nrt, and it's long, so please don't be mad, but i'm, not at all sure i really believe in anything. in fact, i would say that i have certain quasi moral values with more conviction than i do any belief about the world. and long may it not last ha

I don't think a fetus is a person, but I accept that the "Trolley problem" is vacuous outside of its application to the real world.

Yeah, that's the philosopher I meant, Thompson. Looks like it has nothing to do with Kant (I misremembered).

It's a strange set up, and I can't see many people saying it's obligatory that they kill themselves to save the five. In some way, I think it might show it's merely permissible to turn the trolley, because I might give permission for someone to kill me to save five (or 100).

Is it my imagination or are you just saying that people either think everyone is free or some are free, and just ignoring the idea that no people are free in the hope that no-one notices that it may be no more appealing than the other two options?

However, I probably agree to an extent. We are free only to the extent that we begin to be agents that are struggling with how things are (rather than say recognizing how they are or being completely transcendent to them): no-one is completely free, not unless you want to dilute the meaning of that to something smaller than may be its intent.

Heaven does not really exist; hell is spiritual torment, either meaningless pain/suffering or something potentially worse that reworks the integrity of life. This is just my new age bet, cos I don't think that bodies would be subject to God or karma or whatever else.

Unbearable physical suffering/disease is another thing.

The other thing worth noting that in many ways people don't recover from things. The blind don't see again, the lame don't walk, the dead are not brought back to life, and so on. I think the best response to that is to not make moire blind people, but whatever!

i think it's the idea that self sacrifice is a way out of using people as means, but generally considered defective and no longer held by its oroginal proponent. However, frivolity aisde, it is a misisng piece in the psychology of it, if not the reality of moral prohibitions.

You've probably heard of the term "existential depression". I don't think it's a fake term, though it probbaly has limited psychological use/appeal (oh hi I diagnosed you with nothingness). I may have had existential therapy, which sounds odd but anyway.

it may not occur to one to feel despair

OK I'm not very well read, but the sensation that only despair is real means something, even if nothing else does. Of course, it's better that other stuff means! I used to think of it in terms of the most bullshitty misunderstanding of Buddhism: I don't matter, so no-one does! Will to annihilation, for sure, and FWIW you'd just want to locate yourself among other people who can refute the consequent (not that difficult).

Death, well I have read Heidegger, and the analysis of "my death" is not merely evocative but startlingly so. How we relate to it matters forsolong as (complete that sentence...).

Not read the whole thread, but I found this insightful

The basis of the happiness result, either more or less happy, is the consequence of choice/action

If we lack moral responsibility, due to determinism, then presumably we are not morally responsible for the happiness we create for ourselves, nor free to squander/enjoy it. That would defintely take the sheen, if not the shit, off of things for many.

If it just comes down to ought implies can, then desserts (rewards, fruits of labour, whatever) would analogously imply they can be withheld by others and/or fail to make us happy. Not saying that happiness must be moral but that happiness involves chance or choice, not just action.

----------

something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents

(antichrist 4); it's a phrase that reppears similarly in the gay science 995

owing to happy and reasonable marriages and also to lucky accidents, the acquired and accumulated forces of many generations, instead of being squandered and subdivided, have been assembled together by means of steadfast struggling and willing. And thus, in the end, a man appears... and the wretched intellectual play of aims and intentions and motivations lies only in the foreground

There may be be some contingency to greatness (or happiness), though IDK enough about it to have an opinion...

Appearances are nice, but even supposing that nobody cares about themselves, having lost all sense of self, I cannot see it. Earlier, I test ran looking at myself in the mirror and saying "I love you". I would naturally link the question to tennis and the will to self annihilation, as peak capitalist decadence. This looks interesting

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/contagion.21.2014.0131

I know nothing about Bataille beyond his name!

If OP means that no-one has resuscitated God, sure, but then many things get discarded by philosophy. Does anyone still believe in aether and the four elements, except in some poetic sense? My point is that philosophers (after Nietzsche) might not just be involved in destruction, but also creativity and creating new value.

nice quote; i googled it to make sure and got this free book chapter.

‘The thinker’, Nietzsche writes, ‘regards everything as having evolved … he asks: whence does it come? what is its purpose?’ (WS, §43). — the above link

I sometimes get the sense of Nietzsche only being engaged in refutation (showing that a person claim or theory is wrong), but I would be inclined to think, naively, that he also wants to assert the value of himself etc. and that this is not because everyone was so mean about him (wrong, wrong, wrong). Does it depend on how trivially the two attitudes (creation/destruction) are related: why the unity might slip out from anyone's "purpose"?

Anyway, I don't think he should be considered the final word, the alpha and omega, on nihilism or philosophy, if only because (from the very little I know) the end is also the beginning (*obligatory pic of Ouroboros*).

Hi, interested in phliosophy, and have used philosophy forums before; they are fun, though I will probably shy away from bothering with political discussion: I'm "one of the most left wing people on the planet"!! Especially interested in existentialism, aesthetics and science, though I know little about any of them. Cheers,
clemon