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Can you answer whether you believe that a football player being constrained by rules against maiming his or her opponent is a constraint that "[goes] against th

• admissionsguy 5y ago
  [I rewrote the post at the same time smhost replied to the previous version, apologies] I get an impression you are trying reduction ad absurdum in a way that might work to sway the audience, but just skims on the surface of actual argument. Obviously, you can still have lots of competition under constraints (though you cannot have constraints at the highest scale), but that I believe has no bearing on my argument.
  • smhost 5y ago
    I don't think I'm strawmanning at all. You just accepted that unconstrained competition leads to violence. All you're doing when you argue against the principle of having global constraints is privileging one type of violence against another. And you seem to accept as a matter of fact that "constraints can't be placed on the largest-scale structures". I don't share your confidence. The largest-scale structures are already self-constrained, because in order to reach a certain level of scale, it has to operate according to a certain self-imposed logic. Even at the individual level, what is discipline other than a form of self-domestication? I would even go so far as to flip your formula around and say that human motivations at every level of society can only come realized through a series of internal and external contraints.