Riedquat

That's because of the motivation for the interference - it's always far too tainted by dogma and / or not wanting to upset the wrong people for it to work.

Exactly right, and that's precisely why something needs to be done about the bankers - they've had control of the money and shuffled it around to efficiently allocate it to themselves. You must be deluded if you think that that was coincidentally efficient allocation to the benefit of the rest of the economy, in particular that part of it that actually does something useful. Even if it did work you'd still have to prove that the bankers' increases matched an increase elsewhere, instead of them merely finding another way to increase the size of the slice of the pie passing through their hands.

You're not doing your argument any favour with this approach. Whatever legal clothes are put on it at the end of the day the sole purpose of the licence is to fund the BBC (although I suppose the TV licenencing keep a bit for themselves to pay for their threatening letters). Actually that's an interesting point - does any of it go to fund more generally used infrastructure?

And AZ's point is that people who don't watch commercial TV still have to pay for that, just more indirectly. Advertising isn't free, and avoiding the costs added on to what you buy due to the company's advertising budget is very difficult even if you don't watch any TV at all. At least if you don't watch any TV at all you don't contribute a penny towards the BBC, even if you listen to the radio.

Oh yes. Drat. Fingers crossed that it's just the result of noise.

The 0.6% on the other thread? I thought that was a prediction, not Halifax's actual number unless it's come out since. I thought it came out tomorrow.

But a solution that benefits several at the expense of one other? And that's still assuming that it's possible to come to a universal agreement of what constitutes a benefit. And some moral systems aren't too interested in benefits anyway - what's moral is still a matter of opinion. No, we're discussing what's moral. The in reality possibility of such an action is irrelevent to the discussion of whether such an action would be moral or not. Impossibility is not a barrier. There's heaps of fiction that involve characters making decisions and doing things that are impossible in real life yet such opinions may make a key part of the story - Gulliver's Travels, for example.

But you're the one who's claiming it's even possible to do that. Taking your coercion example, what is coercion trying and failing to do? And why is that failure an indication of a moral problem and not merely a practical one? Coercion certainly achieves some things which some people will describe as beneficial, as does leaving everyone to do whatever they feel like. You have not demonstrated that it's even possible to logically demonstrate that the results of coercion are good or bad - they're just results even if they're ones that you strongly dislike. We might even agree that the results are unpleasant and we'd rather not have them - but it's still only an opinion. Moral laws obviously have to fit within the physical universe to be practically meangingful, but the laws of nature neither define nor limit morality. It's perfectly possible to offer an opinion on the morality of actions that are physically impossible - e.g. would it be right to go back in time and do something or other? I hope we'd agree that it would be immoral of me to travel back in time and murder the ancestors of someone I don't like. The fact that that's impossible to do anyway doesn't change the morality of the concept.

Which is fine, but as I keep pointing out you need to define what you're testing for. Well, only if you can find such a thing, which you can't, because it boils down to opinion. Your statement begins by assuming the existence of an absolute morality and trying to determine a logical course from there - it's backwards. What is the stated aim? What do you mean by "good for human beings"? I'm still asking for your unambiguous, universally agreed definition of "good". I may even agree with some of it, if I ever find out what it is, but that won't make it more than simply an opinion. If your're trying to suggest that there's no such thing as an end then your entire opinion is contradictory. The end in question is the thing you seem to think you can empirically test the desirability of - a result, state or goal if you prefer from which we can move forward. I have made no logical errors. I have simply not made your assumption that there are both natural physical and moral laws. The presence of the former in no way implies the existance of the latter, and to think it does is an assumption. To equate your assumptions with logic is a mistake.

But there is no such test that can be done universally. Now I'll admit that that doesn't preclude some disagreements to be resolvable - after all, some people do hold logically inconsistent views. But you cannot go from there and draw the conclusion that every view bar one is logically inconsistent, only that some are logically inconsistent with the assumptions being made. And indeed some people don't get any enjoyment out of any music, so to them there is no good music. And even if you make the assumption that there is some good music (and it IS an assumption and not something you can prove logically) it still doesn't take you a step closer towards coming up with logical means for determining which music is good. Certainly not in your post. You've just said "what works" and "what is good" without defining what you mean by them. If you mean by what can be tested then you're going in circles. What is this "works" for which you're testing? You need to have defined that before you can start the test. An end does not mean the stopping of time. It simply means the result of a series of events that lead to it. That end can (and will) be part of a series of events towards another end, ad infinitum. And what is good is also a matter of opinion, "good" being another artificial concept in a universe where, ultimately, the only absolutes are logic and the laws of physics (which we've probably got no chance of ever being able to completely get to the bottom of, if there even is one).

It's not universal if there's no agreement - if two people are holding contradictory views of what's moral. You won't necessarily be able to separate them logically because the difference will always boil down to opinion. [qupte]Also, saying that morality is always subjective is an objective state,emt about morality - which means there is still an objective morality. That isn't a logical conclusion. Replace the word morality with something else, like "what music is good". If your statement were true it would mean that there's an objective good music. For that to hold you have to make a whole raft of assumptions about what you mean by "work". You won't get a universal, objective definition of that. You can test (in theory, might not always be possible in practice) whether a particular attitude is more likely or not to lead to a particular outcome, but that doesn't define morality. The assumption is still that the outcome is desirable. It also leads towards "the end justifies the means".

No it isn't - morality is always subjective. Some things have a near universal agreement, but it'll never be possible to find complete 100% agreement with everyone on whether or not something is moral. It's an artificial concept after all - it's not as if the universe gives a damn. Logic certainly doesn't help you there - it only helps you to decide given a set of assumptions. It can't tell you whether or not your assumptions are moral, at least not without recourse to a different set of assumptions.

There seem to be rather a lot of people who define "bias" as "not in complete agreement with my point of view" (seeing as no-one ever admits that they may be biased this is hardly surprising). It's not unusual to hear accusations of bias from two opposing points of view (the Middle East is usually a good contendor for this). Most of the time the BBC does seem to aim for the middle ground; its problem is more that it seems to be very unwilling to even consider much outside of that.

Yes.

Its income will drop which will obviously affect what it can produce. If that simply cuts out on most of the rubbish I'd be fine with it, but rubbish is usually cheap and the last thing to go. Addressing some other points - someone is seriously suggesting that commercial channels provide less biased news? I don't for a minute wish to suggest that the BBC's reporting is anywhere near perfect, but to suggest that commercial broadcasters are better is utterly laughable. Qualtiy - there's still some there, albeit getting more and more thinly spread. Show me a commercial UK station that does better, and would do better still without the BBC there. US ones can afford to make stuff simply by having a far, far larger home market. The quality argument against the BBC would've worked better in the past when the likes of ITV were capable of producing some things worth watching. Both have gone downhill, but commercial TV has done so more rapidly. This is true in various areas; compare the sports coverage of the same events. I'm in agreement with the idea that something needs to be done about the BBC, but scrapping the licence fee isn't the answer.

ITV is dire, and the adverts make it even more so. You want to drag the BBC down to that level? It might not be that far above it these days, but at least it is above it.

If you want to get rid of the TV licence then you want even more lowbrow cr@p and advertising on TV. The BBC funding model is pretty bad; all the others are worse. That's not to say that some reform isn't needed, but commercial pressures will drag the BBC down to the level of the rest. At present it's merely the best of a bad lot.

But it contributes towards the house being habitable - same principle IMO as anything that comes with the house breaking. Don't see any fundamental difference between a slate falling off and wasps getting in.

Only had an issue with them a couple of times (once a mouse, once a wasps' nest) and in both cases the landlord (separate places years apart) was happy enough to deal with them, which seems unlikely if it's caused by anything other than the tenant's negligence.

A few people doing it makes sense. Everyone doing it would result in the country being even more blighted by ugly crap. Not worth it - the not-messed-up-by-lots-of-bad-development parts of England are some of the few things left of it that are worth keeping. If that means I have to keep renting then so be it.

Arguably a separate issue, although the practical results are that it's hard if not possible to separate them. Some posters seem far too keen to find excuses to treat workers as dirt, others seem far too keen to spend money that we don't have and can't afford to borrow.

In which case I'd prefer an absolute monarchy to an absolute dictator. They're pretty much the same thing, and both are almost always going to be looking out for themselves but there's a slightly better chance of a monarch not being quite as self-interested at everyone else's expense (if a dictator wasn't he wouldn't have managed to get into that position), and the monarch usually has some weight of history behind him to make it a little harder to go completely off the rails. Although not entirely without its good points absolute control has even more bad points than democracy.

I don't like that any more than I like having unaffordable jobs - it effectively means that there's no point in you having a contract.

Even before that, and with animals too - land has value so intrinsic to them that they can use the concept without even being able to think about it - that's why hunting species have territories and why there's competition for the most productive territories, maintained with "I've got the sharpest claws and biggest teeth". Grazing species probably do the same if there's only limited good-quality grazing.

Access to do what?