Management is, by design, an instrument of domination. Is that what you are driving at?

If it is, I agree, but with a shrug. It is inevitable that we should manage stuff (including ourselves). Given that, we must pick among methods of management (noting, all the time, that we are automatically dominating the objects of our management efforts); and the choice is neither trivial nor disconnected from the consequences of our acts.

(By the way, leaving places and resources alone is still management -- at least, and this is quite difficult, management of the human beings who disagree with this goal).

Ring species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

Yep, freudian slip by me there. I intended to write "philosopher". But I guess my subconscious was aghast at the thought of doing it.

This is the topic of one of the books I have not written.

But at least I have the sketch of the book ready. I've written it many years ago. It goes like this, from memory:

1. Natural resources (bear with me for a while here, this sketch is quite old, and it takes for granted some terminology that fell out of favor since) are very often mismanaged.
2. Their mismanagement has terrible consequences (both short run and long run).
3. The consequences can be fairly understood as the "externalization of costs and benefits". (Insert longish explanation here if this is not clear -- it is an economics concept).
3.1. (As regards the OP): the externalization is usually conceived as pertaining to human subjects, but there is no intrinsic obstacle to extending the notion to non-human subjects.
4. The general framework that fosters these externalizations is the "Tragedy of the Commons" (Hardin, 1968; google it if you haven't heard about it).

So far this has all been more descriptive than prescriptive. But the prescription starts here:

5. We have, now (this was in 1998, more or less -- of course the situation is much improved since then), the technical means to enable valuation and to produce accurate estimates of the externalized costs and benefits in many commonplace situations. My example back then (in tune with my career specialization) was water use issues. It is child's play (theoretically) to estimate the cost of (a) cleaning up a polluted water body on an on-going basis and (b) prevention of pollution in the first place (e.g., by sewage treatment facilities). It is then easy to compare the two costs; and if reality is following the more expensive cost, it is, obviously, because some parties, without a say in the decision-making process, are bearing the brunt of these costs.

5.1. The situation is not so easy in other contexts. How much is a species of insect worth? What kind of ecosystem services is it involved with, and what is the value derived from them? Etc. (Note that here I was skipping the ethical problem of "who are we to put a price tag on another species", but this can be dealt with separately).

6. So, the strategy for better dealings with the environment becomes clear:

a. Reduce, as much as possible, externalizations. In other words, people who are responsible for X must pay the costs for X; people who benefit from X must be responsible for X.
b. When externalisation is (still) inevitable due to technical shortcomings of our engineering and scientific practices, act as if it could be reduced by the individual. This is an ethical imperative. People must increase their awareness of costs and benefits derived from their surroundings. Costs and benefits are not solely (or even mostly) economical in nature; the pleasure from a waterfall, the feeling of wellbeing from a well-preserved urban forest, etc. If you are aware of some benefit accruing to you, take responsibility for it. If you are aware of some cost imposed by your activities, try to pay for it. Summing up, if you are an agent (negative or positive) of externalization, be aware of it, and adjust your behavior so as to minimize externalization.

6b may sound utopic, but I don't think it is (and I strive to practice it in my own life). It is more a matter of awareness than of calculus or anything more utilitarian in nature.

These enlarged views may, for a moment, please the imagination of a speculative man, who is placed in ease and security; but neither can they dwell with constancy on his mind, even though undisturbed by the emotions of pain or passion; much less can they maintain their ground when attacked by such powerful antagonists. — Agustino

In other words, people are bad reasoners (because they have competing passions in their souls). I agree with Hume. But this is clearly no reason to believe that any argument fails. ("People are bad reasoners, therefore, argument X is bad" is, er, bad reasoning).

20 years ago I gave lessons on speciation.

From memory, there are very obvious (and instantaneous) cases of speciation in plants, through chromosomes reconfiguration. It is probably the clearest example to provide to a recalcitrant non-speciacionist.

(And if the claim that chromosome reconfiguration is not "true speciation" somehow, remind them that they are cheating, since the layman's idea of "a species" has nothing to do with genotypes; it is about morphology).

Alex Rosenberg (physicist) is a known proponent of "scientism".

Check this very short essay about it:

https://philpapers.org/archive/PIGISA

Good and evil are ethical terms, and ethical terms are never inequivocally objective or subjective. (Ethics are a favorite Platonic instance of the metaxy, the in-between in which human beings must navigate).

Any deemed-to-be-evil person is doing good in his own (subjective) estimate. To use a fictional example, the Joker (from Batman) lusts after pleasure, derived from the shock his actions create. If one prefers real-life examples, your favorite dictator is insecure and yearns to impose his (internal) order upon a recalcitrant world, which will be far better (from his perspective) if he prevails.

The Platonic teaching in this matter is that you must learn to doubt your own judgment about good and evil; what you perceive to be good may actually be evil, and vice versa. Of course, Plato does not leave you hanging in the relativistic chasm; he provides you with the criteria for proper choosing, namely, concern for your immortal soul. As Aristotle would later formulate, you must "immortalize yourself" to the best of your abilities, and in order to do that you must downplay the lusts that keep you close to your mortal nature and reinforce the yearnings that attract you to your immortal nature.

Compare the gospel sentence -- "When I have been lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people toward me" -- with the Buddhist mindset and the difference is clear. The agent in Christ's sentence is Christ.

In the oldest sects of Theravada, it is absolutely required to have met a buddha in at least some past life for enlightenment to be possible - or otherwise to encounter the Dhamma externally by yourself, a direct revelation. — Agustino

And is this scenario more akin to "attracting agent" or to "necessary precondition"? That's the core of the difference.

Right, but this idea that salvation does, to some extent, depend on something external can be found in non-Abrahamic traditions too. For example, in Buddhism, one must encounter the Dhamma, at least in one of their past lives, for the possibility of salvation to exist in this life. — Agustino

The difference is that in one case (Christian grace) it is a gift from an agent (God) to the subject; in the other case, it is a precondition that is not offered by an agent. In Buddhism (as far as I know) there is no mind guiding or attracting people towards 'salvation' -- it is a result of personal effort + necessary preconditions. Therefore, it is quite unlike Christian grace in that it does not require external conscious help by an agent.

Could you expand on this? — Buxtebuddha

The Hindu worldview (and others, e.g. Taoism) is predicated on the thesis that moral judgments are not ontologically relevant. Damnation/Salvation involves the application of moral categories upon ontology; in the Christian milieu, the worldview is represented by the notion that Lucifer's fall and Adam's error tainted the entirety of created being (as St. Paul said, the entirety of creation is aching for salvation).

All of this is related to the notion that God is good and that his creation was very good (before the fall, and therefore it is still potentially very good even now), and that this goodness of creation is true precisely because it was created by the God who is good. God is the source of all goodness, and he bequeaths his goodness upon his creation. This worldview is very different from the Hindu worldview, which involves an eternal nature (which is not properly called "creation" in the Christian sense), cycles of being, etc.

The thesis that belief is unnecessary for salvation deals with salvation as something extrinsic to the subject. Christian theology has thousands of pages about the "gratuity of grace". The main purpose of this thesis is to stave off Pelagianism (i.e. the notion that salvation is predicated on the subject's efforts, unaided by God). As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle -- it is unimaginable that salvation can be forced upon someone against his will, or that God would force belief upon some subject (and this is relevant to the example of your interaction with your friend). But it is also unimaginable that salvation can be achieved without external assistance -- the very word, "salvation", would become an exaggeration in such a scenario. "Saving oneself" without any external aid is more like "learning something" or "regular development" than like really "saving".

The entire concept of salvation, of course, is predicated on a, let's say, Abrahamic anthropology that views man as at least mildly tainted (on a spectrum that goes all the way to fully damned). If man is intrinsically good, then salvation makes no sense. In that sense, the translation of the concept "salvation" to a Hindu worldview is problematic.

Quite the opposite, I'd say: irreductionist is only describing the situation by generalizations and taking a look at the bigger picture. The reductionist is the one explaining. This is all assuming the reductionist is correct of course, in that there's no supernatural force affecting the situation. — BlueBanana

According to your interpretation, none of them is explaining anything. A full description of all the details involved in an event is not an explanation. "Explain the murder to me, please" cannot be answered by, "well, when he pulled the trigger, it started this specific chemical reaction in the gunpowder and then some gases expanded quickly, pushing the bullet...."

@Wayfarer

You lost that bet. Where can I collect?

;)

Mr. Reductionist thinks, mistakenly, that a description is an explanation. But this is a serious definitional issue, which is why I voted for methodological rather than just confused.

I don't think so, because in my mind chaos is actually something which acts. That's why I'm confused when you try to tell me that chaos is infinite potency. — Agustino

Please elaborate. Show me some ordinary sentences in which chaos is something which acts. (I want to get a grip on what you mean by chaos, to translate it into my own lexicon).

By the way, chaos as defined in mathematics has very little to do with chaos as used in metaphysics (and in everyday discourse, too).

Well potency cannot actualize itself - infinite potency (in the absence of act) is just infinite nothing - it doesn't do anything, it cannot do anything. — Agustino

It does not do anything and cannot do anything, but that does not make it "nothing". It makes it "something which cannot do anything". Pretty much congruent with chaos.

In what sense is potency without act something? In the sense that it could be something if acted upon? — Agustino

Yep. Just as nothing would not become something "if acted upon". If you act upon nothing, what you get is nothing. (Else you would be acting upon something).

Prime matter (as per Aristotelian usage), or "stuff" for our modern-day sentences, is something. It is undetermined (since any determination is an act), but it is something nonetheless.

We are here on the edges of discourse, so I cannot do much more than refer you to the Aristotelian discussion... and this discussion was not supposed (by Aristotle) to end the subject, but rather to point the student to a stance from which he would grasp the potency/act distinction. Aristotle was very clear that this distinction cannot be defined or explained (on pain of infinite regress), it has to be immediately grasped. (And this takes us back to my original comment about how all evidence for God requires immediate experience, rather than experience mediated by some concepts)

Afterall, potency without act is nothing. — Agustino

Nope. Potency without act is something. Nothing is no thing. In nothing, there is no potency.

Chaos is unlimited potency, while order (of a given kind) is a given actualization of said potency.

How else would you categorize chaos and order?

I guess the other issue here is whether order is primordial, or chaos is primordial. — Agustino

Aristotle already answered that in the Metaphysics. Act has metaphysical precedence over potency.

When we speak of randomness, we are talking about unpredictable events enmeshed within a contextual order. Take the two most common examples of randomness, gambling devices and radioactive decay. A six-sided die can provide one of six results {1,2,3,4,5,6}. It doesn't come up with zero, or seven, or 19. A decaying radioactive atom will emit particles which can be theoretically described. It doesn't turn into a pink elephant or become a six-sided die.

Randomness is, therefore, enmeshed in a context of order. We do not have even language to describe what "decontextualized randomness" would look like. What is probably the closest word to describe it is irrational, but used with the full apparatus of imagination, something which we rarely do (and when we do it we often recoil from it in horror).

In other words, the dichotomy order x randomness ought to be named order x irrationality.

***

But the entire program of establishing evidence for God from observations of Nature is misguided, because Nature is not immediate for us, whether in our created artifacts (dice and roulette included), whether in given experiences. We bring our interpretative schema into the issue when we do that, and this is why the debates are non-conclusive. It is more efficient to trace back the idea of God through history and to realize that the God we are talking about did not present itself (as an idea, without begging the issue of its 'reality-out-there') through natural manifestations, but rather in the human psyche (which is, indeed, immediate to us). It was only after the human psyche (I'm using this term in its Platonic sense, by the way) identified and developed the idea of the divine that it applied this notion to natural manifestations -- including social and cultural manifestations under this umbrella --, rather than vice versa.

In effect, the main driver of the modern atheist-theist debates is a conception of man (which is often embraced by both sides) in which the human psyche is isolated from the universe. The debate then becomes, "God exists only in the human psyche" vs. "God exists both in the psyche and outside the psyche". The discontinuity between psyche and reality, a nonsensical position, is taken for granted in this framing of the debate.

Here are the most salient of the 16 characteristics of sociopathy referenced in the Psychology Today article: (my emphasis)

Superficial charm and good intelligence
Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking
Absence of nervousness or neurotic manifestations

In other words, evangelicals who display sociopathic features are not outright 'crazies'

These seem quite significant:

Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love
Specific loss of insight
General poverty in major affective reactions
Untruthfulness and insincerity
Lack of remorse and shame — Bitter Crank

Sounds like the depiction of the ancient Athenians in Thucydides. It has been among us for a very long time.

Trustworthiness of the reporter. If the author of the account has a strong track record for reliability, it makes for a more probably trustworthy account. (Compared to a reporter who lacks such a record; and, of course, even more so compared to a reporter who is notoriously untrustworthy).

These conspiracy theories seem to me to derogate from the suffering of the people involved, and the intense engagement of hundreds of people in trying to resolve the causes of such an event, for the sake of an intellectual game. — mcdoodle

It is one way to look at it.

But another way is to consider that the immense suffering of those personally involved in it, and the recurrence of similar events in different times and places, leads people -- even people from so far away and still untouched by "standard terrorism"* -- to become interested in it and to notice anomalies, and to muse about them. In other words, what you call conspiracy theories is far from derogating, it is actually a way of honoring the suffering of the people involved. These events are so important that we want the truth, and will not accept inconsistent narratives -- the bar is raised for them. If you'll examine cases of conspiracy theories, you'll see these two common traits:

1. The event being explained is an emotionally-charged event
2. There is an official narrative, with some inconsistencies.

Now, inconsistencies do not falsify any narrative. The fact that some narrative has inconsistencies is to be expected when dealing with human events. There is a gradation of "tolerance", though. People will accept inconsistencies in a minor, page-24-buried story that has little emotional charge that they won't accept in stories of terrorist attacks.

I think that the search and analysis of inconsistencies in official narratives can only do good for the body politic, by the way. We, as societies, would certainly do better with a more scientific approach to situations like this.

* note, though, that the printed media in Rio de Janeiro has just declared our situation to be that of "war" and is instituting "war departments" in local coverage.

Nah, threads are not personal fiefs. And this one had served its purpose (of musing out loud about something curious).

"The system is not working right now, there is nothing we can do". As if this were my problem rather than theirs.

Jesus did say such things as 'I and the Father are One' but whether this amounts to him declaring that he actually is God, is another matter altogether. — Wayfarer

Check out Jesus` reaction (after the resurrection) when St. Thomas says, "my Lord and my God".

There is something fishy about the site. — Bitter Crank

No disagreement from me on that. But the facts listed there remain (and are verifiable, at least at a general news level). The narratives offered there are not nearly as interesting as the curious facts listed.

Oh well, Google is your friend if you were not following the news at the time. Is the Guardian ok? First link on the google search:

https://www.google.com.br/search?client=opera&q=manchester+terrorist+identification+us+authorities&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

it's pretty clear that this discussion is rooted in nonsense. — Michael

Must be great to know so much about the world that strange phenomena do not inspire doubt. This kind of knowledge is really fun if it allows one to dismiss facts based on their provenance.

That isn't the general view. The general view is that the US authorities published the name first, but that they obtained the name from UK sources who didn't want it published. — mcdoodle

A good example of the difference between a narrative and a fact. The fact is that the US authorities divulged the name of the suspect mere 3 hours after the explosion. What you call "the general view" is a story to explain this. It may be true. But the fact remains curious in its own right (so curious that it demands a narrative to explain it).

Because they want to die, they know it doesn't matter that they carry ID or pay for truck with their own credit cards. — Thorongil

This is an argument for they having the same rate of "passport carrying" as the average citizen, but it appears they have a far higher rate.

Are you suggesting that the police are not actually "discovering" passports on site, but are merely planting evidence, so that they can report progress in the investigation? — Bitter Crank

The police are not necessarily the ones planting the documents. But the salient point is that, given the accumulation of cases, I think it is more reasonable to believe that someone is planting documents than to believe that terrorists are more fastidious than the average citizen.

The question of why are they planting documents is probably worthy of different answers depending on the case. One explanation, which I usually prefer, is bureaucratic ass-covering. But there are others, ranging all the way up (or down) to manipulation by governmental agencies.

It is at least quite strange (to mention one of the cases listed in the link) that the US authorities knew the Manchester guy before the UK authorities did.

whether that be a passport or a driver's license. — Michael

I would question this in the case of passports. Driver's licenses (especially when you are driving!), I agree. But passports?

Anyone has data on the % of people who carry their passports around? My guess would be less than 10%.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.". H.L. Mencken

Direct democracy (as per ancient Athens) would be better than what there is nowadays. But it would still be quite tyrannical. Ask Socrates.

In a nutshell, because the freedom to search for the right ethical values is the freedom to search for God. Without this freedom, man's happiness would not be anchored on God's love (as it is in our world). It [happiness] would be exterior, and dead.

No, not just for myself, for everyone. — Agustino

You can think they are for everyone, but people may disagree with you. Because they are free. And you must cherish this ability that they have, of disagreeing with you even when you are right, because a world without that freedom would be horrible beyond imagination.

The idea that reason can guide us towards finding the right action is an idea I agree with. But my agreement does not make it right.

There is a subtle point here that I'm not sure you are grasping. There are distinctions between (a) X being the right action, (b) M thinking that X is the right action, and (c) M being justified in thinking that X is the right action. The locus of ethical freedom is (b). But you keep on pointing to (a) and (c).

But we can establish what is eudaimonia right? — Agustino

For ourselves. Yes, we can. Because we are ethically free. Hence the value of that freedom.

The serial killer may THINK his eudaimonia is different, but he would be wrong in his judgement. — Agustino

Says you. It is easy to say that John Doe is wrong when we are discussing serial killing. But some moral issues are not so beyond the pale.

Note, I don't disagree that John Doe is wrong (in other words, I'm no relativist) -- what I'm disagreeing with is the notion that you, or I, can decide for others what is the correct way to reach eudaimonia.

Mortimer Adler had no right to go about bossing people around, even if he was right about how to reach eudaimonia. This also applies to you, and to me.