Alonois
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Blog Comments posted by Alonois
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What you are describing is more a social contract than morality. Prison is part of a social contract but people would argue that prison is immoral, or at least not moral. Execution is part of the social contract of laws, but is execution moral? Socrates accepted his fate under laws, but was accepting suicide the moral option or simply the option that led to a more stable society?
Morality can in fact oppose order and society. Order is not moral, it is orderly.
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Morality can be self interested and I never said it was. But just because you occasionally do moral actions when acting out of self interest does not make you a moral person. I have not denigrated the quality or value of morality, simply stated it does not reign and ultimately has no effect on the politics of Bob. I do not personally find it valuable since Bob is amoral. Survival is my first and foremost concern, and the concern of any who do not see themselves as martyrs. Action is required for morality to exist, not words.
I'd call you out for editing, but I don't have the original page open so I'll presume I've got an early case of senility and/or dementia.
My comments about hegemony and karma and so on are about your statements that they will "lose support" but the issue is that the camps exist and are rather firm. The one has never had support from the other and short of significant changes in one government or the other never will. Nothing is to be lost in terms of support. The only way to eliminate one side is to take aggressive action, but few seem to be willing to suffer a little to enact their beliefs. People are comfortable where they are.
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Oh hey. Some one picked a random quote and ignored the rest of what I was saying, that the current existing efforts towards a "more moral world" are token efforts at best and see-through grabs at reputation at worse. Honoring a treaty is hardly a moral action. You honor a treaty because in turn it will be honored. A gun dealer isn't any more moral if he delivers weapons for money instead of just taking the money. Casus belli exist as nothing more but vague justifications. You could argue they prevent wars springing up all over the place and may have been implemented as a means to make a moral world as opposed to simply self protection, but of course I remember a recent-sh casus belli that could be summed as "they probably would have attacked us" that was supported just fine by non-"UNJUST PATH" alliances. This implies a moral reason is not necessary just a reason of some sort, meaning casus belli exist to protect those who are strong enough to be involved in them from the random wars that tear them apart. It's more akin to two giants not killing each other for no reason.
Spying is akin to being attacked. Is spying immoral however? I'd say more spying falls under "dishonor" and honor is not the same as morality. Honor and morality are two different things (and I plan to write on honor at some point), but it is false to say that honor and morality are the same.
As for political support, ex-Unjust Path will never have support from ex-Hegemony. It is not about morality. It never has been, it never will be. This is very clear by statements made by ex-Hegemony members in support of rogues attacking ex-Unjust Path. The kinds of people otherwise made to be villains by ex-Hegemony. Morality is nothing more than rhetoric.
PS: It's Alonois. I'm not a greek pretty boy. And I was never aware I was "at the head" of some sort of movement. I have colluded with no one, these are and always have been my views. I am a very pragmatic person in regards to Bob. Morality is secondary to the interests of my alliance to me and self-interests. This is because the world is not moral, and to be moral is to weaken myself and invite destruction.
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Morality means different things to different people.
Every alliance defines morality as things their friends do, and amorality as things their enemies do. For instance raiding alliances will consider raiding to be fine but "claiming spheres" (disallowing any raiding on a colour sphere) to be amoral. Similarly an alliance that sees themselves as the world police will consider raiding amoral but destroying alliances, PZI sentences etc as fine since they are simply "police actions".
Thus you will find everyone in agreement with you when you say people do not act on morality, but you will have zero agreement as to what constitutes moral behavior. Indeed, the very post you have written espouses several things that you write about positively (for instance attacking or sanctioning tech raiders) that many alliances would consider extremely amoral.
What is morality is another discussion all together. This is that one cannot BE moral unless one ACTS in a moral manner and actively goes against immorality. To not act upon morality is to be amoral, whatever you define morality as.
Morality and pragmatism must be united if anything is to be done to advance one's cause. I write positively only in that they would be possible steps to take to changing the current atmosphere of Bob. Not that they are steps that must be taken but that would affect positive change. Whether or not such actions themselves constitute moral, immoral, or neutral, is another debate entirely. The exact implementation of an anti-raiding policy would require its own discussion between the enforcers of it. However one must also be willing to accept a little amoral pragmatism is, in the current environment, necessary to push for morality. We must play within the rules of the world we exist and better some of what you value than none of what you value.
Though I doubt anyone would suggest backing the beleaguered to be immoral. A justification for war, perhaps, but if one does not stand for their ideals then they are nothing more than fiction.
And amorality is not immorality. Amorality is without morality. Immorality is actively immoral, or evil. Some one amoral can be immoral or moral as the situation suits them. This is of course presuming your moral system views self-interest as inherently neutral instead of good or evil, moral or immoral.
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No one is moral, and that's why Karma gave every defeated alliance a viceroy
wait
Karma's war against the Hegemony goes far deeper than the rhetoric of morality. One could argue that morality, that a need to dispense justice in this case, had a role in the decision but a far more pressing and far more universal concern would have been the displacement of the top most power so as to free it up for a power grab.
Also, from everything I've gathered (Though I lack an exact time stamp for this one Dilber's ended in September 2008), viceroys were banned before the Karma v Hegemony war. Even had they wanted a viceroy, and I'm sure they would have since a viceroy is very valuable for the winning alliance, they couldn't have instated one. They still drew up some very steep surrender terms.
http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?showtopic=63887
350,000 tech and $10,000,000,000 in reparations. That is hardly a light sentence and arguably excessive.
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There is nothing wrong and no need for an alliance to be fully sovereign. It is probably a bad thing because of what it takes to be fully sovereign necessitates the exclusion of any real capacity to defend it. The only way to be forever absolutely sovereign would be to either be so powerful as to never be tested or to be so utterly beneath the notice of others as to never be tested. Both are unlikely situations to be in.
You are right that as long as an alliance remains unbroken, either diplomatically or through sheer brutality, it retains its sovereignty. At significant cost to its capacity and, eventually, that sovereignty it was so unwilling to barter for safety. However you say "truly sovereign" and that suggests a binary definition of sovereignty. That it is either/or, either you have control or not. But in reality you can have control over many situations but not have control over some. That does not eliminate your capacity for self determination in those situations you have it, merely means you are not at the absolute end of ideal sovereignty.
Also whether or not you choose to give up your sovereignty, once it is given up you do not have it until you reclaim it. To repeat the comparison I made in the entry, whether or not you choose to wear chains you still wear chains.
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If you can not defend your sovereignty then it ceases to exist. An unaligned nation is the epitome of sovereignty so long as they remained unchallenged. Consider the state of many indigenous people in any continent. They are sovereign so long as there were not colonists. But once they were toppled they ceased to be sovereign. If you are capable of making decrees but not acting upon them, are you still capable of self determination? No. If you can only think of the choice but not make it you are not sovereign in that regard. When people speak of sovereignty they also tend to speak of the connection between self determination and the defense of it.
Nor is sovereignty an either/or state. It is not have or have not. The alliance with a viceroy is not entirely sovereign but, depending on the viceroy, is still capable of making decisions of their own.
Even if you were to remove the defensive aspect of sovereignty, if you were to define it entirely as the capacity to set yourself on a course regardless if you can follow through (And this would imply every single citizen is sovereign), it does not change the focus of this essay is the fact that sovereignty is not an inherent portion of being a nation. Many nations have little. Weak nations can have a lot. Sovereignty is a gradient and it is not a required aspect of any nation to continue to exist.
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Did they just suggest they're nazis?
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All caps is sexy
Aww yeah baby. Me, you, and a bottle of 7/11's finest soft drink. All night.
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OH BLAH BLAH BLAH GOONS MASTER COMEDIAN RACE BLAH BLAH BLAH I QUOTED AL CAPONE I'M DEEP (He's a philosopher, right?) BLAH BLAH BLAH MOONS
The Value of Morality
in Pseudophilosophia
A blog by Alonois in General
Posted
That is still a social contract, not morality. Social contracts can be built upon morality but morality itself does not dole out punishments or prizes. That morality can create society does not mean morality is society nor that it is the only means of society. The existence of order does not prove the existence of morality or even moral mores in that society.
Morality is a system for identifying good and evil. Right and wrong, moral and immoral. At its core morality is usually constructive vs destructive (I can think of few who would consider theft, murder, or rape not evil in general, though they may not feel that way in certain circumstances) with various cultural attachments. But even when a society is built upon a moral code that does not transform it into that social contract nor does it mean that the presence of a social contract means the presence of an underlying moral code. A society can be built on honor, which is not inherently moral and often contains many attributes beyond morality (status, gender, etc. etc.), as well as it can be built on morality or even the idea that the strong rule.