Interesting topic. I notice the issue of practicality has been raised. I wonder how people feel about a hypothetical global human survey which somehow qualifies what the majority of humans take to be moral? Could this data form a legitimate basis for our opinions? If so, this would be a scientific basis. — Zophie

Sure, but it would be a flawed foundation for morals based on opinion and tradition instead of universal. This is why a method that has a foundation that implies doing no harm to humanity and the self works better to stop reasoning immoral actions as moral.

How long people will believe that utterly stupid line? Trump hasn't shaken up the system. Not a bit. On the contrary, corruption flourishes extremely well under an inept and defunct administration. All he has been able to do is that tax cut for the rich. — ssu

If people want to change the system they need to have someone to change the system. Bernie Sanders stance on social democracy would definitely have shaken up the system if applied, but the idea that Trump would shake up the system is only based on their idea that because Trump is so incompetence it would destroy the fundamentals of government, and then everyone rebuilds a new government upon it. It's the Animal Farm idea of revolution and it's a delusional strategy that has no grounds in reality.

People who thought like this were only interested in the chaos, to "get back at those politicians". I cannot see their reasoning behind it as anything other than idiocy and uneducated emotional outburst to blame someone for their own shitty lives. It's the same idea behind racism and blaming immigrants, how strange that there are so many of these racist haters of immigrants who also voted for Trump. What a coincidence.

As far as I can tell, and I'm sure you know this like the back of your hand or inside and out (take your pick), every extant moral theory is flawed in some way or other making them hopelessly inadequate as a fully dependable compass when navigating the moral landscape. Given that our moral compass is defective, what course of action do you recommend? Each and every moral problem we face can't be solved by the simple application of a moral rule for there are no moral theories that covers all moral problems. Given this predicament, it isn't complete nonsense to suggest that when faced with moral problems we should do what a rational man would do and this is virtue ethics. I think Aristotle had his suspicions about moral theories - none seem to work perfectly. — TheMadFool

This is the basics I try to build past. Because moral theories focus on how to act more than how to figure out how to act. I try to take a step back in the process, proposing that morality comes a step before what the moral theories usually aims at.

Take the trolley problem for example, in terms of utilitarianism you need to pull the lever. The theory demands this action. The method I propose does not say what action you take, it's a method of finding out the action. The use of the method to find out the action to take is the good moral. If you choose something based on this method, you have already acted morally good before pulling or not pulling the lever. It doesn't mean the action is 50/50 good or bad, it means you used a method to calculate the probability of a good choice to the best of your ability and that choice of thinking/reasoning is what is morally good. And the method can't be corrupted to your gain or will either, it respects you and the group (humanity), so you can't abuse it, like the example above with slavery for the greater good.

So what I mean is that since we can accept that all moral theories have flaws, that moral landscapes shift through time and it's impossible to objectively give people answers on what actions to take in moral dilemmas. We can only propose a method used for each moral dilemma dynamically. If the method always leads to a probability of good choices, it is a moral obligation to use such a method in order to act morally good.

But they do have a rational argument. Their society is experiencing a boom in industry and commerce, health and life expectancy, more aggregate happiness, and so on and so forth. How is that not a rational argument? — Wolfman

Because when framing the argument through my moral theory, they are acting immoral and have ignored other types of ways to prosper that don't require 5% of humanity to be slaves. They have not respected the foundation of well being and harm and they haven't done any unbiased rational thinking to arrive at their conclusion, objections I listed a few of in the earlier post.

Let's charitably grant that their original decision to adopt slavery was initially suboptimal from a mathematical standpoint. Maybe there was only a 40% chance of success and 60% chance of failure. But they went on with adopting slavery anyway. Against the odds, slavery turned out to work great for them. So while you might say their original plan was suboptimal, nothing in your theory says their decision to continue their way of life is immoral/suboptimal, because it has been found to work for them, and it has withstood the test of time for the last several hundred years. — Wolfman

Your reasoning here require that we divide humanity before making it logical, but you break the morality of it before trying to make it logical, meaning, you can't break the foundation of the method, you cannot harm 5% of the group. You can only harm 5% of the group (humanity) if the other option was unproportional suffering for the entire humanity. And even by that reasoning, you need to rationally support why other methods aren't better. Like, if humanity faced extinction, then arguing for the joint effort of everyone to help against and that a few of the group will suffer because of this, is not the same as enslaving people for it. But in your example, it's about capitalistic commerce prosperity, ignoring any other possible prosperity method that includes the 5% with the ones getting the well being out of it.

There's no way to spin your argument without breaking against the moral method I proposed, they will never be able to support slavery if applying this moral method to it. If they don't use the method, they aren't acting morally, so their choice was immoral however we look at it.

Here it seems your theory cannot address such a notion because it is entirely explicated from the perspective one takes prior to making a moral decision, and cannot make sense of the intuitively repugnant consequences that follow as a result following through on decisions turned out to have good odds after all. — Wolfman

You ignore the foundation of well being and harm here. You cannot reason without it and ignoring it to argue against the method is ignoring a huge part of the argument. You are essentially ignoring Asimovs law of robots to argue that a robot would kill a human. Which makes that argument flawed as you ignore the specifics of the theory.

By the lights of your own theory, nothing says slavery in this case is immoral. — Wolfman

Yes, harm to the group (humanity). You cannot start by reasoning the probability of good with harm to the group, you start with no harm to the group or self and then reason for a solution. How can you reason for slavery without breaking the foundation of the method?

This method has the foundation and the rational reasoning as two parts that need to exist together, you cannot ignore the foundation and you cannot act without reasoning. Your conclusions about slavery don't survive either of them. Either you harm humanity (since the 5% is part of that group) or you fail to reasonably falsify your justification for slavery since you ignore other possible ways to prosper.

At the moment it seems you are grasping for straws, so I hope you look at the details of the method first. Right now you conclude the method to support slavery by ignoring a big factor that isn't in compliance with such a conclusion.

I think your defense is one step removed from where it needs to take place. It doesn't matter how their way of life came to be. The point is that it's already happening, and it's working for them now. On what grounds do you tell them to stop? — Wolfman

I tell them to stop since they are harming 5% of humanity and do not have a rational argument built upon the foundation of not harming 5% of humanity. If they don't agree to that point, they aren't morally good, I am.

So how do you define well-being, Christoffer? And how does well-being compute, if at all, into your idea? TMF is quite right to point out some similarities between what you are proposing and virtue ethics, but I'm trying to see you flesh out your position more and take it to its logical conclusion. — Wolfman

This is the tricky one, I agree. The foundation is the "Asimov law of robots" for this argument, to prevent the rational method going bonkers. Virtue ethics is more about replicating the good characteristics of a person, while mine is more about method, so that's where I see the difference between them.

At this time of the work on this argument, I define well being and harm through their basic definition applied to humans in priority of three: humanity (group), then the self, then the other. So you can act for your gain as long as you don't act against the group of humanity and you can act against another person as long as you don't attack that person as part of the group. If that person attacks you, he himself attacks the group (since you're part of it) and defending yourself is defending the group.
All of this through harm and well being of the mind and body, so you can't harm the body just to get well being of the mind and vice versa. You can harm the body if it's necessary for the well being of the mind, meaning if the harm of the mind is so severe that harming the body is necessary for reducing harm to the mind, it is justified within harm/well being.

So

Reduce harm to the body/mind
Maximize well being of the body/mind
Doing harm to any of them is justified in proportion to the harm of the other. (so operating a body to heal the mind is harm to the body in proportion to the harm of the mind by not doing it).

Set within a priority of act against/towards
Humanity (group)
Individual Self
Individual Other (as long as not against going against the first (humanity)

How does this theory escape some of the traditional criticisms leveled at utilitarianism. Imagine a world where 95% of the population believes slavery is a good thing. By enslaving the 5% minority they are able to develop their civilization to new heights and usher in a period of prosperity that has lasted for the last several hundred years. — Wolfman

How do they come to the conclusion that enslaving the 5% follows the framework of avoiding harm to humanity? It harms 5% of humanity, it might harm further by the consequences of slavery in form of civil wars in later years. The justification for slavery falls flat by using the proposed method of thinking.
And even if it only harms the body of a few to give a utilitarian good for the others for many years to come, what about the harm of the mind? Aren't we still tackling harm to the mind by the resulting culture of what came after the slave culture in US? A society can prosper on the bodies of the few, but it's questionable or even certain (by historical records) that the well being of the people with the knowledge of the historic slavery as the foundation for their society will have maximized well being. To choose to enslave 5% is a choice to speed up the development of a capitalistic society. Wouldn't it be better to change the society's foundation of economics if the goal is to improve society fast and then prosper, minimizing the harm to 5% and include them into the well being of the entire group (humanity)?

I just applied the method to the question of which utilitarianism would just settle on a yes.

The counter-argument you present here ignores the foundation of well being and harm you build your rational thinking upon. And using a scientific mindset is about exhausting all possible outcomes of a choice and excluding your biases, so it would be impossible to see the benefit of slavery over the benefit of other solutions.

Let me get this straight. The method that one uses to arrive at a moral decision is what morality is about and not the moral decision itself for reasons I can only guess as having to do with the lack of a good moral theory.

Wow! That's news to me although such a point of view resembles virtue ethics a lot - Aristotle, if virtue ethics is his handiwork, seems to have claimed that the highest good lies in being rational - the method, rationality, is more important than the what is achieved through it. That said, if one is rational, a consequence of that would be making the right decision, whether moral or otherwise, no? Unless of course morality has nothing to do with rationality which would cast doubt on your claims. How would you make the case that rationality can be applied to morality? Is being moral rational? I believe the idea of the selfish gene, which subsumes, quite literally, everything about us, points in a different direction. — TheMadFool

I see your point about virtue ethics, but that has more to do with replicating those with virtue to be good, not to use a method of thinking and reasoning in order to be good? The foundation for the method isn't about virtues, but about how we define harm and well being. Virtue is more about characteristics and it's a very loose slippery form of ethics I'm not so sure works very well.

And using the rational method of thinking still needs to be combined with the foundation of well being and harm, otherwise, you could rationally argue for very immoral things. It needs to have a framework to be a method of good morals.

My argument focuses on this specific form of thinking as a defined morally good way to live. Not by replicating vague virtues or just being rational without a framework around it.

Here's a question about the disinfectant-gate.

Even if he doesn't directly tell people to drink bleach, by some reports people have followed his reasoning and hurt themselves or died because of it. Would it legally be possible to charge Trump with manslaughter or constructive involuntary manslaughter or criminally negligent manslaughter?

I find no one asking that question as if it couldn't be applied to him? In all logical reasoning, it should?

1. A technical impossibility: human affairs are not predictable. You cannot objectively predict effects from causes as in physics. If these were the case it would be awful. Imagine predictable tools in Hitler's hands. Human slavery would be warranted.
2. There is not logical contradiction in preferring the falling of the whole world before I have a toothache. That is to say, you cannot deduce "to ought" from "to be". Unless you scientifically establish that the lowest good of the highest number is preferable to the highest good of the lowest number. And with what yardstick do you measure the greater or lesser good. But the utilitarians have been trying to solve this question for centuries, without success so far.

That is why I am afraid that in ethics we will always find approximate answers that will convince more or less good people. — David Mo

This is the foundation for my thinking. That we cannot find what is good or bad moral acts. So how can we be morally good? We can be so by having a mindset of tackling moral questions that maximize the probability of making a good choice based on definitions outside of ourselves and our biases. That the act of calculating what choice to make is the morally good thing to do, not the act as a result.

Your second point is the tricky one. It has to do with the definitions that are used as a foundation for the scientific mindset to build upon. How do we define the well being and harm definition? I would argue that it's a form of priority. First, humanity, then the self, then the other. Meaning, well being of yourself cannot come before humanity, but it can come before another person. So you cannot propose well being for yourself over humanity, you can do so over another person as long as that doesn't also set your well being before humanity. That way, killing another person to save yourself can happen and be good, since it was an act to also preserve the well being of the group (humanity) as you are a part of it, but killing someone else for your gain cannot be done since you act against the well being of the group (humanity) which the other is also a part of.
By defining when well being can be broken we have a more clear definition of well being and harm and can use that definition as a foundation about how to test our hypothetical moral choice in any given situation.

So, it isn't about defining the morally good by the act and choice we make, but by how we figure out what choice and act to make. The act of figuring out, by method of bypassing biases and understanding consequences through a set of definitions about harm and well being, is what defines us as morally good or bad, not the act or choice we arrive at in the end.

In another possible world people play Tetris all day. They are otherwise physically and psychologically healthy people, but they make the decision to play Tetris, in a room by themselves, for 10 hours per day. Now, this decision doesn't seem to harm their mind or body, nor the minds or bodies of anyone else; however, making the decision to play Tetris all day doesn't seem like the sort of decision we would normally categorize as "moral" either. But by the lights of your own theory, we would have to do that. How would you account for that? — Wolfman

Are there any choices that aren't fundamentally moral choices? The decision to choose milk in coffee instead of plain coffee might not seem moral, but calculating the consequences of the choice, it has moral ramifications in many directions. What are the consequences of playing Tetris 10 hours per day, how does that affect them outside of those hours? How does it affect the rest of the world? And so one. It becomes a moral choice since the only choice that isn't moral is a choice made outside of a human mind, but such a choice can't be made since we first need a human mind to make a choice and by making a choice in a human mind it affects the self and others.

I fail to see how any choice isn't a moral choice. It depends on the perspective and scale of how you look at the consequences of a choice.

↪Christoffer The scientific method consists of the following:

1. collecting unbiased data
2. analyzing the data objectively to look for patterns
3. formulating a hypothesis to explain observed patterns

How exactly do these 3 steps relate to ethics?

What would qualify as unbiased data in ethics? Knowing how people will think/act given a set of ethical situations.

What is meant by objective analysis of data and what constitutes a pattern in the ethical domain? Being logical should make us objective enough. Patterns will most likely appear in the form of tendencies in people's thoughts/actions - certain thoughts/actions will be preferred over others. What if there are no discernible patterns in the data?

What does it mean to formulate a hypothesis that explains observed patterns? The patterns we see in the ethical behavior of people may point to which, if any, moral theory people subscribe to - are people in general consequentialists? Do they adhere to deontology? Both? Neither? Virtue ethicists? All?

Suppose we discover people are generally consequentialists; can the scientific method prove that consequentialism is the correct moral theory? The bottomline is that the scientific method applied to moral theory only explains people's behavior - are they consequentialists? do they practice deontological ethics? and so forth.

In light of this knowledge (moral behavioral patterns) we maybe able to come up with an explanation why people prefer and don't prefer certain moral theories but the explanation needn't reveal to us which moral theory is the correct one; for instance people could be consequentialists in general because it's more convenient or was indoctrinated by society or religion to be thus and not necessarily because consequentialism is the one and true moral theory.

All in all, the scientific method, what it really is, is of little help in proving which moral theory is correct: the scientific method applied to morality may not lead to moral discoveries from which infallible moral laws can be extracted for practical use. Ergo, the one who employs the scientific method to morality is no better than one who's scientifically illiterate when it comes to making moral decisions.

That said, I can understand why you think this way. Science is the poster boy of rationality and we're so mesmerized by the dazzling achievements it has made that we overlook the difference between science and rationality. In my humble opinion, science is just a subset of rationality and while we must be rational about everything, we needn't be scientific about everything. In my opinion then, what you really should be saying is that being rational increases the chances of making good decisions, including moral ones and not that being scientific does so. — TheMadFool

I'm not sure you have carefully read my reasoning in this thread, there are a lot of things mentioned in the responses to others that further explains my point. I argue that the scientific mind is about how a scientist tackle the scientific method and borrowing this mindset into how we tackle moral questions on a foundation of definitions around well being and harm creates an act of unbiased epistemic responsibility in thinking and that this mindset is how we act morally good, not the act itself. To rationally reason past our own biases and arrive at the best moral choices is how we act with good morals and that the act and consequences cannot be considered objectively good or bad, only how we arrive at what choice we make.

What you are describing is closer to use the scientific method to arrive at the best moral system, which isn't what my argument or conclusion is about.

But your last sentence touch upon what I'm saying. That being rational through using a method of thinking is how we define good morals. What I'm defining the method as is to borrow how scientists tackle their questions, to tackle moral questions you encounter. That being moral is to detach yourself, examine the choices through the scrutiny of unbiased reasoning and arrive at a choice. By doing so you act with good morals, however immoral the chosen act seems to be at a surface level.

The fundamental question in ethics is, how do we choose/act good or bad? My answer is, you don't, you calculate the probability of a good choice/act and that calculation is what is morally good, not the resulting act of the calculation itself since trying to answer what is objectively good morals is impossible.

In a sense i wasn't questioning whether they are morally good, but if they have all the necessary kinds of skills and knowledge needed to make decisions. — Coben

No, they don't, but the method scientists use are focused on bypassing biases and perception to arrive at truths outside of the human mind. If such a process can be reframed as a mindset, a way to filter your choices to arrive at moral acts that exist outside of your biases, based on foundational definitions about harm and well being, the method itself is that which defines good morals, not the act.

My concern here is that the scientific mind tends to ignore things that are hard to track and measure. For example, let's take a societal issue like drug testing in the work place. Now a scientist can readily deal with the potential negative issue of false positives. This is fairly easy to measure. But the very hard to track effects of giving employers the right to demand urine from its employees or teachers/administrators to demand that from students, also, may be very significant, over the long term and in subtle but important ways, is often, in my experience, ignored by the scientific mind. And I am thinking of that type of mind in general, not just scientists, including non-scientists I encounter in forums like this. That a lot of less easy to measure effects for example tend to be minimized or ignored.

A full range mind uses a number of heuristics, epistemologies and methods. Often scientific minds tend to not notice how they also use intuition for example. But it is true they do try to dampen this set of skills. And this means that they go against the development of the most advanced minds in nature, human minds, which have developed, in part because we are social mammals, to use a diverse set of heuristics and approaches. In my experience the scientific minds tend to dismiss a lot of things that are nevertheless very important and have trouble recognizing their own paradigmatic biases.

This of course is extremely hard to prove. But it is what I meant.

A scientific mind, a good one, is good at science. Deciding how people should interact, say, or how countries should be run, or how children should be raised require, to me at the very least also skills that are not related to performing empirical research, designing test protocols, isolating factors, coming up with promising lines of research and being extremely well organized when you want to be. Those are great qualities, but I think good morals or patterns of relations need a bunch of other skills and ones that the scientist's set of skills can even dampen. Though of course science can contribute a lot to generating knowledge for all minds to weigh when deciding. And above I did describe the scientific mind as if it was working as a scientist. But that's what a scientific mind is aimed at even if it is working elsewhere since that is what a scientific mind is meant to be good at. — Coben

I think there's a fundamental misinterpretation of how I use the idea of a scientific mind as a method. Maybe it's closer to traditional rational inductive methods. The idea isn't to science the hell out of day to day moral choices, but to have the scientific method in mind as a guide for how to arrive at moral choices.

Meaning, if I have a moral problem to solve, I need to factor in "data" and think about the moral problem with my biases in mind. Can I verify my hypothetical act? does it hold up against falsification (is it the act that arrives at the best conclusion in terms of well being and reduction of harm), is my hypothetical choice applicable to replication (can it be universal in other situations or is it only a gain for me?) and can I through this thinking predict the outcome (even past obvious consequences). As I filter my hypothetical act through the cornerstones of the scientific method, does it hold up as the best choice on the foundation of well being and minimizing harm for me, another individual and humanity as a whole? The best choice does not equal the act to be objectively good, but the process of arriving at that conclusion is objectively good since it's the limit of how well humans can arrive at truths outside of their own minds. It's a way of thinking that maximizes the ability we have to rationally find an answer to a moral question and by doing it, we act with good morals regardless of the consequences as we cannot factor in things that haven't happen yet, only what we know at the time of calculating the choice. To calculate the best moral choice is the good moral act, not the calculated act itself.

And a handsome work it is, too! But I wonder: many of the legs holding up your argument are either themselves unsupported claims or categorical in tone when it seems they ought to be conditional. In terms of your conclusions it may not matter much. The question that resounds within, however, is of how much relative value a "scientific mind" is with respect to the enterprise of moral thinking. It's either of no part, some part, or the whole enchilada. If it's not the whole thing, then what are the other parts? — tim wood

Thank you :) And yes, it's obvious when reading comments that there's more work to be done on this.

As I see it, we can definitely find some truths about well being and harm for humans and humanity. But those truths are still shifting with the tides of new knowledge findings of human health. Still, the intention to draw upon the current knowledge of well being and harm is the foundation and the method of thinking, the mindset that is built upon that foundation is the morally good act. So what I'm proposing is that you can never create axioms of moral or calculate absolutes of moral, but the intention and method to choose morally can be the defining form of what is good moral. So the method to find out how to act is what morality is about, not the act itself. So finding a method that excludes biases is to find a system for good morals that are objectively working for that purpose. It's my hypothesis that such a system can exist and should be the foundation for how we act morally.

I am not sure why you're equating benefit and value in P1. Both "beneficial" and "valuable" are value judgements, and there doesn't seem to be any obvious reason to use one term or the other.

Furthermore, what you mean by "humanity" remains vague. Is humanity the same as "all current humans"? When you write "valuable to humans" do you mean all humans or just some?

In P2, it's questionable to define a benefit as the mere absence of harm, but it's not a logic problem. What is a logic problem is that P1 talks about benefits to humanity, and p2 about benefits to a single human. That gap is never bridged. It shows in your conclusion, which just makes one broad sweep across humans and humanity.

P3 is of course extremely controversial, since it presupposes a specific subset of utilitarianism. That significantly limits the appeal of your argument. — Echarmion

As per the discussion that followed with DingoJones, I'm aware of the problems in my premises for this part of the argument, so I'm reworking this (I should maybe mark it).

Again, I am confused by your usage of valuable and beneficial here. Since P1 already talks about what's valuable, it doesn't combine with P2, which defines value in terms of benefit. So the second half of P2 is redundant. — Echarmion

Agreed. I think the main culprit is the argument about value morals which would change the one combining the two conclusions.

I have to nitpick here: the scientific method works entirely based on evidence within human perception. It doesn't tell us anything about what's outside of it. The objects science deals with are the objects of perception. What the scientific method does is eliminate individual bias, which I assume is what you meant. — Echarmion

Scientific theories are still the best measurement for truth that we have and some of them bypass our perception by pure math. I guess if you apply cartesian skepticism you could never know anything, but the theories we arrive at in science still have practical application that further proves their validity outside of mere perception.

But, as you say, my point here is how the scientific method eliminates the individual bias and it's important for epistemic responsibility.

That's not a syllogism. Your conclusion is simply restating P2, so you can omit this entire segment in favor of just defining the term "scientific mind". — Echarmion

Makes sense, might have been overly focused on making the argument foolproof that it fooled itself :)

While I understand what you want to say here, the premises just don't fit together well. For example P1 is taking only about what is less valuable and has a high probability of no benefit. It's all negative. Yet the conclusion talks about what has a high probability for a benefit, i.e. it talks about a positive. And p4 really doesn't add anything that isn't already stated by p3. — Echarmion

I think that the first premise needs rework since it's based on the flawed first part of the argument. So if I rework that I think it's gonna be more logical.

Your conclusion is that knowing the facts is important to making moral judgement. That is certainly true. Unfortunately, it doesn't help much to know this if you are faced with a given moral choice.

What you perhaps want to argue is that it's a moral duty to evaluate the facts as well as possible. But that argument would have to look much different. — Echarmion

I think you're right and I might have clogged down the argument in parts that are unnecessary. The conclusion I'm arguing for is that using a scientific method of thinking about day to day moral choices is how you act morally good. Since morals shift and change, we either have to say that there are no morals and there's no point in discussing morals if there aren't any, or conclude that there are some basic things for which we think morally. If there are such things, what are they, and how do we act morally good according to them.

So the argument needs to prove that we have an objective need for well being and objective need to avoid harm of body and mind. Then how we can arrive at the most probable truth possible using methods found in the scientific method and how this method can be applied to look for the best outcome in any given choice. Point being that borrowing the scientific method as a framework for how to think and applying that to a set of basic objective human needs is a moral strategy that is what we can consider morally good.

That we cannot define good morals by acts or consequences alone, only by maximizing understanding of a complex moral issue and acting to the best of our ability using such a method can we maximize the probability of doing good and therefore the act of doing this is what it means to act with good morals.

Ok, so is that individual good translate to the group? I would argue that it doesnt, that the group consideration is different since now you also have to weigh the cost to the group, which you never have to do with the individual consideration. Thats why we have laws against vigilantism, because people can lie about their moral reasons or moral diligence in concluding that killing the murderer is correct. Hopefully the possibilities are fairly obvious.
So that would be an example of whats good for the individual not being good fir the group.
I think that this part of your argument is foundational, and it will all fall apart unless you can alter the premiss to exclude exceptions to the rule like we did above. — DingoJones

Yes, but it is good for the group if I defend the group (more people, i.e the family and possibly other families after mine). Also by proxy-choice if I try to help people with mental illness not to be handled wrongfully by society in order to end up like the killer I act upon my kill of this person to help others to not end up in a situation of being killed in self-defense. The choices accumulate and if more and more act through the method I propose, they all help each other.

The act of killing is also in a sense forced vigilantism. The moral choice of killing the killer only occurs because police and other systems fail to protect. Killing the killer is only a last resort when looking at the options in front of you. So lying about moral reasons is in itself morally bad and doing vigilante actions fail when using the method I propose. It's not an act of vigilantism if it's the only option left to protect others from harm. But it is vigilantism if done without regard to other options and solutions.

Doing something as a vigilante is to act against the possibility of other options. You can't be a vigilante if there isn't a choice to act outside of a legal system and second, you can't be a vigilante if there isn't a system to begin with. To act as a vigilante is to actively act against a system that's supposed to protect you. If such a system fails or doesn't exist, then you are not a vigilante.

If you think about a real situation with the current legal system, police and everything we have for justice. There's no court that would charge you with murder or call you out as morally wrong if the police fail to act, there weren't any protective measures against a known killer where the information of his whereabouts existed and the threat of the killer acting out his threats where concrete truth based on previous killings. Your action is in that case, not an act of a vigilante since there was no system to balance your act against. If the system was there and worked, then the police would have acted upon it and if the police was mislead and you ended up in a situation of self-defense, then it would be self-defense, not vigilantism.

Are you agreeing that under a certain set of circumstances, after all due consideration of all options (there is a scenario where police are not the best option for example) etc, its good (avoiding mind/body harm) to go kill this guy? — DingoJones

If the inductional thinking of the situation leads to the best option to kill the killer and that the killer doesn't have any justification for that killing other than malice or mental illness that is impossible to change, then yes, it is justified since you are defending lives from a morally bad choice another is taking.

But the research into the situation also requires understanding the reasons the killer has to kill you and the family. So what if you actually caused the death of the killer's family or more people around them? Then surely the killer has the moral on his side to take out that justice. Well, not really, since its an act of retaliation and such an act doesn't hold up to harm since my family didn't do anything, I did. And there isn't really anything to say that my death, if I've done such a thing, is bad. But that requires insight into who I am today compared to who I was when I caused this killer's family to die. So it almost always becomes a bad moral choice when balancing factors in terms of retribution against someone. The killer also have the obligation to validate his actions based on this method of thinking. Will I kill more families? Am I a changed man? Is the better act for him to propose me to help others as a justice for all harm I caused?

But if I didn't do anything and this killer is on his way to kill my family out of malice or mental illness and I have no help from others than to act in a situation to defend other lives (my family and my self in this case), then there's no time to change the laws of mental health care etc. and the only option is to kill the killer. The morally good thing to do here is to kill, but also to maybe push for better mental health care so that there aren't any situations like these happening to other families. And also arguing for better handling by police and protectors that couldn't handle the situation I ended up in.

So, even after the act of killing the killer, I could find further moral actions to be taken that are proxy-choices to the initial moral choice of killing him.

I would need to see evidence that people with scientific minds are as empathetic as other people, have emotional intelligence, have good introspective skills so they know what biases they have when dealing with the complicated issues, where testing is often either unethical or impossible to perform, that are raised around human beings. And I am skeptical that the scientific minds are as good, in general, as other people when it comes to these things. I mean, jeez, look at psychiatry and pharma related to 'mental illness', that's driven by people with scientific minds and it is philosophically weak and also when criticized these very minds seem not to understand how skewed the research is by the money behind it, the pr in favor of it, selective publishing and even direct fraud. Scientific minds seem to me as gullbile as any other minds, but further often on the colder side. — Coben

I see your point and I agree that there are problems with viewing scientists as morally good, but that's not really the direction I'm coming from. It's not that science is morally good, it's that the method of research used in science can create a foundation of thinking in moral questions. Meaning, that using the methods of verification, falsifiability, replication and predictability in order to calculate the most probable good choice in a moral question respects an epistemic responsibility in any given situation.

It does not simplify complicated issues and does not make a situation easy to calculate, but the method creates a morally good framework to act within rather than adhering to moral absolutes or utilitarian number calculations. So a scientific mind is not a scientist, but a person who uses the scientific method to gain knowledge of a situation before making a moral choice. It's a mindset, a method of thinking, borrowed from the scientific method used by scientists.

Its always a temptation with presenting a theory to jump around between all the explanations and arguments and supporting arguments and premisses because you are uniquely familiar with them. Im not though, so one thing ar a time. — DingoJones

Agreed.

So that seems like it qualifies as good in your view, since the individual mind/body harm is at stake. Is that right? — DingoJones

In a sense, yes, but the mind/body harm is only a springboard towards how to tackle the situation. So, we can first assess that because we have a murderer who's always following his threats we have a real possible situation where the harm of me and my family is at risk, the murderer is acting out of bad moral and I can prevent this act by doing the same kind of harm. Now, if the choice was to either be killed or kill we can easily conclude that the one killing the other to prevent a killing is the best moral choice. But reality is never that black and white and what I propose is that we have an obligation to gather as much "data" as possible about the situation to know what choice is the moral one.

1. Why does the killer want to kill me and the family?
2. What is the timeframe for me to act upon knowledge of the threat?
3. Are there any other preventive measures that can be taken instead of killing the killer?
4. If other actions are taken to prevent the killer, will the killer always have try again until succeeding?

1. If the killer wants to kill me and my family because of something I have done to him, I must have already done something to justify this action from him and if so, is it proportional, reasonable? Is it out of rage or thoughts of justice? Or have the killer chosen me and my family randomly and is acting out of mental health issues?

2. Will this act of killing me and my family happen five minutes from now, a day from now or a week from now? If the answer is unclear or if it's just a minute before the killer bursts into my home, then acting out in deadly defense is justifiable since there's no time to find other options. If it's a week from now, I have an obligation to seek answers that can help me decide if killing the killer is the moral thing to do or not. Which makes less sense in such a long timeframe.

3. Can I call the police? Can I get protection? If I have whereabouts of the killer so that I could kill him, then I can take other precautions and actions to stop the killer instead of killing him.

4. If I have options to prevent the killer, but the killer will always return and try again, or do anything to succeed, then I have exhausted all the options and would need to permanently stop him.

Taking all of these into consideration you can find the best moral action to take. Which could be to kill the killer, based on the parameters of the problem, but it could also be that the initial thought was to kill the killer, but there are options only seen when looking closer at the problem. And even if there was, if the timeframe was too short, it's not a morally bad thing to kill the killer if there wasn't any time to act upon further research.

The idea of the method is to always ask questions and research the moral choice to take and that the act of research is the morally good thing to do. The intention of figuring out the best outcome with respect to harm of body/mind of everyone involved, including the killer, is the morally good path to take.

Have you read “the Moral Landscape” by Sam Harris? — DingoJones

I have not but am familiar with his thinking. The problem is that he tries to expand the idea of the objective to parts that are questionable (and he's also pushing the argument to favor his anti-Islam ideas and seems to be his primary goal, not creating a moral theory). And the overly focus on neurological facts for well-being seems to demand us to fully understand the mind before his ideas can be applied, which we can't yet. So before we know everything about the mind, he can't really claim science to conclude what is moral. That's why I'm trying to tackle this in another direction.

I'm more based in the idea of epistemic responsibility as a foundation for morality. That choices should be made out of the individual opening up their minds to a scientific method of questioning their choices before a choice is made. To scrutinize all options until the option and choice that makes the most sense in terms of well being can be decided.

It's the trolly problem. 5 people against 1. You have 30 seconds to decide, you choose according to utilitarianism because that makes most sense according to the situation. Even pushing the fat man is. But with more time you can question, who is the one person against the other five? Is that person someone who is of such importance to humanity that the utilitarian approach is to let five die and the one to survive and do the deeds that make it the better utilitarian choice. It's a variable method of morality based on the probability of a very basic definition of well being.

Ok, so your central claim seems to be that what is good for the individual is whats good for the group aa long as the good is defined as not doing harm to the body/mind. Is that correct? — DingoJones

Central claim to that part of the argument, yes. As what is good for the individual will eventually also be good for the group. What is good for the machine is good for each of the cogs in that machine and what is good for one cog will benefit the entirety of that machine. So a good moral choice is that which is good for the individual and the group. The idea for this part of the argument is that what is considered morally good can be calculated as a basic form in terms of harm/wellbeing, but the variations in how we know what is good is the problem with morality. Which is tackled in the other parts of the argument.

In a civilized society based in democracy, voting for stability and competence is a priority over partisan ideologies. Bad decisions out of ideological reasons left or right are not worse than incompetence that creates nation-wide chaos.

It doesn't matter what ideology or world-view someone has, no one benefits from Trump's incompetence and it doesn't matter who challenges him, as long as they are competent enough to keep stability. Under stability, we have the time and balance to question ideological ideas and debate specifics of politics, but the clusterfuck of incompetence negates that playing field.

No one in their right mind, no one rational who is capable of deductive thinking would ever propose Trump to stay in power, or getting that power in the first place. His presidency was the result of a nihilistic narcissism, greed and boredom in the voters who voted for him. People who wanted to create chaos against others because of a jealousy towards the educated.

The problem might be that there are only two choices in each election. Because when someone like Trump appears, the party belonging to that candidate need to vote for that candidate in order to get the power, even though the candidate is mentally incompetent to lead. So, on one hand, you have the nihilistic people wanting to just create chaos and on the other the republicans who have no choice but to vote Republican since they cannot choose a Democrat.

It's fundamentally broken as a form of democracy, enforcing a demagogical result every time.

It's interesting that any occupation in the world need education before handled, sometimes, in cases of dangerous jobs, it needs a specific license. But in the case of the leadership of a nation, no such certification or license is needed, even though the occupation is one of the most dangerous we have. I would argue that the bar to which we hold the standards of politicians in roles as leaders should be much higher. I would argue that while Plato was wrong in his philosopher-king argument, he is right in that they need to be philosophers.

We need a philosopher-republic instead, in which the ones able to be voted into power can only have that position with the right competence in philosophy and leadership. So that whoever is voted into power, they have a basic competence in order to enforce stability. That way we would minimize the risk of chaos and incompetence in politics that is downright lethal to the people.

Well Im not sure how that would change that there are exceptions to your claim that haven't been accounted for. How exactly do you mean objectively valuable? — DingoJones

By objectively valuable I mean things that do not have to do with preferences but necessities. The value of things that reduce harm and suffering while increasing well being. A smoker value smoking, but it isn't objectively valuable to that person as the smoking harms him. The objectively valuable thing is to stop smoking.

p1 What is objectively valuable to humans is that which is beneficial to humanity.

The value of things that do not harm and increase well being is that which is beneficial to humanity. For one is for all.

Or maybe this premise needs to be phrased differently? Maybe the intention of the premise is weak due to its rhetoric? What might be a better premise that speaks of what is good for one is good for all?
I might need to rephrase the entire argument of value-based morality?

What about if there are two harms, smoking and stress. The smoking relieves the stress, but harms the body, but so would stress. In that case, the smoking is harmful to body but its also beneficial to the human. — DingoJones

In this example, I would argue that the long term is an important factor as well, the smoking relieves stress, but the harm isn't visible until later. If the smoke directly caused instant harm, no one would use it to relieve stress. If someone got cancer after one smoke as a replacement for the harm of stress, no one would smoke to relieve stress. Human ignorance is the only thing arguing for a smoke being a good thing for them. What about yoga? Yoga has scientific support for relieving stress, so why choose a cigarette to battle stress when yoga has no side effects? By breaking down acts we can find to the best of our ability and time, which is most beneficial to humanity.

In this, we can go on to object that there are some things people feel is beneficial to them even if it harms them. Meaning, a smoker just likes to suck smoke and would gladly trade a few years of their life to reap the benefit of that smoke rather than doing yoga. But that would not be beneficial to others, people who need to deal with the consequences of this person's degradation in health, death, or people affected by second hand smoke.

So they are related. But in terms of one person, what is beneficial to one is not really always something that they agree with, but that still doesn't take away the fact that beneficial in an objective sense needs to be defined as not doing harm to body/mind. It's beneficial to be in good health and doing something that has the consequence of putting you in bad health is not beneficial to you.

p2 What is beneficial to a human is that which is of no harm to mind and body.

The counter-argument has to prove that there are beneficial things that do harm to the mind and/or body. What things are good for us, short and long term, that is harmful to the mind and/or body?

On a macro scale, what about decisions that benifit more people than it harms. Wouldnt any kind if utilitarian calculation be an exception to your rule? — DingoJones

This one is trickier, but I don't think it's an exception really. It can be argued as an extension to the argument and I think the final conclusion I'm trying to build to has to do with using a scientific mindset in order to calculate the best moral choice and that the intention to use the method will lead to the most probable good moral choice. So in terms of utilitarianism, if you calculate case to case that killing one to save 10 actually has merit, it is the good moral choice to do. The method is supposed to bypass absolutism and utilitarianism as both being valid and invalid depending on individual cases. It's a form of epistemic responsibility to not slave by moral broad concepts and/or teachings, but by a scientific method mindset of calculating each situation based on basic objective properties about benefit and harm. I guess it's a form of Nonconsequentialism?

It's more about the probability of good or bad rather than objectively good or bad. To calculate the probability of an outcome, choosing for the probability of most good, and in calculating that and choosing that, you are acting with good morals.

Maybe this moral theory needs another name. Something like Probabilitarianism (though another field of philosophy), Moral Probabilitarianism?

Shakespeare is wheeled on for this thought experiment rather than, say, Charles Dickens because he’s the supposed apogee of literary creativity. The reductionist probabilitarians are saying: you think Shakespeare’s the greatest – well, he can be reproduced by empty randomness. — Chris Hughes

The answer to this might be found in the library of babel? https://libraryofbabel.info/

Thanks for the replies.

Your conclusion should be that unsupported belief has a high probability of being less valuable to humanity (where chaotic consequences are bad for humanity). The “always” doesnt follow from the rest of your equation.
Also, you can have calculated consequences which are bad for humanity so P3 doesnt follow either. — DingoJones

Makes sense.

P1 is not true at all. Many large groups of humans value things that are not beneficial to all humanity. Its arguable humanity as a whole doesnt value what is beneficial to humanity as a whole, so I would say you need more support for p1. — DingoJones

What if I change to "objectively valuable"? Seems that within a context of objectively valuable for one the benefit for the many includes that one person. So to have a value objectively it needs to be of benefit for the whole? Or am I attacking this premise in the wrong direction?

P2 seems weak as well, as its quite a stretch to claim everything that does no harm to mind and body is beneficial to humanity. Don’t you think there are somethings which do no body/mind harm but do not necessarily benefit mankind? Or vice versa...the sun harms your body but is beneficial to humanity, — DingoJones

What things are beneficial to humanity and humans that do harm to the body or mind? The sun does only damage when exposed to it too much, so that means overexposure to the sun is not beneficial to humans and humanity while normal exposure to the sun is.

So what is beneficial is valuable as too much exposure to the sun is not beneficial or valuable. The premise also specifically points to one human, so not humanity as a whole, but could be applied with expansion to it. But it's hard to see anything beneficial to a human that is at the same time harming the body and/or mind. Even euthanasia can't be harming the mind of body if the purpose is to relieve the body or mind from suffering.

So I had a scenario where this plays out not well for employee pitted against employer when the lockdown measures were not as stringent.. and I think this will be the same in any country, including Sweden. Check out the discussion here — schopenhauer1

This is exactly the kind of dilemmas that businesses in Sweden are facing today. They don't have orders to lock down and send home employees, but they have the option. This is where the trust in the public comes into play. There are many employees who's been vocal against their employer if they didn't change anything of how the business should go about through this crisis. And the employees generally win such arguments and the business changes their day to day routines. I don't have any numbers on this, but from what I've heard, there is plenty of businesses who without orders from the government already and early changed so that everyone who can work from home does so.

The hard part has been the non-essential and essential staff. But I think most companies have argued that by keeping as many as home as possible, it also lessens the risk of the essential staff, who needs to be at the company, to get infected.

So the ethical thing to do is to do everything that is rationally possible to help stop the spread and suffering, even if there aren't any orders from the government to do so. It is irrational to only follow the guidelines and orders from the government if there is a possible choice to be made that doesn't negatively affect the business and employees by doing so.

I.e Priority one is to follow the official guidelines and then ask what else you can do. I think the biggest mistake we can do as a people, is to view this crisis as a separate entity from the government. We have the government, but we are also a people fighting against this virus and if everyone accept to be a part of this fight, we can ask ourselves what we can do to help. If staying at home and not interacting with anyone is something we can do, that is a part to be played and everyone has a part to play. To not play a part in it, is to be an obstacle for everyone and unnecessarily endanger other people.

It's not just the media. There's always a duplicitous crowd prepared to use an event as a vehicle for politics and propaganda: leftists, rightists, westerners, easterners, etc., etc., each one with a mirror image at whom to hurl claims.

Its in the long term that a scientific view wins out. Give it time. — frank

I agree. But I don't know if scientific views always win out. I think that in order for scientific views to win out, it needs to be repeated and repeated how important that view is, otherwise the pseudo-science and tin foil hat mass wins out and dictates what is science and what is not as they influence public opinion.

But I do think we can (and should) criticize approaches that deny citizens their basic civil liberties and throw the global economy to the wind. Sure, that approach may work to stave off a pandemic or to prop up our inadequate healthcare systems, but the unintended consequences of such actions may end up being far worse. — NOS4A2

I think it's a delicate balancing act. People who can't see more than five days ahead scream of quarantining everything in society, shutting down everything and people who see far but aren't in groups who will suffer much from the virus argue for not shutting down anything. I think that keeping the curve down is a priority and in the cases where that needs to happen fast, there have to be much harsher restrictions.

There are also some interesting factors here. Sweden's approach is basically based on the notion that the people here, for the most part, listen to experts and scientists more than in many other nations. We also have a culture that already has social distancing built into it to some degree. So leaving the country semi-open with the recommendation that people stay at home and work from home as much as they can, actually works. How well, that's for the times to tell, but comparing this to a nation like Spain (which I have a contact in who's given me some grounded info on it), they continued social-cultural behaviors far into the spread of the virus, kissing on cheeks etc. This can also factor into why the spread there is so massive. Not a singular reason, but one of the reasons.

So cultural differences in how people behave in day to day life can also dictate how harsh the restrictions need to be in order to contain the spread of the virus. The balancing act can be a very complex question to solve and I don't think there's any good answer that is right for every nation; it's up to everyone to handle the situation out of the complexity it has, therefore discussions on which strategy is best between different nations become a bit fruitless.

I think we can do a little bit of sieving here, but actually the populous has to be kept calm too, and for that governments need to earn some trust with some honesty, not keep pretending things that people would wish for. — unenlightened

The biggest problem with the balancing act of keeping the populus calm and at the same time informed is that media is doing such a poor job. This is the problem with the kind of privatized media that do news based on where their funding comes from instead of informing the public based on knowledge and careful rhetoric. News dramatize and pushes emotion when emotions are the last thing we need governing how people should act through this and it's not a foundation for taking responsibility as a citizen.

Media today lacks the intelligence to inform the public in a good way. If reporters aren't pushed by who's funding them, they often lack the attributes to actually inform the public. Like the old saying: "if you read the news you're misinformed, if you don't read the news you are uninformed." It's media's fault that the public act with such panic and misinformation as we have institutions that provide lacking and badly interpreted data to a populus even less capable of handling that data. A big sign of this is how many youtubers who are scientists, or channels carefully going through data and the scientific information provided by publications, manage to handle the populus concerns much better than official news. But then you run into the problem of the lack of "markings" which channels and people online who truly are trustworthy.

The bottom line is that media can be blamed for a lot of the bad things that have happened, but we still need media in order to spread the things people need to know. I just wished the media could fire every journalist or personal who push uneducated dramatized bullshit into the publics eye, while highlighting journalists who are wise, educated and have good authority and rhetoric to bring necessary information to the public while minimizing the risk of misinformation and riling up emotions.

But as long as news media is a business before anything else, we will never have that.

Yes, but I'm not defending or condemning the current approach to the national handling of the crisis, because at the moment there are far too many unknown factors in the statistics which makes any interpretation heavily biased or plain wrong. As I said, I don't think anyone at this time can praise or criticize a certain nation's strategy because we have so little data to make such a conclusion.

What we can conclude though, is that leaders and politicians who make bad decisions when there's room for good ones, is objectively bad in terms of public health. Some nations create a business around breathing masks instead of supporting wherever they are needed, which is objectively bad. Making money on masks at this time can be argued through a libertarian point of view as justified, but no one gains from having the virus spread around, not even the ones doing a profit on masks, so it's an ouroboros point of view that doesn't hold up in any kind of long term perspective.

I think we have to take the risks though, because we need to do things even if they are not all the best things. Doing nothing, I am sure has a bad statistical outcome. It looks like Germany is doing a rather good job, so if you haven't a better idea, let's do what we can of what they do. — unenlightened

I agree that action is still better than inaction. However, problems arise when the mass influences decision making and the mass form their base of knowledge on faulty analysis of statistical data, dramatized news media with simplified writing and the entirety of post-truth behavior around knowledge.

In times of crisis, we need philosopher-kings and not demagogues. Even if we don't know whether or not Sweden's approach to this crisis will pay off, both short and/or long term, I still find it refreshing that the government give the populistic populus the finger and let the experts and scientists show them the way. It's a rarity today when most politicians act as demagogues and the decisions are based on calming the populus rather than fighting the virus spread.

Deaths rising 12% and the rate of infections rising also quickly. Sweden is leading the Nordic countries in infections and deaths by any measure. — ssu

We have to be careful when speaking about different nation strategies so that we don't just interpret good or bad based on a statistical number that doesn't really show the whole truth. It's easy in these times for people to just recite numbers or do their own interpretations of statistics, even not knowing themselves that they do.

We have to account for more factors, like that Sweden was almost a month earlier in their curve than the other Nordic countries, that we hade a large number coming back from a vacation week in northern Italy just as the breakout happened there, that we've had the unluck of spread within elder communities and homes, that our testing has been lower compared to other countries meaning the statistical percentage deaths against confirmed cases becomes higher than nations with higher testing numbers.

We will actually not know anything about which strategy is working best until all factors are accounted for in all nations after the crisis is over. It's dangerous to rule out or praise strategies in any direction when the statistical analyses are done by people without any knowledge of analyzing statistical data.

I see media outlets, people without education (at all or not in the area of expertise) all making their own interpretations of statistical data on a daily basis and it's one of the main reasons of spreading panic. One day we have a country doing great and then they're not and people are confused.

If we are to do something like calculating who's actually doing good and who's doing bad in this crisis, there has to be a much more rigorous and scientific approach to the data we have. Anything else risks spreading misinformation and chaos.

In what context do you conclude people to not be the same? If we are talking about biology and psychology, then yes, people are very different between individuals and groups.

However, the biological differences are rarely or ever sole reasons for who they become in life. The environment is at a greater play here; what people learn, think is truth etc. While measurable things in psychology like IQ shows a set framework for what a person's mental capabilities are, it's never possible to predict who they will be. If someone gets brain damage that radically changes their personality, it can either be positive or negative based on the damage.

So the differences that exist are irrelevant really. The responsibility for all to teach empathy with balanced morals and methods of handling conflicts and arguments in order to be what we call a "good person", is the only thing that matters in society if the purpose is to improve people's lives.

We already know that we are different from each other, so what is the point? The sky is blue, the grass is green, the rock is hard and the cloth is soft. That people are different from each other becomes a pointless remark that has no real practical value since it's an obvious truth with no relation to the problems it's mostly connected to. Only for eugenics, racists and similar thinkers are the differences a basis for ideals.

Some people are born stupid, lazy sociopaths — Dusty of Sky

Side note: you cannot be really be born a sociopath, that's a psychopath. A sociopath is someone who generally gains psychopathic traits out of purely sociological factors. While a psychopath doesn't have a conscience, a sociopath has, but it's barely there, probably because the sociological factors "programmed" them down that path.

if one atom of gold is not gold, then your ring, perhaps billions of atoms, cannot be gold, because no part of it is gold — tim wood

That's just my point; the characteristics of gold is only through a set of atoms, not one single atom. Even in gas form, it's the group of atoms which makes up gold, a single atom is neither gas, solid or liquid gold, it's specifically a gold atom. So the essence of gold is through the group of gold atoms making up gold, not single atoms. Point being, how we define the materials around us aren't based on the singular atoms, but the grouping of those atoms. A ring cannot be made of one gold atom, only a group of atoms, therefore, how we work and view gold as a substance does not come from the singular atom, but the group that makes up how we define it as a substance. Even in chemical reactions, one single gold atom is impossible to make enough reactions when in contact with a group of others. You wouldn't say that an iron dagger which has one gold atom in it, is an iron-gold alloy.

It's not really about what is technically true here, it's about language, how we define things. Technically, one gold atom is gold by the makeup of its neutrons, protons, and electrons, but no one would define gold as a substance with the essence of gold as we view it, if there was only one atom. Because the properties of gold as we know them comes from a group of those atoms, not one atom.

So your counter argument now is that I should give up? Did you try understanding what I'm aiming for here? What I wrote also applies to an iron atom. I think you are mistaking the science with what I refer to, which is how we define material in language. No iron atom or water molecule works as "iron" or "water" in any terms of how we define the properties of them. If you deal with this discussion as a chess match of who makes most "mistakes" as you put it, then I'm not interested, and that is not what a philosophical dialectic is about.

No. One water molecule is exactly water. — tim wood

Can you add properties like viscosity, gas, solid state to one water molecule? Can you hold it, drink it? Is the air essentially water since we have humidity levels? We say different things about water based on its form as a group of water molecules, but we cannot add any properties whatsoever to only one water molecule. Therefore, that water molecule is not specifically water, it is distinctly a water molecule. The essence of water, with all the properties of water as a group of water molecules, is out of them being a group, not a single molecule.

No. Iron is an element. One iron atom is iron. That's why it's called an element. Lots of things are not elements, like water. Water cannot exist at a level less than a molecule of water, a particular binding of hydrogen and oxygen. Or did you mean something else? — tim wood

Even if an iron atom is an element, it's still a certain group of neutrons, protons and electrons which we designate the definition of iron. But I think you improved my point because it's better to make that point with molecules rather than atoms. One water molecule isn't water, it needs to be a group of molecules to be water in any term of the word we define it.

I think the philosophy-infused series "The Good Place" has a point about this as well.

A statement is either true or false. — curiousnewbie

Schrödinger's cat is dead.

Population growth, larger groups than 12 people at a time, politics for larger societies, global scale politics, religious-based laws etc.

I could make a long list that equates down to... society is almost infinitely more complex today than during hunter-gatherer times and because it is more complex, there are far less short-term solutions and far more long term consequences of the choices made as nations, groups and globally.