You brought it up. — Sapientia

No, I brought up the examined life, not the vapid notion that we can have "feelings" about our life without examining it. Seems blatantly false to me. And really a sort of anti-intellectualism, as if caring about one's life is elitist.

If that counts as philosophy, then that's a very broad conception of philosophy. — Sapientia

Yes I interpret philosophy broadly. Even baristas can engage in it. Indeed, philosophy is our most natural condition - we have to prevent people from doing it, otherwise they will.

Yes, I'll take that bet. If they were black or Muslim and in a remote Oregon outpost arguing that some ranchers got unfair treatment, then there would not be a response greater than what we see here. It'd be confusing no doubt given the strange demographics for the region, but I don't see a dissimilar response.

Here's where you say "it would too be different," and I say "no it wouldn't." We then would go back and forth calling each other out of touch for a little while and then we'd go on talking about something else.

To the extent that you want to change the facts to include an urban area or an argument over some other cause, then we'd have dissimilar, inapplicable facts. — Hanover

I think you'd lose that bet. Every GOP politician and absurd conservative pundit (i.e., all of them), along with Fox News would be calling for a death strike against the thugs and/or terrorists.

But some white welfare ranchers who support sedition and arson on my public lands - we're supposed to treat them with kid gloves.

These freaks need to be surrounded and arrested, and if they don't go peacefully, they should be shot dead. They are armed insurrectionists who represent a much greater threat to the US than some ISIS maniacs. These guys threaten the rule of law.

Ammon Bundy bears a startling resemblance to Torgo from Manos: The Hands of Fate a movie dear to the hearts of fans of MST3K. I wonder if they would best be besieged, as it were; nobody in and nobody out, until there is a resolution. — Ciceronianus the White

One of my favorite MST3K episodes.

But Torgo had a heart of gold, when he wasn't trying to get the "Master's" brides.

You don't have an immediate general feeling about your life? — John

Not even sure what you're asking or what it entails.

I do care about my life, which means I've examined it and my future or past or present are issues for me. You seem to be talking about an issueless life. Ironically, even that requires examination.

Are you claiming that it is not possible to have an "opinion" about your life without doing philosophy? — John

How do you have an opinion about something you haven't examined even if the examination is as cursory as claiming you just have an opinion about it?

This topic is a bit jejune. It's odd it should produce such vehement responses by people who insist they haven't examined their life but still care about it? How would you ever know?

So you can't preflectively tell the difference between generally feeling good and generally feeling bad? — John

You didn't say "generally." You said, about your life. So how do you tell the difference and what does it entail, if it's about your life? I can't imagine this doesn't require examining your life, if only in the sense of whether a future life is something to look forward to or not.

You got that right.

I truly hope Obama does the right thing and sends a large force of armed marshals to the site to tell the welfare ranchers to surrender for arrest or die in a hail of bullets. Let's see how tough these gun nuts really are.

Just to give a little context about these leeches and their welfare lifestyle, BLM leases were so egregiously a waste of taxpayer money and a subsidy for welfare ranchers like Bundy during the 80s, that numerous environmental groups sued with some success. Ultimately, however,some groups starting bidding on the leases to outbid the welfare ranchers since the BLM refused to really get market rate. When the enviornmental groups outbid the leeches, the Bundy-types whined, claiming it was unfair to them and the purpose of the leases was to support their welfare lifestyle. The BLM actually agreed, and refused to grant leases to people who were willing to pay more for them if they protected the land rather than trashed it with overgrazing. I was involved in some of this litigation. It was a through the looking glass sort of thing.

So much for gun nuts love of free markets.

I guess in retrospect the environmentalists should have gotten guns and occupied the BLM offices saying we are the ones to decide the law, just like Arguing Aristotle above claims the goons have a right to do about arson.

The SWAT team didn't greet the folks in Oregon, not because all the protestors were white, but because, other than the local sheriff and maybe a deputy or two, there is no additional law enforcement there, much less a SWAT team. — Hanover

This rather misses the point. If some Muslim activists or Black Lives Matters took over an empty federal office with guns, want to make a bet they wouldn't be surrounded by SWAT and federal marshals with an ultimatum to surrender or die?

This is the true meaning of the 2nd Amendment - liberating a bird sanctuary from Big Gummit so that welfare ranchers can commit arson. — Landru Guide Us
It is a wildlife refuge that is only there because the ranchers back in the 1800's dug water ways thru the terrain to water their cattle and where cattle go, the birds will follow.

Could you please explain how they are "welfare ranchers"?

Committing arson is intentionally setting fire with the intent of destruction. Performing a controlled burn is very legal and replenishes the soil, giving it new life with the ash and providing a fire break (back burn) to remove the fuel in a defined space to stop a fire from spreading. Has anyone ever performed a controlled burn that got out of control? You betcha. Is everyone convicted of it? Hardly ever.

You have to love gun nuttery. — Landru Guide Us
Not all fools carry guns. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

You're not aware that BLM leases to ranchers on public lands are at below market value and represent a taxpayer subsidy to the "ranching lifestyle", one that degrades public lands and externalizes the costs to the taxpayers? I guess you're not very informed on the subject.

The Hammonds were convicted of arson. I guess you've decided, like the rightwing goons, to decide who is innocent and who is guilty and what a crime, outside our democratic and judicial process. We're all supposed to let you and the goons decide, it appears.

Like I always say, you and the gun nuts really have a beef with democracy and the rights of others, don't you?

If you can "feel life is worth living" without examining your life, then you should be able to feel that it isn't worth living without examining your life. So how would you ever tell the difference without examining your life? Sounds like the difference doesn't matter to you.

This is the true meaning of the 2nd Amendment - liberating a bird sanctuary from Big Gummit so that welfare ranchers can commit arson.

You have to love gun nuttery.

This all sounds like the examined life to me, simply characterized after the fact as not examined.

There is no need to examine my life and evaluate it as being worth living, I merely have to feel that it is worth living for it to be, by definition, worth living. — John

Then you've examined your life, however cursorily. Your feelings are about your life, are they not? And you've examined them to determine that they tell you that your life is worth living, correct? If you haven't, then what are you talking about?

I don't know how you haven't just made my point. If you don't want to examine your life, that's your business and I'm not trying to convince you to do otherwise. But by the very fact that you find such an examination uninteresting and obvious means that you don't care about the meaning of your life. And so, you can't argue to me that your life is worth living.

If you now turn around and protest, that your life is meaningful to you, then you must admit that you examined it, and hence have made my point again.

Unless I am greatly mistaken, QM interpretations are absolutely not science. If they were, they would be falsifiable. Rather, each interpretation is equally consistent with all the given evidence, and each will in principle remain consistent with future evidence if any of them does. There is no theoretical scientific manner by which to choose preference between one and the other. So far as I can tell, the only reason they are considered science in any way is that their origins are from scientists working in the field of QM.

If I am incorrect on this, please cite a source for further reading, because so far as I have read, this is the case. — Reformed Nihilist

You have to make a distinction between what is falsifiable in practice versus in principle.

The obvious example is the multiverse interpretation of Everette against the Copenhagen interpretation. They can't be tested in practice. But David Deutsch has proposed various ways of testing them in principle. We simply lack the technology at this time. Several other physicists have proposed additional experiments (again outside of our practical range, but not in principle impossible). There is no reason to believe that in the future we won't be able to test these interpretations and eliminate one or both of them.

This comment seems off the mark to me. I am not proposing any philosophical claims that invoke QM, I am trying to discuss the relative merits of QM interpretations in terms of philosophy. — Reformed Nihilist

I'm not sure what this could possibly mean except the category error I stated.

QM is science. It isn't philosophy. How could philosophy possibly sort out which interpretation of a scientific theory is the best scientific interpretation? The only possible way to sort that out is more hypotheses and more empirical testing.

I don't understand the distinction you're making, RN.

Existential questions aren't subjective per se; rather analysis of an issue as "subjective" is only possible because we have existential structures. Not to put too fine a point on it, but invocations of the subject is on a different level than I'm discussing. Or to put it another way, I'm denying the subjective-objective dialogue is useful to this issue. Happy to discuss why in more detail, but basically it assumes existential meaning (the examined life) is derivative of that dialogue, while I argue the opposite is the case.

Is morality anything more than being good, with being good defined in a manner which doesn't necessarily include self-interest? — Agustino

I would think moral philosophy is the inquiry into what is right or wrong (not good) from the perspective we find ourselves in at the time. Defining that as "being good" is the type of thing at issue in the inquiry, and a bit old fashioned and Platonic. But again, I'm not claiming that putting the self-interests of others ahead of one's own is necessarily moral. I'm saying that it's a better way to live. I don't think the distinction is that hard to grasp. Indeed, it would have been - and was - considered immoral in Roman antiquity, not to mention stupid. The Roman authorities generally thought that Christians were immoral for helping the poor and weak (not to mention a threat to the state, not to mention stupid).

There is no particular relationship between living an examined meaningful life, and living a moral one. Though I could of course define the former as the latter. Still, I'll resist that. It seems to me that morality is historically contingent and not on the same level as existential structures.

Well, you're confusing the relationship between them, at least. There is no logical dependency of one on the other. (Unless your argument is an argument by definition, in which case, I reject your definition). And I have responded. It's up to you whether or not you wilfully ignore it. In short: nope. Your assertion 'P' doesn't warrant any more than a dismissal or an assertion '~P'. Or are you trying to shift the burden of proof? But additionally, as others have also noted, there are counterexamples to your claim, and your position fails to acknowledge them. That is good enough reason to reject it. — Sapientia

The relationship between them is the difference between the ontic and the ontological. Whether that's logical or not hardly matters. My position would be that logic arises out of the difference.

Indeed. Which is what makes your argument that the worthy life necessary involves self-examination so egregious. Your "third person" pontifications about how only examined lives are worth living don't define the life of anyone. They may have an "unexamined" life in which they are both comfortable and good. Some people don't need the critical reflection of philosophy to have a life which is worth living for them. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Sure it does Willow. It describes Dasein's life. And Dasein is always my Dasein. That's true for you too. But if you don't think it is, then don't examine your life and don't determine whether it's worth living. It's OK with me.

By using science!

To me, morality and goodness are intrinsically linked. What is good, in a general sense, is moral. What is good for me, may or may not be moral — Agustino

Hard to see how this claim would survive even cursory scrutiny, and the examples already given seem to do that. But in any case it is yours to defend. You certainly haven't convinced me that this vague claim provides any useful moral guidance or doesn't lead to absurdities.

The judge of morality doesn't have to be stronger than those weak people. He can be just as weak as them, and yet identify that it would be better if he was stronger. — Agustino

Conflating "what is better" with what is moral is another mistake, among many, that you are making

QM is not only science, it's one of our best scientific theories. Science is simply the social practice of using methodological naturalism to explain observed facts and to make useful predictions based on that explanation - an explanation better than the alternatives, not some perfect explanation. QM excels at both (though like all scientific theories it doesn't explain everything the weird properties of gravity for instance.)

QM has nothing to do with philosophy, though some of the facts that it explains, being the result of experiments peculiar to QM, potentially raise interesting philosophical questions about our experience of the world. But that would be the case whether we had the theory or not.

I'd go so far as to say that any philosophical claim that invokes QM is by definition askew and has fundamentally conflated science and philosophy.

I think I've been clear: it is our human condition that most people will do anything necessary to stop somebody from torturing them or killing them or abusing them under pain of death and bodily injury. It's not a weakness. It's who we are. To moralize that, particularly from a false claim that the judge of morality is stronger than those weak people, is not only obscene, but probably immoral in itself. It's blaming the victims.

Now some people are impervious to threats of death for whatever reason (though nobody is impervious to torture). So they may resist. We conventionally call that courage - though it may be they simply don't care about life, or have a death wish, or are unrealistic or deluded about death and pain, or lack imagination, or are wired in a funny way. In any case, I have no problem calling them courageous, and recognizing their uniqueness, whatever the source. But they aren't more moral since the alternative isn't immoral.

Read the ending of 1984. It illuminates the limits of morality in the face of power.

Don't avoid answering the important part :) I didn't special plead to avoid your point, I actually tackled it by means of another example, which I would agree with. — Agustino

Sorry, Agustino, it's just special pleading - complying with a robber under threat of death isn't abetting a robbery but complying with a murderer under threat of death is murder (or whatever).

These sort of absurd contradictions is sufficient evidence that your moral claims have no force. I won't get into rebutting the Gish Gallop of claims that follow.

I don't find that to be an instance of abetting a robbery. Nor do I find giving a thief my own money to be something morally wrong. Let me give a better example: — Agustino

Special pleading won't save your contradictory moral claims.

Nope, you're just confusing two separate things: that life is worth living and knowledge or awareness that life is worth living. You therefore fail to account for those cases in which life is worth living despite lacking that knowledge or awareness.

If, for you, life is only worth living with that knowledge or awareness, then, that is fine. But, again, this is reflective of your judgement, rather than a fact about life. — Sapientia

I'm not confusing them at all, Sapientia. I'm distinguishing them for the reasons stated. You haven't responded to that but I'll give you one more chance:

Whether a life is worth living is not empirical. It always means is my life worth living to me. Thus it is an existential question, which can only be determined by me examining my life. Thus if my life is not examined by me, it is not worth living.

Someone does not have to know that their life is worth living in comparison to another, to live well. Some people live well without engaging a process of "examination". For them, examining their life is not required to live well, and may only serve as a pointless (or even damaging) distraction.

Examining things is no doubt the basis of philosophy. Philosophy is a critical project. The problem is that ethical action is not. It's it's own state of existence, which may be present without the critical examinations of philosophy. Sometimes people just do good and know what is good. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Living well is not the same as a life worth living. For a person to live a life worth living, it has to be worth living for that person, not for some third-party observer (who does not and cannot live that life), and that requires self-examination.

Your argument relies on the mistaken assumption that knowing whether or not one's life is worth living is necessary for a life to be worth living. — Sapientia

It is for the person, and that's the sense that counts. A "third party" conclusion that a life is meaningful isn't relevant to whether my life is worth living to me. And for it to be worth living to me, I must examine my life. Thus the unexamined life can never be worth living.

You are making a category error, as if the meaning of one's existence is empirical, when it is existential. Dasein ist je meines - existence is always my existence.

So do you believe in and worship a dickish god? Or do you reject all traditional claims about god exempting it's existence? Or is there a third option that I'm not seeing? — Reformed Nihilist

It makes no sense to believe in, much less worship, a God that clearly doesn't exist and who would be monstrous if he did. God can't be empirical and moral.

That has no relationship with accepting a text as sacred, which to my mind is just a way to say it is existentially relevant to who I am and who I should become. Hamlet is important to me (Bloom argues the play created the modern person), but I don't "believe" Hamlet is or was an empirical person.

That's a separate issue from whether or not being selfless is a better way to live, but yes, I do disagree with that, because I recognise that these things are not absolute. Your view is too simplistic. I for one happen to prefer the examined life, but that's just me, and doesn't say much. — Sapientia

Well, we have found the root of our disagreement. I assert unapologetically that it is part of the human condition that the unexamined life is not worth living.

I don't know how you can really disagree since if one didn't examine their life, how would they know it's worth living. They have condemned themselves to Socrates' judgment by their failure to examine their life.

To me this is the basis of philosophy, and hence every philosophical question, including the morality of selfishness. So we'll have to leave it there.

One is committing immorality by forcing the other one to make a decision, the other one is committing immorality by sacrificing their family/friends for their own survival. Both are immoral, to different degrees, of course. — Agustino

So if a robber holds a gun to your head and you give him the money, you're committing the immoral act of abetting a robbery? Oh the absurdity of imposing morality on people in extremis.

Like Ben Carson you would have rushed the Wehrmach and let them torture you to death before you would do anything immoral in a concentration camp. Right.

My principle: There is no moral way to act when you are beaten, tortured, threatened with death. There are no moral choices in that situation. Just suffering. Now some courageous people act courageously even in extreme situations. We should acknowledge that. But that has nothing to do with morality.

But you haven't actually provided any evidence which supports that assertion, and I can think of possible counterexamples — Sapientia

I think I have. Regard narcissists like Trump or Lindsey Lohan. They are childish boring fools, and don't even know it.

The unexamined life is not worth living. Are you actually going to disagree with that?

So therein concludes my emotive argument for atheism. Thoughts? Critiques? — Reformed Nihilist

My feelings exactly. Either there is no empirical God, or if there is one, he's a monster. To believe in an empirical God, biblical or otherwise, requires one to accept he's total immorality. Which sadly orthodox Christians do. They actually have to argue God was doing a good thing by ordering Abraham to slit Isaac's throat like an animal or by letting the Holocaust take place. The cognitive dissonance of orthodoxy is chilling.

This doesn't prevent me from being a Christian, just from accepting orthodoxy.

There is no difference Landru. It's still a failure to live up to my moral standards. I know I won't be able to in those circumstances, but that's because Im a coward, and I admit to it... How can there be a difference? Does being forced to make a decision make it different? Does my life being threatened make it different? What is it that makes it different? — Agustino

Yeah, well, there we have it. If your moral system can't tell the difference between a Nazi and a Jewish victim struggling to survive the horrors of Nazism, it really isn't worth much. This is what happens once you go down the road of rightwing thinking

No I am given to moral introspection. But look Landru. If I sell my wife in slavery in order to save my life, I have still done something immoral. — Agustino

You're like Ben Carson blaming the victims of mass shootings for not "rushing" the gun man.

You have no idea what you would do when your life is threatened by somebody with power over you. It's intellectual absurd to claim otherwise. You will do what you do based on where you are in life as you face a horrible situation not of your own making. I would call somebody who sold his wife into slavery at pain of death cowardly or less heroic than somebody who didn't (I think it's curious that this is exactly what Abraham did, whether you are aware of that or not). But not immoral. That's especially true if you lived to do something about it, rather than just got yourself killed and have your wife sold into slavery anyway. That's stupid (but also not immoral). I would save the charge of immorality for the person forcing the choice on you. He's the immoral one.

Your inability to see the difference suggests a very defective moral system.