Total Control (pro) is Better Than Free Will (con)

Thanks ASB. “I’m not advocating free will. If one wanted steak and it was with compliance to the rules then he would be forced to eat steak.” This still sounds like free will with a slight caveat. Also, who decides what is or is not in compliance with “the rules?” Does eating a steak show “concern for the well-being of others?” If we didn’t use so many crops to feed the cattle, there would be far more food in the world. It’s unclear how the “controller” will evaluate competing rights claims. “So I guess it is safe to say that a cure for AIDS, since it is the not probable, will be worse than a cure for AIDS. Is it really that safe to assume that all things that are improbable are better than the known because Bluesteel said so?” I’m not saying that total control is improbable, but that it is impossible. My opponent drops my proof that God does not exist, so he agrees that total control is impossible. Things that exist are better than things that do not exist. I’d rather have a real Ferrari than an imaginary Ferrari. A cure for AIDS is also not improbable. “A Cure For HIV/AIDS: On The Horizon” http://commonhealth.wbur.org... “When was the last time someone killed another person… today.” This doesn’t answer that the vast majority of people act morally. Of course there will be some deviants, but the majority of people don’t murder. The need to control the murderers does not justify eliminating free will. “Rothbard was a moron: Anyone who believes in jumping from capitalism to anarchy or true communism ‘successfully’ is a moron.” Rothbard believed in anarcho-capitalism, not anarcho-communism. I still ask my opponent to find an anarcho-communist author who is in favor of eliminating free will to achieve their utopia. My opponent never answers my argument that total control is just totalitarian control to the extreme. My opponent also never answers who is in control. Someone has to evaluate competing rights claims. Imagine that a train is traveling down the train tracks at 200 miles per hour and the track splits into two. On the track the train is currently on are three people who are stuck on the track; you can pull a lever to divert the train to the other track, but there is a single person stuck on that track. Do you intervene to save 3 lives at the expense of one person’s life? This is what Derrida calls the aporia of the undecidable, where moral decision-making takes place. My opponent’s ethical system does not give us an answer as to what we should do (just that we respect human life), so forced will does not suffice to give us an answer. Only a person can decide what to do in this situation. In addition, who writes the rules? My opponent has picked rules that were created by free will. This seems incompatible with his case. Locke is still another straw man. My point with social contracts was that if someone (like my opponent) wants to submit to forced will, let him or her do so voluntarily. Let that person use his free will to submit himself to some higher power who will control him like a puppet. But people should still get to make the decision whether to submit to forced will. “Derrida lived in a world of free will, he sees things every day, like we do that just make him mad.” How does my opponent know this? Derrida clearly believed that free will was central to morality. “Derrida is also a nihilist” Not true and irrelevant. Let’s evaluate my opponent’s case by looking to the Matrix Trilogy. According to the Architect, the machines built a utopia, a perfect world with no suffering or sadness because people were not free to act on their desires. Yet the humans ultimately rejected this first matrix. The machines had to create a new matrix with a semblance of free will, but this brought back misery and suffering. And with free will came the ability for some humans to reject the Matrix completely and choose to live free, in the real world. While the second matrix and the real world may not be perfect, they are both superior to a world with no free will, where we are either mindless drones or trapped within our bodies, unable to act on our own desires.