yeahiknow3

Laws limiting the height of your fence are debated in the following way.

1. First, the benefits and harms to you and your neighbors are considered.
2. These considerations are weighed against the relative costs to the rest of the community.
3. Rules are agreed upon that take everyone’s interests into account.

This is a moral exercise, because to debate something is to engage in normative deliberation. Indeed, your only mechanism for social appeal is moral: “This is the right thing to do” for some reason, such as justice, fairness, harm reduction, or whatever.

If you pass a law protecting rare valuable books, then you also need to decide which books are protected.

You’re right. Laws are constrained by pragmatism. It turns out, figuring out which books are important is analogous to figuring out which natural habitats should be legally protected from construction, etc.

What?? Every law we have is a matter of moral debate. Why do you think murder is illegal, or rape? Because these are evil behaviors.

Did I make any policy suggestions? These are simply moral facts. Laws are a matter of convenience, and if it’s inconvenient for us to legally constrain some evil behaviors, oh well.

• Buying food in order to destroy it is bad.

• Buying art in order to destroy it, also bad.

Ownership itself is a pragmatic social construct: you “own” things insofar as that “makes sense.”

Does it make sense for Amazon to own rare books? Not really. I’m not sure why that would be allowed. It’s like a child owning a rocket. It simply makes no sense in most contexts.

I posted a small comment on Reddit for the first time in, oh, idk, years. It was in a thread about the book Dungeon Crawler Carl. My comment said, paraphrasing,

DCC is not a nihilistic book

Short and to the point. I received three replies, all of them antagonistic. The first one said,

You’re wrong, because DCC is not a nihilistic book.

Except weird and long-winded. The second one said,

your definition of nihilism is wrong. DCC is not a nihilistic book.

The third one was,

You’re being pedantic.

Aaaand last time I post a comment on reddit.

Yes. It only looks like magic until you see how the trick is done.

Why not?

People are such goddamned babies.

What is the context in which you are spoiling the plot to a children’s movie?

Many such cases.