What do female readers think of Hilgya Firehelm?

[Koo Rehtorb]

Alternate thought experiment - there are six dying people in hospital who need different organs. I could, in secret, kill someone (instantly and painlessly) who is compatible with all of them, steal that person's organs, and give them to the six people. Six lives for one is a great deal, and even if some of them don't take, we're probably saving three or four lives. Expected utility is almost certainly positive. This is something we could actually really do, but if anything people probably hate the idea more than Omelas.
Now, let's make the situation even better - suppose we can actually keep the healthy patient alive after they lose their organs. Their quality of life will plummet, but it won't quite be a fate worse than death. So expected utility is even more positive, but I'm betting you're still not going to get many doctors stealing a healthy patient's liver.
That situation parallels your 'justified' forced marriage really well - one person's quality of life, in exchange for several lives. If you allow one exchange, you must be fine with the other, right?

The negative utility of building a society where people are randomly murdered for their organs outweighs the positive utility of occasionally saving some extra lives.

[Dragonus45]

I may or may not have confused you with Dragonus, apologies if so. So you do think a forced marriage is wrong, even if it prevents war, yes?

Yes, I'm the one who said I was happy that the practice has largely died out but that it at least had purpose at places in time when marriage meant totally different things then it does now and generally preferable to war which was my example because its an extreme situation anyways and I think someone brought up Brave and the example stuck in my mind. Which marriages between families didn't really stop in the long term anyways. Its mostly just me challenging the idea that the practice had universally no merit. I also made a few comments saying that the comics arranged marriage being a result of Hilgya having had some wrong committed of the shotgun wedding variety made as much sense as any other option since we know nothing other then her own unreliable narration and her seduction of Durkon reading very much like a gender swapped version of the kind of thing that would get you in front of an alter in the first place. Personally I find it unlikely and that the crossbow wedding was just a visual gag that we are looking to far into. Personally I liked a theory I heard that this clan oriented wedding was just some parents pushing kids towards each other with dwarven subtlety and Hilgya's persecution complex has over time warped it into a massive ordeal where she was forced in at gunpoint and had to flee her entire society that she already didn't like all that much to escape. Or not, The Giant is tricky that way. But that theory makes about as much sense as any other.

[RatElemental]

Alternate thought experiment - there are six dying people in hospital who need different organs. I could, in secret, kill someone (instantly and painlessly) who is compatible with all of them, steal that person's organs, and give them to the six people. Six lives for one is a great deal, and even if some of them don't take, we're probably saving three or four lives. Expected utility is almost certainly positive. This is something we could actually really do, but if anything people probably hate the idea more than Omelas.
Now, let's make the situation even better - suppose we can actually keep the healthy patient alive after they lose their organs. Their quality of life will plummet, but it won't quite be a fate worse than death. So expected utility is even more positive, but I'm betting you're still not going to get many doctors stealing a healthy patient's liver.
That situation parallels your 'justified' forced marriage really well - one person's quality of life, in exchange for several lives. If you allow one exchange, you must be fine with the other, right?

When I first heard of this thought experiment, the person who would be doing the killing and harvesting of organs was explicitly a doctor, and the victim a random backpacker who stopped in for a check up. I know these caveats were not there in the version you just proposed, but I'm going to assume that at least the person doing this is a doctor, otherwise their chances of succeeding are rather slim.

I for one think the murder is not justified, and part of the reason (aside from the violation of the victim's autonomy) is that it would be a violation of the doctor's oath to do no harm, and a violation of the patient's trust in the doctor. That oath exists for a reason, which is to allow patients to be able to put their lives in the hands of a doctor and be able to trust them with it. Every violation of such an oath cheapens it, and sours the relationship between patients and doctors a little more should it be discovered, making it just the little bit harder for doctors acting in good faith to provide the care their patients need.

It is difficult to calculate just how much damage the act of killing that patient will cause, to more than just that one individual.

[Fyraltari]

HEY!!! How DARE you???

I would never, EVER say Maybe it's violence.

How DARE you attack my reputation this way?

The video is called "Always the Answer" though.
I wanted to use Shoot All Your Problems Away at first, but the last second joke changes the meaning of the video so it didn't work as well.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I haven't heard anything about that, where does that happen? Wouldn't that lead to only every other house having insurance?

It did indeed. The logic was: if a house next to one you insure is on fire, it makes sense to put out that fire gratis, because it is cheaper to do that than to wait for the fire to extend, then try to put out the fire of the house you do insure, and then pay for whatever repairs are needed in said house.

Which lead to, as you spotted, the perverse incentive that it was better to buy a house next to an insured one than an insured one, because you got fire insurance for free. Such perverse incentive is the reason why private fire insurance turns out to be a terrible idea in practice.

I don't know the status of your block list, but there were definitely people up thread actively contrivance situations in which forced marriage is an acceptable thing for the clan to do.

I probably missed the ones that did, it seems. That said, dwarven knowledge of consequences of non-honarable conduct being what it is, there are fairly clear scenarios were forcing a marriage (assuming that an enforced marriage is honorable, a statement which I can't imagine being true, but as per canon, nevertheless we probably need to take as a given), would be better (better, but still not good) than the alternative. But only because dwarven society doesn't concern itself with what is Good or Evil, but what is honorable (I'm expanding on this concept a whiles down the post).

My position is that society is compromise, but that society should not curtail rights beyond what is strictly necessary. My position is further that bodily autonomy is much, much more inviolable than property rights.

I would argue that, for example, taxation and fines are perfectly acceptable, because money and goods are rarely obtained in isolation from the benefits proved by society at large, and so society has a "claim" to some portion of them in the form of taxes, as well as the right to demand restitution in the form of a fine if someone has acted in a harmful way.

Money (and therefore possessions obtained through interchange of money) are a subset of autonomy, though: money can be described as labour hours: time an individual voluntarily exchanged their autonomy for. Taking money from an individual is consequentially the same as preventing them from earning said money in the first place. In fact, from the perspective of the person whose money is taken, they might have preferred to be put in jail for the equivalent amount of time than being "double punished": they still had to work, but did not retain the fruit of their labours. So I can't draw a distinction between curtailing bodily autonomy and forced repossession of property: they are at their core two different expressions of the same forced activity - taxing and jailing are identical violations of an individual's liberty (as is indeed forced conscription).

(This of course doesn't apply to inherited money, a reason why it takes a lot of special pleading to oppose inheritance tax).

To be clear: despite all that, I draw a line at forced sexual activities (amongst others, torture being the next one off the top of my head). Which thinking about it I can't actually put into words. It just feels wrong, and I'm fine with going with my gut rather than attempting to thread the logic of it.

I would argue, conversely, that society has little to no right to someone's body or to control non-harmful personal relationships. A society which 'needs' two people to get married whether they want it or not is one that's failed in its duties to its citizens and is deeply flawed.

You'll get no argument from me that dwarven society is horribly, deeply flawed, because of Loki's bet. It is a society in a constant, never-ending defensive crouch. I just saw someone post a "what race would you want to be in OotS" thread that opens with "dwarves" and all I could think is "only someone that hasn't though through the implications of being a dwarf in OotS could possibly want to be one". And that stings, because I personally love dwarves, and I can't enjoy them in OotS, because none of the characteristics I price in dwarves are freely chosen: they are a necessity of the stupid wager. All their autonomy was taken away from them by Loki, Hel and (marginally) Thor, and I hate that that is the case.

Disclaimer: I'm not a philosophy student, so I'm about to butcher Kant, but what little I got from having to study philosophy is a discussion about Pascal's Wager and Kant's imperative. If you only do something good because you want to avoid a bad consequence, can you really be said to be good? My conclusion was no, for the same reason that Kant said that doing the right thing when you wanted to do it anyway is not actually a notch in your belt, so to speak: it is only when you act against your own actual wishes to do good that it "counts".

By that logic, the dwarves are prevented from ever doing True Good. They act they way the do because the alternative is millenia of torture. Every action they take is taken with a loaded gun to their head, and if they pick wrong, the gun will go off. Pretending anything they do is moral is ludicrous: not a single one of them has actual autonomy to speak of.

I think that the idea that losing property is preferable to losing bodily autonomy is a fairly widespread one - would you rather lose a kidney or a hundred dollars, for example?

That's hardly a fair comparison. A kidney is worth a hell of a lot more than $100. If you offered to give me, say, $10M, I'd probably chose the kidney.

For this, I do apologize, sincerely. I read this thread on mobile while half asleep this morning and misunderstood the context of your post. I took the juxtaposition as you comparing forced marriages to being drafted into the military, E.G. as something that the clan/society has a right to enforce if it's needful. I missed context and thought you were espousing a position you were not, and for that I apologize.

Fair enough. As will be obvious a bit ways down, it's not like I was blameless.

We can discuss it, but I don't know that I'd call the fact that a woman was in that position in the first place consistent with a Lawful Good society, which was how this whole conversation got started in the first place.

OK, there's our biggest disconnect. I would never agree that dwarven society is Good. It is extremely Lawful, certainly (with the caveats above about lack of actual choice in the matter), but I don't think it concerns itself with the Good/Evil axis. I wouldn't even call it Neutral, it needs a different orthogonal axis for Honorable/Dishonorable, which does not and cannot be mapped to Good/Evil.

Look. I don't think arranged marriages are a good idea. But I want to draw a distinction between one where someone says "yeah, sure" and one where someone says "NO" and is then forced into it anyway, and that involves acknowledging that at least consensual arranged marriages have a consensual basis.

Leaving aside I suspect participant consent isn't required in dwarven marriages, agreed. I'd point out, again, that arranged marriages can be a good idea for the families as a whole while being terrible for their participants.

What??? At what point did I "piss on women who chose the lesser of two evils"?

I'm sorry: I was completely out of line here, and I should've removed it on edit. I myself wasn't posting from the calmest possible position, but that is only an explanation, not an excuse. It was hyperbolic, and worse, stupid of me to say this. Please do accept my apologies.

Then I misremembered and do apologize. For the sake of further use, what are your pronouns?

They/them. Or GW/GW's, like with V.

Grey Wolf

[azaph]

The negative utility of building a society where people are randomly murdered for their organs outweighs the positive utility of occasionally saving some extra lives.

in secret

Only if you get caught.

When I first heard of this thought experiment, the person who would be doing the killing and harvesting of organs was explicitly a doctor, and the victim a random backpacker who stopped in for a check up. I know these caveats were not there in the version you just proposed, but I'm going to assume that at least the person doing this is a doctor, otherwise their chances of succeeding are rather slim.

I for one think the murder is not justified, and part of the reason (aside from the violation of the victim's autonomy) is that it would be a violation of the doctor's oath to do no harm, and a violation of the patient's trust in the doctor. That oath exists for a reason, which is to allow patients to be able to put their lives in the hands of a doctor and be able to trust them with it. Every violation of such an oath cheapens it, and sours the relationship between patients and doctors a little more should it be discovered, making it just the little bit harder for doctors acting in good faith to provide the care their patients need.

It is difficult to calculate just how much damage the act of killing that patient will cause, to more than just that one individual.

Again, only if you get caught.
Also, doesn't have to be a doctor.
Just 'arrange' for someone to die of 'natural causes' in a hospital with their organ donor card on the table beside them. I'm reasonably confident the hospital will know what to do.
There's actually a very specific reason I didn't say doctor, which is that there is a second version of the argument where you are an individual with healthy organs, and there is a hospital you could travel to which needs those organs.

Yes, I'm the one who said I was happy that the practice has largely died out but that it at least had purpose at places in time when marriage meant totally different things then it does now and generally preferable to war

Fair. I did get ye mixed up then. Sorry.


EDIT:

Money (and therefore possessions obtained through interchange of money) are a subset of autonomy, though: money can be described as labour hours: time an individual voluntarily exchanged their autonomy for. Taking money from an individual is consequentially the same as preventing them from earning said money in the first place. In fact, from the perspective of the person whose money is taken, they might have preferred to be put in jail for the equivalent amount of time than being "double punished": they still had to work, but did not retain the fruit of their labours. So I can't draw a distinction between curtailing bodily autonomy and forced repossession of property: they are at their core two different expressions of the same forced activity - taxing and jailing are identical violations of an individual's liberty (as is indeed forced conscription).

(This of course doesn't apply to inherited money, a reason why it takes a lot of special pleading to oppose inheritance tax).

Nooooooope. Nope nope nope nope.
Alllll of my nope.
I'll reply with my usual um... verbosity... later, just wanted to register extreme disagreement.

Disclaimer: I'm not a philosophy student, so I'm about to butcher Kant, but what little I got from having to study philosophy is a discussion about Pascal's Wager and Kant's imperative. If you only do something good because you want to avoid a bad consequence, can you really be said to be good? My conclusion was no, for the same reason that Kant said that doing the right thing when you wanted to do it anyway is not actually a notch in your belt, so to speak: it is only when you act against your own actual wishes to do good that it "counts".

That's not quite accurate - Kant's point was that if 'the right thing' was what you enjoyed anyway, we couldn't know if you were doing it out of duty or because you enjoyed it. Wheras when duty says you have to do something you hate, it's easier to tell that you're doing it because it's your duty.
Which is important, because it means your next point doesn't quite follow.
(TBF, Kant himself wasn't that clear on the topic)

[King of Nowhere]

You'll get no argument from me that dwarven society is horribly, deeply flawed, because of Loki's bet. It is a society in a constant, never-ending defensive crouch. I just saw someone post a "what race would you want to be in OotS" thread that opens with "dwarves" and all I could think is "only someone that hasn't though through the implications of being a dwarf in OotS could possibly want to be one". And that stings, because I personally love dwarves, and I can't enjoy them in OotS, because none of the characteristics I price in dwarves are freely chosen: they are a necessity of the stupid wager. All their autonomy was taken away from them by Loki, Hel and (marginally) Thor, and I hate that that is the case.

Disclaimer: I'm not a philosophy student, so I'm about to butcher Kant, but what little I got from having to study philosophy is a discussion about Pascal's Wager and Kant's imperative. If you only do something good because you want to avoid a bad consequence, can you really be said to be good? My conclusion was no, for the same reason that Kant said that doing the right thing when you wanted to do it anyway is not actually a notch in your belt, so to speak: it is only when you act against your own actual wishes to do good that it "counts".

that can be said of anyone in oots, as they will be sent to the lower planes if they misbehave. Heck, it can be said also of many real world religion.
For society, it is a necessary curtailing of personal freedom; society can only function if a large majority abides by certain rules, and while some will certainly abide just because they find those rules right, they won't be enough. So society must set up a convoluted system of incentives and a straigthforward system of punishments to make sure that even people who don't give a damn will behave because it's in their best interest.
It makes it awfully difficult to judge someone based purely on their actions, though.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

that can be said of anyone in oots, as they will be sent to the lower planes if they misbehave.

No, it cannot, because in all other cases their actions place them in the appropriate plane, while the dwarves must make good and evil subservient to honorable. You can't say that "the dwarves are immoral because their actions are immoral" like you can of, say, Xykon, because they don't get to participate in a fair system in which they are allowed free will to screw up their lives and deal with the fair consequences of it. They don't get to go to an afterlife where they fit best, they get to be tortured for millenia by Hel. Holding them to the same moral standards as you would others in the setting is nonsensical. It is the same way that we allow far greater moral latitude to people in extreme situations - i.e. people that steal supplies during war, or that descend to cannibalism in a famish. It is understood that when the circumstances are grave enough, morals can't be measured the same than in what we may call "regular" circumstances. Well, for dwarves, they don't get regular.

And this is assuming that lower planes are indeed a punishment. It doesn't necessarily mean that it is - Belkar may end up in an eternal battle for his life that to, say, Haley would be a horrible fate but that Belkar will take as the greatest fun challenge he has ever faced, and go full Shoeless God on everything in his path.

Grey Wolf

[Keltest]

No, it cannot, because in all other cases their actions place them in the appropriate plane, while the dwarves must make good and evil subservient to honorable. You can't say that "the dwarves are immoral because their actions are immoral" like you can of, say, Xykon, because they don't get to participate in a fair system in which they are allowed free will to screw up their lives and deal with the fair consequences of it. They don't get to go to an afterlife where they fit best, they get to be tortured for millenia by Hel. Holding them to the same moral standards as you would others in the setting is nonsensical. It is the same way that we allow far greater moral latitude to people in extreme situations - i.e. people that steal supplies during war, or that descend to cannibalism in a famish. It is understood that when the circumstances are grave enough, morals can't be measured the same than in what we may call "regular" circumstances. Well, for dwarves, they don't get regular.

And this is assuming that lower planes are indeed a punishment. It doesn't necessarily mean that it is - Belkar may end up in an eternal battle for his life that to, say, Haley would be a horrible fate but that Belkar will take as the greatest fun challenge he has ever faced, and go full Shoeless God on everything in his path.

Grey Wolf

I want to agree with you here, but given that Hel seems to have been cheated of the majority of the dwarven souls she would otherwise be getting, dying with honor doesn't seem like something that a lot of dwarves have to go terribly out of their way to do. Its only the really selfish chaotic evil dwarves like Hilgya who actively run away from all their responsibilities and problems that would have to curb their natural behavior to any significant degree.

[Kantaki]

that can be said of anyone in oots, as they will be sent to the lower planes if they misbehave.

The difference being that a dwarf can be the living embodiment of all that is Good and still end up with Hel for no fault on their own.

Besides, for someone Evil the lower planes aren't necessarily a punishment.
I strongly doubt Hilgya for example would have a particularly worse time wherever she ends up for serving Loki than Durkon would have in Thor's realm.
But both would end up equally miserable for the „crime” of dying the wrong way.

Or take Belkar. Do you really think he would see the Abyss as a punishment?
Dude would've the time of his life. Death. Whatever. Point is he would enjoy it.

Okay, Tarquin might hate the Nine Hells, but only because he won't start on top.
But let's face it, he would still consider it a situation he can work with.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I want to agree with you here, but given that Hel seems to have been cheated of the majority of the dwarven souls she would otherwise be getting, dying with honor doesn't seem like something that a lot of dwarves have to go terribly out of their way to do. Its only the really selfish chaotic evil dwarves like Hilgya who actively run away from all their responsibilities and problems that would have to curb their natural behavior to any significant degree.

I mean, I cannot prove it either way, but the impression I get from Rich's post on the subject is that most dwarves do go out of the way indeed to get out of Hel's clutches - that the reason dwarves act like stereotypical dwarves in OotS is not because they are stereotypical dwarves, but because despite their natural inclination, only by acting like stereotypical dwarves do they stand a chance to avoid Hel. Their entire culture is built around going out of the way to act the way they must - that it is not in their nature to stereotypical dwarves but that pretty much all learn from the start to go through the motions because the alternative is worse in every way.

GW

[Keltest]

I mean, I cannot prove it either way, but the impression I get from Rich's post on the subject is that most dwarves do go out of the way indeed to get out of Hel's clutches - that the reason dwarves act like stereotypical dwarves in OotS is not because they are stereotypical dwarves, but because despite their natural inclination, only by acting like stereotypical dwarves do they stand a chance to avoid Hel. Their entire culture is built around going out of the way to act the way they must - that it is not in their nature to stereotypical dwarves but that pretty much all learn from the start to go through the motions because the alternative is worse in every way.

GW

Didn't Rich say that many dwarves felt that going out of their way to die honorably instead of just acting like themselves was in itself dishonorable (gaming the system), and therefore just trusted that when their time came, the gods would give them the opportunity?

Edit: yeah, here we go.

[Lacuna Caster]

No, it cannot, because in all other cases their actions place them in the appropriate plane, while the dwarves must make good and evil subservient to honorable. You can't say that "the dwarves are immoral because their actions are immoral" like you can of, say, Xykon, because they don't get to participate in a fair system in which they are allowed free will to screw up their lives and deal with the fair consequences of it.

Besides, for someone Evil the lower planes aren't necessarily a punishment... ...Or take Belkar. Do you really think he would see the Abyss as a punishment?

Look, I know that Sabine and the IFCC give the impression of the lower planes being one giant rowdy frat party with maybe some casual backstabbing for fun, but in standard D&D, even imps like Qar represent a best-case career path enjoyed by maybe 0.001% of the inhabitants.

Evil afterlives typically offer you the choice of being boiled down to a vacuous, suggestible husk of your former self- and I'm not using 'boil' as any kind of metaphor- or being the spiritual equivalent of marine snow in a cold, dark place filled with creatures that are mostly mouth. It's called the Abyss for a reason, folks.

The only ones who really benefit from serving evil are either intelligent undead or those who manage to become demons-in-good-standing before they die. For anyone else, it's a lousy deal.

[AstralFire]

I have confidence in Mr. Burlew as a writer, but if it were most other writers doing this right now, I'd be incredibly dismayed by what I'm seeing of Hilgya so far. Not dismayed enough to stop reading in 3 pages, but it's not a promising start.

[azaph]

Money (and therefore possessions obtained through interchange of money) are a subset of autonomy, though: money can be described as labour hours: time an individual voluntarily exchanged their autonomy for. Taking money from an individual is consequentially the same as preventing them from earning said money in the first place. In fact, from the perspective of the person whose money is taken, they might have preferred to be put in jail for the equivalent amount of time than being "double punished": they still had to work, but did not retain the fruit of their labours. So I can't draw a distinction between curtailing bodily autonomy and forced repossession of property: they are at their core two different expressions of the same forced activity - taxing and jailing are identical violations of an individual's liberty (as is indeed forced conscription).

(This of course doesn't apply to inherited money, a reason why it takes a lot of special pleading to oppose inheritance tax).

I wish I had a TLJ clip to link.
I'm guessing you know the one.
Economic philosophy:

1. Inheritance: If money is an expression of bodily autonomy, you should be able to do what you want with it (if what you're doing isn't itself a bad thing), yes? Which would include giving it away, yes? To charity, as Christmas gifts... or to your chlldren as you die. If money is about autonomy, so is bequeathing it as inheritance.
2. Labour hours: Money cannot, in fact, be defined as labour-hours, for two reasons. Firstly, because the same amount of labour over the same time period often translates into different amounts of money. Secondly because there are ways to obtain money from things other than labour. Gambling, for example. Finding a rock on the ground in an unexplored cave that turns out to be a diamond. Being the benificiary of a charity. Money simply doesn't translate into labour-hours in any consistent way - it's a convenient way to avoid having to use the barter system the whole time.
3. The Problem of Original Ownership: If you buy stolen goods, they don't become yours. In fact, in general if you agree to pay someone for something they don't own in the first place, it doesn't become yours. Which means that goods obtained by paying for them are only 'yours' if the person you paid for them owned them to start with. Since in most settings there is a time before everything was owned, you need a way for something to become owned. Which doesn't obviously exist.
4. Social contract theory: I said the social contract was bunk. But that's because it requires people to agree who clearly don't. The advantage of a property based social contract is that you only need agreement once - the people in the society agree that the government has some ownership rights over their property. However that property is subsequently changes ownership, only the part the government doesn't own will change ownership. This one is even better if you argue that inheritance tax is justified - the government can take partial ownership of property when it's inherited and only actually take posession of it over time.
5. Money creation: Since money is ultimately government issued, it is within their rights to retain rights over it as part of the agreement in which they give it to someone else. Alternately, it is possible to see it as inherently 'perishable', and taxes as being built into the nature of fiat money the same way 'going bad' is part of the nature of milk. When one agrees to a transaction involving fiat money, one agrees to give the issuer of that money a part of what they got out of the transaction as a kind of 'service fee' for permission to use the convenience of fiat currency. If you don't want to, you can use the barter system, or invent your own currency. Or just don't make any transactions. In either case, the creation of the money strictly increases the number of free agreements available between individuals, and thus increases your autonomy.
6. Double counting: You're not compelled to work, it's a free agreement. Even if everything else you said was true, we'd only be talking about a single punishment (losing your rightful money), the work would still just be legitimate activity.

Is that enough to be getting on with? Because I wasn't exaggerating, literally every statement in the part of the post I quoted is wrong. It's arguably impressive.

[King of Nowhere]

I wish I had a TLJ clip to link.
I'm guessing you know the one.
Economic philosophy:

1. *snip*

Is that enough to be getting on with? Because I wasn't exaggerating, literally every statement in the part of the post I quoted is wrong. It's arguably impressive.

Those seem like obfuscating nitpicks, though. Or maybe stuff that relates to big corporations. Theoretical stuff with little bearing to the life of most people.

To the vast majority of people, it is as grey wolf said. People take orders to do stuff from others, they get money for it. They can use that money to make other people do stuff for them. Generally you buy the product of labor, and not the labor itself, but it doesn't change the fact. You work for some time, earn X money. You buy some good, that other people worked X time to produce. Money is, within a reasonable approximation, equivalent to work.

Money cannot, in fact, be defined as labour-hours, for two reasons. Firstly, because the same amount of labour over the same time period often translates into different amounts of money.

I don't see why that's relevant. Depending on economic situation, availability of labor, and bargaining skill of the involved parts, the same labor may be paid differently. Doesn't mean it's unrelated.

Secondly because there are ways to obtain money from things other than labour. Gambling, for example. Finding a rock on the ground in an unexplored cave that turns out to be a diamond.

Those are very minor ways to earn money. Anyway, extracting minerals still requires work from those involved; you spet time to go search for those valuable rocks. While gambling doesn't earn anything, it's mostly a bunch of people who agree to exchange their money based on some random games.
Now, I'm sure you can find better exceptions, or ways to overcome those objections, but still, the main point is that for the vast majority of people, in the vast majority of circumstances, money is equal to time spent working, and no amount of theory will change that.

You're not compelled to work, it's a free agreement

Sure. You're not compelled to eat, either. But if you want to do the second, you've got to do the first.

In fact, regardless of what economical theory says, my favourite definition of work is the one given by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert:

work is anything you'd rather not do.

People would rather not get up and go to the factory, but they do it because they are paid to do it.
Even people who like their job don't like it enough to do it for free. At least, I've met a lot of people who like their jobs (I'm one of those myself) but none who would still go work 40 hours per week if there wasn't money (or the hope of money) involved. Heck, even if you like your work, having to do it 40 hours per week or more, without much saying on what exactly you'll do, or when you'll do it, or with whom you'll do it, is enough to make it unpleasant. Even if you love your job enough that it's still pleasurable to you regardless of it, you still need to earn a living, so you could not afford to work for free because that would take all the time you otherwise need to make money. So you still would rather not to the job, even if you genuinely wanted to, because you don't have the time. Even if one can find some contrived exception, it's still such a little specific case that it doesn't invalidate the general theory. Working means doing something you'd rather not do with the epectation of being paid for it.
So you do stuff you don't want to do in exchange for an abstract form of compensation that you can offer other people to make them do stuff they'd rather not do, so that you won't have to do that stuff yourself. There's just so much beautiful simplicity in it.
Sure, people can steal, scam, ask charity, but a whole society cannot be based on that. Society is based on division of labor - one of the main steps in going from tribal organization to a more advanced society - and division of labor basically means that one person produces a speficific good/service for many other people. This requires then that those people may exchange the product of their work so that everyone can fulfill all their needs, which are many. So currency evolved as a way to exchange working time, in the form of the product of such work.
We built a lot of other structures on top of it, because once humans made the system, they went on looking for new ways to use/exploit it, but at its core, stripped of all modern trappings and paraphernalia, currency still is mmostly used as a way to exchange work.

So being fined for one the equivalent of a daily wage and being forced to work a day for no wage, is pretty much the same thing.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I wish I had a TLJ clip to link.
I'm guessing you know the one.

No, I don't.

Inheritance: If money is an expression of bodily autonomy, you should be able to do what you want with it (if what you're doing isn't itself a bad thing), yes? Which would include giving it away, yes? To charity, as Christmas gifts... or to your chlldren as you die. If money is about autonomy, so is bequeathing it as inheritance.

Irrelevant. The person receiving it didn't earn it.

Labour hours: Money cannot, in fact, be defined as labour-hours, for two reasons. Firstly, because the same amount of labour over the same time period often translates into different amounts of money. Secondly because there are ways to obtain money from things other than labour. Gambling, for example. Finding a rock on the ground in an unexplored cave that turns out to be a diamond. Being the benificiary of a charity. Money simply doesn't translate into labour-hours in any consistent way - it's a convenient way to avoid having to use the barter system the whole time.

Irrelevant. Just because different levels of effort or skill results in different amounts of money doesn't mean I don't see money as an expression of effort and skill. And yes, sometimes low-skill low-effort work has a significantly higher pay-out than you, it seems, deems "fair". It is irrelevant, because the world isn't fair.

The Problem of Original Ownership: If you buy stolen goods, they don't become yours. In fact, in general if you agree to pay someone for something they don't own in the first place, it doesn't become yours. Which means that goods obtained by paying for them are only 'yours' if the person you paid for them owned them to start with. Since in most settings there is a time before everything was owned, you need a way for something to become owned. Which doesn't obviously exist.

Irrelevant, as in: I don't see what this has to do with my position, and you did a poor job of explaining it. Most money is earnt by performing work.

Social contract theory: I said the social contract was bunk. But that's because it requires people to agree who clearly don't. The advantage of a property based social contract is that you only need agreement once - the people in the society agree that the government has some ownership rights over their property. However that property is subsequently changes ownership, only the part the government doesn't own will change ownership. This one is even better if you argue that inheritance tax is justified - the government can take partial ownership of property when it's inherited and only actually take posession of it over time.

I disagree.

Money creation: Since money is ultimately government issued, it is within their rights to retain rights over it as part of the agreement in which they give it to someone else. Alternately, it is possible to see it as inherently 'perishable', and taxes as being built into the nature of fiat money the same way 'going bad' is part of the nature of milk. When one agrees to a transaction involving fiat money, one agrees to give the issuer of that money a part of what they got out of the transaction as a kind of 'service fee' for permission to use the convenience of fiat currency. If you don't want to, you can use the barter system, or invent your own currency. Or just don't make any transactions. In either case, the creation of the money strictly increases the number of free agreements available between individuals, and thus increases your autonomy.

Irrelevant to my thesis.

Double counting: You're not compelled to work, it's a free agreement. Even if everything else you said was true, we'd only be talking about a single punishment (losing your rightful money), the work would still just be legitimate activity.

You agree to work in exchange for money. Working for no money is not desirable for the great majority of the population. Arguably, working for no money is not working at all.

Is that enough to be getting on with? Because I wasn't exaggerating, literally every statement in the part of the post I quoted is wrong. It's arguably impressive.

Oh, It's enough, but not because you have in any way disputed my claim, but because I know what you are going to say, I've had the conversation already, and I'm not interested in repeating it.

To be clear: I am not interested in discussing with you whether or not money is equivalent to effort. First, because its off-topic and worse, boring. Also, as far as I am concerned, it is, for all practical purposes, and nothing you have said above in any way contradicts it.

Didn't Rich say that many dwarves felt that going out of their way to die honorably instead of just acting like themselves was in itself dishonorable (gaming the system), and therefore just trusted that when their time came, the gods would give them the opportunity?

Edit: yeah, here we go.

As far as I can see, that only refers to dwarves suiciding to ensure a honorable death the moment they are old enough to understand that that'd get them out of Hel's claws. That most dwarves DON'T go out to pick a fight with an elm the moment they can hold a weapon, because they'd consider that cheating. But that very post is the one I'm referring to when I say that most dwarves behave not in a manner consisting with free will, but in a constrained "stereotypical" dwarfish way that renders a lot of the arguments about whether what they do is "good" or "evil" mostly irrelevant, because as far as they are concerned, being good is not as crucial to their overall existence as being honorable.

Which, to tie it to what I was talking about: lots of people are trying to pass moral judgement on Hilgya's clan's forcing her to marry. Which, you know, fine, whatever. My point is that when doing so, you can't simply ignore that good or bad (and it is most definitely bad), that wasn't their priority. There is no need to posit "maybe they did it because it would prevent a war", because we need to posit "maybe they did it because it was the honorable thing to do, even if it was Evil". Because that's just how screwed Dwarven civilization is.

Look, I know that Sabine and the IFCC give the impression of the lower planes being one giant rowdy frat party with maybe some casual backstabbing for fun, but in standard D&D, even imps like Qar represent a best-case career path enjoyed by maybe 0.001% of the inhabitants.

Let me remind you of your evidence for that assertion: Xykon saying he'd do anything to avoid the fires below. Xykon. The guy with literally no knowledge about anything bookish, and who we know was turned into a lich not because he was trying to avoid death but because RC tricked him into it.

On the opposite corner, we have actual (if crayon) look into the actual Evil Dark One's realm, and I saw no torture, no pain. Just "join your god's army".

So I think I am confident is saying that the jury's still out on what kind of afterlife Belkar will get.

GW

[Lacuna Caster]

Let me remind you of your evidence for that assertion: Xykon saying he'd do anything to avoid the fires below. Xykon. The guy with literally no knowledge about anything bookish, and who we know was turned into a lich not because he was trying to avoid death but because RC tricked him into it.

On the opposite corner, we have actual (if crayon) look into the actual Evil Dark One's realm, and I saw no torture, no pain. Just "join your god's army".

I'm not saying that the standard setup in D&D necessarily applies anywhere and everywhere in OOTS. It is, however, fair to suggest that most intelligent beings in OOTSverse have divine patrons that impose certain standards of conduct on their followers, with the risk of being lost or damned should they fall short of said standards. The dwarves (and perhaps goblins) just have different standards. I'm not saying that's an ideal arrangement, but it's not not coercive.

Xykon never outright says he was hoping to avoid damnation prior to getting lichified, but that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't a concern. A more valid question is what, say, Tarquin was looking forward to.

[Fyraltari]

No, I don't.

Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, half smiling calmly stating: "Impressive. Every word you just said... was wrong." It happened at two important moments in the film. It has meme potential, I would say.

Let me remind you of your evidence for that assertion: Xykon saying he'd do anything to avoid the fires below. Xykon. The guy with literally no knowledge about anything bookish, and who we know was turned into a lich not because he was trying to avoid death but because RC tricked him into it.

On the opposite corner, we have actual (if crayon) look into the actual Evil Dark One's realm, and I saw no torture, no pain. Just "join your god's army".

Hell is still a terrible place in the sense that you are stuck with all the bastards. There's a description of Hell and Paradise that I like : Hell is a long table with the most delicious food you can imagine on it. Every guest must eat with special cutlery tied to their hands that are too long to reach their own mouth. Heaven is the exact same. In Hell they are hungry, in Paradise they are not.

How funny do you think Belkar will find it when he gets stabbed/beheaded/fed his own innards ?

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Not at all.

Sure the one on top of the food chain may like it but everybody else doesn't. And there's always a bigger fish.

We don't know the first thing about the Hobgoblin army of the Dead. Maybe everybody gets whipped ten times a day.

So I think I am confident is saying that the jury's still out on what kind of afterlife Belkar will get.

True. They even have charts.

[Jasdoif]

To be clear: despite all that, I draw a line at forced sexual activities (amongst others, torture being the next one off the top of my head). Which thinking about it I can't actually put into words. It just feels wrong, and I'm fine with going with my gut rather than attempting to thread the logic of it.

Probably because they intentionally undermine a person's autonomy, by going after their biology instead.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Probably because they intentionally undermine a person's autonomy, by going after their biology instead.

Yeah, but so does putting them in jail. So it can't be the restriction of the person's autonomy. But as I said, I'm fine with trusting my gut when it says "rape and torture are worse than incarceration". I don't feel the need to figure out why at this moment in time.

GW

[Vinyadan]

Xykon never says that he became a lich to avoid Big Fire Below. He says that those who used certain tricks to avoid it were chumps who didn't have the balls to stay in the game. He insults them, because they are OK with complete loss of agency to avoid getting hurt. Also, he performs a nice foreshadowing talking about the vampires. (652)

As for the reasons why he became a lich, well, I don't see trickery.

[Keltest]

As far as I can see, that only refers to dwarves suiciding to ensure a honorable death the moment they are old enough to understand that that'd get them out of Hel's claws. That most dwarves DON'T go out to pick a fight with an elm the moment they can hold a weapon, because they'd consider that cheating. But that very post is the one I'm referring to when I say that most dwarves behave not in a manner consisting with free will, but in a constrained "stereotypical" dwarfish way that renders a lot of the arguments about whether what they do is "good" or "evil" mostly irrelevant, because as far as they are concerned, being good is not as crucial to their overall existence as being honorable.

Which, to tie it to what I was talking about: lots of people are trying to pass moral judgement on Hilgya's clan's forcing her to marry. Which, you know, fine, whatever. My point is that when doing so, you can't simply ignore that good or bad (and it is most definitely bad), that wasn't their priority. There is no need to posit "maybe they did it because it would prevent a war", because we need to posit "maybe they did it because it was the honorable thing to do, even if it was Evil". Because that's just how screwed Dwarven civilization is.

I mean, he explicitly says that many dwarves probably live their lives the way they want, and just trust that the gods will give them an opportunity to die with honor when their time comes. That certainly seems to suggest that dwarves really just are that way by nature.

[Kantaki]

Xykon never says that he became a lich to avoid Big Fire Below. He says that those who used certain tricks to avoid it were chumps who didn't have the balls to stay in the game. He insults them, because they are OK with complete loss of agency to avoid getting hurt. Also, he performs a nice foreshadowing talking about the vampires. (652)

To quote Luke Skywalker: Impressive. Every word you just said... was wrong.

Xykon pretty much says the exact opposite.

Oh, you poor, dumb elf. Don't you get it? Be a Vampire, or a ghost, or an immortal with a paint-by-numbers portrait in the rec room. Hell, even a brain-in-a-jar in a pinch. Anything to avoid the Big Fire Below. So what this tells me is-

-you're channeling the "raw unlimited power" of two chumps who didn't have the balls to stay in the game.

What big X is saying is that the souls V is using are loosers for not employing those measures to stay "in the game".
So either he doesn't know how vampires work or he thinks being passenger in your own head is better than dying for real.

Okay, he's not explicitly saying that that's the reason for his extreme diet, but he strongly implies it.

[theNater]

Irrelevant. Just because different levels of effort or skill results in different amounts of money doesn't mean I don't see money as an expression of effort and skill. And yes, sometimes low-skill low-effort work has a significantly higher pay-out than you, it seems, deems "fair". It is irrelevant, because the world isn't fair.

It's relevant because it means that some portion of the money a person receives for their work is due to random factors, rather than to their effort and skill. Taking the luck-based portion of that is not interfering with their autonomy any more than taking an inheritance is.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

It's relevant because it means that some portion of the money a person receives for their work is due to random factors, rather than to their effort and skill. Taking the luck-based portion of that is not interfering with their autonomy any more than taking an inheritance is.

And since that part, if it exists at all, is vanishingly small in everyday life, I feel it is irrelevant. Unless you know a lot of people who make their money from randomly finding diamond in caves when they're not paid to go into caves looking for diamonds. Labour is subject to supply and demand, and unfair as that is, randomness is not involved to any significant degree.

GW

[Kish]

I mean, he explicitly says that many dwarves probably live their lives the way they want, and just trust that the gods will give them an opportunity to die with honor when their time comes. That certainly seems to suggest that dwarves really just are that way by nature.

This is what he said.

Knowledge: Religion is cross-class for Xykon and a subject he's never shown any interest in, including the part of it that deals with the undead even though he is one; how vampires work is something even most clerics have been shown not to understand.

It is a fact that Xykon made no efforts to prolong his existence in any way; it was all Redcloak and he had to be talked into going along with it. As for whether he strongly and unambiguously implied that part of what made him so mighty was his supposed refusal to accept death, well, apparently opinions on that can differ.

[Vinyadan]

To quote Luke Skywalker: Impressive. Every word you just said... was wrong.

Xykon pretty much says the exact opposite.



What big X is saying is that the souls V is using are loosers for not employing those measures to stay "in the game".
So either he doesn't know how vampires work or he thinks being passenger in your own head is better than dying for real.

Okay, he's not explicitly saying that that's the reason for his extreme diet, but he strongly implies it.

The reasons for the diet were in SoD.

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To regain his magic and use it to escape a prison. Those were very contingent reasons. And, before meeting Redcloak, his problem with getting old was (as he said) that he had had fun, but got no legacy. Even being a lich didn't make him care about long-term mortality, since he challenged Redcloak to smash the phylactery, because it wouldn't immediately kill him, in spite of it being his respawn machine if things got wrong.
Later Xykon protects the phylactery (with spells and trying to recover it). I don't think that he has changed the way he sees it. It's an asset to protect if it's worth it and it doesn't turn into a way for extorting stuff out of Xykon, like Redcloak tried to.

Otherwise, I think that your reading makes sense. The reason why it doesn't click well with me is that those two souls were about to get free to wander the world once again, as Mrs Necro had, and already were essentially avoiding the Fire.

[Kantaki]

The reasons for the diet were in SoD.

Otherwise, I think that your reading makes sense. The reason why it doesn't click well with me is that those two souls were about to get free to wander the world once again, as Mrs Necro had, and already were essentially avoiding the Fire.

I know, I've read Start of Darkness.
But just from the online strips- particularly #652 -it could be concluded he did in fact do it to escape the Big Fire Below.

As for the souls, without V's deal they would still be downstairs and even so they got a pretty limited time until the IFCC hunts them down again, nevermind that they can't even interact with the world.

So, Xykon has a point, minus the bit about vampires of course.

[azaph]

Irrelevant. The person receiving it didn't earn it.

The person recieving the money doesn't remotely matter. The person giving the money is having their autonomy restricted.

Irrelevant. Just because different levels of effort or skill results in different amounts of money doesn't mean I don't see money as an expression of effort and skill.

Great! I see money as an expression of velocity. I am also wrong.

And yes, sometimes low-skill low-effort work has a significantly higher pay-out than you, it seems, deems "fair". It is irrelevant, because the world isn't fair.

And I didn't use the word 'fair'. If one thing is an expression of another, there must be a definite way of converting between the two. If one thing can be described as another, there must in fact be a way of describing one in terms of the other. Velocity can be described as distance over time, so velocity can be expressed in terms of distance and time. There is no way to describe money purely in terms of labour and time. Therefore, money is not an expression of labour and time (nor of effort and skill for the same reasons). Premise, premise, conclusion - morality is irrelevant.

Irrelevant, as in: I don't see what this has to do with my position, and you did a poor job of explaining it. Most money is earnt by performing work.

'Most'? If even some money isn't earnt by performing work, then it is quite obviously not possible to describe money as labour hours, in the same way that it is not possible to describe a human as 'someone with two legs'.
That wasn't my point, however.
Imagine a newly created world with noone on it.
Obviously, nothing on it is owned.
Two people are created. It seems equally obvious that merely existing doesn't give them ownership of the world.
Now fast-forward a few thousand years. Everything in the world is now owned.
Many of these owned things existed in some form before anything was owned.
Therfore, at some point, unowned objects became owned.
The problem of orignial ownership is saying that without a compelling way for this to have happened, and given that you can't transfer property rights you don't have, everything is still unowned. Noone owns anything except themselves.
The most plausible origin for ownership, I would suggest, is that it is basically the same as what side of the road you drive on - a convenient agreement imposed by government because it has beneficial consequences.
If that is true, it follows that government need not allow this ownership to be absolute.
QED.
I underlined the bit you'll want to attack for simplicity.

I disagree.

With what? That things could be partially owned by the government, or that you can't give away things that you don't own?

Irrelevant to my thesis.

If your thesis is that it is that

taxing and jailing are identical violations of an individual's liberty

I find it hard to believe that an argument concluding "Therefore introducing money and taxing any transaction made using it is a strict increase in liberty" is not relevant, unless you think that jailing someone is also an increase in that person's liberty.

You agree to work in exchange for money. Working for no money is not desirable for the great majority of the population. Arguably, working for no money is not working at all.

What is and is not desirable for people isn't relevant. You have the ability to choose not to work, you chose to do so in exchange for money. That's not a violation of liberty, it's a free exchange you agreed to. Subsequently not being given that money is. But that's one violation, not two.

To be clear: I am not interested in discussing with you whether or not money is equivalent to effort. First, because its off-topic and worse, boring. Also, as far as I am concerned, it is, for all practical purposes, and nothing you have said above in any way contradicts it.

1. Don't make claims you won't defend.
2. In which case you don't understand what I've said. You can claim I'm wrong, but my conclusions definitely contradict you. I suggest you may be assuming I'm making arguments I'm not.
3. Since your thesis leads to the conclusion that forcing Hilgya to get married was qualitatively the same as taxing her, and most people think taxation isn't wrong, I'd say it's fairly relevant whether or not you are right.

Those seem like obfuscating nitpicks, though. Or maybe stuff that relates to big corporations. Theoretical stuff with little bearing to the life of most people.

I did say 'philosophy'.
I wasn't planning to say anything relevant to practical economics, simply to show that there is qualitative metaphysical distinction between property rights and personal rights which means that one can justifiably treat them differently.
Given that Grey Wolf was making an ethical argument, I don't think attacking that argument on metaphysical grounds is a nitpick (and whether or not taxation is OK does seem kind of relevant.)

To the vast majority of people, it is as grey wolf said. People take orders to do stuff from others, they get money for it. They can use that money to make other people do stuff for them. Generally you buy the product of labor, and not the labor itself, but it doesn't change the fact. You work for some time, earn X money. You buy some good, that other people worked X time to produce. Money is, within a reasonable approximation, equivalent to work.

Four things:
1. In the city of Foodopolis, people use food as currency. People do work, and get food from it. People buy goods with that food. There is obviously no equivalence between food and work.
2. I suspect the mistake you're making is using X for both money earned and labour cost of the item bought - there's no actual direct relationship between the two, price depends on supply and demand, and labour is only one factor in supply.
3. As I said, the issue is that I work for X time, get Y money, and can then buy a good with that money which took anywhere between Z and A work. For most people, work is involved in making money, but that's not enough to say they're equivalent when so many other things are also involved too, and when (because of everything else involved) amount of work X correlates somewhere between loosely and 'not at all' with amount of money Y.
For most people, school works reasonably similarly - you work for some time X, and then get a grade Y at the end of it. You then use those grades to apply to a university with quality of teaching Z. But 'amount of work done in school' is obviously not equivalent to grades.
4. Even if they were reasonably correlated, the distinction between 'x is equivalent to y' and 'x usually correlates with y' is philisophically very important. It is absurd to treat two equivalent things ethically differently, but perfectly reasonable to treat things that correlate with each other differently (shooting someone and trying to kill someone are morally pretty different, even if generally speaking there's a reasonable approximation between the two).

I don't see why that's relevant. Depending on economic situation, availability of labor, and bargaining skill of the involved parts, the same labor may be paid differently. Doesn't mean it's unrelated.

Of course they're not unrelated. The amount of labour required to do something affects the disutility for the labourer of doing it meaning they demand more money. It's just that 'how much work you actually do' is only one factor in determining how much money you end up with, and not remotely the most important one
(that's probably tech level). There is a vast and perilous gulf between 'labour and time are factors in determining pay' and 'money can be described as labour hours', just as there is a gulf between 'how much effort a sportsball player puts into the game is a factor in determining whether or not they win' and 'the winning team of a sportsball game can be described as the team which tried harder' (or even 'victory in a sportsball game is an expression of the effort of the team members' or 'proportion of sportsball victories is equal to average effort'). However hard they try, a team consisting of people I rounded up off the street probably won't beat the world champion sportsball team.

Those are very minor ways to earn money. Anyway, extracting minerals still requires work from those involved; you spet time to go search for those valuable rocks. While gambling doesn't earn anything, it's mostly a bunch of people who agree to exchange their money based on some random games.
Now, I'm sure you can find better exceptions, or ways to overcome those objections, but still, the main point is that for the vast majority of people, in the vast majority of circumstances, money is equal to time spent working, and no amount of theory will change that.

The whole point of the example is that I didn't spend time looking for the valuable rock - I just happened to trip over it and notice it was shiny.
And yeah um... people absolutely do earn money gambling. Expected value is negative, but 'winning the lottery' is still a thing people do. What's your point, that they get that money from someone else? That's... how all 'earning' works.
But the main point:
No. It absolutely isn't. That's not even the labour theory of value, that's just absurd, it implies that we should be able to predict annual wages from time worked. Time spent working, and intensity of effort, are factors in money earned. They are not equal. One is not an expression of the other, one cannot be defined in terms of the other. One is a factor in the other and that. Is. All.

Sure. You're not compelled to eat, either. But if you want to do the second, you've got to do the first.

...yes, and?

Nothing else you've said seems to add anything different to my point. Except that 'economic theory' doesn't have an 'al', and that money evolved to exchange goods and services, not time (time is a possible limiting factor on supply, that's all).
That point is, once again (I am aware I can be hard to read), that current consensus in economic science is that labour and time are not the main factors determining wages.


EDIT:

Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, half smiling calmly stating: "Impressive. Every word you just said... was wrong." It happened at two important moments in the film. It has meme potential, I would say.

Yeah, it was that one.