Delta4Embassy
Gold Member
If 85 individuals control more wealth than the bottom 50% of the whole planet's population, would murdering those 85 and seizing their assets then distributing it among the ~3.5 billion poorest be ethically justifiable?
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Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?
- Thread starter Delta4Embassy
- Start date
If 85 individuals control more wealth than the bottom 50% of the whole planet's population, would murdering those 85 and seizing their assets then distributing it among the ~3.5 billion poorest be ethically justifiable?
To be fair, some conservatives prioritize quantity before quality as well. You see this in terms of rugged individualists who believe in might makes right where the popular, powerful, and politically correct are entitled to manipulate common sense folk community as an excuse to expect individuals to conform to norms.
These are the types who expect people to represent predestined callings through the performance of good works, and often claim to empathize with intelligent design, divine right of kings, and the teleological proof of God. They oppose objective rational thought, but instead, proclaim themselves to be chosen by God to be elected for salvation as if people are supposed to just have instincts that are in touch with their natural environment. Those who lack such instincts are obviously of an inferior class or "goyim".
Strangely enough, some on the egalitarian left are similar. While some conservatives evoke quantity before quality through common sense folk community, many egalitarian leftists evoke it through populist social democracy. They even deny objective morality in the name of moral relativism and emotivism, and support environmentalist globalism.
Perhaps the real key to equality isn't focusing on income, wealth, or estates. Perhaps it's challenging that quantity before quality state of mind at its roots.
Capstone
Gold Member
- Feb 14, 2012
- 5,502
- 952
- 290
The question, in my mind, is: can 'parity' be viewed as an ethical value at all, much less one worthy of the lofty status of a moral modus operandi on a social scale?
In my opinion, the answer is: yes, on both counts.
At the individual level, parity can be used to attain balance (bodily, emotionally, and intellectually). Consider the practical application to one's diet, for instance. Splitting the recommended set of calories, nutritional content, ETC., as close to evenly as possible amongst the proper number of meals/snacks, could well be the best way to avoid diet-breaking hunger between meals. This makes the application as good or better a candidate for a 'good thing' as anything else I've seen. Likewise, emotionally and intellectually, the conscious efforts to remain as even-keeled and moderate as possible has served me well in recent years, despite being occasionally characterized as an "extremist" over that period (...most often by extremists, it should be said).
At the societal level, some means of parity applied to socioeconomic factors would certainly relieve a far greater amount of poverty-based suffering than simply continuing under the greed-driven status quo apparently preferred by the few who've been wealthy enough to buy the lawmakers over the past several decades. Want to battle crime? How about targeting the incentive to steal by enabling people to buy the things they want and need? Want to battle debt? Why not automatically apply some percentage of the redistributed wealth to pay off the existing debts of the beneficiaries? Want to eradicate poverty? Why not establish both a ceiling and a floor for the net personal wealth of ALL adult US citizens and their offspring? I suspect a common factor in the various rationales against such ideas would rest in the power and influence of a relatively few greedy (and in some cases, racially-driven) individuals.
To be a little more specific here, practically speaking, consider the widespread benefit of capping net personal wealth (say, hypothetically, at $100,000,000) and distributing the existing overages amongst the rest of the population by percentages based on (what else?) the net personal wealth of the respective beneficiaries. Controls, such as automatically applying some percent of the benefit (on a sliding scale up to, say ...25% of the monthly/yearly benefit) to pay off the existing debts of the beneficiaries, would circumvent the capacity to blow off their present creditors. Also, premiums could be established as incentives to retain the relatively low-paying jobs that are critical to national infrastructure, in order to foster the seamless transition into the new paradigm. The cap amount itself should be maintained at a level that preserves some incentive to reach for that number; and this may entail raising or lowering it on the basis of the robustness of growth of an ever more inclusive 'middle-class', thereby periodically changing the parameters of the 'low/middle/upper-class' distinctions ...such that the 'lower-class' would eventually NEVER AGAIN be in any way defined by the term "poverty" -- and that alone, in my opinion, is a beautiful justification for an ethical "should" on a societal scale.
In my opinion, the answer is: yes, on both counts.
At the individual level, parity can be used to attain balance (bodily, emotionally, and intellectually). Consider the practical application to one's diet, for instance. Splitting the recommended set of calories, nutritional content, ETC., as close to evenly as possible amongst the proper number of meals/snacks, could well be the best way to avoid diet-breaking hunger between meals. This makes the application as good or better a candidate for a 'good thing' as anything else I've seen. Likewise, emotionally and intellectually, the conscious efforts to remain as even-keeled and moderate as possible has served me well in recent years, despite being occasionally characterized as an "extremist" over that period (...most often by extremists, it should be said).
At the societal level, some means of parity applied to socioeconomic factors would certainly relieve a far greater amount of poverty-based suffering than simply continuing under the greed-driven status quo apparently preferred by the few who've been wealthy enough to buy the lawmakers over the past several decades. Want to battle crime? How about targeting the incentive to steal by enabling people to buy the things they want and need? Want to battle debt? Why not automatically apply some percentage of the redistributed wealth to pay off the existing debts of the beneficiaries? Want to eradicate poverty? Why not establish both a ceiling and a floor for the net personal wealth of ALL adult US citizens and their offspring? I suspect a common factor in the various rationales against such ideas would rest in the power and influence of a relatively few greedy (and in some cases, racially-driven) individuals.
To be a little more specific here, practically speaking, consider the widespread benefit of capping net personal wealth (say, hypothetically, at $100,000,000) and distributing the existing overages amongst the rest of the population by percentages based on (what else?) the net personal wealth of the respective beneficiaries. Controls, such as automatically applying some percent of the benefit (on a sliding scale up to, say ...25% of the monthly/yearly benefit) to pay off the existing debts of the beneficiaries, would circumvent the capacity to blow off their present creditors. Also, premiums could be established as incentives to retain the relatively low-paying jobs that are critical to national infrastructure, in order to foster the seamless transition into the new paradigm. The cap amount itself should be maintained at a level that preserves some incentive to reach for that number; and this may entail raising or lowering it on the basis of the robustness of growth of an ever more inclusive 'middle-class', thereby periodically changing the parameters of the 'low/middle/upper-class' distinctions ...such that the 'lower-class' would eventually NEVER AGAIN be in any way defined by the term "poverty" -- and that alone, in my opinion, is a beautiful justification for an ethical "should" on a societal scale.
Last edited:
Indeependent
Diamond Member
- Nov 19, 2013
- 73,633
- 28,500
- 2,250
Spock says so...The Wrath of Khan.
If 85 individuals control more wealth than the bottom 50% of the whole planet's population, would murdering those 85 and seizing their assets then distributing it among the ~3.5 billion poorest be ethically justifiable?
No.
The implication being: that if murder isn't morally justified by the inequity of wealth, then neither would less drastic measures by the masses be so justified?
Dear Capstone
Yeah that's the hidden agenda here, for sure.
Lets see if the man can pull it off.
Waiting for the other jackboot to drop...
Your fellow poster
editec
"Prosperity doesn't trickle down, but greed does." John Naughton
Ethically why? Where would that justification come from?
Why murder them, why not just share what is sharable? Of course most of this wealth is speculative paper money. See quotes below.
The fact they own 50% of the wealth is a result of greed, accumulated advantage, unfair tax structure, tax shelters, and deregulation.
Of course, morally no one has a right to this much of the world's capital, but morals, justice, or fairness have nothing to do with markets.
None of these people created this money, only society and government create wealth. Alone on an island they would be broke and useless.
"On moral grounds, then, we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent to return that wealth to its real owners. In the United States, even a flat tax of 70 percent would support all governmental programs (about half the total tax) and allow payment, with the remainder, of a patrimony of about $8,000 per annum per inhabitant, or $25,000 for a family of three. This would generously leave with the original recipients of the income about three times what, according to my rough guess, they had earned.Untitled, UBI and the Flat Tax
"What is a human life worth? You may not want to put a price tag on a it. But if we really had to, most of us would agree that the value of a human life would be in the millions. Consistent with the foundations of our democracy and our frequently professed belief in the inherent dignity of human beings, we would also agree that all humans are created equal, at least to the extent of denying that differences of sex, ethnicity, nationality and place of residence change the value of a human life." What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?, by Peter Singer
"The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer" The Conservative Nanny State Strikes Again | Op-Eds & Columns
Excerpt from 'Voltaire's Bastards' John Ralston Saul
"Meanwhile. every other potentially inflationary area was gradually being opened to marketplace manipulation. General economic activity was drawn towards the financial sector by this explosion in ever-less-regulated activities. Inventiveness concentrated itself on the creation of new, immeasurable financial abstractions - abstractions built upon abstractions - forms and levels of leverage which made the standards of 1929 seem almost responsible by comparison.
By the mid-1980s - even before the Big Bang - the annual value of transactions in the London financial market was $75 trillion a year. That is more than twenty-five times the total value of world trade, which was $2.84 trillion in 1988. Foreign exchange speculation in major world centres was $35 trillion a year - twelve times the total value of world trade. These transactions represent no concrete activity. They are multiplications of paper which have no beneficial effect on economic activity. Thus, the City in London may prosper and cohabit quite happily with general economic depression in the rest of Britain. The degree to which governments have become addicted to the easy pleasures of this speculation could be seen in Britain's reluctance to put the pound into the European Snake, and indeed into the European Monetary System, both of which are attempts to develop monetary stability in a large but realistically manageable geographic area. The official British argument against participation has been that the Snake might limit the government's ability to set policies appropriate for competition at home and in the world. One of the unspoken reasons was that membership in the Snake might eventually limit the City's ability to speculate in currencies. The gradual conversion of the City to the Snake came as they realized that speculation would not be limited.
In this context the traditional definitions of bank exposure no longer mean very much. Writing in 1873, Walter Bagehot said of reserves:
"The amount of that cash is so exceedingly small that a bystander almost trembles when he compares its minuteness with the immensity of the credit which rests upon it. ". Bagehot's minuteness would seem enormous today. For example, in the mid-1980s, the American merchant bank Lehman Brothers had a capital base of $270 million. It had a daily exposure of $10 billion.
This floating speculation in bonds and securities is done by numbers men on computers. Convention calls them bankers, but they arc merely technicians, whose training resembles that of a clerk and whose talents parallel that of a racetrack bookie. They have no experience away from their screens; no understanding of the industrial activity the illuminated numbers represent. Worse still, they have neither responsibility for nor a sense of the effect that their enormous transactions might have on society as a whole. As early as 1984 men such as this were tradlng $4.1 trillion in a single New York merchant bank, First Boston Corporation. That was more than the total American GNP.
The golden word which has permitted all of this is deregulating. The United States followed by the entire West, has raised this flag in the name of the spirit of initiative. There is no doubt that a half century of administrative structure building - aimed at repairing the injustice, instability and damages created by nineteenth - and early twentieth century free markets - had gone too far in certain areas. But the reaction to this over regulation has borne no relationship to the real problem at hand. The result has been the return of antisocial freedom: the freedom to act irresponsibly, to speculate and profiteer, not just over stocks but over money itself.
The problem docs not lie only with specific fashions, which may be short-lived, from currency swaps, junk bonds, financial futures and options to stock index futures (which require a down payment of only 6 percent), leveraged buyouts and over-the-counter equities, whose real value is unclear and thus open to speculation and arbitrage. Nor are these fashions as short-lived as they sometimes appear, to an economy so distanced from reality, forms of speculation no longer disappear simply because they have been exposed as of dubious value. For example, junk bonds have gone on after their disasters of the late 19805 and now represent more than a quarter of all corporate bonds rated by Moody's. Nor are these dangerous phenomena limited to the United States. Japanese regulations permit leverage based on 5 percent, British corporate debt has risen from £10 billion just before the first crash in 1973 to £53 billion billion in 1988. One might suspect that this was a creation of the inflation-infected 1970s. But official inflation seemed neither to encourage nor to discourage corporate debt. Things got even further out of control during the 1980s. The whole process was fed by minor finance companies, which under stricter regulations would be considered marginal, if not criminal. With deregulation they became banks. And the large deposit banks, seeing the enormous paper profits made by these little speculators, leaped down into the gutter to play the same game. The overall picture is what Keynes would have called a Casino society.
And that is now one of the determining activities of our economies. The truth is that annual growth in the U.S. economy after inflation has steadily shrunk as deregulation has proceeded: 4.2 percent during the 196Os, 3.1 percent during the crisis-ridden 1970s, and 2.1 percent during the theoretically prosperous 19805. In Canada, despite its wide and solid social protection net, the number of people living in poverty grew in this period of deregulation from 14.7 percent in 1981 to 17.3 percent by 1985 and continues 10 grow." from pp 397,398
"Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness." George Bernard Shaw
If 85 individuals control more wealth than the bottom 50% of the whole planet's population, would murdering those 85 and seizing their assets then distributing it among the ~3.5 billion poorest be ethically justifiable?
Ethically why? Where would that justification come from?
Why murder them, why not just share what is sharable? Of course most of this wealth is speculative paper money. See quotes below.
The fact they own 50% of the wealth is a result of greed, accumulated advantage, unfair tax structure, tax shelters, and deregulation.
Of course, morally no one has a right to this much of the world's capital, but morals, justice, or fairness have nothing to do with markets.
None of these people created this money, only society and government create wealth. Alone on an island they would be broke and useless.
"On moral grounds, then, we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent to return that wealth to its real owners. In the United States, even a flat tax of 70 percent would support all governmental programs (about half the total tax) and allow payment, with the remainder, of a patrimony of about $8,000 per annum per inhabitant, or $25,000 for a family of three. This would generously leave with the original recipients of the income about three times what, according to my rough guess, they had earned.Untitled, UBI and the Flat Tax
"What is a human life worth? You may not want to put a price tag on a it. But if we really had to, most of us would agree that the value of a human life would be in the millions. Consistent with the foundations of our democracy and our frequently professed belief in the inherent dignity of human beings, we would also agree that all humans are created equal, at least to the extent of denying that differences of sex, ethnicity, nationality and place of residence change the value of a human life." What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?, by Peter Singer
"The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer" The Conservative Nanny State Strikes Again | Op-Eds & Columns
Excerpt from 'Voltaire's Bastards' John Ralston Saul
"Meanwhile. every other potentially inflationary area was gradually being opened to marketplace manipulation. General economic activity was drawn towards the financial sector by this explosion in ever-less-regulated activities. Inventiveness concentrated itself on the creation of new, immeasurable financial abstractions - abstractions built upon abstractions - forms and levels of leverage which made the standards of 1929 seem almost responsible by comparison.
By the mid-1980s - even before the Big Bang - the annual value of transactions in the London financial market was $75 trillion a year. That is more than twenty-five times the total value of world trade, which was $2.84 trillion in 1988. Foreign exchange speculation in major world centres was $35 trillion a year - twelve times the total value of world trade. These transactions represent no concrete activity. They are multiplications of paper which have no beneficial effect on economic activity. Thus, the City in London may prosper and cohabit quite happily with general economic depression in the rest of Britain. The degree to which governments have become addicted to the easy pleasures of this speculation could be seen in Britain's reluctance to put the pound into the European Snake, and indeed into the European Monetary System, both of which are attempts to develop monetary stability in a large but realistically manageable geographic area. The official British argument against participation has been that the Snake might limit the government's ability to set policies appropriate for competition at home and in the world. One of the unspoken reasons was that membership in the Snake might eventually limit the City's ability to speculate in currencies. The gradual conversion of the City to the Snake came as they realized that speculation would not be limited.
In this context the traditional definitions of bank exposure no longer mean very much. Writing in 1873, Walter Bagehot said of reserves:
"The amount of that cash is so exceedingly small that a bystander almost trembles when he compares its minuteness with the immensity of the credit which rests upon it. ". Bagehot's minuteness would seem enormous today. For example, in the mid-1980s, the American merchant bank Lehman Brothers had a capital base of $270 million. It had a daily exposure of $10 billion.
This floating speculation in bonds and securities is done by numbers men on computers. Convention calls them bankers, but they arc merely technicians, whose training resembles that of a clerk and whose talents parallel that of a racetrack bookie. They have no experience away from their screens; no understanding of the industrial activity the illuminated numbers represent. Worse still, they have neither responsibility for nor a sense of the effect that their enormous transactions might have on society as a whole. As early as 1984 men such as this were tradlng $4.1 trillion in a single New York merchant bank, First Boston Corporation. That was more than the total American GNP.
The golden word which has permitted all of this is deregulating. The United States followed by the entire West, has raised this flag in the name of the spirit of initiative. There is no doubt that a half century of administrative structure building - aimed at repairing the injustice, instability and damages created by nineteenth - and early twentieth century free markets - had gone too far in certain areas. But the reaction to this over regulation has borne no relationship to the real problem at hand. The result has been the return of antisocial freedom: the freedom to act irresponsibly, to speculate and profiteer, not just over stocks but over money itself.
The problem docs not lie only with specific fashions, which may be short-lived, from currency swaps, junk bonds, financial futures and options to stock index futures (which require a down payment of only 6 percent), leveraged buyouts and over-the-counter equities, whose real value is unclear and thus open to speculation and arbitrage. Nor are these fashions as short-lived as they sometimes appear, to an economy so distanced from reality, forms of speculation no longer disappear simply because they have been exposed as of dubious value. For example, junk bonds have gone on after their disasters of the late 19805 and now represent more than a quarter of all corporate bonds rated by Moody's. Nor are these dangerous phenomena limited to the United States. Japanese regulations permit leverage based on 5 percent, British corporate debt has risen from £10 billion just before the first crash in 1973 to £53 billion billion in 1988. One might suspect that this was a creation of the inflation-infected 1970s. But official inflation seemed neither to encourage nor to discourage corporate debt. Things got even further out of control during the 1980s. The whole process was fed by minor finance companies, which under stricter regulations would be considered marginal, if not criminal. With deregulation they became banks. And the large deposit banks, seeing the enormous paper profits made by these little speculators, leaped down into the gutter to play the same game. The overall picture is what Keynes would have called a Casino society.
And that is now one of the determining activities of our economies. The truth is that annual growth in the U.S. economy after inflation has steadily shrunk as deregulation has proceeded: 4.2 percent during the 196Os, 3.1 percent during the crisis-ridden 1970s, and 2.1 percent during the theoretically prosperous 19805. In Canada, despite its wide and solid social protection net, the number of people living in poverty grew in this period of deregulation from 14.7 percent in 1981 to 17.3 percent by 1985 and continues 10 grow." from pp 397,398
"Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness." George Bernard Shaw
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If 85 individuals control more wealth than the bottom 50% of the whole planet's population, would murdering those 85 and seizing their assets then distributing it among the ~3.5 billion poorest be ethically justifiable?
No. I suggest you read John Rawls "A Theory of Justice".
Delta4Embassy
Gold Member
- Thread starter
- #14
Reason for asking was to spark debate on the value of a human life. Lotta great replies. A similar conundrum comes from World War 2 when having broken the German's Enigma encryption system, Prime Minister Churchill learned of an impending attack on the city of Coventry, England. PM Churchill knew that he evacuated the city before the attack the Germans would piece together their encryption system had been broken and alter their codes for future operations. Do nothing and thousands of British men, women, and children would die. So how much is a human life worth compared to the possible outcome of the war? As it happened, PM Churchill didn't evacuate and many died. But the Allies went on to win the war the Germans never learning Enigma had been cracked.
So clearly, for a greater good like winning a war, some may need to be sacrificed. If the deaths of thousands or millions can be prevented giving them ample food by causing the deaths of just 85 is that not ethical?
So clearly, for a greater good like winning a war, some may need to be sacrificed. If the deaths of thousands or millions can be prevented giving them ample food by causing the deaths of just 85 is that not ethical?
If 85 individuals control more wealth than the bottom 50% of the whole planet's population, would murdering those 85 and seizing their assets then distributing it among the ~3.5 billion poorest be ethically justifiable?
Except it never ends. Then you must kill the next group and the next as the money you distribute gets spent with no way for them to replace it. You don't help anyone and you steal others property.
Delta4Embassy
Gold Member
- Thread starter
- #16
Killing very few to save many seems logical. Is it not? And if it is in fact logical, should logic be our guide for choosing what to do on issues? If not, why not?
Reason for asking was to spark debate on the value of a human life. Lotta great replies. A similar conundrum comes from World War 2 when having broken the German's Enigma encryption system, Prime Minister Churchill learned of an impending attack on the city of Coventry, England. PM Churchill knew that he evacuated the city before the attack the Germans would piece together their encryption system had been broken and alter their codes for future operations. Do nothing and thousands of British men, women, and children would die. So how much is a human life worth compared to the possible outcome of the war? As it happened, PM Churchill didn't evacuate and many died. But the Allies went on to win the war the Germans never learning Enigma had been cracked.
So clearly, for a greater good like winning a war, some may need to be sacrificed. If the deaths of thousands or millions can be prevented giving them ample food by causing the deaths of just 85 is that not ethical?
No.
Killing very few to save many seems logical. Is it not? And if it is in fact logical, should logic be our guide for choosing what to do on issues? If not, why not?
There is a HUUUUUGE chasm between murdering people to take their wealth and allowing a German bombing mission to go through without warning the population. The act of murder is inherently unethical. What Churchill did was not.
Why is it you collectivists ALLWAYS resort to murder to get your way?
Stalin killed 60 million, how many is enough to assuage your thirst for blood?
Doubletap
VIP Member
- Dec 28, 2012
- 451
- 131
- 78
If 85 individuals control more wealth than the bottom 50% of the whole planet's population, would murdering those 85 and seizing their assets then distributing it among the ~3.5 billion poorest be ethically justifiable?
If the wealth was honestly earned or inherited the answer is an unequivocal NO.
What can possibly be righteous about looting the earned wealth of some for the unearned benefit of another?
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