: I really should be working...You are, according to you
: Because the duty of jury service makes me who I am, and secures for me my place in the world.
It doesnt. If you accept it then it becomes part of you. Accepting it is your choice. Same with voting and not intiating violence (well come to that)
: because not showing is a way of voting.).
Not showing is way of judging.
: refusal should be out and out unthinkable.
The fact that it is very "thinkable" tends to remove the ought from the is.
: No, because I know that the courts are subject to me and my peers,
Thats where it falls down - your peers, whom may outnumber you and act in your disinterest.
: I agree current laws are not just,
Hence you understand why it is "thinkable" that people consider jury service, when compulsory, as no less than slavery. it proves that its no good (in eyes of many people) by being compulsory.
: The advocates of Represetative democracy say the idea is to vote for people to run society for you, so you don't have to- but isn't working running society? Isn'tdeciding what to do today running society. This is what I am driving at.
It is - and it shows why representatives are counter interest (they can *only* be interested in themselves as per what I wrote below)
: No, its an illusion to think I have a choice, waggling my dick just doesn't occur to me, nor would it occur to me to leave a person lying in a gutter. There is, and can be no choice in that matter.
There is, you have just chosen how you will react in the given circumstance - you are the one who initiates the action, it belongs to you.
: Can I chose not to curse, I doubt it, the illusion of choice comes retroactively when I see what else I could have done. I act, and then imagine choices.
You are speaking of choices differently. If you curse when the brick lands it is yours, your action and your consequence. "I didnt mean to" is no excuse, your action is selected and undertaken. The choice may appear automatice, it remains yours.
: If there is responsibility there is no choice, you must do what you must. To talk about choices is to assume that moral/social law is optional (or even conscious). I am, on this point, decidedly anti-Kant. (Its not a good act unless you do it involntarilly under duty, he says).
Kant wraps himself up a little with his various imperatives. Responsibility is self, if you walk past the fellow and he dies then you understand your relation to it (not as cause, but as foregoing an opportunity to help). Self directed action and consequence, regardless of the particlar mix of what influences the self direction to direct.
: : When we argue that the non-aggression principle is a good one it is in recognition that when
others attempt to remove your free choice by force that you can no longer be self directing
and self responsible. Some people prefer to avoid both.
: But you are, then, appealing to legitimation by the Self, with the individual as the supreme
good
It does not require an authoritarian state to support the non-aggression principle in action.
: derives its main value, in true Liberal Pluralist fashion, through 'Because *I* Choose to...'
*I* being what you are. I being the receptacle of your values.
What if, following Sade, I chose murder and torture as my personal values?
Then, following the logic of a non-aggresion principle being necessary to personal liberty a victim may freely and rightly seek to preserve that liberty by shooting you.
: So long as you are an individual, on guard against all interlopers, desperate to maintain property rights over yourself, then you aren't free, and can't be.
You mean not free of threat against your values. No one will be. Not in any kind of anarchy I might envisage, not in a nightwatcman state and not in a global socialist collective where your values are inexpressable, unseperable from every other person - except it would happen, 6 billion individuated *I*s cannot be a *we*.
