There is no point in debating who's the cause of Jack's suffering if you picked A — khaled

the A and B choices above have nothing to do with causality. They have to do with why one feels that something is ethically wrong.

Ok. The point of the whole scenario was that IF you were B, I would say that the harm isn't caused by Jill but by Jack's decision. But if it's A then yea sure Jill bad — khaled

It's caused by Jill because it's Jill's decision to apply the forces she's applying to Jack.

It's only Jack's responsibility if Jack gives his consent, although Jill still has to decide to cooperate.

Just to be clear, do you consider applying any force that leaves physical changes without consent bad because: — khaled

It has to be something where there are macro-observable effects for at least a few days after the event, and then it's also simply an issue of whether the victim cares enough about it to feel it's a problem.

It's a foundational disposition for me. It doesn't rest on another disposition. So "just cuz it is (the way I feel about it)"

Again, if you were paying attention, not trolling, etc., you could have already answered for yourself that B isn't the case, because I specified countless times that I formulate no ethical stance on "suffering" or "harm" per se.

Let's put this in Jack and Jill terms for you.

Jill kidnaps Jack and tells him:

Either Kill yourself by pushing this button or I'm going to torture you.

Jack says, "Screw off and let me out of here."

Jill then makes a choice to torture Jack. Jack doesn't have the option to choose to not have the force applied to him that Jill is applying as she tortures him. It was Jill's choice to torture him. She could have chosen otherwise. She could have let him go.

Is torturing someone while giving them an easy way to kill themselves wrong or not? — khaled

By this point, if you were not a moron, you should be able to know what my answer will be:

Its wrong if by torture we're referring to doing nonconsensual physical violence to the person, in a way that the macro-observable effects will linger, where the victim is normally capable of granting or withholding consent to such actions.

I have no clue what you're talking about — khaled

That's a big part of the problem, obviously. Either you're incapable of following a conversation very well, or you're simply not making an effort to.

If I quoted you saying "So how is what the kidnapper did wrong," then obviously I'm referring to the post where I responded to that question.

"So how is what the kidnapper did wrong"

But okay, maybe you had in mind the torture, too. Again, I added that to the post in question awhile ago.

So was the torturer. — khaled

Goddammit you're a moron. You brought this up re the Hitler tangent. (Seriously though, you really are an idiot, or otherwise maybe a bit crazy or you're just trolling.)

I thought you would say that a torturer and kidnapper would be culpable for BOTH torture and kidnapping not just kidnapping. — khaled

You asked me about kidnapping. So that's what I answered. I added that you had also stipulated that they were torturing the person, but you only asked about kidnapping.

Re (1), first off, did you grant permission for them to enter your property and do this? Aside from that, just what are we positing re the devices?

Is a rapist culpable for doing harm onto someone? — khaled

It's bizarre just how dense you are with understanding the distinctions here. (It's kind of bizarre just how dense you are period.)

A rapist is physically doing something to someone else, aren't they? They're not only telling someone else to do something

No they're not they're sleeping. — khaled

You might as well hold up a sign announcing that you don't understand why I'm using the term "normally"

How would Hitler be culpable for anything? He didn't cause direct physical deformations did he? — khaled

Right. He wasn't culpable on my view.

I'm not in favor of any "conspiracy" crime by the way.

So how is what the kidnapper did wrong? — khaled

He kidnapped someone. That's doing something against their consent, where the person is normally capable of granting or withholding consent.

You also stipulated that the kidnapper was torturing the person.

Doesn't it? "Precondition" and "Necessary condition" sound like synonyms to me. — khaled

makes mincemeat out of the conventional connotations of "cause" and "culpability." — Terrapin Station

By the same token, by the way, in my view Hitler didn't kill anyone (at least not per my knowledge/memory). People beneath him (hierarchically) rather made decisions to kill people.

Oh in that sense yes but there is a nuance here. Zoning an area as residential IS a cause for "Joe commited suicide at home" but not for "Joe committed suicide". It is a necessary condition for the area in which Joe commited suicide to be called "home" but not necessary for Joe to have committed suicide — khaled

It's necessary for him to have committed suicide at home, though. It's the same thing as my South Africa example earlier, where you and Janus argued that traveling to South Africa was indeed a cause of me breaking my leg in South Africa.

Yes there is. If you use my definition of causality as necessary condition. Joe's mom had to have Joe in order for Joe to commit suicide. Therefore Joe's mom is accountable for his suicide (although partially). Joe's mom is also accountable for all suffering and joy Joe experiences — khaled

The reason we'd not be able to make sense out of it is that all of that's identical in the two cases with different outcomes. So that makes mincemeat out of the conventional connotations of "cause" and "culpability." There's no way to make sense of it other than simply saying that it's a precondition, but that term doesn't at all have the same connotations.

Also I want to take this problem to the extreme and ask why the kidnapper is wrong in this case:

A person kidnaps you at night completely painlessly and without any damage done then puts you into a torture chamber. You wake up, he gives you a button and says "Press this button and you will die" and then proceeds to torture you. Now you have two options

A: Die
B: Severe pain

The kidnapper in that case would not be the cause of the person choosing to die. The person deciding to push the button was the cause.

No? Under what set of axioms do you think zoning an area as residential is wrong? — khaled

Zoning an area as residential is a cause per your vernacular, where you're using cause to refer to culpability, for someone committing suicide at home.

If you notice a couple posts back I asked if you were the "arbiter" of what is good. — schopenhauer1

If you did, I didn't see it. Probably because it was a long post. I can tell people that I'm not doing long posts covering a bunch of different points, but it's up to them whether they want to just go ahead and type long posts anyway, for whatever reason. At any rate, I'm not reading them. It's important to be able to learn that.

At any rate. Yes, I'm the arbiter of what's good, relative to me. You're the arbiter of what's good, relative to you. That's how it necessarily works for everyone. Good/bad and the like are judgments we make and dispositions we have regarding preferences. That includes if what someone uses for a guide is a consensus opinion or something like that. They're still deciding that relative to them/their opinion of good, they're going to go by what the consensus opinion is.

Morally culpable: Did an action classified as wrong under a certain set of axioms that evolve out of culture and survival strategies. — khaled

Focusing on that one first, you're claiming that a precondition like zoning an area as residential is classified as wrong where that evolved out of cultural and survival strategies?

I don't but that doesn't matter. — khaled

The reason it matters is that there's no way to make sense out of saying that Betty, Joe's mom, is culpable, with respect to causality, for Joe's suicide, where Joe freely chose to commit suicide in world A at time T1, whereas in identical world (prior to T1) W, Joe did NOT choose to commit suicide.

but something else, where you would say the person is both employing empirical methods and is not doing science — Moliere

I can't think of something where I'd say that offhand.

The examples where people aren't doing science are things like when someone simply intuits that they're the reincarnation of Napoleon, or that aliens are monitoring their thoughts, or that Gods exist, etc.

I don't think you are saying that babies don't feel, perceive, or experience. Or are you? Is "sentience" the right word? Do you mean self-aware or conscious? — T Clark

To feel, perceive or experience subjectively requires a mentality that babies may not have.

We know that people do not recall much prior to at least the toddler period--and then memories are pretty spotty until we're talking about, say, a five or six year-old.

We don't know if that's because mentality in general isn't sufficiently developed until then, or if it's just something inadequate about memory prior to that point.

Well, I do not mean anything like the majority or powerful members of the group assigning value levels when I say the group has a certain value level, Im talking about a group who all have more or less the same value level. You are inserting context where none was needed or mentioned. The individuals have a value level, they are part of a group with other individuals with the same value level. The group has that particular value level. — DingoJones

It seems like maybe you were thinking about valuing a group rather than a group valuing something? Or am I misreading that?

I don't agree with Pigliucci in that essay. What he calls the "expansive" definition is the one on track, I'd say. That doesn't make the term meaningless. We don't always employ reasoning about empirical matters in a way where we'll make changes based on recalcitrant evidence, etc. The important thing to stress is rather that scientists aren't really doing something significantly different than what plumbers do, what we do when we learn how to cross the street, etc.

They are doing something significantly different than what preachers do (or at least, they should be doing something different than that).

All I'm saying is self-reports don't necessarily tell the whole picture of what's going on. But, as I said to you, this empirical data, doesn't even matter to the argument. I know shocking, since that is what you will use.. — schopenhauer1

The reason it matters to me is, as I said, that my view doesn't ignore other persons' opinions. Most people don't think that only suffering matters, and most aren't so miserable that suffering greatly outweighs everything else. My view takes other persons' opinions into account. You don't have to do that, of course. There's not a right or wrong way to formulate an ethical view. I'm just telling you how I formulate mine on this particular issue.

Aside from that, as I've mentioned countless times, I don't formulate ANY ethical view merely on "suffering" or "harm"--those ideas, simply stated, are never an ethical hinge for me. Those terms are too vague for my tastes, and in that vagueness, they often refer to things that I don't feel are an ethical problem at all.

I never said legally culpable. What is practical to make legal and illegal and what's moral and immoral are not the same. — khaled

What makes the difference on your view?

It seems like you don't really buy the idea of free will.

You don't believe that every preceding factor could be the same (hypothetically) in two different cases with person A deciding x and person B deciding y (which is not-x)?

(Or we could ask rather if you don't believe that in possible world W, versus actual world A, someone couldn't make decision y (not-x) in W at time T1 rather than decision x in A at T1?)

So if someone decides to commit suicide, say, you're holding not only their parents, but their grandparents, great-grandparents, etc., as well as the gun manufacturer, the builder of their home, the people who zoned that area as residential, etc. all legally responsible for the suicide?

I can see lawyers loving you, at least. "Hey, this is my kind of guy."

Cause: A necessary condition — khaled

So it has no relation to "cause" in terms of culpability? For example, for legal purposes?

In my defense I thought you were talking about this: — khaled

You're either being dishonest or you're an idiot or crazy. You don't have another option here, and none are satisfactory.

That was AFTER the post in question.

Sure, so there's an uncountable number of causes for every event in your view, and "cause" need not even refer to something with a deterministic connection to an event.

So could you explain just what you have in mind with a "cause" and what any cause's significance is to anything in your view?

At this point you had used "materials" to refer to sperm and eggs on multiple occasions — khaled

Remember when I said just above that I care about honesty in conversations?

Do you consider the big bang a partial cause?

I'll get to the rest later, first:

A door requires two keys A and B. Turning A is not the cause of the door openeing. Turning B is not the cause of the door opening. Turning A AND B is the cause of the door opening. In the same way: Being able to perceive/experience suffering is not the cause of suffering. The stimuli that cause suffering if perceived are not the cause of suffering. Being able to experience suffering AND there being a stimuli for suffering are the causes of suffering. — khaled

In a similar way, wouldn't you say that being conceived and/or born is not the cause of suffering with respect to breaking your leg when you're older?

Secondly, I don't know why you're wasting so much energy on this — khaled

It matters to me whether we're having an honest conversation in good faith, and whether we're "with it" enough to be able to do so sensibly, coherently, etc.

The entire post in question reads:
===============================================================
↪Terrapin Station

You'd have to say that it's morally problematic to do things to materials that could turn into living things — Terrapin Station


I did. And so did you. You said genetically modifying babies to suffer is bad. Genetic modification and birth are both things you do to organic materials that turn into living things.
===============================================================

It was only four posts AFTER that that this was introduced by you: "Sperm and eggs aren't living things?"

So the "I did" wasn't in response to something about sperm and eggs.

"life is good" is often wrought with internal biases that distort events of the time versus remembered. — schopenhauer1

The point remains that to know this, we'd need data about persons' evaluations at the two different time periods in question--the (1) scenario in my post above.

If we had the data in question, and it suggested what you're hoping/claiming it would suggest, we'd also need an argument as to why the evaluation at time T1 has precedence over the evaluation at time T2, rather than those simply being two different evaluations, where it's not the case that one is correct and the other is incorrect.

because they are beings, and not simply objects. — Wayfarer

Beings are "simply" objects. ("Simply" is in quotation marks because objects are not really that "simple.")

"Scientism" usually has a connotation of treating science more or less as a religion. Scientism sees science as uttering dogmatic truths, for example.

On the connotation of treating science like a religion, this is neither necessary nor sufficient: "There is only one knowledge-justification method, i.e. the scientific one. Every question would be decidable by experimentally testing possible answers. In other words, the scientific domain would be all-encompassing and complete."

There are definitely people who treat science as a religion. I'm not sure if there's actually anyone with the view you describe in quotation marks above. If there is, they probably either (a) believe that mathematics actually is characterized by experimental testing in some sense, or (b) stress that mathematical utterances are not actually true or false, so that they're not knowledge in the jtb sense.

(b) can be the case on a constructivist view--a view that sees mathematics as simply a language that we've constructed to talk about how we think about relations on an abstract level.

“I’m looking at the man in the mirror! (Oh, yeah!)
I’m asking him to change his ways! (Oh, yeah!)
And no message could’ve been any clearer!
If you want to make the world a better place,
Take a look at yourself, and make that change!” — Noah Te Stroete

I already noted that he thinks I'm an idiot. You might, too.

I don't regurgitate much, partially because I can't. My memory doesn't work well in that manner to enable it. But it's also partially because even the philosophers I like the most I disagree with probably as much if not more than I agree with them. So I'm not about to simply forward stuff they said most of the time. I have a lot of idiosyncratic views.

Re frames/points of reference, I've already explained it a few times. They're spatiotemporal locations, where at all spatiotemporal locations, existents, including existents at that spatiotemporal location, have properties/relations where at least some are unique relative to what the "same" properties/relations are at other spatiotemporal locations, and there's no way for properties/relations to be sans particular spatiotemporal locations, because it's not possible for spatiotemporal locations to not obtain. Properties/relations are always what they are only at particular spatiotemporal locations.

An argument explaining why the purported explanation fails to explain the phenomenon in question. — Marchesk

No one does that in a way that implies an actual demarcation criterion they have for explanations in general.

The level of value of the group isnt literal? What changes between an individual and a group that makes the latter no longer literal? — DingoJones

It's not literal because the group, as a group, can't value something. That's a category error, in that valuing isn't something that a group does as a group. Saying that a group values something is a way of saying that a majority of, or the "right" (powerful, influential) members of, etc. a group all individually value something. It's a shorthand way of indicating that fact.

Look at it this way: it's not literal in just the same way that it wouldn't be literal to say that "the group ran the marathon" or "the group (let's say a band) drove (as in sat behind the wheel and pushed the gas, etc.) their tour bus to Des Moines." Each person in the group had to run the marathon for themselves--the group can't run as a group, even though they did all run at the same time. And each person had to take turns driving. Etc. (though for a good illustration of the idea of people literally walking as a group, see Clive Barker's short story, "In the Hills, the Cities")