First: I apologize for not getting back to you more quickly on this. Due to complications resulting in part from a power failure, my primary workstation, as well as several other systems for which I'm responsible, is currently out of commission. Until I have this situation sufficiently resolved, I'll be less regularly on any discussion fora than usual.

Understood.

Second: "Most people" agreeing with something is wholly irrelevant to its truth, and your reference to "most people" agreeing with a statement you made is the fallacy of appeal to popularity to which I referred in earlier post(s).

I agree that logic stands or falls on its own. Popularity has no bearing on the correctness of an argument. Present me with an argument, and that is how I'll approach it.

However, as I pointed out at Re^12: Musing on Monastery Content (and you're ignoring), there are times when a statement about popularity is relevant to the assumptions of an argument. For instance language is established by usage. So if you argue that the phrase "valid ethical system" does not describe what the rest of the world believes to be a valid ethical system, then you're effectively speaking a different language and calling it English. It may be a sensible language. If you're willing to inform me of the definitions, I'm likely to try to speak it as well. But it won't actually be English.

Third: I haven't flamed you. The fact that you seem to think I have is evidence that your skin may be too thin.

Well I believe that phrases like "Hint: Calling an argument "invalid" has nothing to do with being in a wheelchair." are more insulting than anything that I have said...

Fourth: Your insistence on belittling and dismissing me for no reasons apart from my apparent lack of popularity and conformity with popular opinion is getting more and more difficult to overlook in the interests of diplomacy. Before you claim you aren't doing such things, I suggest you read through your commentary to which I'm replying, in which you use appeals to ridicule to imply I have no substance behind my words and am incapable of reasoning.

Funny, I thought that I was criticizing you for having not given any substance. Which you hadn't. And for showing no signs that you were intending to give any. Which was also the case.

What you'd done is repeatedly claimed to be an ethical philosopher (and therefore an authority), and then argued from your authority as a philosopher. But anyone can claim to be a philosopher. And there are no shortage of influential philosophers who disagree with your stated position.

How should I have reacted to that? How would you have reacted if our situations were reversed?

Fifth: I never offered proof of anything — only logically valid reasoning. Proof (as opposed to "a proof") requires truth and, unfortunately, every single assertion a human can possibly make must be based upon an assumption somewhere.

Actually you didn't offer your reasoning for inspection until this post.

Rather than pick this up in your suggested other venue, I'll just present here a brief summation of an example of a valid ethical system:

I'll follow the example, but I need to note for the record that the presenting of an example fitting your pattern is logically irrelevant.

The implication in Re^3: Musing on Monastery Content that I objected to is that all valid systems of ethics must disagree with the law on the subject of intellectual property. This is a statement of the form, All (A)s satisfy (B)." This can be proven by demonstrating that no (A)s exist that do not satisfy (B). This can be disproven by presenting a single (A) that does not satisfy (B). You'll note that in Re^4: Musing on Monastery Content I was trying to disprove the statement, and I did it by presenting a counter-example.

When you provide an example of an (A) that satisfies (B) you prove the statement, Some (A)s satisfy (B). No amount of evidence for some will translate into a proof of all.

Any philosophy student should recognize the above syllogism as coming straight from Aristotelian logic.

Okay. From the beginning.

One must start somewhere. I begin with cogito ergo sum, as it seems the very beginning of both epistemological and ontological metaphysical frameworks. Let me know if you disagree.

It certainly has a famous precedent. And I must admit that trying to get from there to intellectual property being wrong is less ambitious than trying to prove the existence of God. But, as the old joke says, be careful in your reasoning not to put des cartes before de horse.

Based on the notion, then, that I exist, I contemplate whether others do. This seems to be an insurmountable problem. Solipsism is not disprovable. Solipsism, however, is irresponsible when its alternative is no less disprovable. Thus, I operate under the assumption that others (the rest of you) are out there as well.

I have no problem granting the assumption that there appears to be an external reality. It frees me from the fear that I'm just talking to myself...

(skipping procession from "others" to "you" and simple existence to some kind of empirical validity, which is mostly based on the same process as moving away from solipsism simply reoriented)

You certainly aren't starting with the controversial stuff!

If we're all out there somewhere, and this world exists, it becomes clear that we have two options: interact, or not. If you choose "not", you're removed from a discussion of ethics, and of no concern to me.

This is shakier ground. However if we're not discussing the ethics of how to handle mentally ill people, I'll grant it.

Interaction has two options: interaction for benefit, or interaction for reasons that do not take benefit into account. Interaction for reasons other than benefit are A) pointless or B) ultimately self-defeating. Let's assume a desire to interact for benefit.

This I'll only grant with the significant proviso that people may perceive their benefit differently than you do. In particular the benefit that the other person is motivated by may be very indirect, or many be something that you wouldn't consider a benefit.

(we've been EXTREMELY simplified in the explication thus far, and will continue to be so: try to avoid looking for reasons to disagree based on the fact I haven't gone into greater depth)

I'm not looking for such. I'm just clarifying points where I suspect that my understanding of what you're saying could plausibly differ from what you expect.

Interacting for benefit requires some rules of conduct to maintain higher rates of success in producing benefit. Such rules of conduct — stating what is "right" or "wrong" in systems of interaction for purposes of maximizing benefit — would be called a system of ethics. Thus, an ethical system is needed. More to the point, it must be a system that is not self-contradictory, and it must be something that can be universally applied so as not to invalidate itself by inconstant and arbitrary application.

This is a very strong theoretical condition that I think is quite unrealistic. Some of the thorniest ethical questions confronting democracies have to do with how to handle the fact that people have differing values. And furthermore how to handle the fact that people's values change over time. Both effects leading to inconsistencies in practice.

Furthermore very few people deeply analyze the ethical system that they live by and can therefore have confidence that they don't have internal contradictions. While this can be claimed as a fault, as a practical matter people seem to get by anyways.

But for the sake of argument, I'll grant you this assumption.

Benefit for any individual can only be had if that individual can define its own standard of benefit. That being the case, self-determination is the first internal goal of a valid ethical system.

Depending on what you mean by the first internal goal, I can't grant you this.

Obviously there is the infamous problem that, Your freedom to extend your fist ends at my face. While self-determination is an imporant goal, it is not an unlimited good and has limits.

However there is a much bigger and subtler problem that arises from economics. If you're not familiar with the economic theory of groups, then I'd strongly advise you to read The Logic of Collective Action. You can find an OK summary of it here. In brief the theory explains why groups of people generally do not act in their own best interest when it comes to provisioning public goods.

In fact examples are given in the book where large groups of people have demonstrably repeatedly chosen (by overwhelming margins) to be coerced into doing things that virtually none would have chosen to do on their own. What is truly striking is that all evidence suggests that this choice was entirely rational.

In other words in some situations removing self-determination can be more effective for realizing benefit than preserving it! Later in this post I'll give an example of reasoning along these lines of extreme importance to the legal thinking on intellectual property.

As a mathematician or computer scientist would say, "A greedy algorithm does not always produce a globally optimial solution." Attempting to optimize for every person is not always best.

Self-determination being an important goal of a valid ethical system, one must realize that the principle of self-determination requires a restriction on individual behavior, in that no individual can act to interfere with the right of self-determination of another individual. By extension, no individual can act by proxy to interfere with another individual's right, either.

I'm curious, how do you propose to deal with cases where an individual chooses to not abide by this restriction? How should others react in that case? Incidentally if your system cannot figure out an appropriate response, then it is not something that can be universally applied and so by your own criteria above, it should be rejected as an invalid ethical system!

Of course, as I noted above, I didn't grant that self-determination is an unlimited right. Given that it has limitations, I believe that there are cases when it is appropriate to limit someone else's self-determination.

Incidentally if you have kids, then I'm very curious about how you applied your philosophy in your parenting...

Thus, coercion and uninvited violence are right out.

And the correct response if someone chooses to use coercion and uninvited violence is...?

From what I've said thus far, we arrive at the necessary initial premise of a valid ethical system: The initiation of force is wrong.

Looking at your home node, I see that property rights matter a lot to you. So let me give you an example involving property rights.

Suppose that I'm walking along the sidewalk. And I notice your car. With your keys in it. I notice that I'll get where I'm going faster if I drive, so I get in and drive it off. You happen to be watching and have a phone available. What next? I've only exercised my self-determination. Your philosophy says that you can't initate force against me. You know full well that if you call the police, force will be initiated against me, on your behalf.

Do you make that phone call? Or should the car be mine because you left your keys in it?

I suspect that you haven't thought this philosophy through enough. There seem to be these nasty edge cases...

I tend to think that a reasonably intelligent individual with some grasp of logic can fill in the rest from there, proceeding from that premise to a libertarian system. If you have some other system we'd arrive at from there logically, it'll certainly boggle my mind, but I'd be interested to hear/read it.

If I accepted your reasoning, then yes, I'd probably be a libertarian. As you'll note, I've seen what I believe to be rather serious flaws in it. Part of that is because I'm coming from a different belief system.

Now belief systems are interesting beasts. As I pointed out in What do you know, and how do you know that you know it?, when people from different beliefs examine the basic assumptions behind one system, they tend to come to very different conclusions. This is usually not because one is stupid and the other is intelligent. It is because we start with very different assumptions, and each of our sets of assumptions will reinforce our own views of the world.

Now I promised an example relating to intellectual property of someone choosing to be coerced for his own benefit. First let me start with a statement about copyright that you'll probably like quite a bit:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Can any point of view be clearer? Yet the hand that wrote that also wrote these words, The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Now I can see you wondering how on Earth a person can get from the former quote to the latter position. The key is found in the sentence following the quote that I gave you. That sentence starts, Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility... In this and other writings Thomas Jefferson clearly saw intellectual property as an unnatural state of affairs. It is a straightjacket maintained by coercion from the government. Yet he believed that this coercion could be justified by the prospect of the gains to be realized from giving people more motivation to produce valuable ideas.

This, then, is what scholars know as the copyright bargain. Society inflicts on itself the injustices necessary to create intellectual property in return for the rewards of increased intellectual output. I don't want to argue whether Jefferson's belief was right. I certainly can't argue that this bargain has been maintained fairly (particularly in the last century). In fact the book that I recommended on the theory of groups has plenty to say about "regulatory capture", an economic phenomena that explains why what we've seen happen to copyright in the last century was to be expected.

By the way, your "humble" suggestion is anything but. Self-flattering arguments from personal authority such as your link to Saints in our Book are anything but humble. I shouldn't be surprised, however, that you're subtly contradicting yourself yet again.

I admit that I was not very fair in that comment. I admit to being human. I'm not always inclined to fairness when I have to do that much work to get someone to stop repeating a falsehood and actually address the real point.

I'll trade you though. I'll not make further allusions to people's views of me if you'll stop referring to yourself as an ethical philosopher.