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How to address raiding


RandomInterrupt

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By raiding someone, you deny their right to grow their nation. A direct attack is the single largest violation of someone's freedom of action. If you really believe what you said there, as an OOC guide to how to play games, you cannot justify raiding.

This has already been pointed out, but protecting someone from raiding is not the only way to reach the end of "freedom to grow their nation." They can also join an alliance - which often times will allow them to grow a lot faster, because many alliances hand out joining / training aid, and provide people with whom the nation ruler can do tech trades for still more cash. If a person really wants to grow his nation in peace, any fool can see that joining an alliance is the right thing to do. A person does not have the right to two things which are mutually exclusive - he does not have a "right" to grow as fast as he would in an alliance without joining an alliance. You don't have a "right" to a house as safe as one that has a burglar alarm, without paying for a burglar alarm. If you want the security, you pay the price.

Also ktarthan made a wonderful post, the likes of which I was going to write myself last night. Let's look at the situation a slightly different way. There are three possibilities.

1. Tech raiding is a valid moral philosophy and those who wish to curtail it are wrong for attempting to infringe it. This would, obviously, be okay with the tech raiders.

2. Tech raiding is valid, but so is the desire to abolish tech raiding. This is ktarthan's "all internal moralities" idea. This possibility is also okay with the tech raiders, because it still provides a moral ground for raiding, and the practice can continue.

3. Tech raiding is not a valid moral philosophy (for some reason which its opponents have failed to adequately explain in twelve pages of trying), and the abolitionists hold the most valid or only valid philosophy. Solely this, out of the three possibilities, is okay with the abolitionist - yet we can see that, in order for him to be in the right in his attempt to abolish tech raiding, he must not only prove that his position is more moral or correct than the other, but also prove that the other has zero credibility and merit to it. This is a substantial burden of proof.

Now would be a good time for a review of the four systems of morality. When the abolitionists attempt to explain why tech raiding is always immoral, they will need to provide a reason why, not merely state it as if it's a fact.

1. Morality is socially defined, by the collective will of the majority. Problem: tech raiding used to be widely accepted in CN.

2. Morality is individually defined, and each person's is different (see: ktarthan). Problem: your individual morality does not supercede mine, so you cannot tell me what to do.

3. Morality is defined as "non-harm" to others. Problem: this philosophy is convoluted and hypocritical, because everything you do in this game keeps someone else, however indirectly, from getting what they want. See pages 4-7 of this thread.

4. Morality is an absolute standard which exists in the universe, usually explained as coming from a deity. Problem: CN has no deity, so this is not valid. The closest thing that CN has to a deity has programmed the game in such a way that tech raiding is possible and hiding in peace mode for a long time is crippling. What should this tell you about the way he intended the game to be played? No one has yet answered this question.

Edited by TheNakedJimbo
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Nobody here is mugging little old ladies. We're talking about raiding people who are perfectly capable of fighting back, defending themselves, and possibly even winning - and could easily, very easily, keep themselves from being victims at all if they merely joined an alliance. Feel free to go in search of a more accurate analogy that will let you feel smug and self-righteous.

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By raiding someone, you deny their right to grow their nation. A direct attack is the single largest violation of someone's freedom of action. If you really believe what you said there, as an OOC guide to how to play games, you cannot justify raiding.

I said that I believe people have the right to action, but not the right to dicate the outcome. That's why I added the stipulation that one must accept the consequences of your actions; consequences being anything that results from your action, good or bad. This precludes expecting an outcome. Growing a nation is the culmunation of a many number of actions (buying infra, land, tech, collecting taxes, paying bills, etc.), with the expectation of increasing in NS (simplifying a bit). Raiding does nothing to impose upon which of these actions may be taken.

Not absolutely, I am anti-raiding but I only want one colour to be protected from raiders, you can go hog wild on the other colours as far as I care once a safe haven is established.

You are a pragmatic anti-raider, at least, which I appreciate. I'm not sure if you were trying to specifically rebut anything in my post, or just share your alternate viewpoint, so I'll stop at saying that an arbitrary colour sphere limitation is fairly irrelevant to my point. If you are limiting any actions of even just one person for the wrong reasons it is still just as immoral.

Now would be a good time for a review of the four systems of morality. When the abolitionists attempt to explain why tech raiding is always immoral, they will need to provide a reason why, not merely state it as if it's a fact.

1. Morality is socially defined, by the collective will of the majority. Problem: tech raiding used to be widely accepted in CN.

2. Morality is individually defined, and each person's is different (see: ktarthan). Problem: your individual morality does not supercede mine, so you cannot tell me what to do.

3. Morality is defined as "non-harm" to others. Problem: this philosophy is convoluted and hypocritical, because everything you do in this game keeps someone else, however indirectly, from getting what they want. See pages 4-7 of this thread.

4. Morality is an absolute standard which exists in the universe, usually explained as coming from a deity. Problem: CN has no deity, so this is not valid. The closest thing that CN has to a deity has programmed the game in such a way that tech raiding is possible and hiding in peace mode for a long time is crippling. What should this tell you about the way he intended the game to be played? No one has yet answered this question.

I'd like to offer my opinion on the bolded part.

1 works well with 2 (3 and 4 really being sub-sets of 2) as a system to determine consequences for actions, rather than its own system of morality. We may take some cues from society about how to act and what is moral, but in the end the real decision making process is done internally. There are also some "morals" that are hard-coded into our personalities, often in the form of survival instincts, that will generally supercede anything taught to us by society, and that we definitely have before we are introduced to society.

What this all comes down to is that when their pre-defined internal morality lines up nicely with what society has determined to be "moral" or "immoral", they feel that they can be justified in calling it so without substantiation. Under the scrutiny of what morality truly is, it can often be found that what is thought to be "moral" or "immoral" to the masses is simply "popular" or "unpopular". Once this is discovered, unless they can find some non-moral reason for their cause, all they are left with is their own internal compass, which is hardly an objective thing to use in debate. (See: Vilien's final arguments)

I would like to make note that all of what I say is from a completely OOC perspective. I think that IC anti-raiders add flavour to the game, and are welcome by me to take whatever actions they wish to quell the raiding horde.

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I don't know how to explain to someone why mugging little old ladies is bad. Sorry, my bad.

Then do you condone mugging little young ladies? Large old ladies? Average-build teenage transgenders? As far as I know, there are few little old ladies playing this game, so I'm curious why you used that as a qualifier.

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I would like to make note that all of what I say is from a completely OOC perspective. I think that IC anti-raiders add flavour to the game, and are welcome by me to take whatever actions they wish to quell the raiding horde.

I completely agree with this as well. I sent Vilien a PM telling him how much I enjoyed debating with him and that I hope we get the chance to do it again sometime. Intelligent and articulate people are valuable to the game whether they agree with me or not. (Not all of the abolitionists have been such, of course, but neither have all the pro-choice folks either; such is humanity.)

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