vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
IMO the salient thing which defines stealing isn't that it's zero-sum, it's that you're taking something which doesn't belong to you. So it doesn't matter that you are just copying bits, it's still stealing.
But are your moral intuitions completely in line with the law on all points of what things can be "owned" as intellectual property?
As a simple example, clothing designs can't be copyrighted in most of the world because clothing is considered utilitarian.
If I make a knock-off dress, that's completely legal. Do you consider me to be morally as bad as a person who has pirated a movie? Do you think the law should be changed to punish people who copy clothing designs as well?
Or what about board games? Game mechanics and rules are not copyrightable.
It is perfectly legal for me to make a clone of Monopoly, as long as I use my own names, art, presentation of the rules, etc. for everything. Do you think if I make such a clone that I'm "stealing" something not currently covered by law from Hasbro?
Don't get me wrong. I understand your position to a degree, but I find it highly suspicious when a moral position is identical with the law. How do you morally deal with situations like the UK granting perpetual copyright on Peter Pan, because the copyright is owned by a hospital? Do you think I'm stealing, if I download the original Peter Pan stories from Project Gutenberg in the United States, even though there's someone, somewhere in the world with a claim to ownership over that intellectual property? What about if I make my own original Peter Pan stories, since he's public domain here? If it's morally okay for me to download the original Peter Pan stories or make Peter Pan fan ficiton in the United States despite the perpetual UK copyright, is it okay to pirate copies of other works in countries that aren't party to the Berne Copyright convention?
I think with the legal concept of derivative works, they're clearly in the wrong. I also don't agree with modern copyright law on derivative works.
I'm fine with a regime where, say, "Star Wars" is a trademark, and where the specific, fixed form of the movies and books is intellectual property of Lucas Films or Disney or whoever. But I believe very strongly that someone who writes a 500 page book with Han Solo should be legally able to profit from their creation. The world doesn't benefit at all if a 500 page Star Wars fan fiction, becomes a 501 page work where all references to Star Wars IP have been scrubbed, and one page of boilerplate has been added trying to establish who San Holo our completely unique main character is.
Free-riders are going to be a significant problem with such a system.
No, in a system where everything is paid for ahead of time by patrons, there are no "free riders." Or at least, people are free riders the same way that people who get a free game during a promotion are free riders.
I'm a huge fan of Pathfinder's business model for media going forward. They make the actual rules of their game available for free. I played Pathfinder legally for half a decade, without paying Paizo a dime, and then because I was thankful for the experience I went back and bought a bunch of books from them. I was a "free rider" until I wasn't one.
I prefer that infinitely to WotC's business model for D&D, where there is no legal way to purchase PDF's for the modern books, and the only digital formats available are on proprietary websites where there's no guarantee that content will always be available. (See the recent kerfuffle with Modenkainen's Presents, where they errata'd a bunch of information out of Xanathar's and MToF and then made it so that it's impossible to buy that version of the content anymore going forward.) I would pay WotC for PDF's if I could, but they don't make the format I want to use available. So I buy the physical books, and then pirate the fan-scanned PDF's without a shred of guilt.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Piracy might be morally wrong, but I've always felt like the attempt to compare it to "stealing" is incorrect. It's in a separate category. If I steal an apple, the merchant doesn't have the apple any more. If I pirate a movie, no merchant has been deprived of a DVD or anything like that - there's just one more copy of that movie in the world.
Imagine I had a matter duplicator. I walk up to your car, duplicate it, hotwire the copy and drive away. Did I steal your car? The only moral violation I think I might have done there is violating your privacy, depending on what was in the car when I copied it.
Now, I acknowledge that in a world with widespread matter duplication, the government might impose limitations on the use of matter duplication, so that creators are incentivized to create and innovate and produce new products. But I almost think this is getting the obvious funding model backwards. In a world where it's easy to create a copy, but hard and resource intensive to create an original, it's foolish to stop the creation of copies. Money needs to enter the system somewhere, but the distribution step isn't the most obvious place for that to happen. Instead, it makes sense to me to use a patronage/crowd-funding model.
Car companies would put together a proposal that says, "We'll create a car with features X, Y, and Z and we need to collect $A in order to make it worth our while." Then people who like their cars can pay into the crowd-funding scheme, and after car is created, people can use their matter replicators to make perfect copies of the car.
I feel like media companies have resisted moving to funding models that are a better fit for the world we live in, and trying to stop the creation of new copies when literally every person has the means of creating a copy in their pocket is Quixotic at best, whatever it might mean for morality.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
It seems to me that these sorts of equivocations only work in very specific circumstances and contexts.
I think it's largely a function of what is common in a particular social and material environment, and what expectations are common in a particular question-asking environment.
In a culture that's crazy about pigs, the trivia category "Famous Pigs" will probably be about non-fictional pigs. In our culture, where most people hardly interact with real pigs, the names are going to be "Babe", "Piglet", "Wilbur", etc. In both worlds, additional context can disambiguate (e.g. "Famous Literary Pigs" vs. "Famous Real-world Pigs")
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Scott's idea of categorization is a pragmatic one, so I'm not sure he would agree that it's all that vulnerable to the attack of "what is a whale?" or "what is birth?"
It might be philosophically unsatisfying, but humans do just tend to categorize things in their environment, and pragmatism is fairly happy to take large swaths of categorization for granted. Something like the category "dog" just naturally emerges from a human interacting with a lot of dogs. Likely for reasons of computational and memory efficiency, we're not the kind of animal that looks at one furry quadruped and treats it as a new and completely unique entity, and then encounters a similar furry quadruped and forgets everything we've learned as we try to learn all the new and unique rules that apply to this separate entity. We find patterns, and one of those patterns is something like what we label "dog."
The boundaries of these spontaneous categories are always fuzzy and ill-defined to start. Then, when humans engage in goal-directed behavior, we take all of these spontaneous categories and find the boundaries that are most important to have a consensus on with respect to that goal-directed behavior.
Why do we have words with well-defined boundaries like "cow", "heifer", "bull", "steer", "cattle", "calf", "milk", "beef", etc.? Because for the art of cattle ranching (which groups a number of goal-directed behaviors together), all of those distinctions are important. A steer can't have offspring, but might be suitable for pulling large equipment. A heifer doesn't produce milk, a cow does. And so on, and so forth.
Just by interacting in the world, humans are going to have a fuzzy version of the "woman" and "man" categories in their heads. Depending on our needs, we can change those fuzzy borders into well-defined ones by looking at what we're using the word for. We're perfectly happy to say that Shakespeare's Othello is a "man", even though he's just a fictional representation of a man. As a fictional character, Othello can't do any of the things usually characteristic of a man - he can't actually breathe, can't eat, can't sleep, and he certainly doesn't produce sperm that could impregnate a real flesh-and-blood woman. We're happy to omit the very important context that "Othello isn't real, and any sentence said about him is about the fictional story he belongs to", because most humans can understand the concept of fiction and don't really need reminding.
I think the distinction between a trans woman and a cis woman is going to emerge at some level of the discussion, because there are goal-directed reasons to make the distinction. If a cis man wants to have his own biological children, then he'll want to impregnate a cis woman and won't have much luck with a trans woman. But... the distinction exists. Even just "trans woman" and "cis woman" captures the distinction pretty well. I think the fight over the specific word "woman" is a distraction. We have "toy bears", which we're happy to call "bears" despite them just being paint and plastic. In a trivia game asking for "famous bears" most of the "bears" will actually be fictional representations of bears, and not flesh-and-blood bears. So, why can't a "trans woman" be a "famous woman" in a trivia game?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Sure, but I wasn't proposing a self-ID regime.
I'm okay with legal hoops comparable to adoption or naturalization.
For people who haven't yet undergone the legal hoops, people can still treat them as honorary members of their identified group, the same way people might say, "You might not be my daughter, but I already feel like I'm your mother", or a close friend might say, "You still have some legal hoops to jump through, but you're just as French as anyone else in my book, and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise."
My point was that we already have many malleable socio-legal categories in society that amount to "lies" if taken absolutely literally. I fail to see how legal gender transition poses any notable risk to society's foundation.
Ultimately, the purpose of philosophy is to find the Truth, not to make policy recommendations.
But the truth is trivially easy in the trans case. No one on either side is really confused.
Ask any empirical question, and the pro- and anti-trans side can answer all these questions the same way:
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Can transwomen give birth?
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Can transmen produce sperm?
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Do trans-women and -men typically have XX or XY chromosomes?
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Etc.
The fight over the specific words "woman", "man" and "gender" are shallow side shows in my opinion. They're not really part of any deep philosophical discussion. It's a simple classification question - that's philosophy 101. People are just eager to pounce on a relatively uninteresting part of the debate, because they're so sure that they have the one True definition written on the Tablets of Reality, but unfortunately such tablets don't exist, and we can't consult them even if they did.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
If society has to live a lie, it certainly is at a higher cost than if it is telling the truth. You cannot train everyone to lie everyday and expect no consequences.
I think this is a little overdramatic. There are plenty of "lies" that come at very little cost in a society.
Lies like "these people may not be biologically related, but as a legal fiction they are parents and children" or "this person wasn't originally from France and isn't of French ethnicity, but now they're declaring their allegiance to France now so they're French." There are even fairly strong social taboos against pointing out the differences between adoptive parents and naturalized immigrants in most cases.
I think viewing the trans "lie" as particularly pernicious or destructive to society is an isolated demand for rigor.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I do think it's only a tiny minority of trans people claiming to be "biological men/women" of their identified gender. "Biological" as a modifier for sex and gender is one that fell by the wayside years ago - but I think words like "gametic" or "chromosomal" are much more specific while emphasizing the point being discussed.
Veronica Ivy might be viewed as an "honorary" woman, the same way adoptive parents are "honorary" parents despite their lack of biological connection to the children they're raising. But with current technology, "honorary" women lack many of the feature of cis women, such as the ability to produce large, immobile gametes or XX chromosomes. Maybe that technological barrier will be overcome some day, who knows?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
They don't have to be axes if you don't want them to be. You could just view them as two different components of a person's view of trans people.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I'm imagining the trans-related equivalent of the Catholic who is morally opposed to abortion, but doesn't think it should be illegal. Or the gay man who lives with his male partner, but doesn't believe being gay should be valorized and celebrated as much as it is in society, in favor of more "traditional" family structures.
I'm sure there are people disgusted by transgenderism who don't believe that medical transition should be illegal for adults who want it, and who are okay with pronoun hospitality on a case-by-case basis. Or people who say that "transwomen are women", but who still think social contagion might be a factor that should be quelled as far as possible.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
You see this kind of rhetorical move used a lot by the woke--drawing on the essentially universal consensus that the civil rights movement was a good thing, and then trying to make parallels between the activism of that era and the activism of our own, and implying that the moral questions are just as easy to answer now as they were back then.
I think to be fair, during the actual civil rights era these weren't considered easy questions to answer. We went from 4% of polled Americans supporting interracial marriage in 1959, to 94% today. The argument is that it was only because a small and annoying minority of 4% argued their point in the marketplace of ideas that support for interracial marriage can be so high today. MLK Jr. was one of the most hated men in America, and considered a dangerous radical.
Certainly, for any civil rights struggle there would have once been a time when the average American wouldn't have accepted that the thing under discussion was an easy question, even if we look back and see it as a no brainer.
I think it goes without saying that if trans activists "win", then in 40 years it will be just as "obvious" that they were right to most people.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Could one not be "transphobic" and still refuse to acknowledge that "trans women are women"?
I personally think it would be more helpful to break things down along two axes. The first axis is how one thinks society should deal with trans people, and the second would be one's "trans metaphysics" or how they answer the question of what trans people are, and whether there are any important differences between trans people and cis people.
Obviously, in some people those two would be connected questions. If one thinks that trangenderism is a fetish that children are being brainwashed into to mutilate and sterilize themselves, then one might have a different attitude towards trans acceptance than if one thinks that medical transition is the least bad option for a group of sick people who would commit suicide at an unacceptably high rate otherwise.
I think I'd reserve "transphobic" for people who are illiberal on the social axis, but I think many trans advocates take a wider view, and consider a trans metaphysics that doesn't allow for "transwomen are women" to be a true statement to be transphobic as well.
Of course it does, but why should that matter? Nobody is going to be swayed because from a descriptive linguistic stand-point, "groomer" means X and "transphobia" means Y.
The people who say something like, "J.K. Rowling has never said anything that is transphobic" and the people who say that she has, don't necessarily disagree about what she has actually said. They disagree about whether what she said is bad or not.
The people who say something like, "Left-wing groomers are brainwashing children to mutilate themselves" and pro-trans people, don't necessarily disagree on certain statistics like the number of transitioners or detransitioners. They disagree about the causal web that leads to that, and whether schools with more permissive policies nudges the causal web towards bad outcomes or not.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Is this really banana republic stuff? Libel, slander and fraud were all already legal limits on free speech.
I do agree with OP that 4900 possibly lost Democrat votes in NY is pretty unlikely to have had any real impact on the election, and that there should be a lot of room to exercise leniency for judges. But sending a strong message that election interference won't be tolerated seems like a reasonable enough thing for a democratic country that wants to maintain legitimacy.
Do you consider punishing any form of providing fake election information to be going to far? I'm not sure the "it was just a joke" defense really gets off the ground here.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I do think this kind of turns the "stochastic terrorism" angle on its head. Far from all the anti-trans rhetoric and legislation creating an environment where violence against trans people is more likely, it seems that trans and GNC shooters are more common in recent months.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Would this actually prove that point?
I feel like it could just prove that masculinizing hormones actually masculinize people, which is hardly a revelation. Plenty of transmen already report anecdotally being quicker to anger, or needing to masturbate more after HRT.
In fact, the inverse being true isn't even catastrophic to the LGBT position. If fewer FtM people are school shooters and violent criminals, then it could be evidence that socialization plays a stronger role in gendered behavior than biology, at least as concerns violent crime. FtM's who are socialized as girls through their early childhood end up less likely to commit crimes than cismen socialized as boys.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I would imagine it matters a lot more what official Nashville policy policy is on how they report the sex and gender of perpetrators. That, or AP Stylebook standards on how best to use "female."
I wouldn't necessarily assume from the outset that the man/woman vs. male/female distinction has been removed from journalistic practice yet.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
This is the first mass school shooting by a woman that I know. Probably the first mass shooting I hear at all committed by a woman.
Wasn't one of the first notable American school shootings a woman? The Cleveland Elementary school shooting by a 16 year old female perpetrator, which lead to the Boomtown Rats song "I Don't Like Mondays."
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Telling a person to kill themselves was an acceptable response to them not liking your favorite game back then.
Maybe in the circles you rolled in. I'll attest that my corners of the internet never had that norm, and I've been an active internet user since at least 2005.
I think the main difference is that I never really gravitated towards competitive multiplayer video games or the communities around them. My experience of video game-related communities was fun, innocent discussions on the Ushi no Tane forums for Harvest Moon, and not (as they seemed to be from my outsider perspective) the toxic cesspools of teenage boys with no adult supervision teaching each other to be more and more aggressive and bullying over the most pointless things imaginable.
I don't doubt the other part of your post is true - a lot of the sides in Gamer Gate are explained by different media bubbles that had emerged in the pre-2014 internet, but to pretend it was some universal experience is a big mistake.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I'd say that if you diligently investigate the merit of classical philosophical theism then you should arrive at a place where you consider it philosophically formidable and worthy of respect if not actually true.
I minored in philosophy with a focus on classical philosophy. Granted, I've always found ethics more interesting than metaphysics, but I am at least familiar with Plato and Aristotle's metaphysics. Certainly, I think there's a lot to respect in both of their philosophies, though I think I'm more impressed with their ability to find the right questions to ask, rather than their ability to arrive at the correct answers.
I'll admit that Aquinas is a gap in my studies, since he's quite a bit later than I'm usually interested in when it comes to philosophy. What little I have seen of Thomism has generally impressed me, though it hasn't really swayed me much. Catholicism does have a lot of smart people in its stable, but so do other religions. Buddhist Abhidharma literature and the works of Nāgārjuna are also philosophically formidable, and I still don't believe in reincarnation and Nirvana in an "orthodox" Buddhist fashion.
I might check out Edward Feser. If you had to pick one book of his that you think I would benefit most from, which would you recommend?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Atheism forces you to remain ignorant of substantial parts of human experience. It would be difficult to hold that level of ignorance for a very long time, especially with the internet.
I'm an atheist, and I wouldn't say I'm "ignorant" of anything. I've been highly interested in religion and mythology since middle school, and I've done a lot of reading in this area. I've never really stopped reading about religion. I've read the Bible as well as religious and secular Bible commentaries, the Quran and several biographies of Muhammed, studied Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism in college, read pagan apologia like Sallust's On the Gods and the World and what remains of Julian the Apostate's Against the Galileans, and recently I've been reading through some important Vaishnavite Hindu texts, like the Srimad Bhagavatam. I've attended services everywhere from Eastern Orthodox churches to Hare Krishna temples.
I'm not convinced of the metaphysical truth claims of any revealed religion I've investigated, and I'm not compelled by watered down forms of religion like deism or "spiritual but not religious."
I don't think that the curiosity involved in rationalism would be able to also support being an atheist. The cognitive dissonance would be too strong.
I'm very curious. I've constantly investigated religious texts and rituals around the world. I like to think I have an open mind.
The most I can say is that the concepts of metis and signalling have given me grounds to believe that religion could have some place in society to make large social groups function well. But other than that pragmatic argument, I don't think I've been convinced by any particular religious claim.
What do you consider the place I should have ended up in after I had done all my investigations?
If you agree that downloading the original Peter Pan in the US isn't "stealing" despite the perpetual UK copyright of that work, then do you agree that a person can morally object to the length of copyright terms in a country, and morally pirate all works older than a certain age?
For example, if I decide to live by a self-imposed 28-year "moral copyright" code, where I only pirate things older than 28 years old (the original copyright term in 1790 in the United States), do you think I am stealing when I download a work from 1993? (If you think 28 years is too short, substitute some arbitrary time less than the 95 years of modern US copyright.)
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