Gah, the forum ate my original response. Again

Quote Originally Posted by IowaSkinsFan
wufwugy, your making an insane amount of assumptions in your post. Also, most of the time it doesn't appear that your backing up your arguments, your just stating them.
Not sure if I follow on the assumptions. I haven't really stated much other than general truisms. If you would like clarification on specific examples, let me know

I also haven't been 'backing it up' because I'm usually long-winded and didn't wanna make the post into a dissertation. If you would like some backing up of specifics, let me know. Some of it will be hard since it's either generalizations from subjects like biology and social sciences in which specific studies are hard to find or indirect, or refers to epistemological and logical issues which are quite difficult to just point to a link and be like here look see evidence. I could do some though so let me know

"Again, this isn't black or white. If I kidnapped you and your brother, held a gun to your head, told you that I was going to either kill you or him but I will allow you to choose, if after you chose yourself and I killed you, could I tell your brother that you wanted to die?"

I think this example arguably could never occur in a vacuum. What I mean is that this situation could occur randomly without any backstory seems impossible, so who knows? Your brother may have done something that lead to this situation. Now lets say he didn't: I feel its also the crux of making any sense of the world for me. I can't really argue that this situation is possible or impossible, because I really have no logical proof besides my life experience.

What it seems like your trying to say here is that some people in the world are vicious hounds, incapable of being or learning how to be good and must be governed and forced in the right direction. When put in a situation where they could "seize" power, they will do so. Thats a hell of an assumption, surely backed up by some evidence. I don't believe that there are people in the world who are incapable of doing "good" or whatever you feel are the absolute values of the world. Therefore, I can't agree with your argument, and I will agree to disagree with you.
I wasn't making a moral statement. I was pointing out the flawed logic (a sort of faulty generalization) in your assertion that consequences of actions that are acted out = desired. There are loads of consequences to loads of things, many of which are dynamic and dillemmatic in nature, and the human genome has evolved to only be cognizant of and reactionary to a handful of them in any given circumstance. Even then, our decision making processes are quite flawed and often result in normally erratic behavior

"Yeah, it sucks, but that's reality. We don't live in a universe where all things are dichotomies. Overlap and connectedness is tremendous, paradoxes abound, and ideological contradictions do not carry over into the physical universe that often. Decision making is hosted by currently innumerable factors, and it is not at all unnatural for a human to lament the multinational corp pay structure while still being in his best interest to purchase product from that corp."

This is absolutely not true. In this Bounty situation, if you think that best interest means paying the least amount of money, your both limited in your scope of what money is but also wrong. Lets say people did not want to purchase paper towels from a producer who paid executives high salaries. They wanted their salaries lowered x amount. They decide to boycott paper towels from Bounty until they lower the executives salaries. Now lets say this is 30 million peoples values, and they all boycott Bounty. One of Two things (maybe others?) will happen: 1. Another paper towel company will come along with low executive salaries and take all the customers. 2. Bounty will lower their executive pay and keep their business. This is what the economy is all about. People offer you goods and services that you want. If enough people want a certain kind of good or service, it will be offered. If enough people want a paper towel company that has low executive pay, it will be offered because a profit can be made.
You seem to be equating scales. While you're right about the consequences of individual actions on a large and collusive scale, what I was referring to is the standard that without that en masse revolt, the game changes. Also, to call individuals acting in harmony for the ultimate good a rarity is overstating its frequency IMO. This type of thing is represented in Tragedy of the Commons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

It is important to keep scale in mind and to be sure to not accidentally equate different situations. A well known example of this can be found in physics i.e. big scale = relativity model and small scale = quantum model, and attempts to explain one via analogizing the other yields no fruit even though it's all about the 'same' stuff.