HM Solomon I

Please disregard, this was just me being dumb and forgetting to pay my bills once every three days.

I have no soldiers or tanks currently, and I have plenty of working citizens (more than 60k), but I'm unable to buy either tanks or soldiers. I recently sent some soldiers with foreign aid, not sure if that triggered this error or not. [url=http://s1246.photobucket.com/user/HMSolomonI/media/ScreenShot2014-11-18at85228AM_zpsee89b368.png.html][/URL] [url=http://s1246.photobucket.com/user/HMSolomonI/media/ScreenShot2014-11-18at93040AM_zpsc282e058.png.html][/URL] For reference, the error message when I try to buy nukes just says that I've specified an invalid transaction amount.

Seriously people, get this man a war! Won't someone think of the funk ...

In a sense you could say that like in other realms, those in the trenches never really fight for what's right, they fight for those next to them.

This is a video you should definitely watch because holy crap it's hilarious. So in order to bring it to you I'm taking a break from my usual reasoning on complex issues and dealing with Tywin going on about something (I don't care what most of the time) to bring you it in all its glory. To note: I do not know the maker of the video, but whoever it is deserves some serious props! Here's a link to it: http://captiongenerator.com/25821/Chims-Coalition-Plans

o/ We shall bury you all ... with the power of love. :D

Sure, that's true. It would be a reason, but it's not enough for that to be the result. For it to be ethically permissible, the party making war would need to have that as a reason going in. Wars cannot be justified after the fact. I can certainly conceive of situations in which they do not have a reason in mind beforehand and that would be unethical. The point of this article was to establish the minimum needed to meet the obligation implied by ethics, which is that one needs a reason. It doesn't have to be a good reason, it just has to be a reason. Further reasoning will be needed to determine what else is required by ethics. For one, do CBs need to be "valid" to be ethical? If so, what makes a CB valid? Is a war justified by a valid or even non-valid CB ethical per se or is more required to make a war ethical?

Yes, that's definitely part of it.

Are you impressed/horrified at how much can actually be written about this subject? Perhaps we should also have a conversation on the ethics of words, specifically on whether it is ethical to use words as weapons to take out others eyeballs with sheer volume.

I didn't actually say that, I said that declaring a war for fun is effectively the equivalent to declaring a war because you feel like it, and that cannot be reasonably understood by others. But more significantly, there is a difference between being able to determine if someone would have fun given some set of circumstances and making a decision just for the sake of fun. One is a judgement, the other is an action; comparing them does not make sense.

lol But to be serious, that misses the point entirely. Even in racquetball there are rules, others involved, and such. There is a context, it isn't just a bare room with a ball and nothing else in the world.

It is absolutely not impossible to define fun for anyone but yourself because of context. Politics is merely the term we assign to the context in which we play this game: the structure of the world in which interactions occur. Without context, there can be no fun. Picture this as a thought experiment: You are in a white walled room. There is nothing that you can see except one rubber ball. You start bouncing the ball against the wall, and you quickly realize that nothing changes and nothing happens except the ball coming back to you repeatedly. Then you find yourself in another room exactly the same in every way except that now when you begin to bounce the ball, the wall changes and begins to split into sections and move about. The ball bounces differently each time as the wall moves around to change angles and surfaces. Which room would you prefer? I would guess that nearly everyone would say room two, and those that don't are merely being facetious or intentionally obtuse. Politics is the moving wall sections, it causes the same action to have different responses depending on the exact circumstances (how the wall is arranged at the precise moment). This context is omnipresent, and I'd say that it may be a lot harder to separate out from this game than one might think. Even neutrals experience this context though maybe to a lesser extent; in any event, neutrality is defined by the context in which it is practiced. Different context would change the response to an assertion of neutrality.

You may very well want to tackle it from a different angle from ethics, but that is irrelevant to a discussion on ethics unless you are claiming it cannot actually be tackled from the perspective of ethics. Even if their real reason is to settle grudges or to gain power that's still a reason. Just to have fun wouldn't be a reason though since that's effectively the same as declaring war because one feels like it. The reason has to be or involve something external to the person feelings of those making war since making decisions based entirely on one's own feelings is arbitrary. Here one could define arbitrariness as a condition which exists when no one could reasonably understand the motivations behind a decision. Doesn't mean they do, it just means they could (and no one can ever truly understand the personal feelings of another since they do not themselves experience them). Because we don't like you is a reason if you have a reason not to like them other than it simply striking your fancy (as per the reasoning I gave above). Even if it's just that they're a threat and you want to silence said threat. More importantly, I never claimed to be arguing for what constitutes a "viable CB". I am only concerning myself here with whether one ethically needs any CB at all to declare war.

I never said it had to be accepted as valid. Even if it's just an attempt at justifying a war, it satisfies the above conditions because then the war wouldn't be truly arbitrary; under the above logic, you'd be ethically required to provide a justification, but you wouldn't be required to provide one that even anyone else would find acceptable. If you have some reason, then it isn't arbitrary (some reason beyond "I felt like it" or the equivalent of course). It also doesn't need to be publicized either. I said when making war, one needs a reason, I never said it had to be posted anywhere in public, though presumably those directly involved on both sides would know it simply by virtue of them being involved. I also never commented on whether having a CB makes a war "ethical", I was merely commenting on whether it was ethical to have no CB at all. And yes, there are neutrals and presumably they find it fun to just build, but without politics what would neutrality even mean. You can't have neutrality in a vacuum, at least some of the fun of being neutral and building ones nation is based on the context provided by politics. I think you've read a lot more into this piece than was actually there, bringing the typical baggage associated with this topic to bear even when no one else has brought it up. I urge you to reconsider it without this baggage, as I've attempted to do. I don't claim to have been entirely successful, but I don't think all that many have made a genuine attempt to reason without the baggage.

This entry of Practical Ethics will be about casus belli, or CBs. More specifically it will be about whether it is ethically permissible to have no casus belli when going to war. For any that do not already know, casus belli is a latin phrase meaning the reason for war. It is the justification used by one party when making war against another party. Casus belli have a long tradition on our world, going back to the first ever war fought amongst alliances, but tradition does not make something ethical or not. Perhaps though, some further reasoning can be found in why this tradition even exists. CN is a political simulator in so far as it simulates the interactions between nations and groups of nations (read: alliances). More importantly, much of the fun derived from playing this game is from playing politics, speculating on politics, working to change politics, or discussing politics, and most of the rest is made all the more so by politics. Building a nation wouldn't be all that enjoyable if there was no political framework to give it depth and to provide some meaning. Given this, CBs find a place in our world. If CBs were not ethically required to declare war, then a large chunk of the politics would evaporate from this game as requiring a reason for war is the same as saying that wars cannot be arbitrary. If wars are arbitrary then there is no need for a system behind them: no need for treaties or other formal agreements, no need to scheme, no need think about how war might be started, no way to discuss wars in a political context. Wars would just be a time for fighting, there would be no further context to them. Politics is a system that gives structure to this world and politics cannot exist in a world of arbitrary decisions and arbitrary wars. So given that politics is a key part of what makes this game fun, that wars cannot be arbitrary for politics to have a real place in this world, and that a lack of CBs in wars makes them, by definition, arbitrary, it follows that for this game to be fun CBs must exist. Those making war must somehow justify their actions for the game to remain fun. So to paraphrase a favorite English teacher of mine: so what, who cares? How does any of this relate to ethics you ask? Well if you make war arbitrarily, then you take away much of the politics and thus take away much of the fun. Taking away the fun of others is itself ethically impermissible unless you happen to be doing something that outweighs this loss of fun. Now one might claim that war itself is so fun that making it, even arbitrarily, outweighs any other losses that might be suffered. However, this misses the point. Since so much of the fun in this game is tied to the politics, making war without justification ruins the fun of the entire game, and no war can overcome that because, by extension, most of the fun derived from wars is tied to the politics of those wars. Without it there would be no real context, and war without context would be boring and not very fun at all. Thus, it is not ethically permissible to make war without a casus belli.

Two of my very favorite alliances getting together, what's not to love?

Agreed, stats should only include approved members just as the total nations count only includes approved members.

Quick, someone seize him, he's been replaced with a double! I knew something was going on last we spoke. :P

ITT andyt2k wins ITT. :D

Our plan is finally coming together ...

Question: are you going to be employing any game theory? I think that'd be a fun one.

Looking forward to seeing your first full entry. I love that someone is writing a blog with a more academic slant, especially in the field of economics which obviously has loads of applications here.

The problem with this is it assumes that I said that nations give up irrevocable rights; in other words, they give up ownership of their nations. I specifically said that they don't do this.

This simply isn't the case. By saying that, you're saying that members can't post on the OWF, can't talk to friends from other alliances on IRC, can't send a message to a foreign nation in-game or receive one. I've never heard of an alliance in which this is the case, nor would I imagine such an alliance would attract very many members.

That sounds a lot like what I said, with some purely semantic changes. I even said that it isn't ethically wrong by default, meaning that members could decide that they want their alliance to have the right to exclusive communication. It's just that this cannot be assumed to always be the case. If you're pledging to defend your fellow members, you are, by definition, giving up the right not to defend them. And you're giving up any rights ancillary to that one, such as the right to use your nation exactly and only as you see fit. It is not something that can be avoided even in the most free form alliances, at least some rights must be ceded to the alliance upon joining.