Pursuing and Maintaining A Responsible Early Retirement

[darkelenchus]

Purpose & Rationale For This Thread

Since nobody seems to have any real objections to the central argument in sol's thread on how your early retirement might be evil, and since the thread has morphed into a discussion about somewhat tangentially related matters (e.g. justifying charity, differing moral systems, the purpose/value of taxation, sustainable population levels, et alia), I figured it'd probably be be best to start a new thread to begin discussing practical ways of reducing or eliminating the evil in pursuing & maintaining early retirement.

Summarizing the Problem

Okay, so let's identify the areas (in italics) where evil can creep in to MMM/ERE-style early retirement:

MMM/ERE Early Retirement =^df A lifestyle attained and maintained through frugal practices and investment strategies, whereby one keeps a high savings rate during one's working years, eventually reaching the point where return on investment from savings covers all living expenses at the very least, which enables one to forego working a conventional job and thereby free more of one's time in comparison to more conventional working careers.

The thesis is that in pursuing early retirement, each of the three italicized areas above could perpetuate an unjust inequality: viz., the manner in which one executes one's early retirement could support (or at least be dependent upon) a system that denies that same opportunity to others.

• Frugal Practices: If one seeks to maximize one's savings rate by purchasing the lowest priced goods at the best value, one might be supporting businesses that utilize exploitative business practices.
• Investment Strategies: Investing in stocks provides capital to companies that seek to maximize return on shareholder investment. Just as with keeping prices low for the consumer, many companies employ exploitative business practices to maximize that return. Investing in bonds provides capital to many of those same companies.
• Allocating Free Time/Resources: If we will early retirement as a value, it would be contradictory for us to maintain that other's shouldn't have that same opportunity. Merely refraining from perpetuating the system is not enough. We should do what we reasonably can to provide people that opportunity.

If we're concerned with reducing or eliminating this unjust inequality, then we'll have to a) choose frugal practices and investment strategies that at the very least don't exasperate the unjust inequality, and b) actively do what we can to help alleviate it. Below are some of the ideas I've come up with for going about doing this.

Responsible Frugal Practices

• Consume Less: Bakari pretty much nailed this one.
• Whenever Possible, Investigate and Factor In the Practices of the Companies and Vendors That Sell the Products You Buy: If this means that a product with an ethically benign history costs more than a product that was exploitatively produced, don't fret over how this negatively impacted your savings rate. Rest well knowing that your purchasing behavior didn't perpetuate unjust inequality.
• Reuse/Repurpose, Whenever Possible: If you're reusing and repurposing things, chances are you're eliminating the possibility or otherwise necessity of purchasing products that are produced via exploitative means.
• Grow/Make Your Own Stuff: You're producing goods for yourself or your household, which is about a 99.99% certainty of being not self-exploitative.

Responsible Investment Strategies

• Consider Socially Responsible Stocks: Not all companies on the stock market are evil. If you invest in individual companies, make it part of the process of doing your due diligence to consider how the practices of the companies you're analyzing stand up to moral standards. If you're a more passive investor, consider socially responsible mutual funds.
• Invest in Tax Liens: Many counties across the country auction off or allow you to make an assigned purchase of tax lien certificates, which entitles you to any interest that the property owner owes as a result of being delinquent on her taxes. It's a win-win, in many ways. You buy the property owner more time to pay for her delinquent taxes, the county gets the money it needs to operate, and either you collect the interest (which varies by state & sometimes county, but tends to be pretty high) or, if the property owner doesn't pay the taxes, you get the property at no extra cost.
• Buy Rental Properties and Be An Upstanding Landlord: That is, keep the property in nice working order, give the tenants a fair market price, treat them well, consider how your rental behavior affects the greater community, etc. You've got a lot of control if you own rentals. This one is really only exploitative if you make it so.

Responsible Allocation of Free Time/Resources

• Volunteer: Help others develop skills that might make them more self-reliant, help distribute resources to those in need, help organize and develop systems that facilitate the missions of non-profits/charitable organizations.
• Donate to Non-Profits/Charitable Organizations: Many non-profits/charitable organizations need money and resources more than they need your assistance. Do your due diligence when you donate, but donate what you can.
• Donate on a Peer to Peer Level: There's no need to think that charity is restricted to giving to an institution. Most of my own giving is direct to the person who receives the aide (e.g. giving or buying clothing, bus tickets, food, providing shelter, etc., to the homeless/needy). Bakari's giving customer's a discount by not charging for hours worked is another example. In my experience, I've noticed that this builds one's charitability muscle more effectively than, say, having money directly withdrawn from my paycheck or including a dollar donation for the Save-The-Trees Foundation when I buy tofu at our local co-op. That doesn't mean its more effective to the recipient of aide, just that it's more effective in cultivating virtuous character.
• Invest in or Start Social Businesses: This whole "responsibility" thing is about making the world a better place, and donating to charities and non-profits are one way of doing it. But they're dependent on the generosity of others to sustain their activity. Sometimes that generosity may run dry. Social businesses address many of the social maladies that charities and non-profits address, but they're not dependent on donations. As a business, they seek to preserve themselves by charging a fee for their products and services. However, their motive is to treat a social malady rather than maximize return for their investors, which allows them to keep their prices down. Any social business will, however, pay back any money invest in it, which effectively makes it a no interest loan. As an investor, you can then allocate that returned money to another social business, or to a charity.
• Do What You Can To Not Be a Burden To Others: The less liability you have, the less risk you have of being dependent on others. Obviously someone who has reached early retirement is so asset positive that they're unlikely to be a financial burden on others, but what about emotionally, psychologically, physically? Take care of your health and seek ways to improve in these areas. Of course, others may need help in these areas even if you're okay, which brings me to my last point...
• Share MMM/ERE-Style Early Retirement and Social/Moral Responsibility Ideas and Practices With Others: What others have said (e.g. gooki & James81, to an extent) is true - If early retirement is an alternative to the typical consumerist Western lifestyle that perpetuates the unjust inequality even more so than pursuing early retirement in a moral vacuum, at least you're doing something that currently alleviates that inequality (less consumption of resources, opens up a position of employment for another) by promoting MMM/ERE-style early retirement as better serving one's own self-interest. I reckon that if everybody began to pursue FI, the world would be a different and probably much better place. The message of FIRE isn't merely early retirement; it's also one of self-reliance, and by letting others know about it and explaining/teaching/helping others to get it, you're not only helping to make the world more just, you're also making the people in the world more happy. This is the motivation behind the blog that my wife and I started, and I suspect this is true of MMM, too, given the whole "save the world" undercurrent (even if somewhat in jest, it's still somewhat in jest).

On another note, I was scheduled to write a post for our blog (i.e. the blog of my wife and I, not MMM) today, but this seemed more important and I'm kinda tired after writing all this. Would you guys mind if I used this as a basis for a near-future post on Real Sustainable Habits?

Also, I wanted to say thanks to everybody who has participated in the other thread so far. The discussion has inspired quite a bit of introspection on my part, which has been fruitful. 

[tooqk4u22]

Please read this thread for responses https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/welcome-to-the-forum/your-mustache-might-be-evil/.

Just kidding, couldn't resist.

[tooqk4u22]

I agree with most of what you saying, except that the fundamental issues lies in the personal deviations between each individual's definition of morality.

Because of that you can argue anything to be good or bad, as an example....

• Invest in Tax Liens: Many counties across the country auction off or allow you to make an assigned purchase of tax lien certificates, which entitles you to any interest that the property owner owes as a result of being delinquent on her taxes. It's a win-win, in many ways. You buy the property owner more time to pay for her delinquent taxes, the county gets the money it needs to operate, and either you collect the interest (which varies by state & sometimes county, but tends to be pretty high) or, if the property owner doesn't pay the taxes, you get the property at no extra cost.

Sure you are giving somebody a second chance but to get to this point the local tax authority has given it to them many times already, and if they don't pay you would be evicting them and throwing them out on the street - how would that pencil out to the moral equation, how can you live with yourself.

• Buy Rental Properties and Be An Upstanding Landlord: That is, keep the property in nice working order, give the tenants a fair market price, treat them well, consider how your rental behavior affects the greater community, etc. You've got a lot of control if you own rentals. This one is really only exploitative if you make it so.

Keeping a place nice is not necessarily responsible, I kind of view it as a good investment practice so I can attract and retain better higher paying tenants that will take better care of the place while they are there.  That sounds like some form of economic discrimination.  Also what if I have owned the houes for 15 years, paid it off throught the sweat of my tenants, and it has appreciated considerably and then I decide to raise my rents because the overall  market rents are rising, am I not exploiting a persons inability or lack of desire to buy a house for my own personal gain - I mean I could keep rents down because I still have enough cash flow and then choose to rent to a lower income family to give them a chance to live in a better neighborhood then they otherwise could.  Wouldn't that be the more morally responsible thing to do?

[Jamesqf]

Since nobody seems to have any real objections to the central argument in sol's thread on how your early retirement might be evil...

Oh?  I guess I'm Nobody, then :-)  (And no, my real name isn't Odysseus.)  Either that or my writing skills weren't up to the task of adequately expressing my disagreement.

The thesis is that in pursuing early retirement, each of the three italicized areas above could perpetuate an unjust inequality: viz., the manner in which one executes one's early retirement could support (or at least be dependent upon) a system that denies that same opportunity to others.

The questions here being 1) Do we all regard that inequality as unjust, rather than say a necessary factor that drives the economic engine, much as temperature differences drive heat engines?  2) Does the system in fact result in increased denial of opportunity over what's inherent in nature, or in other systems?

If one seeks to maximize one's savings rate by purchasing the lowest priced goods at the best value, one might be supporting businesses that utilize exploitative business practices.

But if we instead purchase more & higher priced goods (that is, lower value per the Boots Theory), do we not give even more support to such businesses?  This is the flip side of the Boots Theory: it might take a decent cobbler an hour to make a pair of cheap boots that last for a year, but five hours to make good boots that last for ten years, so a side effect of buying good boots is to create unemployment among cobblers.

[tooqk4u22]

If one seeks to maximize one's savings rate by purchasing the lowest priced goods at the best value, one might be supporting businesses that utilize exploitative business practices.

But if we instead purchase more & higher priced goods (that is, lower value per the Boots Theory), do we not give even more support to such businesses?  This is the flip side of the Boots Theory: it might take a decent cobbler an hour to make a pair of cheap boots that last for a year, but five hours to make good boots that last for ten years, so a side effect of buying good boots is to create unemployment among cobblers.

Coach makes more profit selling purses than say Walmart does, and Coach probably doesn't employee as many people (even if the Walmart ones are in China making $5/day).  Wouldn't this also lead to wealthy people getting wealthy, which apparently is a major source of contention.

[darkelenchus]

I agree with most of what you saying, except that the fundamental issues lies in the personal deviations between each individual's definition of morality.

Good. Then let's talk about different moral theories.

Because of that you can argue anything to be good or bad.

Merely because people have different definitions of morality or because there is disagreement about moral issues and principles doesn't mean that there isn't a moral fact of the matter.

Sure you are giving somebody a second chance but to get to this point the local tax authority has given it to them many times already, and if they don't pay you would be evicting them and throwing them out on the street - how would that pencil out to the moral equation, how can you live with yourself.

These sorts of scenarios are extremely rare with tax liens, from what I understand. Despite rarity of such a situation,  it can happen. Counties handle the foreclosure process, so you wouldn't be throwing them out on the street, but in that scenario I'd do what I could learn something about the scenario and to help the person. This isn't so much a counter-example so much as showing that tax liens could lead to a situation that requires moral judgment.

Keeping a place nice is not necessarily responsible, I kind of view it as a good investment practice so I can attract and retain better higher paying tenants that will take better care of the place while they are there.  That sounds like some form of economic discrimination.  Also what if I have owned the houes for 15 years, paid it off throught the sweat of my tenants, and it has appreciated considerably and then I decide to raise my rents because the overall  market rents are rising, am I not exploiting a persons inability or lack of desire to buy a house for my own personal gain - I mean I could keep rents down because I still have enough cash flow and then choose to rent to a lower income family to give them a chance to live in a better neighborhood then they otherwise could.  Wouldn't that be the more morally responsible thing to do?

These are good moral questions that a rental property owner faces, some showing that there's potential for exploitation. However, as with the tax lien example, they're not counter-examples.

[darkelenchus]

Oh?  I guess I'm Nobody, then :-)  (And no, my real name isn't Odysseus.)  Either that or my writing skills weren't up to the task of adequately expressing my disagreement.

And I'm not a Cyclops. (Love the Odysseus reference, BTW! I see what you did there.) There's a difference between expressing disagreement and having an adequate objection.

The questions here being 1) Do we all regard that inequality as unjust, rather than say a necessary factor that drives the economic engine, much as temperature differences drive heat engines?

We don't have to all regard that inequality as unjust for it to in fact be so. This presupposes justice and injustice are a matter of personal opinion. Do you have an argument for that? Moreover, note my use of the conditional in the original post: "If we're concerned with reducing or eliminating this unjust inequality..." If you don't regard an unjust inequality as unjust, you're not likely to be concerned with reducing or eliminating it, and so the consequent needn't apply.

Does the system in fact result in increased denial of opportunity over what's inherent in nature, or in other systems?

Great question, and a great topic for another thread.

If one seeks to maximize one's savings rate by purchasing the lowest priced goods at the best value, one might be supporting businesses that utilize exploitative business practices.

But if we instead purchase more & higher priced goods (that is, lower value per the Boots Theory), do we not give even more support to such businesses?  This is the flip side of the Boots Theory: it might take a decent cobbler an hour to make a pair of cheap boots that last for a year, but five hours to make good boots that last for ten years, so a side effect of buying good boots is to create unemployment among cobblers.

You raise a good point about something one has to factor in when evaluating one's purchases. As such, it's not really an objection to the idea itself.

I should also say that this post, tooqk's post, and some of the posts in other threads seem more like intellectual 'Gotcha' than anything else. That's not to condemn it as such. As a professional philosopher I can (and unfortunately sometimes do) play that game all day long. But it generally distracts from the purposes of the discussion, and so is somewhat harmful to the discussion between the community of existing members and perhaps off-putting to otherwise new members. I don't mean to discourage your input, but am asking you to be mindful of conversational etiquette.

[Jamesqf]

There's a difference between expressing disagreement and having an adequate objection.

Likewise, trivializing objections as inadequate is a nice rhetorical trick :-)

We don't have to all regard that inequality as unjust for it to in fact be so. This presupposes justice and injustice are a matter of personal opinion.

Aren't they?  Certainly I can think of many examples in which they depend on whose ox is being gored.

I should also say that this post, tooqk's post, and some of the posts in other threads seem more like intellectual 'Gotcha' than anything else. That's not to condemn it as such. As a professional philosopher I can (and unfortunately sometimes do) play that game all day long. But it generally distracts from the purposes of the discussion, and so is somewhat harmful to the discussion between the community of existing members and perhaps off-putting to otherwise new members. I don't mean to discourage your input, but am asking you to be mindful of conversational etiquette.

I don't intend them as such, but as ways of expressing what to me are real objections.  (I do hope you realize that the language of professional philosphers is not my native tongue.)  I don't think etiquette should force acceptance of basic assumptions, unless they're explicitly stated: e.g. "Assuming such and such for the purposes of discussion, it follows that...".

[darkelenchus]

Likewise, trivializing objections as inadequate is a nice rhetorical trick :-)

Threre's no trivialization if there's no objection to trivialize. At any rate, just to keep things organized, post whatever objections you've got or whatever you think are objections in that other thread and we'll discuss them there. :-)

We don't have to all regard that inequality as unjust for it to in fact be so. This presupposes justice and injustice are a matter of personal opinion.

Aren't they?  Certainly I can think of many examples in which they depend on whose ox is being gored.

Moral judgments might be different, but that doesn't necessarily entail that there is no moral fact of the matter. That conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premise.

I don't intend them as such [i.e. posts coming off as intellectual 'Gotcha!'], but as ways of expressing what to me are real objections.

Sure (non-scarcasic). It doesn't seem to be the case that anyone on this forum intends this (amazingly), but sometimes people get caught up in the debate and lose sight of the point of the conversation (present company included). Conversational norms like the principle of charity help to counteract this.

I do hope you realize that the language of professional philosophers is not my native tongue.

I realize that probably nobody but me speaks any of those languages. If I spoke like that, you'd think I'd be spewing complete gibberish rather than partial gibberish. I brought up my profession because I see it happen often in those circles, and over time have become more sensitive to it it and how it can diminish the value of the exchange of ideas.

I don't think etiquette should force acceptance of basic assumptions, unless they're explicitly stated: e.g. "Assuming such and such for the purposes of discussion, it follows that...".

I totally agree. Here's a rule I live by: Never sacrifice honesty/truth for etiquette.

Re: the present conversation, I believe I have made those assumptions clear. Of course I'm up for discussing those assumptions, too. But it'd probably be be best to do so in a different thread, just to keep things straight.

[ShavinItForLater]

I objected to Sol's central argument as well, and IMNSHO I thought it was more than adequate.  It seems to have been mostly ignored, possibly because it was sandwiched between two people bickering about netiquette (yes Sol did respond to one part, although I didn't buy his counterargument in the least).  Posting here for discussion:

I don't think working to achieve FI is in conflict with helping others.  Achieving FI is about achieving an abundance of resources--you have more than you need.  Almost by definition, that means you therefore have the *ability* to help others. 

The bible advises you to provide for your own household first.  Airplane attendants tell you in the event of loss of cabin pressure, put your own mask on first, then help others.  There is a reason for this kind of advice--if you can't even support yourself and your own needs, you have nothing to give to others.

You can argue about the evils of capitalism all you want, but in my opinion it is superior to most other attempted economic systems at rewarding people for doing their best, and at providing value to others around them.  It promotes those opportunities to surpass your own needs and create surplus to help others much more than more communist sorts of economic systems.  It also encourages people to improve the world around them, because they directly benefit themselves by doing so.  Yes it means that people could choose to turn a blind eye to those in need--but the reality is that the wealthy give more to charitable causes than the non-wealthy.  Not exactly rocket science to see why.

That said, that doesn't mean that people should give nothing to those in need while in the accumulation phase.  Research also interestingly shows that being generous throughout your career *causes* you to become wealthy.  Makes perfect sense--if you're a greedy bastard, looking to only take and not give, cheat when you can, etc.--nobody will want to do business with you.  Even as an employee, if you are just doing the bare minimum, you're not going to get as far as someone busting his ass to provide the most value to his employer, and by extension to the customers who benefit from that employer's products/services.  Being involved in charitable work (with both time and monetary contributions) also creates natural opportunities to network and develop relationships with people that can multiply your opportunities for your own success. 

The list could go on and on--giving helps others, and it helps you.  I think the key is having balance.  The bible recommends the tithe--giving 10% of what comes in.  They say to give it to the church, but that's from a time when the church was the provider of just about all charitable services--nowadays other charities provide a lot of what the church used to do (and I'm surprised at some churches at how little focus there seems to be on charity).  I don't know that 10% is any sort of magic number, I would argue what's most important is that you are able to support your own family, move towards FI, and still give something.  If you want to give nothing and plan to give a lot after FI, hey you're free to do so--I'd argue that you're going to have a tougher road getting to FI with that kind of attitude.  Generosity breeds financial success.

My overall point is that in my opinion, there is no fundamental conflict here.  Yes we should save the drowning children, in our own communities and around the world.  But just as we talk sustainability from a global perspective, we should also seek sustainability in our own finances--if we drown trying to save the child, we've saved no one, lost ourselves, and lost the ability to save more in the future.

Luxury purchases on lattes or whatever is another deal--but I don't think anyone is arguing that Mustachian attitudes are encouraging wasteful or luxury purchases.  However, I would say that there is an element of bettering your own life, whether it's through luxury purchases or achieving FI or whatever a particular person values, that underpins the argument above that capitalist economies encourage people to help others through business--when you provide a valuable product or service to others, the profit (or salary) you receive is a natural reward, and encourages you to try to produce even more value. 

In my opinion this is a virtuous cycle, at least relative to a more communist philosophy of give what you're able, take what you need.  If you are expected to be 100% altruistic and don't see any personal benefit from your work, then the system lacks that natural incentive to cause people to work more or better, to improve their own lives and communities.  I don't think being prosperous is evil--on the contrary, if you don't prosper, and don't have any surplus to give (time, money, etc.), then the whole world suffers more.

[darkelenchus]

I objected to Sol's central argument as well, and IMNSHO I thought it was more than adequate.  It seems to have been mostly ignored.

From what I can tell, your objection is this:

• Early retirement is not necessarily in conflict with helping others.

This doesn't really address the central thesis, which is that your path to maintaining and attaining early retirement might be dependent on and perpetuate an unjust inequality that denies others the very thing you value. The injunction to "just donate" or, in your words, "help others" was offered as a prescription to help resolve the malady.

This thread presupposes possibly what you meant to say, viz. that maintaining and attaining early retirement needn't involve unavoidably exploitative means (e.g. see how I responded to tooqk's and Jamesqf's purported counter-examples, which present exploitative scenarios but don't illustrate that those means are necessarily exploitative).

[ShavinItForLater]

My objection goes further than just saying it's not necessarily in conflict with helping others.  I'm saying that having a surplus of wealth, which I argue is what MMM is teaching people to have, is a prerequisite to helping others, and by definition, these teachings are increasing the amount of giving, of both time and money.  Sol wanted to focus solely on money--but I think MMM's recommended lifestyle of having a surplus of both time and money enables you to give more of both to those around you.  The opposite--not having that surplus of wealth to the point of financial independence, and leading a high consumption lifestyle--I argue by definition reduces and in many cases eliminates your ability to help others, and in far too many cases turns you into one who needs help.

I go further than that, arguing that the path to attaining wealth is both aided by and highly correlated with charitable giving during the accumulation phase.  If you choose not to give anything, focusing 100% on selfish goals and not giving, you cut yourself off from opportunities.  You also will be seen as selfish, only out for yourself, and people will not want to do business with you.  High integrity and generosity are highly correlated with success and becoming wealthy.  I argue that it is the exception to the rule when someone completely miserly succeeds.  Think about the people you know at work who are selfish and miserly, who never give to others, or in any way by your definition you would say do evil acts.  How successful are they compared to those who always look to do the right thing, who are generous, and who look to help those around them?  Which type of leader would you want to follow?  Sure there are exceptions to the rule, but I still call them exceptions.

I also argue that the free market / capitalist economic system has inherent reward mechanisms for helping those around you, through your work, not just your side contributions to charities.  The way your company makes a profit is by providing value to your customers.  You are encouraged by this system, as well as free market competition, to increase quality, produce more, and lower costs, thereby increasing the quality of life of everyone your company touches.  As an employee, the better you perform--the more value you create for your employer (and by extension, her customers), the more you are rewarded personally through raises, bonuses, and promotions.

Therefore, I argue that the path to attaining and maintaining early retirement is not evil, and does not depend on or perpetuate evil.

[darkelenchus]

My objection goes further than just saying it's not necessarily in conflict with helping others.  I'm saying that having a surplus of wealth, which I argue is what MMM is teaching people to have, is a prerequisite to helping others, and by definition, these teachings are increasing the amount of giving, of both time and money.  Sol wanted to focus solely on money--but I think MMM's recommended lifestyle of having a surplus of both time and money enables you to give more of both to those around you.  The opposite--not having that surplus of wealth to the point of financial independence, and leading a high consumption lifestyle--I argue by definition reduces and in many cases eliminates your ability to help others, and in far too many cases turns you into one who needs help.

Sure, you said a lot of other things. I don't disagree with all those other things you're saying above. In fact, the original post in this thread is saying nearly the same thing: i.e. the very concept of early retirement has built into it the possibility of assisting others due to the surplus of money and time. But this conceptual observation doesn't change the fact that there exist unavoidably exploitative measures to attain and maintain early retirement that some of us may be using and may be uncomfortable using.

I go further than that, arguing that the path to attaining wealth is both aided by and highly correlated with charitable giving during the accumulation phase.  If you choose not to give anything, focusing 100% on selfish goals and not giving, you cut yourself off from opportunities.  You also will be seen as selfish, only out for yourself, and people will not want to do business with you.  High integrity and generosity are highly correlated with success and becoming wealthy.

Nothing about early retirement requires being charitable, even if being generous might give you opportunities that might help speed up early retirement. Perhaps the argument is that early retirement isn't in conflict with charity because being charitable leads to more wealth (via the opportunities that charitability creates) and more wealth leads to early retirement. These are nice thoughts, and if true, charity itself is a non-exploitative means of attaining and maintaining early retirement. They don't, however, illustrate that there are no non-exploitative means to early retirement.

I also argue that the free market / capitalist economic system has inherent reward mechanisms for helping those around you, through your work, not just your side contributions to charities.  The way your company makes a profit is by providing value to your customers.  You are encouraged by this system, as well as free market competition, to increase quality, produce more, and lower costs, thereby increasing the quality of life of everyone your company touches.  As an employee, the better you perform--the more value you create for your employer (and by extension, her customers), the more you are rewarded personally through raises, bonuses, and promotions.

So the point here is that capitalism promotes good behavior by rewarding it with profit. By no means will I deny this. But this doesn't change the fact that the profit motive also elicits exploitative behavior, some of which behavior might fuel the investment returns of one's early retirement nest-egg.

Therefore, I argue that the path to attaining and maintaining early retirement is not evil, and does not depend on or perpetuate evil.

It should be clear now that you argued that early retirement might not be evil, and needn't depend on or perpetuate evil. That doesn't falsify the sub-contrary, i.e. the claim that early retirement might be evil and could (even probably does, to a variable extent) depend on or perpetuate evil.

At any rate, this thread isn't about explaining why nobody's presented an adequate objection to sol's central argument. It's about overcoming the practical problem that results.

I don't mind discussing the objections and related conceptual issues. In fact, I think there's quite a bit of value in it, and believe it's necessary to engage in the types of discussions we've been having since last Friday if we're to have a meaningful life. I just suggest they'd be better discussed in other threads. The point here is to set aside the "fanatical philosophical bullshit," as James put it, and talk about practical measures.

[Bakari]

On another note, I was scheduled to write a post for our blog (i.e. the blog of my wife and I, not MMM) today, but this seemed more important and I'm kinda tired after writing all this. Would you guys mind if I used this as a basis for a near-future post on Real Sustainable Habits?

I propose that this be the basis for a MMM guest post!

There are lots of things I had to say about the responses, but you addressed them pretty well already...

[darkelenchus]

I propose that this be the basis for a MMM guest post!

I'm certainly not opposed to that. :-) Of course, that's not really up to us.

[tooqk4u22]

I should also say that this post, tooqk's post, and some of the posts in other threads seem more like intellectual 'Gotcha' than anything else. That's not to condemn it as such. As a professional philosopher I can (and unfortunately sometimes do) play that game all day long. But it generally distracts from the purposes of the discussion, and so is somewhat harmful to the discussion between the community of existing members and perhaps off-putting to otherwise new members. I don't mean to discourage your input, but am asking you to be mindful of conversational etiquette.

The fact that the comments are some sort of intellectual Gotcha, which may be by design or by accident, is really the result of posing a question that has no answer.  Your comments to the various posts , which is demonstrated by your responses to such posts by consistently saying thats not a counter, not really an objection, good point but better served in a different thread.

Moral judgments might be different, but that doesn't necessarily entail that there is no moral fact of the matter. That conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premise.

This could be the crux of the discussion.  I would that just about anyone who is not a sociopath has a degree of morality but that there are many many degrees that suit people differently.  What you getting at with this statement is the collective morality where society conforms which then sets a moral line either implicitly (societal norms) or explicitly (laws and regulations).  But just because society has determined a line in the sand doesn't make it so on an individiual basis. 

Current example
Chick-fil-a
-the company serves some pretty tasty food and I will argue it fits in to a frugal lifestyle if purchased only occaisonally and when compared to eating at a fancy restaurant (like everything else there are individual degrees of frugal - MMM vs. Financial Sam).

-the company is private, employees a large amount of people and typically pays a higher wage than other fast food places, and because of the company's growth people that work there have the ability to grow. The company is closed on Sunday's as it is day for worship and for being with your family (the amount of money they are leaving on the table for their values is enormous). The company also does a lot of community involvement activities in the areas they serve. 

All in all it seems that Chick-fil-a is an ideal company and serves as a great example of how it should be - or does it. 

The company is now taking a lot of flak in the press for the CEO speaking out against gay marriage, which really shouldn't be surprising to anyone given the strong question values that they live by.  Lets say one of our frugal friends is an occaisonal patron yet believes in gay marriage, so they are now torn and should stop going there because isn't this evil?  What about the person that works at the company that also believes in gay marriage - do they quit and give up the opportunity to earn more money more quickly? What if this is a company that I could invest in, certainly seems like it would be a good investment.

The fact that I may argue that gay marriage is not evil is in fact still evil by society's standards and is demonstrated by the outrageous success of Chick-fil-a's customer appreciation day (I believe it was largely driven by this). 

Additionally, while there are degrees of moral apptitude for the individual that can vary greatly from society's view there is also the fact that this moral quagmire changes over time.  Gay rights, segregation, Women not working or voting are examples.

Don't drop another intelectual gotcha but there are no right or wrong answers to your position, ignoring of course the extremes (like the example of 6 year old drowning and you ignore it). 

[darkelenchus]

The fact that the comments are some sort of intellectual Gotcha, which may be by design or by accident, is really the result of posing a question that has no answer. Your comments to the various posts , which is demonstrated by your responses to such posts by consistently saying thats not a counter, not really an objection, good point but better served in a different thread. 

I'm not sure what question you're referring to that I'm asking. Perhaps we can rephrase my thesis as a question, then: "Is it possible in pursuing early retirement to take steps to reduce, eliminate, or counter-act contributing to a set of processes that might deny that same opportunity to others?"  If this is the question, then I believe I've offered an answer: "Yes, it is possible. Not all frugal acts, investment strategies, or ways in which we spend our free time/resources are unavoidably exploitative. In fact, some of them can help counter-act that exploitation." The fact that some of those steps I mentioned can be exploitative or that one might face some difficult decisions in following those steps, which your examples show, simply doesn't entail that there's no answer.

Disclaimer: I don't want anyone to take the following in the wrong way, but the strong language is needed here. Plus, you guys and gals are Mustachians, so you should be able to take it in stride and recognize it as straight talk rather than an insult or an attempt to score points:

Many moral matters are fucking hard, way harder than the hardest math problems, and the solutions or answers aren't going to come in the same way that we expect answers in the natural sciences, computer science, or mathematics. Morality is where shit gets complicated, and we've been dealing with the more relatively straight-forward issues (especially regarding the conceptual matters we've discussed). Tooqk, you linked to that piece on how capitalism has an image problem, and one of the main points in it is that many of the virtues that supplemented the capitalist enterprise of the recent past have receded, and now we've got "asshole capitalism" as a result. The piece was basically a call for people to stop being a bunch of wussies and take responsibility for the world they're creating, rather than hide behind the profit motive as an excuse for acting like assholes.¹ Well, guess what? Lines of reasoning such as "There's no right answer to moral questions" and "everyone has different opinions, so there's no truth of the matter" are deeply related to the problem that Mr. Murray addressed in his essay, and they have significantly contributed to the moral recession. Recognize these for what they are: complainypants moves. Then stop being a wussy, man up, dispense with these excuses, and face these issues with some bravery.

This isn't directed at tookq. This is for anyone who uses such excuses to shrink away in bad faith when faced with moral issues. Let's start with what we all value, here: financial independence. If you value that for yourself, you value that for the world, and vice versa. Stop using genetic determinism, the supposedly inherent exploitative structures of capitalism, fears about population growth/bottlenecks, the supposed insolubility of moral questions, God, the devil, and the Pope, etc. as excuses for denying responsibility for your FI values by seeking to a) avoid pursuing FI at the expense of denying others that same opportunity and b) actually do something to promote that opportunity. If you're honest with yourself, the moral questions can't be abstracted from FI decisions.

None of this is to say that we can actually realize early retirement as an opportunity for every single person; but that doesn't mean that we should stop valuing it as an ideal (I think much of the confusion comes from not understanding this point). We should do what we reasonably can to promote it. That is, we should look for practical solutions to approach that ideal as much as is reasonably possible and in balance with other ideals. That whole "practical solutions" part is the purpose of this thread. This is in the spirit of the Mustachian outlook that it's a waste of time to play the blame game and try to figure out who's at fault; i.e. that we shouldn't be focused on what we can't do or are unable to do, but instead we should be focused on doing what we can. If we're to be prudent, natural limits and informed estimates about consequences of different courses of action should serve to ground how we go about approaching realization of this ideal.

And, while I'm at it, what the hell: I always kind of laugh when people tell me that there's "no answer" to moral questions. Amazing! You're so brilliant that you don't need to consider thousands of years of tradition and myriad professionals who currently explore such questions to see if you might not be constructing a strawman! All you have to do is observe that people disagree, and proclaim that this observation reveals the questions are unanswerable, as if those same professionals don't have access to the same observation or are just too stupid to draw the right inference. Or perhaps you have some special insight that no other person has? All those professionals should be bowing down to you and thanking you for dropping the scales from their eyes! They're freed from seeking answers to pointless questions! Oh, wait, no... This is bullshit. The vast majority of them (and the others, too, on their good days) are actually humble enough to maintain that they don't know whether there's answers to these questions. Just like physicists are humble enough to maintain that they don't know whether they'll ever arrive at TOE. Is seeking TOE pointless, in itself? If you think you know that there's no answer, you'll never explore the question to know whether it has an answer. The first step towards knowledge is admitting you don't know. And even if there is no answer, reality is such that it poses the questions to each and every one of us, whether we like it or not. Is it painful and frightening to walk into clouds of uncertainty and unfamiliar territory? Of course. But I choose to not be a big fucking wussy complainypants and instead address the questions head on. It's a major part (perhaps the principle part) of the way I or any of us will achieve what has classically been understood as happiness, or what Mr. Murray has called "earned success." This is what defines human beings: we ask questions, seek answers, and create. When we do these things, we flourish, we're happy.

[/reality check rant]

Moral judgments might be different, but that doesn't necessarily entail that there is no moral fact of the matter. That conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premise.

What you getting at with this statement is the collective morality where society conforms which then sets a moral line either implicitly (societal norms) or explicitly (laws and regulations).  But just because society has determined a line in the sand doesn't make it so on an individiual basis. 

No, my position is not one of cultural relativism. I haven't put forward a positive position. I've only denied the position that you've put forward, viz. that a citation of differing opinions is adequate grounds for drawing the conclusion that there is no truth in matters of morality. This denial doesn't wed me to the position you claim I'm wedded to.

I agree with what you say, however. Individual values can conflict with social values. Your examples illustrate that well.


1. In other words, it's not capitalism as such that's given it a bad name, but the behavior of capitalists that have done so. This is similar to how, oh, I don't know... early retirement could get a bad name if people treat it as an end in itself and use exploitative means to get it and maintain it.

[tooqk4u22]

"Is it possible in pursuing early retirement to take steps to reduce, eliminate, or counter-act contributing to a set of processes that might deny that same opportunity to others?"  If this is the question, then I believe I've offered an answer: "Yes, it is possible. Not all frugal acts, investment strategies, or ways in which we spend our free time/resources are unavoidably exploitative. In fact, some of them can help counter-act that exploitation."

I think sums up the question that was identified in the OP.
 

Disclaimer: I don't want anyone to take the following in the wrong way, but the strong language is needed here. Plus, you guys and gals are Mustachians, so you should be able to take it in stride and recognize it as straight talk rather than an insult or an attempt to score points:

I won't take it personally but some might think you are morally corrupt. 

Many moral matters are fucking hard, way harder than the hardest math problems........ Morality is where shit gets complicated, and we've been dealing with the more relatively straight-forward issues (especially regarding the conceptual matters we've discussed).

No shit, that is news to me thanks for pointing it out.

Tooqk, you linked to that piece on how capitalism has an image problem, and one of the main points in it is that many of the virtues that supplemented the capitalist enterprise of the recent past have receded, and now we've got "asshole capitalism" as a result. The piece was basically a call for people to stop being a bunch of wussies and take responsibility for the world they're creating, rather than hide behind the profit motive as an excuse for acting like assholes.¹ Well, guess what? Lines of reasoning such as "There's no right answer to moral questions" and "everyone has different opinions, so there's no truth of the matter" are deeply related to the problem that Mr. Murray addressed in his essay, and they have significantly contributed to the moral recession. Recognize these for what they are: complainypants moves. Then stop being a wussy, man up, dispense with these excuses, and face these issues with some bravery.

'

That is why I posted the article, I think there is a complete lack of moral turpitude, intergrity, honesty, and more.  It is too much about getting the last penny at sake of anything.  I make no apologies for being a capitalist but do feel the system is rigged and corrupt in general with the politcians controlling. I also think that his system of corruption is causing more and more to lean further toward socialist ideals, which makes sense on the surface with the notion being if I can't win anyway I may as well be guaranteed a floor of some kind. Off topic, I digress.

This isn't directed at tookq.

Sure its not ;)

Let's start with what we all value, here: financial independence. If you value that for yourself, you value that for the world, and vice versa.

Actually, no I don't value FI for the world or anyone else for that matter. I only value it for me and my family - would be nice to live in a world of rainbows and unicorns, I guess but then nobody would appreciate them anymore and some hunter would realize unicorns taste good and people would bitch that the rainbows are to bright or not in the right place.  Would I help someone accomplish this, show them the way, provide them support, sure.  But at the end of the day I don't care if they do it or not.  Of course economically speaking if the world were FI then there would be no economy and it would be back to the basics, so on that note maybe I do care and instead I don't want anyone else to be FI and I want them to consume and rent and borrower because that is how we that are trying to get to FI EXPLOIT those who aren't.  Am I morally corrupt because of it - maybe in your eyes, maybe in general, maybe not.

Stop using genetic determinism, the supposedly inherent exploitative structures of capitalism, fears about population growth/bottlenecks, the supposed insolubility of moral questions, God, the devil, and the Pope, etc. as excuses for denying responsibility for your FI values by seeking to a) avoid pursuing FI at the expense of denying others that same opportunity and b) actually do something to promote that opportunity. If you're honest with yourself, the moral questions can't be abstracted from FI decisions.

I don't think that was what I was doing and I cerainly never said that moral questions don't come into play.  I think what I said is that we all have different values - clearly you and I do and I'll bet that we are closer than you think.  So imagine the moral extremes and how different people can view this.

None of this is to say that we can actually realize early retirement as an opportunity for every single person; but that doesn't mean that we should stop valuing it as an ideal (I think much of the confusion comes from not understanding this point). We should do what we reasonably can to promote it.

I know I said above but again I respectfully disagree.

That is, we should look for practical solutions to approach that ideal as much as is reasonably possible and in balance with other ideals. That whole "practical solutions" part is the purpose of this thread. This is in the spirit of the Mustachian outlook that it's a waste of time to play the blame game and try to figure out who's at fault; i.e. that we shouldn't be focused on what we can't do or are unable to do, but instead we should be focused on doing what we can.

I agree with this but you still need to acknowledge and account for the fact that we as individuals and even as societies around the globe have different values. 

And, while I'm at it, what the hell: I always kind of laugh when people tell me that there's "no answer" to moral questions. Amazing! You're so brilliant that you don't need to consider thousands of years of tradition and myriad professionals who currently explore such questions to see if you might not be constructing a strawman! All you have to do is observe that people disagree, and proclaim that this observation reveals the questions are unanswerable, as if those same professionals don't have access to the same observation or are just too stupid to draw the right inference. Or perhaps you have some special insight that no other person has? All those professionals should be bowing down to you and thanking you for dropping the scales from their eyes! They're freed from seeking answers to pointless questions! Oh, wait, no... This is bullshit. The vast majority of them (and the others, too, on their good days) are actually humble enough to maintain that they don't know whether there's answers to these questions. Just like physicists are humble enough to maintain that they don't know whether they'll ever arrive at TOE. Is seeking TOE pointless, in itself? If you think you know that there's no answer, you'll never explore the question to know whether it has an answer. The first step towards knowledge is admitting you don't know. And even if there is no answer, reality is such that it poses the questions to each and every one of us, whether we like it or not. Is it painful and frightening to walk into clouds of uncertainty and unfamiliar territory? Of course. But I choose to not be a big fucking wussy complainypants and instead address the questions head on. It's a major part (perhaps the principle part) of the way I or any of us will achieve what has classically been understood as happiness, or what Mr. Murray has called "earned success." This is what defines human beings: we ask questions, seek answers, and create. When we do these things, we flourish, we're happy.

All those professionals spending thousands of years thinking about a question that they have yet to come up with an answer for....that does sound stupid and maybe you're right that they should bow down to me. 

In case you didn't catch it (are you one of those professionals), my position is that there are many answers, but there are no right or wrong ones.  Each situation and individual can be so different that an answer may not be relevant in any other individual situation. 

I am not afraid, I like to ask questions and inquire and test and the like, clearly made affirmative statements about my positions and others may agree, disagree or not even give a crap.   
 

No, my position is not one of cultural relativism. I haven't put forward a positive position. I've only denied the position that you've put forward, viz. that a citation of differing opinions is adequate grounds for drawing the conclusion that there is no truth in matters of morality. This denial doesn't wed me to the position you claim I'm wedded to.

I did not put this position forward - I believe there is truth in matters of morality but that there are degrees of morality (your so called differing opinions) and many of these degrees are on the margins (hence my comment about us probably not being to far apart on the moral scale) not the extremes.  I am not sure how to illustrate this to get it through to you this basic premise but lets say I am a business owner that needs to higher a new person....minimum wage is $7.25/hr, I paid the last person $10/hr.  But now the job market is tough, I can hire a person even more qualified with more professionalism and I they will take $7.25/hr. Is this not exploiting the situation and person.  I might be ok with this, you might not.  In the end though, because I believe in capitalism, as the economy improves this person will feel no loyalty to me, and may even be resentful, and I will lose that person and have to pay the next, likely lesser qualified, person more.  Short term gain for long term pain. 


Again I am not afraid to ask difficult questions, hear different positions, take my own positions, and even modify them.  Its not the answer you seek, its the question you are looking for that drives you.

[Jamesqf]

Let's start with what we all value, here: financial independence. If you value that for yourself, you value that for the world, and vice versa. Stop using genetic determinism, the supposedly inherent exploitative structures of capitalism, fears about population growth/bottlenecks, the supposed insolubility of moral questions, God, the devil, and the Pope, etc. as excuses for denying responsibility for your FI values by seeking to a) avoid pursuing FI at the expense of denying others that same opportunity and b) actually do something to promote that opportunity. If you're honest with yourself, the moral questions can't be abstracted from FI decisions.

Why must I necessarily value FI for the rest of the world?  Sure, I think the world would be a better place, and people would be happier, if everyone worked for the same sort of FI that I've attained.  But that's just my opinion: many other people obviously disagree, because they e.g. choose to pursue consumerist lifestyles in preference to saving & investment.  So there is perhaps a moral question: do I have a right or moral duty to impose my values on them?

Furthermore, why do you think I am using all those things as excuses?  One of the points that I was trying to make earlier is that I'm not trying to deny responsibility.  I have no moral problems there at all.  (In general, that is: I might object to specific things.)  There are obvious pragmatic reasons (for instance keeping the peasants from revolting), but I am not at all interested in sacrificing myself on the altar of equality.

Just like physicists are humble enough to maintain that they don't know whether they'll ever arrive at TOE. Is seeking TOE pointless, in itself? If you think you know that there's no answer, you'll never explore the question to know whether it has an answer.

But as any physicist will tell you, sometimes the real answer is that there is no answer.  Ask one how to build a perpetual motion machine, for instance.  Yet con artists manage to keep on selling artistically-disguised versions of them to the gullible.

There's also a distinction between the positive "There is no answer" and the indefinite "You don't know the answer, nor do I, so until you do have a provably correct answer, stop insisting that I use the one you'd like to be correct."

The first step towards knowledge is admitting you don't know.

Yes.  The problem is that in the moral area, lots of people not only vehemently insist that they DO know, but are quite emphatic about you accepting their particular answer.

[tooqk4u22]

The first step towards knowledge is admitting you don't know.

Yes.  The problem is that in the moral area, lots of people not only vehemently insist that they DO know, but are quite emphatic about you accepting their particular answer.

I definitely second this. 

[ShavinItForLater]

But this conceptual observation doesn't change the fact that there exist unavoidably exploitative measures to attain and maintain early retirement that some of us may be using and may be uncomfortable using.

They don't, however, illustrate that there are no non-exploitative means to early retirement.

But this doesn't change the fact that the profit motive also elicits exploitative behavior, some of which behavior might fuel the investment returns of one's early retirement nest-egg.

That doesn't falsify the sub-contrary, i.e. the claim that early retirement might be evil and could (even probably does, to a variable extent) depend on or perpetuate evil.

So, if I am understanding your response correctly, you're in agreement that there is nothing inherently evil about achieving or maintaining FI.  But at the same time, it has "unavoidably exploitative measures", and somehow depends on and perpetuates evil?  Or perhaps just that it's possible to achieve it through exploitation and evil means, (which, just about anything *could* be done that way, in theory) and that's somehow a problem?

I really don't get where you're trying to go with this.  Perhaps you could elaborate and provide specifics about what about achieving and maintaining FIRE is so unavoidably exploitative and dependent on / perpetuating evil, because at this point I'm simply not getting it.

[tooqk4u22]

I believe I understand what he is looking for, and that is can you achieve FIRE, or any other goal for that matter, with out exploiting others or comprising on moral terpitude.

And the answer is I can and you can, but can WE collectively do it in a way where we all agree - I don't think so.  My definition of exploitation is probably different than yours and level of morality is also likely different than yours. 

[Daley]

Perhaps it would be fruitful to stop beating around the bush and establish some common guidelines that all can agree upon as being solid points of morality and ethics in this discussion. If I may be humored:

1) Intentional or malicious harm is bad.
2) Theft of property is bad.
3) Exploitation of minors is bad.
4) Permanent enslavement is bad.
5) Usurious loans are bad.
6) Responsibility is good.
7) Honesty is good.

These reasonable enough guidelines for everyone involved? Are they generic enough you think to pass pretty much every reasonable cultural framework? I think this should be sufficient enough to set up a baseline for all involved with this and other discussions on this subject.

Unfortunately, the biggest point of argument is for cases of relativism. Relativism doesn't change the consistent right or wrong, one's knowledge on the subject and tolerance threshold for what they're willing to turn a blind eye to defines their relative morality. This leads me into the next point I'm personally going to make regarding this and objections over the moral gray scale. Use and hide behind moral relativism all you want to defend yourself and your choices so long as you make one concession: you can defend your choices as virtuous in intent so long as there isn't enough evidence to demonstrably prove that it's fuggin' evil. If that point can be established solidly and with proof that your voluntary choices are doing more harm than good, you must either concede that your actions have been exploitative and thus re-adjust your practices to reflect accordingly or be willing to take responsibility and the title of being evil for continuing to deliberately turn a blind eye to the practice.

I bring this up for a reason. We should not be condemned for what we do out of ignorance. However, we're intelligent and rational people that are capable of learning and adapting. I think it fair to state that what truly defines evil is the knowing and remorseless act of doing an established wrong. Ignorance can only carry you so far, though. Plugging your ears (or in this case, covering your eyes) and ignoring proof that something you support is truly evil so you can continue on is equally evil. We have a responsibility towards the truth and doing the right thing. We abandon that, we cease being agents of good and positive change.

This should also leave things open enough to allow for what other cultural definitions of good and evil are based on other practices, giving latitude for agreeing to disagree. Let's use prostitution as an example. If Person A finds prostitution degrading and immoral based on specific cultural standards under all circumstances and Person B chooses to allow people the complete freedom to do what they want right or wrong so long as it doesn't maliciously hurt or exploit others (all parties consenting, aware of the risks and willing to take full personal responsibility for all subsequent outcomes of those acts), then both parties must be willing to agree to disagree on this subject. This then allows Person B to invest in the sex trade without condemnation so long as said invested trade can be proven to not violate both their own core personal values and the shared values established above.

EDIT: To make it even simpler, let's call the above seven points and subsequent flowery language the "Do Unto Others" framework. We're only allowed to practice and participate in things that we would allow to be done to us. This approach even allows some flexibility on limits of right and wrong with one another on those seven points. Say, if you don't view a 50% interest rate usurious, then you would have to be willing to accept a 50% interest rate loan yourself under the same circumstances and with the same restrictions and guidelines as those you lend to, no loopholes, no early payoff.

Objections?

[Jamesqf]

My definition of exploitation is probably different than yours...

To go even further, where some see evil exploitation, others see free market activity which they think is commendable.

[darkelenchus]

EDIT: To make it even simpler, let's call the above seven points and subsequent flowery language the "Do Unto Others" framework. We're only allowed to practice and participate in things that we would allow to be done to us. This approach even allows some flexibility on limits of right and wrong with one another on those seven points. Say, if you don't view a 50% interest rate usurious, then you would have to be willing to accept a 50% interest rate loan yourself under the same circumstances and with the same restrictions and guidelines as those you lend to, no loopholes, no early payoff.

Thanks for this, I.P. Very clear, and similar to the post I had intended to write after reading tooqk's and jamesqf's most recent responses. I think I see now where the hang-up is. Let's see if this does the trick.

Here's what I had written:

Let's start with what we all value, here: financial independence. If you value that for yourself, you value that for the world, and vice versa.

Actually, no I don't value FI for the world or anyone else for that matter. I only value it for me and my family...

Why must I necessarily value FI for the rest of the world? 

Okay, so I overstated my case. It's not the case that we all will financial independence as a value, since tooqk claims he's only interested in financial independence for himself and his family. Now, we probably all desire it. But that's distinct from willing something as a value, which is universal in form. Here's an example: I look around and see stuff that I've acquired through hard work, gifts from others, and so forth. I don't want others to steal or break my stuff. I'm making a judgment: "Stealing is wrong." Or, in other words, I will the respect of personal property as a value. Somebody breaks in to my house, and I condemn the act as wrong. Now, suppose I go to a grocery store and see a candy bar that I desire to eat but I don't have a means to exchange for it. I act on that desire and take the candy. I can try to rationalize this and call it something else that makes it seem "okay." But the form of the act is the same in both cases: it involves disregarding personal property as a value. Both the desire and the value make some demand on my behavior, but if I act on the desire, I do so at the expense of my valuing respect of personal property. I can own my choice and say "I did something wrong." I can dispense with my valuing respect for personal property and be okay with other people stealing my shit. Or I can be a big old wussy and shrink away from responsibility for my action.

The above should make clear that when I say "If I will early retirement as a value for myself, I will the opportunity for early retirement for the world," I'm not putting forth some "Disney World, let's all hold hands and you showed up so here's your trophy" bullshit. I'm pointing out a consequence of the logic of choosing to value something.  Exploitation in this case is not a matter of debate or opinion, it's simply any scenario in which one is denied the opportunity for early retirement at the expense of others having that opportunity. If you will early retirement as a value and someone comes along and does something that denies you this opportunity so that they might have it, that's exploitation. If you do this to another, you can't make it alright by calling it "an investment opportunity."

Note that this does not claim or entail that "everyone ought to will early retirement as a value." I've qualified things with conditionals and modal terms to express this. This is the reason why objections such as the following,

can WE collectively [purse and maintain early retirement] it in a way where we all agree... 

are a distraction from the point. Not everyone will choose early retirement as a value. Nor will everyone with an opportunity to pursue early retirement in fact to so. What's important is that you do what you can to promote early retirement for others and not deny others that opportunity, if you will it as a value.

Nor does this say that there is only one way to go about living in accord with this value. Varying circumstances may require different choices. People will come up with novel solutions, some better and some worse. Many will argue that some systems better realize that value than others. Due to the difficulty of some matters, there will sometimes be disagreements about what to do. One will have to balance early retirement with other values, which also make demands on our behavior. Sometimes we're faced with zero-sum games, and all other bets are off. All these things are true. They don't, however, detract from the central thesis.

[darkelenchus]

So, if I am understanding your response correctly, you're in agreement that there is nothing inherently evil about achieving or maintaining FI.

Correct.

But at the same time, it has "unavoidably exploitative measures", and somehow depends on and perpetuates evil?

No, one's pursuit and maintainence might have such features. The modal terms were key here (i.e. might, might not, possibility, necessity, can, cannot, etc.)

Or perhaps just that it's possible to achieve it through exploitation and evil means, (which, just about anything *could* be done that way, in theory) and that's somehow a problem?

The possibility isn't so much a problem, in itself. For those who are concerned with avoiding an early retirement funded by exploitative means, this is a problem in much the same way that avoiding a car accident while driving in the UK is a problem for someone who doesn't know UK traffic laws. They might unknowingly have investments or engage in frugal practices that are exploitative. They simply might not know about investments and frugal practices that are non-exploitative or avoidably exploitative. Hence the reasons for the ideas presented in the original post.

I really don't get where you're trying to go with this.  Perhaps you could elaborate and provide specifics about what about achieving and maintaining FIRE is so unavoidably exploitative and dependent on / perpetuating evil, because at this point I'm simply not getting it.

Has the above helped clarify? It's not that FIRE is unavoidably exploitative. It's that exploitation is avoidable, and those who are concerned with avoiding it should use the avenues that allow them to avoid it. The post was intended to be about exploring those avenues.

[sol]

To go even further, where some see evil exploitation, others see free market activity which they think is commendable.

This is exactly why IPD's  "do unto others" rules aren't going to work.  All 7 of them are explicitly violated by the way we practice capitalism.  We deliberately harm other other people in the name of profit.  We steal resources and intellectual property.  We exploit minors and enslave workers.  We charge all kind of interest, lie about corporate profits, and duck responsibility when our risk-taking crashes the economy.  It's almost like Wall Street had this exact same list and did the exact opposite of everything to build our economic model.

And many Americans see no problem with that.  We're so entrenched in the idea that capitalism is this virtuous unassailable edifice of democracy (?) that even people who embrace IPD's list in their personal lives or faiths are fine with ignoring it in their businesses.

If you will early retirement as a value and someone comes along and does something that denies you this opportunity so that they might have it, that's exploitation.

Are we worried here about restricting a particular individual, or just the general amount of people who can have early retirement?

I ask because we've previously discussed what would happen if everyone retired early, and I still think that an entire society based on people being full time parents isn't sustainable in our industrial age.  We need some people to work long hard careers or the whole thing falls apart.  By this metric, my early retirement would be necessarily evil because it's not possible for everyone to have that which I have willed as a value.

[darkelenchus]

If you will early retirement as a value and someone comes along and does something that denies you this opportunity so that they might have it, that's exploitation.

Are we worried here about restricting a particular individual, or just the general amount of people who can have early retirement?

We're worried about early retirement as an opportunity for everyone, present and future.

I ask because we've previously discussed what would happen if everyone retired early, and I still think that an entire society based on people being full time parents isn't sustainable in our industrial age. We need some people to work long hard careers or the whole thing falls apart.

Right. So willing early retirement as a value doesn't entail that you're willing everyone to be in fact retired always and everywhere. You will this as an opportunity, a possibility for the world. Some people will take that opportunity, others won't. All things being equal, there will always be people in the accumulation phase at the very least, who work to produce goods, which increases wealth. Those who are retired could even have some claim on those jobs via shares in a company. As long as the opportunity for early retirement is/was present, the ownership is non-exploitative.

By this metric, my early retirement would be necessarily evil because it's not possible for everyone to have that which I have willed as a value.

This is not true. Neither you nor your early retirement are to blame for the way things are if you did not make it so through your own actions. The way things are is just what you have to work with when you make choices, and so you must accept it as the way it is.  However, in willing early retirement as a value, you are responsible for doing what you can to improve the situation and to not perpetuate it. Your early retirement would be evil if you knowingly and willingly participated or contributed to processes and procedures that denied the same opportunity to others.

[Bakari]

Are we worried here about restricting a particular individual, or just the general amount of people who can have early retirement?

I ask because we've previously discussed what would happen if everyone retired early, and I still think that an entire society based on people being full time parents isn't sustainable in our industrial age.  We need some people to work long hard careers or the whole thing falls apart.  By this metric, my early retirement would be necessarily evil because it's not possible for everyone to have that which I have willed as a value.

The issue though isn't "could everyone in society never work?"

It is "could everyone in society work less than 40 years?"

I think the answer is unquestionably yes.
When a generation leaves the work force at age 60, it doesn't cause the economy to collapse.  Other people take the places of the people who left.  The fact that someone retires eventually, and goes on living another 30 years, doesn't mean they didn't contribute to the work that needs to be done in society.

Right now we have something like 8% unemployment (and that number only reflects those people who are both able to and want to work), so right off the bat everyone who is currently working could work 8% less and society would not slow down even a little.
That 8% could be in the form of working 37 hours a week, or it could be in the form of retiring 3 years sooner - in the long run they would both be the same thing.  Each worker works 8% less, giving everyone else an opportunity to have a job.

At the same time, mustachian style ER involves consuming less.
In this thought experiment we are talking about everyone retiring early, so we can assume everyone is consuming less.
That interrupts the whole consumer cycle, as people buy less things.  In turn companies produce less stuff, because there are no buyers.  Which means there is less work to be done.
Lets say, just as a random example, everyone cut their consumption to one fourth (and lets pretend that manufacturing is domestic - ha!)  Now the sectors that produced all the various stuff lay off 75% of their workforce.

Of course, there are other sectors which wouldn't change much, if at all - emergency services, utilities, farming, plenty of things society is still going to need.  But that 75% of people now need to be redistributed into the remaining workforce.  That means that everyone currently employed can work even less still, and everything that needs to get done will get done, while having nobody who wants to work unemployed.

On the one hand, people would make less money.  On the other hand, they would need less money, because they are spending less.  It is obviously possible to spend enough less that you don't have to work as much, because that is the entire point of frugality based FI.

The reason this all works is productivity.  The 40 hour work week was developed over a century ago, when people had to work with a centuryago level technology, and everything got done.  Today each worker can produce 20 times as much value in the same amount of time, yet we still have everyone work the same amount of hours for the same number of years.

The result of that is we need to find crap to produce just to keep everyone employed!  That's why you have politicians urging people to go shopping to help the economy, and why people think the only healthy economy is one that is growing. 

What would be impossible is for every single person to inherit massive wealth and just live on dividends for a lifetime.  Then nothing would get done.  As long as you spend some time contributing via work, then you existing the workforce just leaves a job open for an unemployed person to take.

[tooqk4u22]

Perhaps it would be fruitful to stop beating around the bush and establish some common guidelines that all can agree upon as being solid points of morality and ethics in this discussion. If I may be humored:

1) Intentional or malicious harm is bad.
2) Theft of property is bad.
3) Exploitation of minors is bad.
4) Permanent enslavement is bad.
5) Usurious loans are bad.
6) Responsibility is good.
7) Honesty is good.

These reasonable enough guidelines for everyone involved? Are they generic enough you think to pass pretty much every reasonable cultural framework? I think this should be sufficient enough to set up a baseline for all involved with this and other discussions on this subject.
......

Objections?

Generally I agree and the last two should probably be the first two, but it still doesn't solve the fundamental issue that I have in that peoples view of these are different. And your position that relativism/societal norms doesn't matter, I would in fact argue that is all that matters as that is what determines where the edges of gray are acceptable.  But this too is different society by society - i.e. exploitation of minors is bad, yes here in the US but not so in China - people have children because it is free labor (work the farm) so now they are getting exploited but paid for it. And if we (as in the collective U.S.) are honest about it we must not have any real issue with exploitation of minors because we buy all our crap from there and other places where this is pervasive. Out of sight, out of mind doesn't make it right.

Also why are usurious loans bad - I don't have a problem with it, the higher the interest I can charge the better and is optional because a person has a choice not to put them in a position to need to borrower.  I do have a major problem with fraudulence, misrepresentation, bait and switch, unduly change terms, et al. and this I think is more of the issue.  Look if I go to a loan shark and pay 5% a week and have 30 days to pay I know what I am getting into, if then said loanshark tells me a week later that you now have 2 weeks and it is 20% that is wrong.

[tooqk4u22]

Okay, so I overstated my case. It's not the case that we all will financial independence as a value, since tooqk claims he's only interested in financial independence for himself and his family.

How about this....take out the concept of financial independence and my view is that I will opportunity for all and the freedom to pursue it, which should not come unduly at the expense of others while recognizing that my standard or yours or anybody elses can be different but we must rely on our collective morality to guide us.   

Now, we probably all desire it. But that's distinct from willing something as a value, which is universal in form. Here's an example: .........."Stealing is Wrong"

The above should make clear that when I say "If I will early retirement as a value for myself, I will the opportunity for early retirement for the world," Note that this does not claim or entail that "everyone ought to will early retirement as a value." I've qualified things with conditionals and modal terms to express this.

This is the reason why objections such as the following,

It doesn't make it clear and appreciate that you allow for conditionals. Yes I think we would all agree that stealing is wrong, but people do it all the time and they may not view it as wrong.  [Warning: Intelectual gotcha coming]  In your scenarion of you stealing a candy bar what if it was hungary child stealing an apple.....on one hand the kid is probably doing something he knows is wrong....on the other hand the storeowner could let him have the apple and the expense of the profit.  I bet, no let me restate that, I KNOW that there are people on this forum that will say give him the damn apple because he is starving and it is the right thing to do and others who will argue no f'in way because I would lose $0.25 and then everyone in the neighborhood would suddenly be starving.

And you know what I actually agree with both sides of that argument. I wish I was more like others who's views are so black and white with very little gray - unfortunately for me I live in a world of gray and beleive that almost everything has varying shades of gray (BTW I hate the fact that every time I say this I think about some damn book that is out there now). 

[tooqk4u22]

The issue though isn't "could everyone in society never work?"

It is "could everyone in society work less than 40 years?"

I think the answer is unquestionably yes.

While your post is thoughtful it fundamentally ignores the principles of economics.   There are many flaws in the logic, even if they do sound logical, and is somewhat along the unintended consequences logic.  For instance, if all the older people stopped working to free up jobs you are right that it would create opportunities of younger people.  It would also deplete a significant portion of the labor force and would result in income inflation (supply and demand of the resource), which isn't a bad thing for those benefiting from it but would be terrible for those older people that you just kicked out of the workforce because inflation would kill their savings/fixed incomes.  Just like anything else there will be winners and losers. 

And even if you got your outcome that everyone would make less money but that is ok because everyone will need less money - no that is just deflation.  If everyone deflates or inflates at the same rate then the outcome is neutral.  More people working with less income doesn't change the total income pot.  The inverse of this is when women entered the workforce and overtime it lead to two income households today earning the equivalent of one income household 50 years ago to survive. 

You are also assuming that for the redistribution of jobs the people that are currently unemployed are qualified or skilled enough to do those jobs,  and if we stop consuming then more unemployment would be created from all the layoffs from retailers, hoteliers, automakers, etc.   We need people chasing the carrot.

Let's say we stop consuming/consume materially less and therefore seek to produce less, modern currency theories would become invalidated and the current economic system would evolve, or really devolve.  There will still be haves and have nots but instead of currency wealth, wealth would be accumulated in housing, farmland, water....you know the basic resources to survive with labor being the other commodity to trade.   Not unlike the various empires that existed throughout history.

[tooqk4u22]

[This is exactly why IPD's  "do unto others" rules aren't going to work.  All 7 of them are explicitly violated by the way we practice capitalism.  We deliberately harm other other people in the name of profit.  We steal resources and intellectual property.  We exploit minors and enslave workers.  We charge all kind of interest, lie about corporate profits, and duck responsibility when our risk-taking crashes the economy.  It's almost like Wall Street had this exact same list and did the exact opposite of everything to build our economic model.

And many Americans see no problem with that.  We're so entrenched in the idea that capitalism is this virtuous unassailable edifice of democracy (?) that even people who embrace IPD's list in their personal lives or faiths are fine with ignoring it in their businesses.

Thank you Sol for demonstrating perfectly that we can have different views....as I said varying degrees of gray....well in Sol's case they may be a bit more black and white :)

I ask because we've previously discussed what would happen if everyone retired early, and I still think that an entire society based on people being full time parents isn't sustainable in our industrial age.  We need some people to work long hard careers or the whole thing falls apart.  By this metric, my early retirement would be necessarily evil because it's not possible for everyone to have that which I have willed as a value.

This is funny because it is almost in complete contradiction to your first comment and your general view that capitalism is bad. 

[ShavinItForLater]

Also why are usurious loans bad - I don't have a problem with it, the higher the interest I can charge the better and is optional because a person has a choice not to put them in a position to need to borrower.  I do have a major problem with fraudulence, misrepresentation, bait and switch, unduly change terms, et al. and this I think is more of the issue.  Look if I go to a loan shark and pay 5% a week and have 30 days to pay I know what I am getting into, if then said loanshark tells me a week later that you now have 2 weeks and it is 20% that is wrong.

In my opinion you've overstepped moral bounds with that one.  The key difference in my mind is that the "service" you are providing, using payday loans as an example, is not actually helpful to the customer.  It harms them.  Yes they chose to buy the service, yes they were irresponsible to the point of "needing" to borrow, but when you look at the net effect of what your service does to your group of customers, they are *worse* off.  A payday lender I have no doubt sees the same people coming in month after month, getting in way over their heads, and they know damn well they are being absolutely stupid to use that "service" rather than sucking it up and waiting for their paycheck, or working an extra job to get that money.  They are clearly *preying* on their customers, in the same way a casino preys on gambling addicts and a drug dealer preys on drug addicts.  When your business is harming your customers, I find that immoral, even if it is legal.

EDIT: Perhaps by way of illustration--if you were said payday lender, and your son walked in to get one, would you happily sell it to him?  No?  Why not?

[Bakari]

The issue though isn't "could everyone in society never work?"

It is "could everyone in society work less than 40 years?"

I think the answer is unquestionably yes.

While your post is thoughtful it fundamentally ignores the principles of economics.   There are many flaws in the logic, even if they do sound logical, and is somewhat along the unintended consequences logic.  For instance, if all the older people stopped working to free up jobs you are right that it would create opportunities of younger people.  It would also deplete a significant portion of the labor force and would result in income inflation (supply and demand of the resource), which isn't a bad thing for those benefiting from it but would be terrible for those older people that you just kicked out of the workforce because inflation would kill their savings/fixed incomes.  Just like anything else there will be winners and losers. 

There didn't use to be any retirement age.
Then, at some point in time it was invented.
It didn't kill old people's savings from inflation.
We have inflation currently. 
I agree it would tend to increase wages, but I don't think it would necessarily result in inflation.  That increase in wages could, at least partially, come from lower corporate profits.

And even if you got your outcome that everyone would make less money but that is ok because everyone will need less money - no that is just deflation.  If everyone deflates or inflates at the same rate then the outcome is neutral. 

OK.
Good! 
If we have a system where everyone is employed, everyone can retire early, and everyone has the same effective income they have now, that sounds like a pretty friggin perfect system!

More people working with less income doesn't change the total income pot.  The inverse of this is when women entered the workforce and overtime it lead to two income households today earning the equivalent of one income household 50 years ago to survive. 

Again: Good!  If your theory is right, then people could work less total life hours and in the end the average household would still make the same effective income.  I hadn't even thought of that.  That's a better outcome than my original version.  Thank you for the concept.

You are also assuming that for the redistribution of jobs the people that are currently unemployed are qualified or skilled enough to do those jobs, 

Not right away they wouldn't be.
Just like we didn't transition from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy, or then from a manufacturing to a service economy overnight.  When certain jobs are made obsolete by technology (or outsourcing, or corporate consolidation) the unemployed may need to go back to school and learn a new skill set.  It is a natural consequence of capitalism and technology.  Why would it be any more of a problem in the context of reducing everyone's lifetime labor hours?

and if we stop consuming then more unemployment would be created from all the layoffs from retailers, hoteliers, automakers, etc.   We need people chasing the carrot.

I already covered this in the original post!
Creating more unemployment is the goal
Its just that this unemployment would need to be equally distributed throughout society.
Instead of having some people be employed for 80,000 hours (40 years of 40 hours weeks) and other people working 0 hours, there is no inherent reason we as a society couldn't choose to have everyone work 40,000 lifetime hours.
Less environmental damage and waste, more free time for everyone, nobody wastes their life chasing the carrot.

Utopian fantasy?  That's what all the capitalists said when some radicals proposed a 40 hour work week too.

Let's say we stop consuming/consume materially less and therefore seek to produce less, modern currency theories would become invalidated and the current economic system would evolve, or really devolve. 

yup

There will still be haves and have nots but instead of currency wealth, wealth would be accumulated in housing, farmland, water....you know the basic resources to survive with labor being the other commodity to trade.   Not unlike the various empires that existed throughout history.

Yup.
So?
You are not in favor of economic equality.  Are you suddenly objecting to their being haves and have nots?  Under the system I'm describing there would be more equality of opportunity (which we can all agree is a good thing, no?) as there would ultimately be less unemployment (
I'm was never suggesting that this system would make everyone equal, or that it should even be a goal.  Just because I don't believe in unchecked capitalism doesn't make me a communist!
What I do think is the benefits of productivity gains would be more equally distributed allowing the already rich to skim less off the top of everyone elses labor.  That still allows for some people to own the companies while others do the actual work, and the owners will still make the most money.  They just won't make such ridiculous amounts.  But I'll save more on that for your capitalism thread...

[tooqk4u22]

Yup.
So?
You are not in favor of economic equality.  Are you suddenly objecting to their being haves and have nots?  Under the system I'm describing there would be more equality of opportunity (which we can all agree is a good thing, no?) as there would ultimately be less unemployment (
I'm was never suggesting that this system would make everyone equal, or that it should even be a goal.  Just because I don't believe in unchecked capitalism doesn't make me a communist!
What I do think is the benefits of productivity gains would be more equally distributed allowing the already rich to skim less off the top of everyone elses labor.  That still allows for some people to own the companies while others do the actual work, and the owners will still make the most money.  They just won't make such ridiculous amounts.  But I'll save more on that for your capitalism thread...

For the rest of the discussion we could go round and round with poking holes in our views and why or why not it could work, but it is all theoretical and fun.

But this I like, and from this perspective then I like your world.  I would have no problem being a land owner, producing some food source of some kind, and selling/trading to the people.   Based on this, assuming you are not a communist as you say, you really more against the industrialized way of living that has been created in the last 200 years and would rather reset the clock to before that period.  I am ok with this, actually sometimes wonder about what it would have been like to live back then or in other periods.  Although, I would say if you look back in history there is no better time to be on the lower end of the economic scale than now - so we need to keep that in perspective.   

[tooqk4u22]

Also why are usurious loans bad - I don't have a problem with it, the higher the interest I can charge the better and is optional because a person has a choice not to put them in a position to need to borrower.  I do have a major problem with fraudulence, misrepresentation, bait and switch, unduly change terms, et al. and this I think is more of the issue.  Look if I go to a loan shark and pay 5% a week and have 30 days to pay I know what I am getting into, if then said loanshark tells me a week later that you now have 2 weeks and it is 20% that is wrong.

In my opinion you've overstepped moral bounds with that one.  The key difference in my mind is that the "service" you are providing, using payday loans as an example, is not actually helpful to the customer.  It harms them.  Yes they chose to buy the service, yes they were irresponsible to the point of "needing" to borrow, but when you look at the net effect of what your service does to your group of customers, they are *worse* off.  A payday lender I have no doubt sees the same people coming in month after month, getting in way over their heads, and they know damn well they are being absolutely stupid to use that "service" rather than sucking it up and waiting for their paycheck, or working an extra job to get that money.  They are clearly *preying* on their customers, in the same way a casino preys on gambling addicts and a drug dealer preys on drug addicts.  When your business is harming your customers, I find that immoral, even if it is legal.

EDIT: Perhaps by way of illustration--if you were said payday lender, and your son walked in to get one, would you happily sell it to him?  No?  Why not?

Fair enough, I get your point but there again proves my point that there are varying degrees of morality.  And for the record I don't like them anymore than you do.  And really I would rather go to a payday lender than a loan shark, and sadly they both exist as viable options. And yes it is a vicious cycle, but debt can be a vicious cycle no matter what the interest rate is.  Let's say my son came in presumably I would have the resources to help them on my own, but then again I don't know if I would help my son unabated and unconditionally for ever. So where would he be then, who would he turn to. 

Separately, is it really exploiting a situation if both parties are getting something out of it in willful, voluntary exchange.   Why do those people keep going back, at some level it does equate to stupid tax.  And my goodness it so easy, even now, to get a credit card that if for nothing else can be used as an e-fund, but undoubtedly many of these people have already had them and abused them. 

A car dealer selling you a new car is no different, is it not.  Let's ignore any financing, but you give them your money and they give you something that is worth 25% less just driving it over the curb.  Sounds like a stupid tax, yet it is done everyday by people who typically finance it so it is a double whammy. 

Planning and being responsible typically results in being in such a position, but sometimes you have to learn the hard way.

[darkelenchus]

How about this....take out the concept of financial independence and my view is that I will opportunity for all and the freedom to pursue it, which should not come unduly at the expense of others...

I was going to write something to that effect, viz., that you likely will freedom as a value, and not financial independence. Exploitation would be denial of opportunity for others to pursue one's own interests and satisfy one's preferences.

while recognizing that my standard or yours or anybody elses can be different

No need to mention the caveat. It's build into the logic of willing something as a value. If there are multiple wills, then there is likely to be different valuation.

but we must rely on our collective morality to guide us.

If by this you mean something to the effect that we have to have a general agreement that certain things are generally impermissible and others permissible for society to function or for there to be a society at all, then I agree 100%.

Yes I think we would all agree that stealing is wrong, but people do it all the time and they may not view it as wrong.

It doesn't matter whether all agree that stealing is wrong. Universality is an intrinsic feature of any act of willing something as a value. If any arbitrary but particular person wills respect of property as a value, they will that universally. If that person steals and trys to rationalize it, they're contradicting that value. It may also lead them to give up willing respect of property as a value.

This is distinct from making an absolute, black and white claim that at all times and in all places everyone should refrain from theft. Any given individual is likely to value other things. Those values must inevitably be balanced with other values and demands on our behavior.

In your scenario of you stealing a candy bar what if it was hungary child stealing an apple... on one hand the kid is probably doing something he knows is wrong....on the other hand the storeowner could let him have the apple and the expense of the profit...

Again, this doesn't provide a counter-example to the logic of willing something as a value. It shows that there are different things that make demands on our behavior: e.g. desires, self-preservation, health, respect of property, charitability, etc. What we value and desire, and the manner in which we value and desire, will determine outcomes.

there are people on this forum that will say give him the damn apple because he is starving and it is the right thing to do and others who will argue no f'in way because I would lose $0.25 and then everyone in the neighborhood would suddenly be starving.

Sure. And this shows that different people will different things as values, or, at the very least, if they will both charitiablity and respect of proeprty, they allocate those priorites in different ways. This isn't excluded from the position I put forth. In fact, such disagreement and variation is a virtual guaranteed consequence of the fact that the world doesn't hand us a pre-set system of values; that instead we find ourselves in a situation where we've got to figure it out for ourselves.

And you know what I actually agree with both sides of that argument. I wish I was more like others who's views are so black and white with very little gray - unfortunately for me I live in a world of gray and beleive that almost everything has varying shades of gray (BTW I hate the fact that every time I say this I think about some damn book that is out there now).

I wouldn't agree with either side of the argument until I had further information, but that's neither here nor there w/ respect to your point that moral matters are more spectral than binary. I don't disagree, and neither does the view that I put forth preclude it.

I think we may have been misunderstanding each other's positions: You thought I was arguing "Moral values apply the same way at all times and in all places for everyone, and therefore there's no debating right and wrong in particular cases," and I thought you were objecting: "People differ in their moral values, so a) you're wrong that morality is absolute or objective in the way that, say, mathematics or the natural sciences are objective such that we can all agree in any given scenario what is the right course of action and what is the wrong course of action, and b) as a consequense there is no point in discussing moral matters/no moral fact of the matter."

I'm not arguing what I think you think I'm arguing, and I suspect you probably aren't arguing the (b) part of what I thought you were arguing. At least some of the things you've said recently (e.g. references to collective morality) suggest that moral valuation is not a nihilist, solipsist, or entirely private enterprise. Of course, as I've been saying, the (a) part is irrelevant because it doesn't actually address the position put forward. That is, (a) is based on what you thought I was arguing, when in fact I wasn't arguing that at all.

and appreciate that you allow for conditionals

I suspect that this is not the case; otherwise you would've recognized your counter-examples weren't really counter-examples.

[Jamesqf]

Here's an example: I look around and see stuff that I've acquired through hard work, gifts from others, and so forth. I don't want others to steal or break my stuff. I'm making a judgment: "Stealing is wrong." Or, in other words, I will the respect of personal property as a value. Somebody breaks in to my house, and I condemn the act as wrong. Now, suppose I go to a grocery store and see a candy bar that I desire to eat but I don't have a means to exchange for it. I act on that desire and take the candy. I can try to rationalize this and call it something else that makes it seem "okay." But the form of the act is the same in both cases: it involves disregarding personal property as a value.

But this example is capable of quite a different interpretation.  Suppose you are a successful professional thief: you make your living by stealing from other people, and have acquired lots of stuff.  Will you think it's ok if someone else breaks into your house and steals your stuff?  I suspect not*.  Indeed, I suspect that even Bernie Madoff would have been a bit annoyed to discover that his pocket had been picked :-)  As earlier, lots of supposedly moral predicaments depend on whose ox is being gored :-)

(* See e.g. Donald Westlake's "What's the Worst That Could Happen?")

[Jamesqf]

Also why are usurious loans bad - I don't have a problem with it, the higher the interest I can charge the better and is optional because a person has a choice not to put them in a position to need to borrower.  I do have a major problem with fraudulence, misrepresentation, bait and switch, unduly change terms, et al. and this I think is more of the issue.  Look if I go to a loan shark and pay 5% a week and have 30 days to pay I know what I am getting into, if then said loanshark tells me a week later that you now have 2 weeks and it is 20% that is wrong.

In my opinion you've overstepped moral bounds with that one.  The key difference in my mind is that the "service" you are providing, using payday loans as an example, is not actually helpful to the customer.  It harms them.

Define "usurious" and "harm".  I will argue that the auto dealer offering zero down, zero interest loans to people in order to entice them into buying new cars that they don't need is likewise doing harm to the borrower.

[tooqk4u22]

It doesn't matter whether all agree that stealing is wrong. Universality is an intrinsic feature of any act of willing something as a value. If any arbitrary but particular person wills respect of property as a value, they will that universally. If that person steals and trys to rationalize it, they're contradicting that value. It may also lead them to give up willing respect of property as a value.

This is distinct from making an absolute, black and white claim that at all times and in all places everyone should refrain from theft. Any given individual is likely to value other things. Those values must inevitably be balanced with other values and demands on our behavior.

My head hurts, I am having difficulty maintaining focus on the philosophical end arounds and head fakes.  I think we started in different positions and through the discussion migrated closer and/or refined and clarified our positions. All good stuff and productive, well maybe not in life but for the disussion at hand.  It sounds like that we agree that we all have individual values, we rely on societal norm to function, and that if

Here is what I need from you....please clarify "willing something as a value" - what you think it means, accompishes, etc. It seems so elusive to nail down leading to the back and forth a bit, and certainly everything I suggest is not a counter-examples.  In fact, if you could provide an example of good counter-example that may serve useful to help clarify where you are coming from/going to.  The above quote suggest that we all have values that we will that are different from others and if we go against our values we are not being true to ourselves but if someone else goes against our values it is ok because we have different values. Head spinning.

[darkelenchus]

Here's an example: I look around and see stuff that I've acquired through hard work, gifts from others, and so forth. I don't want others to steal or break my stuff. I'm making a judgment: "Stealing is wrong." Or, in other words, I will the respect of personal property as a value. Somebody breaks in to my house, and I condemn the act as wrong. Now, suppose I go to a grocery store and see a candy bar that I desire to eat but I don't have a means to exchange for it. I act on that desire and take the candy. I can try to rationalize this and call it something else that makes it seem "okay." But the form of the act is the same in both cases: it involves disregarding personal property as a value.

But this example is capable of quite a different interpretation.  Suppose you are a successful professional thief: you make your living by stealing from other people, and have acquired lots of stuff.  Will you think it's ok if someone else breaks into your house and steals your stuff?  I suspect not*.  Indeed, I suspect that even Bernie Madoff would have been a bit annoyed to discover that his pocket had been picked :-)

This isn't a different inerpretation. You've altered the example. Regardless, it doesn't present a counter-example to the logic of willing something as a value. Either A) the professional thief wills respect of personal property as a value or B) she doesn't.

A) If she does, then she's acting in contradiction to her value, and either shrinks away from that responsibility in bad faith or admits she's doing wrong (hating herself for it, feeling guilty, etc., possibly even wanting to stop engaging in her profession). Under this condition, if someone steals her stuff and she condemns the act as wrong, her condemenation is still consistent with what she's willed to value even if her own acts are inconsistent with that value. 

B) If she doesn't will it as a value, then she's not justified in judging it's wrong for others to do it to her. (In fact, in making such a judgment, she'd be choosing respect of personal property as a value. Under this condition, (A) applies.) She might get angry, sad, have a whole host of other feelings she doesn't want to have, but that's different from her judging the theft of her property as wrong.

[Jamesqf]

This isn't a different inerpretation. You've altered the example. Regardless, it doesn't present a counter-example to the logic of willing something as a value. Either A) the professional thief wills respect of personal property as a value or B) she doesn't.

I don't think you're being egotistical enough here.  You're trying to force our thief to construct & submit to a universal personal property value; one that applies equally to her and to everyone else.  I suggest that for many of us the world is much more pragmatic: we wish to survive and prosper; what helps us do so is good.  Therefore me successfully stealing stuff is good, someone stealing from me is bad.  Values are not equal and reciprocal.

Of course there are elaborations on this, as for instance whether theft is a good long-term strategy.  Indeed, one of the reasons (and far from the least of them) that I chose not to become a professional thief was the recognition that I could make more money with less effort and risk doing software.  But my attitude isn't universal: there are lots of people who'd rather make a crooked dime than an honest dollar.

[Bakari]

I don't think you're being egotistical enough here.  You're trying to force our thief to construct & submit to a universal personal property value; one that applies equally to her and to everyone else.  I suggest that for many of us the world is much more pragmatic: we wish to survive and prosper; what helps us do so is good.  Therefore me successfully stealing stuff is good, someone stealing from me is bad.  Values are not equal and reciprocal.

Your correct that this position is both widely held and logically consistent.

Nor is it necessarily even inherently immoral.

But it is inherently amoral.

Its just like how a predator killing its dinner isn't being immoral.  The issue of morality simply doesn't apply.

If you are using the word "value" in the sense of "I value this item that I enjoy", then your correct about everything you wrote, but I think darkelenchus is talking about values, not value.
Given that these are discussions about morality, we are starting with an assumption that we aren't simply looking out for our own best interests.

[Bakari]

Perhaps it would be fruitful to stop beating around the bush and establish some common guidelines that all can agree upon as being solid points of morality and ethics in this discussion. If I may be humored:

1) Intentional or malicious harm is bad.
2) Theft of property is bad.
3) Exploitation of minors is bad.
4) Permanent enslavement is bad.
5) Usurious loans are bad.
6) Responsibility is good.
7) Honesty is good.

I'm not sure about #2. 
You would have to clearly define theft.

If it means taking something which was previously acknowledged to belong to an individual without said individuals permission, then one could make the case that taxes are theft.
(In fact, a whole lot of people do make that case.  They are called the Tea Party)

There are a number of areas in which even in America, probably the most individualistic large society that has ever existed, we do not consider property rights inalienable.
In addition to taxes, We The People see fit to confiscate property as punishment for even minor and/or accidental infractions of the law (e.g. fines for parking or equipment violations).
We redistribute property for alimony and child support.
If not for eminent domain the interstate highway system would not exist, which would have caused a severe hindered to economic expansion.  The land owners get compensated, but giving up the land is involuntary, if it is needed for a public project.

Then there are questions that may be settled by law, but are grey in terms of morality.
If a person owns a plot of land which they have not done anything with for years, and have no intention of doing anything with, and someone else comes along and builds something there, are they a trespasser or a homesteader?
Inheritance undermines the American ideal of equal opportunity and concentrates wealth without adding value to society or the economy, as well as leading to a quasi-aristocratic class with the power to undermine democracy.
Yet many claim that the property rights of the newly deceased should outweigh the benefits to society of redistribution.

Some claim that none but Aboriginal Americans have legitimate claim to any land in the US.  When a tribe occupied Alcatraz island, where they stealing property, or were they reclaiming what was rightfully theirs?

If someone acquired property through legal but unethical means, is it immoral if another person steals the ill-gotten property and returns it to the original owner?

[darkelenchus]

I think we started in different positions and through the discussion migrated closer and/or refined and clarified our positions.

It seems to me we've maintained the same positions throughout, but clarifications have certainly occured which revealed we weren't as far off from one another as we thought.

Here is what I need from you....please clarify "willing something as a value"

Okay, good. As rational beings, we cannot help but make judgments that involve assigning evaluative predicates to subjects. For instance, we assign truth values to propositions (e.g. "'it's raining outside' is true/false" or "'Cheesecake tastes good to me' is true/false"), moral values to acts, (e.g. "Stealing is wrong" or "One ought to respect personal property"), and aesthetic values to things (e.g. "This painting/dance routine/song is beautiful"). But each of these judgments function differently. Judgments involving truth values are judgments about the way the world is, whereas judgments involving moral values are judgments about the way the world ought to be, which may or may not be the way things are.

Judgments involving truth values ultimately answer to the world, since they are descriptions of the actual or potential state of the world. For instance, in stating that 2+2=5 or in stating that it's raining, one doesn't choose for the world to be this way, but makes a claim that the world is in fact this way. These statements neither make demands on one's behavior nor commit one to act in one way or another. 

By contrast, judgments involving moral values, don't answer to the world, since making a moral judgment assigns a valuation to the form of an action, which thereby prescribes a principle or procedure for behavior to avoid/promote acts of such kind. For instance, if I judge that taking someone else's laptop without permission and with no intent to return it is wrong, I've prescribed that any act of the same form should be avoided (e.g. stealing apples from a grocery store, mables from a toy store, money from a bank or from someone's house, etc.), regardless of who might be performing the act, whether it be myself or another. So, to say that one wills something as a moral value is to say that a) anything that anyone regards as a moral value must have been chosen, which presupposes b) that value isn't determined by the world.

We all have values that we will that are different from others

Yes, its a virtual certainty that there will be different moral values. However, there may be (I'd argue that there are) moral values that we all must choose just in virtue of being human or, more specifically, in virtue of being social beings. For instance, respect of property, an expectation of honesty, and respect of one's person are all things we must value in order to have a functioning society or to have a society in the first place. Moreover, we value other such things as health, freedom, and knowledge/wisdom/mental development, ingenuity, etc.

Undoubtedly, there is and will be diversity in going about just how to realize these values in the world. There are and will be conflicting theories regarding which systems, policies, and procedures best promote those values. Behind all the diversity and conflict, however, you'll find that there are human universals of moral value, i.e. moral judgments that are common to humanity. As such, moral facts of the matter are intersubjective in essence (i.e. all moral values result from individual choice, and some moral values are common to all humanity) and a matter of reason (i.e. the result of judgment & deductive/inductive/analogical thought), distinct from brute facts of nature (e.g. the sun rises in the east), institutional facts (e.g. inflation rose by 1.66%), and truths of reason ("Something cannot both exist and not exist," "the square root of 81 is 9," "All bachelors are unmarried males.").

And if we go against our values we are not being true to ourselves...

That's almost correct. And when we go against our values we're confronted with further choice: abandon our values for something else, shrink away in bad faith, or take responsibility for our choice and the reality that resulted from it.

but if someone else goes against our values it is ok because we have different values.

Yes and no. It will depend on whether or not the values conflict and how they're related to the other values of the parties involved, among other possible things. For instance, willing having blond hair and blue eyes as a value lead to some pretty heinous acts that conflicted with many other commonly held values. It's a good thing the greatest generation didn't just shrug their shoulders and say "oh, it's okay what you do, you eugenics fanatics. Your values are just different from ours." In fact, the conflict in values led to that zero-sum game we call "war."

[darkelenchus]

I don't think you're being egotistical enough here.  You're trying to force our thief to construct & submit to a universal personal property value; one that applies equally to her and to everyone else. 

Read the post more carefully. I'm not trying to force her to do anything. If she doesn't choose to honor respect of personal property as a value, then it's not a moral issue, but instead simply one of personal benefit or harm. See my distinction between desiring something and willing something as a value: respect of personal property is a desire in this instance, not a value.

I suggest that for many of us the world is much more pragmatic: we wish to survive and prosper; what helps us do so is good.  Therefore me successfully stealing stuff is good, someone stealing from me is bad.  Values are not equal and reciprocal.

Bakari's remarks adequately address this position, I think. You're equivocating on "good" and "bad." In this instance, these terms aren't predicated to the actions as moral properties; rather, they indicate the act as fortuitous or harmful to the subject that the claim is about.

Of course there are elaborations on this, as for instance whether theft is a good long-term strategy.  Indeed, one of the reasons (and far from the least of them) that I chose not to become a professional thief was the recognition that I could make more money with less effort and risk doing software.  But my attitude isn't universal: there are lots of people who'd rather make a crooked dime than an honest dollar.

Given that these are discussions about morality, we are starting with an assumption that we aren't simply looking out for our own best interests.

Even if we take Jamesqf's pragmatic position (which I sympathize with, to a certain extent) and start with rational self-interest, there are ways to arrive at general moral principles. See Thomas Hobbes's Contractarianism.

[Jamesqf]

Some claim that none but Aboriginal Americans have legitimate claim to any land in the US.  When a tribe occupied Alcatraz island, where they stealing property, or were they reclaiming what was rightfully theirs?

Others, with more knowledge of (pre)history and human nature, would claim that the current tribes had conquered/stole those lands from earlier peoples, who took them from still earlier ones, all the way back to the second group to come over the Bering land bridge.

[tooqk4u22]

Yes, its a virtual certainty that there will be different moral values. However, there may be (I'd argue that there are) moral values that we all must choose just in virtue of being human or, more specifically, in virtue of being social beings. For instance, respect of property, an expectation of honesty, and respect of one's person are all things we must value in order to have a functioning society or to have a society in the first place. Moreover, we value other such things as health, freedom, and knowledge/wisdom/mental development, ingenuity, etc.

Undoubtedly, there is and will be diversity in going about just how to realize these values in the world. There are and will be conflicting theories regarding which systems, policies, and procedures best promote those values. Behind all the diversity and conflict, however, you'll find that there are human universals of moral value, i.e. moral judgments that are common to humanity. As such, moral facts of the matter are intersubjective in essence (i.e. all moral values result from individual choice, and some moral values are common to all humanity) and a matter of reason (i.e. the result of judgment & deductive/inductive/analogical thought), distinct from brute facts of nature (e.g. the sun rises in the east), institutional facts (e.g. inflation rose by 1.66%), and truths of reason ("Something cannot both exist and not exist," "the square root of 81 is 9," "All bachelors are unmarried males.").

I main thing I disagree with is that there are human universals of moral value,  I just think that is not the case....your subsequent example about willing blond hair and blue eyes illustrates that.  I think universal values are primarily limited to individual societies, the relativism argument.  History has proven that humans are opportunistic and generally have no value for societies/tribes/religious sects/generally a populous outside of them and has lead to senslavement, genocide, exploitatation, theft of resources, etc. If anything are would argue that this is the moral value of the human population, as a race we seem to be terrible so our will is to be opportunistic.

Only in recent history, have certain societies (US, Canada, Western Europe) shown a willingness to accept others and even that hasn't been perfect.

[darkelenchus]

Yes, its a virtual certainty that there will be different moral values. However, there may be (I'd argue that there are) moral values that we all must choose just in virtue of being human or, more specifically, in virtue of being social beings. For instance, respect of property, an expectation of honesty, and respect of one's person are all things we must value in order to have a functioning society or to have a society in the first place. Moreover, we value other such things as health, freedom, and knowledge/wisdom/mental development, ingenuity, etc.

Undoubtedly, there is and will be diversity in going about just how to realize these values in the world. There are and will be conflicting theories regarding which systems, policies, and procedures best promote those values. Behind all the diversity and conflict, however, you'll find that there are human universals of moral value, i.e. moral judgments that are common to humanity. As such, moral facts of the matter are intersubjective in essence (i.e. all moral values result from individual choice, and some moral values are common to all humanity) and a matter of reason (i.e. the result of judgment & deductive/inductive/analogical thought), distinct from brute facts of nature (e.g. the sun rises in the east), institutional facts (e.g. inflation rose by 1.66%), and truths of reason ("Something cannot both exist and not exist," "the square root of 81 is 9," "All bachelors are unmarried males.").

I main thing I disagree with is that there are human universals of moral value,  I just think that is not the case....your subsequent example about willing blond hair and blue eyes illustrates that.  I think universal values are primarily limited to individual societies, the relativism argument.  History has proven that humans are opportunistic and generally have no value for societies/tribes/religious sects/generally a populous outside of them and has lead to senslavement, genocide, exploitatation, theft of resources, etc. If anything are would argue that this is the moral value of the human population, as a race we seem to be terrible so our will is to be opportunistic.

Only in recent history, have certain societies (US, Canada, Western Europe) shown a willingness to accept others and even that hasn't been perfect.

Further down the rabbit hole we go. :-)

Okay, I think this might be a misunderstanding about what the claim "there are human universals of moral value" means. This isn't to say, first,  that every single culture will have the exact same values. Rather, it's to say that some subset of the set of all values has been observed in all cultures, i.e. there haven't been any observable exceptions (e.g. an expectation of honesty, which is observed in all cultures and without which there would be no possibility for culture; but an awareness of the manipulative power of language is also present in all cutulres. Of course. If you think about it, these things almost have to go hand in hand). See Donald Brown's work entitled Human Universals, which addresses quite well the cultural relativistic inferences that many have hastily drawn from historico-anthropological observation.  Steven Pinker's Blank Slate begins to delve into the psycho-neurological basis for the presence of these values. There's also more recent research that raises the possibility of there being a "universal moral grammar," (PDF) in much the same way that there's a universal grammar of natural languages. Which brings me to my second point...

There's a distinction between practices and values, in much the same way that there is a distinction between the surface structure and deep structure of natural languages. A cursory observation of diverse practices related to moral matters would seem to suggest they share little in common and thus appear to be almost entirely a matter of convention, just as observation of the surface structure of language might lead one to maintain that the natural languages were purely the result of convention. However, some of the values that lie behind these practices are actually shared, which allows for the possibility of such practices, possibility similar to the way that the deep structure of grammar is the condition for the possibility of the grammar of diverse natural languages. What generates differences in expression of value is circumstance. For instance, the Eskimos practice infanticide, not because they they're cruel by nature or think of infants as worthless, but because they care for the living, which is a value common to all cultures. Their practice is more the result of harsh circumstances (infrequent food supply, weather conditions that might produce debilitating suffering or be fatal to the weak-bodied), lack of adequate means of birth control, etc. than it is a difference in value.  So mere observation of difference in practice is insufficient to show difference in value.

Second, the claim isn't saying that in willing something as a value, everyone will in fact recognize the universal character of moral claims and thereby act accordingly. First, there is such a thing as moral incontinence, which the Greeks called akrasia. That is, even if one does recognize the demands that a moral value makes on them, they may act against their better judgment. Second, they may will something as a value but fail to recognize the universal character of the moral judgment due to beliefs about the superiority/worthiness of one's person, family, tribe, nation, ethnicity, religion, culture/sub-culture, species, etc. This doesn't mean that the values aren't/weren't present in every observed culture. It just means many individuals, past and present, have restricted actions/prohibitions that accord with their values to some sub-set of humanity as a result of ethnocentrism, racism, rabid individualism, etc.

Third, the "eugenics" example shows that there is conflict of value. This just means that some values aren't shared in common and that a further subset of these uncommonly shared values, when held, can potentially lead to a zero-sum game. That doesn't entail that there are no commonly shared values.

Lastly, even if it is false that there are human universals of moral value, this doesn't affect the universal character of moral judgment. The former is an empirical fact, the latter a necessary property of the logic of moral valuation.