Libfas, please explain your ethics

1.  Why is it wrong to kill a violent criminal but okay to kill an innocent fetus?  I'm not particularly opposed to abortions, but it makes no sense that you rail against capital punishment while endorsing abortion.

2.  Why do you despise Christianity but tell everyone else that their religions are beautiful and are to be respected?  I don't understand how you can extol the greatness of science and education while while telling everyone (other than Christians) that their baseless beliefs should be protected.  I'm generally opposed to religion, so I say if you're going to hate one of them, hate all of them.

3.  Why is it wrong from conservatives to go on fear mongering about terrorism but it's okay for you to tell everyone the world is going to end because of global warming?  Whether or not you believe in either of these supposed threats it's clear that both sides are using fear to manipulate people.  Why not take the higher road if you're so educated and ethical?

4.  Why do you like Mac so much?

5.  Why do you believe the federal government can fix all of society's ills when it can barely deliver the mail?  It has been proven throughout history that large central governments lead to corruption and abuse.  Why do you continue to support big government?

The problem with government welfare is that it is slavery, which is wholly indefensible.

The individual is an end in himself, and exists solely for his own sake, to pursue his own rational self-interest.  He has no obligation to provide for others, and others have no obligation to provide for him.  The mere fact of his existence does not entitle him to the means by which to continue that existence.

As for global warming, it's absurd to say it's not happening unless you want to claim that everyone is lying about what they're reading off their thermometers (simplified, I know, but that's the gist of it).  The problem, though, is this: is the cure worse than the disease?

Climatologists are uniquely qualified to tell us about what is likely to happen with the climate, what is causing it, and how it can be stopped.  What neither they nor anyone else is qualified to answer is the normative question of whether it should be stopped.  The answer to this question depends on the cumulative subjective value judgments of the entire world's population.

See, in the real world everything is a tradeoff.  Every use of resources to stop or contain global warming proactively diverts them from other uses that might in fact have a more desirable net effect--and what constitutes a "desirable net effect" is based on the sum of the utility preferences of every single human being on earth.  No climatologist, no government, no monolithic entity at all has the information necessary to decide which measure would be the best to take.  But the free market, in which every individual implicitly contributes his own bit of knowledge and his own value preferences to maximize his own utility, can do just that.

So it's a horrible idea to try and get government involved in dealing with climate change.  The market, by definition, will produce the outcome that best maximizes utility across the board--in other words, it will produce the solution that is best for actual people.  It's the ultimate in distributed decision-making.