I think it’s absurd to believe that people should live miserable, spartan lives and wear hairshirts because other people in the world have bad lives until everyone has a good life. It’s the duty of those who wield the actual power in society (the state and the wealthy) to address the fundamental injustices and inequities that plague us. Not average citizens who have a right to recreation, entertainment and creature comforts. We have more than enough resources to give every person in the world a basically good life. It’s just a matter of ideology and unwillingness as to why it isn’t done.

No. It’s only fair and just if we make it so and even then there’s only so much we can do as humans. A theoretical benevolent afterlife on the other hand is a different story. I certainly hope one exists for my sake and the sake of the countless billions who’ve lived terrible lives of misery, toil, want, abuse etc.

It depends on your definition. You have free will in the practical sense that you make conscious decisions without coercion but you don’t have free will in the ultimate sense that you’re the sole cause of your actions and your nature or could have done otherwise. You certainly aren’t morally responsible enough to warrant desert based punishments. In any kind of logical reality where causality exists that kind of free will could never exist.

Adult human female.

People enjoy pleasure and society is worsening so people use substances to escape in one form or another. The same goes for other vices.

I think it would be objectively good if sentient beings existed but that’s only because I think sentience is intrinsically valuable and good.

No.

I don’t know how much your mind has been changed over the course of these threads but The Matrix aside what kind of plausible answer would you find convincing as to reality and truth being real? You can’t expect certainty regarding fundamentally unknowable concepts.

It seems like Truth Seeker keeps making the same thread about objective truth over and over even when he gets numerous thorough answers. A single ongoing thread on the subject is sufficient.

I don’t think denial is ever truly helpful or something you should do even if not denying something makes you feel worse. Ugly truth is always better than a comfortable lie.

In a deterministic universe you can still be responsible in a practical/attributive sense. You don’t have to be ultimately guilty in the eyes of God as Dennett put it to be guilty of wrongdoing or worthy of punishment for consequentialist reasons.

I think and hope it’s a benevolent paradise of bliss, wonder, love etc where you can do basically anything you want with few restrictions.

I’m suggesting something like the trolley problem except you’re the person that has to die for a larger number to live.

I should have clarified. The people in this situation aren’t attacking you but you are still forced to choose between killing them or sacrificing yourself.

Examples of what I mean by things that aren’t immoral but you shouldn’t want to be the kind of person that does them include living your life in a drugged stupor like the lotus eaters of Greek mythology or someone who wants to do nothing in life but cover themselves in filth and watch Salo on repeat.

Why not?

I’d cite the abundance of veridical near death experiences as evidence of the soul and an afterlife.

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.

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.

True but the ought/is debate is about objective morality and whether or not certain moral claims are objectively true regardless of human opinion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Devil That Never Dies by Daniel Goldhagen is a comprehensive summary of this very topic.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

Being immortal they would possess that attribute of God. — Fooloso4

I meant they can’t be omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient etc.

Yes.
No. If you aren’t omnipotent, omniscient etc then you aren’t God. It’s possible to be extremely powerful but not omnipotent.

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.

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.