Comments

  • Reasons for believing in the permanence of the soul?
    I’d cite the abundance of veridical near death experiences as evidence of the soul and an afterlife.
  • What are your favorite thought experiments?
    Yet we do assume both, quite strongly, yet we don't have good reasons for doing so.Manuel
    Using this argument we can never have a reason to believe in the world becuase we can’t ever escape our senses short of omnipotence and even then you wouldn’t know if it wasn’t just another simulation.
  • An example where we can derive an "ought" from an "is"
    only with context in colloquial speech, where we use words very imprecisely, that one could infer this: so I wouldn't even say this proves, philosophically, that one can derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.Bob Ross
    You summed it up perfectly.
  • An example where we can derive an "ought" from an "is"
    True but the ought/is debate is about objective morality and whether or not certain moral claims are objectively true regardless of human opinion.
  • Reason for believing in the existence of the world
    Others have responded to your question much better than I can but I would like to know what answer would you find satisfactory? Since we can’t escape our senses and aren’t omnipotent we can never truly know that the universe is real or other people are actually sentient and so on but as I said we have more reason to believe those things than that the universe is a simulation and everyone but you is a meat robot without actual sentience.
  • What are your favorite thought experiments?
    Do you still contribute to the animal farming industry though, or have you walked away from Omelas?Down The Rabbit Hole

    I still eat meat though this is out of practicality regarding my individual circumstance rather than me approving of animal exploitation. If I had the means to live a vegan lifestyle I would.
  • What are your favorite thought experiments?
    In reference to the last question I’d say no because I think animal exploitation is wrong and we can still have pleasure, convenience and entertainment without them.
  • Reason for believing in the existence of the world
    If I understand your point correctly I’d say we have far more reason to believe in the objective existence of the world than not. The onus is on the person that says it isn’t real, a simulation etc.
  • Antisemitism. What is the origin?
    The Devil That Never Dies by Daniel Goldhagen is a comprehensive summary of this very topic.
  • The American Gun Control Debate
    It’s not the guns. There are more guns in the US today than ever before yet crime and murder are the lowest they’ve been since their peak in the 1990s. Clearly there is something deeper at work than the mere existence of firearms. Not only that but even if you remove firearm homicides the US still has a higher homicide rate than most developed countries. Clearly it isn’t firearms making Americans so violent. The same goes for mass shootings. Firearms have always been readily accessible in the US yet mass shootings weren’t common in the past like they are today despite gun laws being less strict to the point you could order rifles through the mail and virtually every school had shooting clubs. Here is the chart detailing homicide rates for high income countries (https://ibb.co/2yd4Rzz).

    As for the last part I don’t find gun violence or any kind of violence acceptable. I know others have said this but I think the obvious answer isn’t gun control but addressing the fundamental causes behind crime, violence, suicide etc. What makes someone buy a gun and go on a killing spree at a school? What makes someone kill their whole family and then themselves? What makes someone join a gang and kill rival gang members and turn their neighborhood into a war zone? What makes someone rob people at gunpoint? What makes someone kill their friend after a heated argument and so on and so on? From my research you’ll have much better luck reducing gun violence by addressing poverty, the war on drugs, mental health, poor education, poor infrastructure, hopelessness and the various other systemic issues that haunt our society than even more ineffectual gun control that only serves to infringe on the rights of law abiding citizens.
  • The American Gun Control Debate
    Exactly. It’s the stakes, not the odds. Given that in the US there are over a million violent crimes every year is it really hard to understand why someone would want to arm themselves to protect themselves and their loved ones?
  • How would you respond to the gamer’s dilemma?
    But suppose we did have an author that got off on torturing/raping his fictional characters.RogueAI

    This would be weird but not immoral considering they solely exist inside his head and aren’t actual people capable of being harmed. As long as he didn’t become obsessed with it and start hurting people in real life I don’t see the issue.
  • How would you respond to the gamer’s dilemma?
    No which is why I said “highly doubt.” You can’t be perfectly sure of what goes on in anyone’s mind but that doesn’t mean you can’t draw plausible conclusions. Do you have evidence to suggest otherwise? It’s ridiculous to assume creators whose work includes violence and immorality must be intrinsically depraved.
  • How would you respond to the gamer’s dilemma?
    Again, authors do the exact same thing in their fictional worlds, do they not? Is Stephen King a monster?RogueAI

    There’s a major difference between thinking of dark things for the sake of a story like a writer does and thinking of dark things for its own sake because you desire to actually do those things and get pleasure from it. I highly doubt creators like King, Tarantino, Barker, Zombie etc actually desire to terrorize, torture, rape or kill people like what happens in their stories.
  • How bad would death be if a positive afterlife was proven to exist?
    How do we know what being in the afterlife for eternity is like?Tom Storm

    True but in this scenario we explicitly know what the afterlife is like.
  • How bad would death be if a positive afterlife was proven to exist?
    Being immortal they would possess that attribute of God.Fooloso4

    I meant they can’t be omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient etc.
  • If you were (a) God for a day, what would you do?
    Yes.
    No. If you aren’t omnipotent, omniscient etc then you aren’t God. It’s possible to be extremely powerful but not omnipotent.
  • If you were (a) God for a day, what would you do?
    I’d make the universe a fantastical Culture style utopia and give myself the means to remain the most powerful even after my time as God is over.
  • Can basic desert and retributivism be justified under Compatibilism?
    Dennett’s brand of compatibilism fails to preserve retributivist desert moral responsibility—in fact, it rejects it outright. Furthermore, his justification for punishment, being consequentialist in nature, is completely consistent with the skeptic’s rejection of free will and just deserts. While Dennett himself prefers to retain the notion of just deserts, we contend that this is misleading and potentially inconsistent with his reformist conception of moral responsibility.Joshs
    This sums up my issue perfectly. I’m no free will expert but at first glance it seems bizarre to say that people have compatibilist free will and are morally responsible yet deny that they’re not sufficiently morally responsible to be punished for its own sake when basic desert is an integral part of moral responsibility (at least in the general public’s mind). It’s odd for a compatibilist to say they believe in moral responsibility unlike determinists but when you probe their beliefs it’s really the same kind of consequentialist system that determinists believe in. Maybe there’s something I’m missing.

Captain Homicide

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