn't mean to sound that way, on the contrary I said that to defuse a situation where somebody angrily replies to me with "but then you must hate women" or something. I just don't see how women can be paid as much when they aren't generating anywhere near the amount of money that men are in that particular industry.

Yeah that's the expression, but it first came about to make light of women's problems, I'm not saying that's how you meant it, it just came across that way in context. I agree that as women's football doesn't generate as much as men's they can't be given equal pay, but for sectors like medicine for example, then pay should be equal because it's not like there's a team for female doctors and male doctors it's just everyone together.

Yeah that's the expression, but it first came about to make light of women's problems, I'm not saying that's how you meant it, it just came across that way in context. I agree that as women's football doesn't generate as much as men's they can't be given equal pay, but for sectors like medicine for example, then pay should be equal because it's not like there's a team for female doctors and male doctors it's just everyone together.

Yeah that's the expression, but it first came about to make light of women's problems, I'm not saying that's how you meant it, it just came across that way in context. I agree that as women's football doesn't generate as much as men's they can't be given equal pay, but for sectors like medicine for example, then pay should be equal because it's not like there's a team for female doctors and male doctors it's just everyone together.