Why are you conservative, why are you liberal, why are you independent?

[MilSpecs]

I think what informed my views more than anything else was watching the divorce of business and ethics from the 70s into the 80s. I was much more libertarian before then.

What marriage?

It’s sad that younger people think it was always like this. Lack of ethics wasn’t as prevalent. You own a business. If you inherited it, ask your parents how business ethics have changed over time. It’s not a myth that a handshake was as good as a contract for many. Not all, but many, and public opinion buried liars.

Btw, the same thing existed for personal business ethics. We would have died of shame before declaring bankruptcy.

[DrYouth]

I like liberalism because it has led us out of the dark ages...

Did you mean the actual Dark Ages or was it some reference to the movement away from monarchies in the Age of Revolutions?

Both...

The Renaissance was the early emergence of liberalism, rise of the merchant class, old ideas were new again...
The Enlightenment followed... religious tolerance, science, the fall of monarchy as the only paradigm for governance...

I mean... there is plenty good about liberalism.

But STA is not wrong.... immorality is a thing that can have consequences.

The question is defining immorality.
Promiscuous sex for example.
Does that harm the individual that engages it?
Does that harm society?
What should be done about it?

Whose responsibility is addiction?
Does the community have an obligation to the addict?

People often turn a blind eye to the addiction... and that doesn't really serve the addict.

But what does a helpful confrontation with addiction look like?
An intervention?
REhab?
AA?
Jail.
Morality school?

So far... most of our interventions are pretty weak sauce.

I don't think STA has the answers... but he isn't entirely wrong about the problem.

[DBTrek]

When one defines immorality as “taking actions that harm other human beings”, stating that “immoral actions effect others” is simply redundant. It’s built lt into the arbitrary definition.

Through a ‘butterfly-effect’ lens ALL actions effect others, so moral or immoral becomes moot since they both fall under the category of ‘all’.

Thus the distinction is largely meaningless outside of falsely projecting ones own morality as THE singular morality.

[Speaker to Animals]

Name an immoral behavior without consequences, then. What makes an act immoral is it's negative impact. It has to be spelled out redundantly for liberals, especially the libertarian brand of them, because they literally don't grasp what morality is. They think it's just social conventions, nothing more.

The lie that their politics is based upon is that there are no harmful effects of their immoral behavior upon others. It's just a game of ignoring all the horrible shit these things inflict upon society.

[Speaker to Animals]

I like liberalism because it has led us out of the dark ages...

Did you mean the actual Dark Ages or was it some reference to the movement away from monarchies in the Age of Revolutions?

Both...

The Renaissance was the early emergence of liberalism, rise of the merchant class, old ideas were new again...
The Enlightenment followed... religious tolerance, science, the fall of monarchy as the only paradigm for governance...

I mean... there is plenty good about liberalism.

But STA is not wrong.... immorality is a thing that can have consequences.

The question is defining immorality.
Promiscuous sex for example.
Does that harm the individual that engages it?
Does that harm society?
What should be done about it?

Whose responsibility is addiction?
Does the community have an obligation to the addict?

People often turn a blind eye to the addiction... and that doesn't really serve the addict.

But what does a helpful confrontation with addiction look like?
An intervention?
REhab?
AA?
Jail.
Morality school?

So far... most of our interventions are pretty weak sauce.

I don't think STA has the answers... but he isn't entirely wrong about the problem.

All I have been saying is that we really need to stop pretending like most of this stuff "doesn't harm anybody else". It really does. When one says that something like drug abuse doesn't harm anybody, not only is one lying, but one also essentially argues that drug abuse is not immoral, since by definition if it doesn't cause harm then it cannot be immoral.

Liberals of all stripes seek to cast destructive and immoral behavior as "not harming anybody else", which makes them moral goods or neutral at best. Then people engaging in those activities demand legal protections and social accommodation. That leads to authoritarianism. The negative effects of this behavior in aggregate create all sorts of social costs we have to pay for, such as single mothers, the criminal children of single mothers, the drug abuse epidemic, the demographic winter and the collapsing welfare state that it causes, and so on.

[MilSpecs]

But what does a helpful confrontation with addiction look like?
An intervention?
REhab?
AA?
Jail.
Morality school?.

Scientists discovering the gene or genes that cause it would be helpful.

[JohnDonne]

We all pay for the nature hikers when they get lost and we wind up doing a search and rescue, their behavior has negative consequences, ergo, immoral.

[Speaker to Animals]

We all pay for the nature hikers when they get lost and we wind up doing a search and rescue, their behavior has negative consequences, ergo, immoral.

I didn't claim all behavior that has potential negative consequences is immoral. I claimed that all immoral behavior has negative consequences.

[JohnDonne]

We all pay for the nature hikers when they get lost and we wind up doing a search and rescue, their behavior has negative consequences, ergo, immoral.

I didn't claim all behavior that has potential negative consequences is immoral. I claimed that all immoral behavior has negative consequences.

Ok. Then what is the fundamental difference between recreational sex and recreational hiking that makes one immoral and one not?

Also, suppose in attempting to murder someone I unwittingly saved their life? Would that mean attempting to murder them was not immoral, even though it caused a life to be saved and myself to be elated by the good feelings of saving a life?

[Speaker to Animals]

We all pay for the nature hikers when they get lost and we wind up doing a search and rescue, their behavior has negative consequences, ergo, immoral.

I didn't claim all behavior that has potential negative consequences is immoral. I claimed that all immoral behavior has negative consequences.

Ok. Then what is the fundamental difference between recreational sex and recreational hiking that makes one immoral and one not?

Also, suppose in attempting to murder someone I unwittingly saved their life? Would that mean attempting to murder them was not immoral, even though it caused a life to be saved and myself to be elated by the good feelings of saving a life?

Well, for one thing, our entire society and civilization is built around sex. Sex carries societal consequences; including low birthrates due to abortions and birth control causing the demographic winter, the spread of diseases, and the rise of single mothers leeching off welfare the system and the criminals/drug abusers they raise. We have to pay for all this shit.

And society is literally organized around reproduction. If people stop reproducing enough, civilization collapses. If people start birthing children in sub-optimal family conditions, our society begins to degenerate, which corresponds to a declining quality of life, declining technological progress, and so forth.

Hiking is just taking a walk. You obviously don't understand morality one bit. That's the problem with liberals. They have no idea of the gravity of these things they defend. They refuse to acknowledge the costs. They don't bother to understand anything outside of the narrow confines of their rationalizations for what really amounts to the pursuit of base desires, in an attempt to become more animal-like.