Found Philosophy

The advantage to reading books is that you find that single phrase which perfectly encapsulates something you were already thinking but couldn't quite express.

Choice is the singular moral act and all one chooses can only be considered in a moral context if that choice is free.

Of course, I don't usually expect such a nice summation of the morality of choice from a sentient lizard soldier in a fantasy novel, but you take what you find.

I also note one of the three great doorstop fantasy epics is drawing to a close with this book. One more, and Erikson is done with the Malazan Book of the Fallen. That leaves Jordan's successor to finish up the Wheel of Time and George R.R. Martin to finish up before he kicks off.

Sickness And Health

I don’t often get cranked up about health care issues, because it’s not my primary field of expertise. Of course, my primary field of expertise is mechanical systems and design and I don’t talk about that much here either, so what the hell.

One of my biggest fundamental problems with the current health care debate in this country is assumption of a positive right. You do not have any claim, moral or otherwise, to anyone else’s time and effort and to advocate otherwise is to advocate for slavery. If you indeed had the right to “health care”, someone is then obligated to provide you with medical care. If they do not do so willingly, the gummint will, through threat or application of force, make them give you health care. I just mentioned the word for forcing someone to work for the benefit of another through the threat of force. If I recall my history correctly, we settled that issue definitively, along with several others, on April 9^th, 1865.

Ergo, you have no right to receive medical care. This is to some a cold and heartless proposition, but life often is. Nothing in what I have said implies that if private citizen Bob, in his capacity as kind-hearted philanthropist, decides to treat indigent sufferers of his own accord he should not be afforded the freedom to do so. There is, as I have pointed out in the past, no moral good in forcing people to charity. If you remove the faculty of choice, there is no moral calculus involved for the person being forced.