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RE: Does Prohibition Increase Violence or Improve Wellbeing?
The core issue I think is that peace and prosperity result from expansion of ethical consensus. When more people in an area attempt to support and enforce a wider variety of conflicting ethical standards, the only possible resolution is violence because violence is the only outcome that doesn't depend on consensus.
Enforced prohibition of anything that itself is not aggressive promotes arbitrary ethical standards, which undermines consensus. Ethical consensus has to be built on equality and reciprocity. When some people try to enforce arbitrary preferences on others, others are likely to reciprocate, and the result is chaos and violence.
Well said, but I'm not convinced the only possible resolution is violence. Are you familiar with NVC? It argues violence is a tragic expression of an unmet need. Many may think and feel violence is the only way to reach consensus, but that may not be true. It might also be they do not have the communication tools necessary to accurately express their needs in a way someone else can hear them (even if they come from very different cultural, religious, or even moral backgrounds). I'm excited about Dan's EOS project because it's all about creating tools for building consensus. If we have that, and we can adapt it to many areas of life, we may see violence as a rather primitive thing our ape ancestors used to do.
I agree that forced prohibition (or even "forced morality") will ultimately fail because it skips the first step which NVC tries to resolve which is actually communicating and hearing real needs.
I certainly don't think violence is the only possible resolution for conflict in general. What I mean is that violence is the only way to resolve conflict that does not depend on generating consensus. That makes it the default. A conflict means that two people are on mutually exclusive courses, so some resolution is inevitable. If they don't communicate and come to a consensus to resolve the conflict, the resolution will be violent.
There can be no peaceful coexistence without ethical consensus, because denying the existence of conflict does not resolve that conflict. This is also my problem with "anarchy without adjectives". If we don't work to build consensus on ethics for conflict resolution, violence is the fallback method of resolution, primitive as it is.
I'm also very optimistic about EOS (and decentralized consensus technology in general) as tools to revolutionize how humans collaborate and build community.
I'd argue it's the default because it's all people know innately. It's part of our primitive animal nature. That said, if it doesn't get us the results we want, we may use other options because we are an adaptive species. The link in my last comment has about 30 minutes worth of videos on NVC you might find quite interesting. The inevitable resolution you mention will be violent without communication, I agree, but the world is more connected and humans are communicating orders of magnitude faster than at any other time in our existence. I'm hopeful we can change and I use evidence of the change we've already made to encourage me about the future. Reading books like The Better Angels of our Nature or watching videos like this give me optimism:
And yes, I agree. That's why I've posted a bit about morality quite a bit on Steemit here, here, and here.