Quote from: Reikoku on July 07, 2011, 05:30:36 AM

OK, all you're doing is playing the semantics game here. Instead of advocating perfect 'equality', you're advocating partial 'equality', which is the same thing but even more inconsistent.

I think that you're thinking on too high a level, without understanding where left-wing opinions are derived from in the first place. What you need to do is explain what natural rights are, and then derive your political understandings from there.

Left-wingers tend to believe in a level of equality because of 'social' rights like a right to an education and a right to health. If you accept that somebody's right to my money can be greater than my own because they have a right to health (and can't afford healthcare), why would this right not extend to my body organs which I can function without, when they can't get a body organ?

It's not about cherry picking ideas, it's about understanding where your ideals come from. Most left-wingers do profess a 'right to healthcare' which somehow grants people claim over other people's stuff. I'm trying to understand the inconsistency being applied between a 'right to my money/possessions' and a 'right to my body organs'.

I completely agree with you that most people pick an ideal that works in their favour, but the accusations of greed almost always come from the left. Acting in your own self-interest and calling others out when they do the same is very inconsistent.

If you use a majority opinion as a reason to legitimise a decision, that's argumentum ad populum. In the past, the majority have traditionally supported persecution of the few. If you don't believe me, go and read into apartheid or the civil rights movement.

I'm not sure that you're capable of refuting anything with that nonsense. You've not understood my argument, so I'll ask in simpler terms:

Explain your premise for WHY redistribution of wealth is acceptable. THEN, explain why that premise can't be applied to redistribution of health, kicking intelligent kids out of classrooms so that we can dedicate more time to the slower ones etc. If you can't do this, if your premise has multiple natural sequitors, then you don't have a consistent worldview.

The main argument (2) I had the one I believe refutes your comparison is that you can't do organ transfers in the name of equality without violating someones right to equality. With wealth you can dealing each wealth-class independently. With N people with fully functioning kidneys and m people with bad kidneys and n with non functioning kidneys (N > m > n), if you did forced kidney transfers there will be

N - n people with functioning two kidneys
m people with bad kidneys
n kidney donors
n kidney acceptors

Group 1 and 3 were treated unequally so we violated the principle of equality which we were trying to fulfill. Thus forced kidney transfers violate strict equality (this might be overcome with payment, although I consider that dubious and not equal). I believe that with this reasoning you will come to agree that you original comparison was not founded. With transfer of wealth there is no similar problem as wealth (at least in money terms) can be split in to almost arbitrarily many parts and thus the transfer of wealth can be done equally in each income class. Notice that to achieve 'equality' we treat different income classes as 'unequal' same way as people with fully functioning kidney and badly functioning kidneys got different treatment. Collectivity was one of my arguments which I believe is necessary (but not sufficient) condition for justified forced transfer of wealth. There are very few things you can truly redistribute collectively that aren't measurable in wealth so in my opinion only thing left to discuss is if transfer of wealth is justifiable in the first place. Measuring 'transfer of health' in money terms (to overcome the discrete nature of kidneys) also reduces the question back to just transfer of wealth.

My opinion is that to fix systemic unfairnesses ('the partial referee') transfer of wealth is okay and to use those money to healthcare is just good use of resources if it goes to the target group. Bad luck is not an example of systemic unfairness. More difficult question is whether transfer of wealth is okay just to support naturally more unfortunate groups. I believe that is good, reasonable and beneficial policy but how to argue that everybody would be obliged to do this is a more difficult question. I'll return to it maybe later. Best I can now say is that currently democracy grants legitimacy for it, but this is bit shady as anything deriving legitimacy from democracy is circular as democracy is in effect legitimized by democracy...

As for semantics of 'equal', let me tell that it is very slippery word just as is justice. They can have so many different presuppositions so I would be very careful when deriving any conclusions from somebody using them. 'Partial equality' is even more of an oxymoron than plain equality. Most people don't realise the ambiguity of the word so there you go with exact arguments. One viewpoint on 'equality' is that 'inequality' is acceptable if those unequal are better of in that situation than in the assumed perfectly equality but there are many arbitrary other ways. Maybe we'll discuss about these semantic problems later.

Sorry that I didn't carefully answer your points. Just wanted to summarize my points so far. As said, I think we should talk about legitimacy of transfer of wealth in relation to lefts arguments. Deriving any analogies with seeming contradictions is in my opinion unfounded.

Edit: 'Impartial referee' > 'partial referee'.