Submitted by BernardJOrtcutt t3_123nqpx in philosophy

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread. This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our posting rules (especially posting rule 2). For example, these threads are great places for:

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Asleep-Television-24 t1_jdvshxg wrote

I was reading After Virtue by MacIntyre and came across "emotivism". MacIntyre's thesis in this book is that moral language that exists today has suffered a loss due to the Enlightenment project; 16th century philosophy from Hume to Diderot, Kant to Kierkegaard. This period led to what is known as emotivism, which originated in the early 20th century. An emotivist would say that all moral judgments are expressions of feelings, preferences, and attitudes. To put it colloquially: something is right "because I said so".

According to MacIntyre, emotivism has crept into our current political discourse, bureaucracies, etc. I am fascinated by his arguments on the social context and implications of emotivism, and thought that it would be interesting to share here.

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wetwist t1_jdvzmz8 wrote

Since my post isn't getting approved I will post it here.

I want to have a honest debate with you about equality of opportunity and discrimination as I believe almost everybody, including philosophers, gets it wrong or so my impression. My viewpoint: men(including women obviously) are not created equal and should be actively discriminated for or against for your own benefit or/and for the benefit of society.

  1. Men are not created equal
    We have different genetics, height, brain size, health, talents and etc. etc.
  2. Men exert different amount of effort with varying constancy in their pursuits. Self-evident and confirmed by observation in real world.
  3. Therefore, even if everything else(circumstances usually out of control of the individual) is equal, outcomes will not be equal. This is the best outcome for everybody as we come to enjoy fruits of the most talented and hardworking(Michael Jordan, CR7...).
  4. We have limited resources. Limited space, money, teachers... and even teachers have limited amount of time.
  5. As we know that different individuals will produce different results we should invest our limited resources mainly into the most talented, hardworking and dependable people as they will yield the best results. Investing into average or mediocre people will give only mediocre results. Not only it's not useful, it's harmful as it diverts valuable resources from the most talented and hardworking people.

Basically this. This is just proof of concept, one might have more reasons to discriminate. I believe the idea that we shouldn't discriminate is very harmful. From my own life experience, quality of your life will be greatly determined by your ability to discriminate. You should try to keep smart, talented, hardworking, trustworthy people close to you and give no chance to people who lack those attributes. Real world agrees with me. Universities admit the best students, coaches accept to train only the most talented and dog breeders breed only the dogs with best qualities. But, I'm curious what you all have to say.

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Fourteenhives t1_jdxpsqs wrote

I agree with pretty much everything you said except for the idea that it equals discrimination. If everyone is given a fair opportunity, I agree and its evident that there will be unequal outcomes that highlight biological differences in gender.

I agree that these results shouldn't be looked at negatively. The important thing to me is that people are treated fairly and given equal opportunity regardless of who they are. I also agree with channeling most of our resources toward developing those who have shown to be exceptional at something.

I just don't think any of that is discrimination. You could say nature and evolution are discriminatory for making us unequal but I'd even disagree with that. I believe its only modern society and the way we live now that makes our differences more noticeable. As hunter gatherers, women had it pretty good not having to be as involved in the dangerous tasks of hunting and battling other tribes. But with women being a part of our military and so many other things that were typically done by men of course it creates challenges. I'm not saying women shouldn't be in any particular line of work, just that there are challenges.

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wetwist t1_jdyp62a wrote

> people are treated fairly and given equal opportunity regardless of who they are. I also agree with channeling most of our resources toward developing those who have shown to be exceptional

Mutually exclusive. When mother wolf feeds her strongest pup and ignores the weak pups she's ruthlessly discriminating and it is the best for the survival of their species. I work as a math and physics teacher and I discriminate between my students. I give extra more challenging assignments to my smartest students and I make time to help them in the evenings. As a result my students are winning National and International Olympiads, five years in row in math and 2 years in row in physics my students are making it to the National Olympiad teams. That's the result of my focus on the most promising students.
> with women being a part of our military and so many other things that were typically done by men of course it creates challenges. I'm not saying women shouldn't be in any particular line of work

Women absolutely should be discriminated against being in military for two main reasons.

  1. Women are physically inferior to men. Women who pass physical tests do so by bare minimum. Let me explain. Let's say you have a physical test. For the sake of keeping it simple, let's say the passing score is 6. A lot of women will pass this test by doing 6 or 7, which is in itself is not really problem. The problem is what happens after, when they get in the military. These women are already at their physical peak and no matter how much they train, they will never get to 9-10. Meanwhile, many men who passed the initial screening with 6-7 will become bigger, stronger, faster. When I did my military service(mandatory in my country) I saw this with my own eyes. Many weak men that had no prior training whatsoever surpassed women, who were coming from military academies after years of education and training, within few months. By accepting women into military you are settling with physical mediocrity and giving up on those who potentially could reach much higher physical prowess.
  2. Women drop out of military with much higher rate, most within five years. This is true, at least in my country, don't know how it is in US or other western countries. Main two reasons they give 1. they get married and 2. stress of the work. So, government spends 5 years feeding, training, educating women in military academies and most of them drop out of military within 5 years. That's huge waste of resources, negative ROI frankly speaking. Government should stop accepting women in military.

ps. I hope mods will allow this discussion to continue at least for couple of days and allow people to debate against my points.

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OlgamaAlen t1_jdyr4wb wrote

I have realized something: every political party is guaranteed to have flaws. Because in science, there is a path to truth. In spirituality, there is a path to truth. But there is no path to truth in politics because opinions are central to each political ideology rather than fragments of a greater truth. In science, the endpoint at which truth is realized is when a theory is proven, and truth is realized in spirituality upon death or enlightenment, depending on your religion. In this way science and religion are quite similar and a future where the two are synthesized into one field is possible.

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ephemerios t1_jdzzt09 wrote

> In science, the endpoint at which truth is realized is when a theory is proven

A whole lot of people would argue against the notion of theories ever being “proven” in science. Meanwhile, a whole lot of people would raise the point that there’s a path to truth in politics—one that’s determined by evaluating historical evidence, making use of rational argument, and proposing policies that are in accordance with whatever latest research the social sciences, whatever latest developments political philosophy and ethics have to offer, and whatever the latest developments in history are. Or something like that.

However, we can easily imagine a political party that makes all the right decisions policy-wise, makes competent use of all the frameworks to analyze complex social phenomena in the right way, and still collapses into a corrupt entity suddenly determined by special interests because rather than opinion being central to politics, it is power structures. But in that sense, politics isn’t all that different from science. It’s just that in politics, there’s usually a whole lot more at stake than in science. So science can afford progressing “one funeral at a time” as Max Planck described:

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

For politics, that’s usually not a desirable option.

Or rather, there’s a political and sociological aspect to science that requires our attention. The works of Kuhn and Feyerabend and I guess “continental” philosophy of science has demonstrated as much.

>In this way science and religion are quite similar and a future where the two are synthesized into one field is possible.

What does that mean concretely? Science and religion (or, I guess, “spirituality”) being thought of as “non-overlapping magisteria” is a rather recent development. Aristotle’s conception of the sciences included theology for example.

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OlgamaAlen t1_je02xsf wrote

You prove a valid point. Some kind of political landscape is intrinsic to any society as complex as ours. Without one, there would be chaos. There are too many decisions needed to be made about too many social issues, many of which don't exist in simpler societies (abortion, human rights, etc.). My little paragraph was simply to hint at the theoretical framework of a future society where the complexity in social structure has been reduced to that which is undoubtedly needed to advance intellectually as a species, instead of materialistically.

In terms of the synthesis of science and religion, I meant that there could be a future when the true nature of death and the soul was realized (so a "spiritual science" would be a reality), but that's a road that leads into a lot of unpopular ideas that I wouldn't want to get into.

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Edmondg3 t1_je035ro wrote

I posted on here an idea that mankind doesn't have freewill over the natural levels of testosterone we all produce. Multiple comments said that we do have freewill over this and you can always take hormones. That is besides the point though... None of us have free will over the natural levels of hormones we produce and how they rise and fall throughout multiple decades.

The idea of not having free is obvious like if you are born with a crooked nose. Then the freewill people come out and say "well you can get a nose job".
That's not a counter argument. What is this called? When you clearly don't have freewill over something like how a Mole is created on your arm, but then someone says you can get it removed is somehow freewill????

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Edmondg3 t1_je03w5a wrote

Yeah there is no perfect system of rulling over man.
At some point in the next 2000 years mankind will be able to edit themselves and our shit systems to be more in alignment with intelligent action. Even then we will fight over how we should edit ourselves, but that will be the beginning of a more homogenized collaborative society.

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Edmondg3 t1_je04j4q wrote

If you are going for max survival of the species then we should have a section of the government hand selecting high value people to breed with one another. We would still have regular people procreating as we need the variety. It just takes so long to breed humans. They did a study where they took wild foxes and it took 50 years or like 30 generations to breed out the wild in them and make them into domesticated pets. This would take several hundred years for mankind to breed ourselves. I personally am betting we will merge with robots in the next 200-300 years way before the breeding would be valuable.

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Edmondg3 t1_je05ogq wrote

A great example of this is the stock market. You have to put money on strong companies that you believe will succeed. You must weed out the weak. It is your job to find flaws in companies and how they will fail in a recession. You don't make money by giving equal opportunity. Bet on the heavy hitters that have a proven track record and a few small ones that show promise.

1st world society is going through a phase where they're acting like everyone is valuable. This mindset only exists when survival is off the table. In any competition or risk environment, like the stock market, this is clearly just a bunch of weak woke nonsense.

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OlgamaAlen t1_je05whn wrote

That is something along the lines of not being able to choose the gender you have at birth. Despite the advances in modern technology about changing these kinds of things after the fact, we still are hard-pressed to find any way to change these things at the root. Even if we were able to, a tense moral debate would arise, with human-centrist Transhumanist-types wanting advances like these to be made legal, and deep-ecologist-types like myself arguing that such advances go too far down the road of "playing God". In terms of what you want to call this, you may want to look into Buddhist writings on cause-and-effect, which go into these things quite a bit (intrinsic reality, parabrahman, etc.)

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Edmondg3 t1_je0719a wrote

I was thinking more of the freewill debate. If someone else chooses a babies gender at birth that would definitely not be freewill from the babies perspective. The baby definitely didn't have freewill over this choice.

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OlgamaAlen t1_je0b10y wrote

Survival of the fittest. It was the rule that governed humanity until communism, and then, these 20-something post-modern grievance junkies who call themselves "woke". Funny how humanity has evolved to the point where it has been able to consciously destroy the very heart of evolution/natural selection. I don't think we're done evolving; this species is just too self-righteous to admit it.

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gimboarretino t1_je157jj wrote

Determinism (or absolute causality) is not directly observable in the world around us.

Causality is directly observable to some degree, but we don't empirically observe absolute causality everywhere all the time.

We experience (phenomenologically and empirically) choiche/free will (which can be an illusion, but still, an empirical illusion). More in general, we don't have any empirical experience beyond our limited subjective experience.

In terms of empirical evidence, it is very difficult to argue that it can be demonstrate conclusively that any given agent has not the ability to do otherways than he does in any given situation.

So determinsm is mainly a logic deduction/generalization based on the assumption that all the universe operates according to natural laws that govern the behavior of all matter and energy. Which is kind of circular but anyway.

We experience limited causality, and we find somehow reasonable to extentend causality to all things.

So determinism is a philosophical position that should be challenged or confirmed based on its logical correctness.

  1. one could argue that jumpinig from personal experience of limited causality to the existence of universal laws of determinism can be considered an example of the ontological leap fallacy.

While it is true that we may experience causality, it does not necessarily follow, from a logical point of view, that these concepts are absolute or universally applicable.

  1. epistemologically speaking, if determinism is true, then every statement, including "determinism is true" and "determinism is false," would be determined by prior causes. Both statements would be determined by prior causes in a deterministic universe: whether a person affirms "determinism is true" or "determinism is false" would entirely depend on their "personal", specific set of prior causes.

Which "set of prior causes" guarantees the most correct statements? In a deterministic universe, there is no objective way to determine which set of prior causes is "more true" or has higher epistemological value, as both would be ultimately determined by prior causes themselves. An epistemological inherent and non-eliminable uncertainty is not particulary desiderable for a philosophical theory.

  1. The epistemological uncertainty above could be seen as a self-defeating position. If is true that all our beliefs, true of false, are causally determined, we are bound to hold them no matter what, whether they objectively true or false, irrespective for any validating criteria (all validating criteria are also, whether true or false, causally determined).

All our beliefs are therefore suspect, "undecidable" and non-assessable, including the belief in the truth of determinism.

So... determinism seems to be phenomenologically counterintuitive, empirically doubtful and logically precarious (at best).

It raises more problem than it solves in many areas (e.g. law, morals, human relations).

Why should I "embrace" it?

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Curious_Disaster5494 t1_je5027u wrote

I agree with you. Tho, I don’t like the word discriminate. I think you rather mean one should be pushed to do better. Discrimination means you’re hated for something you can’t do nothing about- like skin color, being a women etc.

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Curious_Disaster5494 t1_je5052v wrote

Moderator Said to post this here.

The origin of Being

I believe there is a point (a nothingness) before and after time, where there is ignorance. (A day when there was no yesterday or there will be no tomorrow.) This nothingness was before everything, is during everything, and will still be after everything. Everything has emerged from this nothingness, and everything will reunite in it. Religions assume that this creation happened intentionally, initiated by a God or a deity. However, this assumes that there was already "something" in existence at the time "everything" was created. I would argue that there is a (time) point before there was anything. Not our galaxy, not our universe, no Big Bang, none of the other universes, no God or deity. The "nothing" before the "being". So, how did "being" come into existence? Religions claim that a deity was always there - infinite. Now who or what is a "deity"? Does it have or is it consciousness? To create something, one must also be conscious of something. Therefore, God has or is consciousness. So, what is consciousness? Humans, animals, plants, and who knows what else possess it. My definition is: consciousness is the ability to gather and process information. This is the basic principle of every consciousness. By information, I mean "everything." Every atom consists of information that consists of further information. Information is infinite and has no beginning. But how did the information in the "nothingness" become something (e.g., consciousness)? There are several differences and few similarities between being and non-being. I will list only a few of them here. One similarity between the two is information. Of everything that does not exist, information has existed forever. The first difference between being and non-being that most likely comes to mind is time. Everything that does not exist only does not exist yet or no longer exists. Time or spacetime is a state in which 3-dimensional beings are located to be able to exist. To put it "simply," it is the "glue" that holds our 3-dimensional reality together. A substance in which 3-Dimensional beings exist like a fish in water. There is another difference between being and non-being. Everything that exists has an intention, a reason. Everything that is, is what it is because it is as it is. Non-being is pure information. Being is information that has an intention. Whoever creates something gives the information in the "nothingness" an intention.

Information/Time + Intention = Being

Therefore, the first consciousness must have emerged from an intention since there was only information before that.

But how could something arise from "nothingness"?

I’m not done with the discussion essay yet but I would like to hear what you think about that so far ?

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radiodigm t1_je7mm2r wrote

Maybe you’re using “discriminate” in the sense that it’s the active choice of a policy-making body to contrive things to create a certain outcome. Make laws, establish institutions and classist social structure, etc. And that’s indeed different than contriving things so as to create a non-discriminatory outcome. You see? We surely apply some discriminating practices that lead to both types of outcome. For example, laws are made to (supposedly) ensure that everyone has equal access to basic liberties. And of course any of those policy actions can simultaneously create discrimination in some areas while relieving it in others.

So it’s difficult to go anywhere useful with your argument. You’re proposing that an A should be done because it leads to so much obviously beneficial B outcome. Sort of like saying we should blot out the sun because that’ll save everyone from the discomfort of sunburn. (Sorry, I stretched for that analogy.) For me at least, it begs the question of what is the trade off. And that would surely be my first contention to your argument if I were trying to argue this like a real philosopher.

If that was indeed what you meant by discriminating, I wonder if you could reframe your proposition around the whole set of possible outcomes. As in, doing A leads to all these different Bs, and most of them are good, therefore we should do A. At least, that’s something I could sink my teeth into.

And maybe you only meant we should prevent discriminatory outcomes. But that gets us into even more of a tangle, it seems, because I’d quickly argue that it’s impossible to prevent any sort of outcome in society and commerce without imposing some sort of discretionary (discriminating) policy, law, or governance structure. And if there’s no practical consequence to the proposition, it’s not really an argument as much as it’s just wishful thinking.

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AdditionFeisty4854 t1_jea49bc wrote

what are you bro!!!
I am enlightened by your words and had this belief since long.. It seems to me I myself is messaging your philosophy as mine.
Thank you.
I am greatly impressed that you told nothing is before time and also after it.
It also seems this nothing you tell is but the synonym of everything
Each and every object, pieces in this 4D cage (universe) we dwell is but a complex illusion of nothing. We conscious being (as you told) moving with time and intention perceive this nothingness as everything.
Now why, that I told nothing is everything ?
For this, we have to find what is truth of existence, the absolute truth
In my views, truth is about change.
Truth of existence for me is two - destruction, leading to creation and again ; with everything in between

>Also, please say some more about how everything comes from nothingness..
I would like to read your statements more

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Curious_Disaster5494 t1_jeerj7t wrote

Thanks a lot!! Your comment made my day !! I’m happy to see someone actually read all this lol. About the nothingness: I believe there must be a startpoint to existence. (Existence of being, not us humans or our solar system etc). My thought was, what was there before that particular starting point. Before existence existed at all. Therefore we have to specify what existence is in the first place. Like I said I believe existence is information, put in time + an intention. Nothing can exist without these 3 (at least how we perceive existence). it may be possible to exist without time, but I think it’s impossible to exist without being/having information and having an intention. Now, intention can come and go, but information is always there and always have been. I believe there was a point in „time“ where not even information was there and that would be the „nothingness“. Means, everything emerged from this „nothingness“ and it still surrounds and it’s still included in everything there is until now since the information (which is everything) was born out of it. I hope this specifies my thoughts a little bit more.

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AdditionFeisty4854 t1_jef2vlk wrote

TBH, I was waiting for your comment to appear in the notifications lol..
So by your explanations, I understood the following statement -

>A being (living or non living) in existence is determined as the information it carries (which shall be absolutely certain and shall not be 0) per time influenced withholding it's intention added

>
>Intention does not matter always

>
>Non living beings constitute pure information whereas living beings constitute information with intention (which develops due to acquired consciousness)
>
>
>
>Now if time is 0, there is nothingness, as (x/0 = can't be defined)
If that is the point then intentions are futile

>
>(you have added more words, but this are the fundamentals)

Now, this nothingness you described, in my terms, shall be called something less than 0 Dimension and obviously, above it.
0D is described as a singular point, having infinite information. Information is all it carries as a property, After it, new property comes which is Length (1D), then Breadth (2D), then Hight (3D), then Time (4D)
Note all property is but an infinite set of its predecessor property... Infinite group of lines (having length as property) form a plan (having breadth as property) Et cetera..
Now, as you judged (don't know if you judged), there should be some property whose infinite set constitute that property of 0D, having information

That's why I told nothing is everything

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GyantSpyder t1_jef3v86 wrote

Is there anything worthwhile or interesting to the theory of Ethics of Care in a philosophical sense? Or is more of a literary/cultural/political "hey this might be a good idea that sounds good to me" kind of "philosophical" thing?

I guess another way of asking the question would be - is there anything to Ethics of Care as theory that operates in a different way than other moral theories, or is it mostly casting itself as separate because the ends it advocates are separate ends than those generally associated with older society and culture, regardless of whether older society actually operated by the ethical theories associated with it? Sort of like how medieval and ancient virtue theory was often different because the virtues were different, but in the compelling sense of what a virtue is it was not as different.

As in, "we have new morals, so even though the old ethics still work, we're going to come up with new names for our ethics because the old ethics are so culturally associated with the old morals." Something like that? Or is there an idea in it different from other ideas worth familiarizing yourself with?

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Curious_Disaster5494 t1_jef8ka0 wrote

That’s exactly what I was thinking. You said it better than me tho.

I think I need to add that Intention just matters to beings in existence. Beings that don’t exist (yet or anymore) [eg. like thoughts someone will have in the future] don’t have any intention. They’re pure information.

And yes just like you said: nothing is everything or is in everything to be specific. I don’t know I it’s judgement but I deeply believe there must be some starting point to the existence of being, and if there’s a starting point there must be something less then 0 too like you said.

It’s nice talking to you about that topic, I’ve had it in my head for a couple years and never knew if anyone would understand what I’m trying to say.

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GyantSpyder t1_jef9iyn wrote

I'd call it "the moral luck of the initial condition."

As in, when we begin to consider whatever question we are considering, if we have two people who are trying to "do" the same thing, the moral value of them doing it will often appear/be (depending) different based on how they happen to have arrived at where they are, which is often a product of, at best, a great deal of random chance if not other factors.

And, since to an embryo the actions of their parents before they develop are unknowable, the condition at which an embryo becomes a fetus becomes eventually a person leads to the person then relating to something like "how they were genetically engineered" as equivalent to randomness.

Here's an example -

Two mountain climbers who don't know each other have each rented a cabin near the base of a mountain they both plan to climb tomorrow. But tonight, it is cold, and there is a snowstorm. They show up at the office at the same time, and they each get a key to their cabin, and they have to walk up some steep dirt roads to get to their cabins. When they got the cabins, neither of them knew of any sort of details about which cabin was which, they just reserved the one the system said was available at the time.

So they go up the road together, and it turns out the first cabin is only a quarter mile up the road, which is great. But the other cabin is up the hill further, let's say another mile up, in the dark, alone, during a snowstorm.

But then the person with the key to the close cabin puts their key in the lock and it breaks.

So, here's the situation -

If the person who rented the closer cabin forces a window open and goes into the cabin anyway, especially if they don't break it, that's fine. They reserved the cabin, it's their cabin - it's not ideal but given the situation it seems fine.

If the person who didn't rent the closer cabin does the same thing, it is not only bad, it's a terrible crime - even though the person who rented this cabin has never seen it before in their life, this is now their cabin, and forcing the window and going into it is breaking and entering, it violates that person's consent, it might be arguably assumed to be a personal threat, it might cause trauma that will be passed down to future generations, all sorts of stuff.

The point is not that the person who rented the farther away cabin would force their way in - they probably wouldn't! But the situation wherein each of them forcing their way into the window has profoundly different moral implications has come about mostly just by chance.

So yeah, there are a lot of ways you could change this situation, especially for future reference- you could check the cabins in the future to see where they are, you could do a better job of checking the weather report and arrive before the storm blows in, you could bring multiple people and rent a cabin together rather than rent it alone, you could bring a snowmobile with headlights, all sorts of stuff. Some people might even say you should burn down the whole campsite and build one fat concrete tower where everybody has to stay in an identical room.

But none of that helps you now. In this initial condition where you find yourself.

And from there there is an interesting ethical conversation to be had about what "the right thing to do" is for each person, if we assume the second person walking up to the farther cabin alone in the dark in the snowstorm is very dangerous,

For example, you could say that the person who rented the closer cabin really ought to invite the other person in at least until the storm blows over a bit for their safety - that they will call the front desk on the telephone and see if there's a Snocat that can take you up or something.

And you could frame that as either a good thing they should do, or as an obligation they really must do, and then discuss how all that works.

Or, you could also say the person in the second cabin, because of the moral luck of their initial condition, should be excused if they insist on coming into the cabin also even if the first person doesn't want them there - that there is no valid ethical basis for excluding them from doing this because the differences in moral luck are more important than, say, the right of the person who rented the closer cabin to consent to who comes into it or not.

And then what follows is a sequence of events with their own moral significance depending on the situation.

So yeah, I would say

initial condition

moral luck

and then "path dependence" wherein the same events can have different relationships with things like consent, free will, etc., depending on the order they happen in.

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Edmondg3 t1_jefebs8 wrote

That shit was crazy as fuck. I hope that's not how the world works and it was so over complicated there is no way you can prove any of that to be true. Sounds like you believe in karma which I think is a shit system. We just stated that free will is mostly an illusion if not 100% an illusion. The idea of being judged by a cosmic force for something you can't control is childish. I hope the universe does not punish biological robots that have no freewill for their actions. It would be much more intelligent for the judgemental gods to just change the creatures so they don't act in a "negative" way. Freewill is pretty much non existant at the human level of reality and no one can truly point to where it comes from if it does exist. Perhaps it exists at higher dimensions, but not here. So karma is really a higher system casting cosmic judgement on a smaller system that has little to no freewill. I hope reality doesn't function that way. You would figure if karma is real then all fishermen, all pest control and all meat farmers would be riddled with bad luck as they slaughter millions of fish/cow/pigs/bugs ect.

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GyantSpyder t1_jegbns6 wrote

This is pretty basic freshman year philosophy stuff. If you're finding it really crazy and eye-opening then this is probably an area where you could blow your mind a lot!

It's long, but it's reasonably well-organized and I think it makes straightforward sense. I didn't make up the terminology.

None of this depends on free will or karma - at least not in the sense that it requires there to be an external punisher who enforces compliance with moral rules or a externally verifiable sense that things could have happened in ways other than they did. A lot of ethics does involve seriously thinking about why anyone would want to be ethical, and it doesn't start and stop with just the supernatural or speculative.

Something can be "the right thing to do" because, for example, it leads to you becoming the person you want to be. And whether you have free will or not does not matter. It can be the right thing to do because it's what you would want people to do for you, which also isn't an exotic concern.

In general this sub is way too obsessed with speculative questions of free will, sentience, determinism, consciousness, and "nihilism" and not really concerned with or interested enough in what life is actually like and how philosophy as a broad literature might give you a systematic way of speaking about it and making some sense of it. Of course you could accuse philosophers of the same thing but that's not always the case.

I just think your initial question in this comment thread isn't really a "free will" question - because whether you have free will or not I think if you're talking about change over time there is a role for random chance as a retroactive explanation that has a role in grasping moral situations.

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GyantSpyder t1_jegco5x wrote

MacIntyre is super important IMO and not nearly enough people know the ideas he was getting at. Think about all the time people spend arguing on the internet - what are they actually doing? Concepts like "blue lies," "concern trolls," and other social behaviors around rhetoric that undermine discourse as debate - if you have some MacIntyre handy it makes a lot more sense than if you don't.

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