So the problem is it actually wrong to murder someone or does it just feel wrong? — Andrew4Handel

Murder for selfish pleasure or personal gain...
Does it maximize well-being for you and others combined?

By the common standard definition of well-being, no.

Therefore, murder in this situation is morally bad.

---

Murder or rather, killing someone to save others.
Does it maximize well-being for you and others combined?

By the common standard definition of well-being, yes, it maximizes the well-being. Not doing it is to let others die and fill yourself with the guilt of that consequence.

Therefore, killing someone in this situation is morally good.


Can there be dire consequences outside of this, yes, but the assessment of the situation defines the morality of you, not if you can predict the future or not.

I think you can deduce what is good for your physical body but not necessarily what is a good action or purpose. I think physical health can be fairly uncontroversial but as to what we should do with our lives I don't see answers. — Andrew4Handel

Look at the method I provided. You mean it's impossible to find out if an action is good or bad with that? Well-being is not only about physical health. If you find the method I wrote isn't working, please point out where the flaws are.

You just go with what you feel and think is right at the time. There's no other option. — S

Look at the method above, isn't that an option? Feelings can be corrupted and therefore, if you base morals on it, you essentially throw all moral values out the window. There's no point to define morals at all. The method above is my attempt to define a moral scale that isn't connected to emotions but still generate what we would consider good morals by the common definition.

People have been killed in terrible ways or died in slavery and there has been no justice. It is rather futile moralizing about an event like this when there is no hope of justice. Religious moralities have offered an afterlife justice of some sort or karma. But if you don't believe in this or objective morality then lots have people have suffered with no recompense, recognition or hope. — Andrew4Handel

Calculate the maximized well-being for yourself and everyone else. The result might not be obvious, but I consider that "good morals". Justice has nothing to do with morals since justice is an invention out of emotional responses to an immoral act, so morals comes first, justice is another question entirely, but what you choose to do with that justice is a moral choice and can be assessed.

My first post in this thread.

1. Do what is positive for the well-being of yourself and others combined.
2. Morality is an evolving process and each situation must be assessed carefully according to point 1.
3. Assessing what is morally good needs to involve current knowledge about human psychology, sociology, and knowledge about human well-being for the individual and larger groups. — Christoffer

Adjustments to that list of points:

1. Do what is positive for the assessed well-being of yourself and others combined.
2. What is well-being need to be assessed according to each situation.
3. Assessing what is morally good needs to involve current knowledge about human psychology, sociology and common/advanced definitions about human well-being for the individual and larger groups.
4. If the consequence of the choice isn't within the assessed parameters of well-being even though the choice was carefully defined to the best possible assessment of well-being, the choice is still good (the one assessing the choice cannot see the future).
5. Neither can the assessed choice be considered morally bad if unforeseen consequences occur later on. But the assessed choice need to take everything possible into consideration to the best ability of the one making the choice.
6. The choice is about maximizing the assessed well-being.

If we are to find an objective method to calculate a morally good choice, this is as close as I can get at the moment. If you take into consideration, psychology, sociology, common definitions of well-being but also advanced forms, like a relief of pain by death; take into consideration further consequences, how it affect society, larger groups and yourself at the same time. Then you can end up at a choice that tries to maximize the assessed well-being and in doing so make a morally good choice.

But at the same time, we have common definitions of well-being. We do not harm, kill or inflict pain on people and call that "well-being". So the above is the detailed argument for situations like my allegory about aliens. But we can simplify it to standard definitions of well-being, as it is defined by a dictonary: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/wellbeing
We can argue details about this definition, but in order for the method to be practical we can distill it down to:

1. Do what is positive for the well-being of yourself and the group combined.
2. Assess the well-being according to current knowledge about human psychology, sociology and standard definition of well-being.
3. If the choice is made with careful consideration of point 2 with the intention of point 1, it is considered a morally good choice at the time the choice was made to the best of your ability.

This is a practical method in our society, even if our society shifts. But this simplification is based on the standard and common definition of "well-being". What is and what is not well-being is in this regard academic, not practical. Moral choices based on emotion does not work since emotions can be corrupted. A person might feel good about killing others, but considering that "good morals" based on his emotions is flawed.

Yes, you could argue a nihilistic point of view and say that there are no moral values what so ever. But if good and bad morals should be defined, this method defines it outside of emotion and feelings, focusing on assessing well-being to the best of the choice-makers ability. If good morals are about maximizing well-being in yourself and others combined and bad morals are the opposite, this method can calculate the difference between them without feelings or emotions involved.

An objective method to assess whose "good morals"? — Terrapin Station

Presented earlier. I've explained it on earlier pages.

I'm saying that nothing, objectively is well-being. If you want to focus on the brain chemistry factors re a feeling of well-being, that's fine, but (a) that still isn't objective (because we're talking about a mental state, which makes it subjective by definition), and (b) there's no objective fact that creating the brain states in question are preferential to not creating them. — Terrapin Station

This is the reason you don't seem to understand the method in the first place. What is and what isn't well-being is what is being assessed by the method and through that assessing the moral choice. Well-being has its definition and I have not said anything about it being objective. I've said an objective method to assess good morals, not objective well-being. That's why I ask you to look at the method I presented, since your whole argument is based on a misunderstanding of the method, therefore, your argument becomes a non-argument against the method.

You're ignoring the point I'm making. — Terrapin Station

Your argument is flawed since you have written it out of the notion that well-being has objective parameters on humans when my method is about assessing the well-being. So you have initially ignored the entire method and argument I've made and so there are no points for me to care for when your argument is flawed in the first place. You are arguing about things I haven't even presented. My method is about assessing the well-being not that well-being is objective in itself.

A hypothetical person who has "zero empathy" can follow someone else's guidelines, sure. And those guidelines will count as "good morals" to people who agree with those preferences. They'll count as "bad morals" to people who disagree with those preferences. — Terrapin Station

Have you even looked at the points in the guideline? I want you to make an argument for how they are "bad morals" in any rational sense.

If they have no emotions or feelings whatsoever, the they have no reason to choose not starting a war and being killed or anything else. They have to have preferences to make those sorts of choices. — Terrapin Station

You are nitpicking the allegory again. Must I do entire worldbuilding on this in order for you to understand the actual point? I can easily say a reason, they are like plants, they have no emotions but they do choices through survival programming. War equals death to their species, hence to survive they need to adapt. They have no emotion to this, they must simply do it. So the choice is still made without emotion or feelings.

You can deduce that food is necessary to survive. You can't deduce that survival is good or better than not surviving, because that's not a fact. That's a preference that people can have. — Terrapin Station

You miss that the deduction was about well-being. Are you saying "not surviving" is well-being? Because of this you need to first explain what well-being is and define it as something other than what its actual definition is. If you don't agree with that definition, then we can just give up and just throw language out of the window and stop even having a dialectic. You are making nonsense out of the argument.

You are also making your own interpretation of my argument before counter-arguing, this is a fallacy.
The rest of your argument is out of this misinterpretation of the deduction argument I presented.

"Survival is well-being" isn't a fact. It's a preference. It's a way that people feel, where they would rather than one set of facts obtains (survival) than another set (a lack of survival). — Terrapin Station

What is your definition of well-being for a person? Please provide the definition in order to support your argument. Well-being is what it is, it's not a preference. Well-being has a clear definition and that definition is a fact of what well-being is.

The emotional value is that you prefer raising their dopamine levels to the alternative. — Terrapin Station

Why are you ignoring the point I'm making? I provided a moral method to use in order to be morally good. The method is detached from feelings and emotions. Using the method you can assess choices through the well-being of people. The choice is to follow the moral method and guideline. You are making an argument that is totally ignoring the entire purpose of ethics philosophy. So your argument becomes a non-argument. If the question is "how can we assess good morals", then your points of emotions becomes invalid. If a person that has zero empathy is told to follow this moral guideline in order to function according to good morals in society, he can do it without having empathy. Then, because of this, the choice of raising dopamine levels has nothing to do with emotions, the choice is to follow the moral guideline, that's the first choice and that choice is made out of the necessity of having good morals in our society. If there is no reason to have good morals in society, then you can throw ethics philosophy out the window since it's irrelevant to you and it's irrelevant to assess morality at all.

So what is your point? That we can't have good morals without emotions? So far I've not seen a solid argument for that. You are intentionally misunderstanding the entire method in order to make your point.

Why would they do that over the alternative(s)? — Terrapin Station

An irrelevant point to the allegory. Invent a reason, like, they need to stay on our planet but will be killed if they start a war with us. So they have to live with us and function in society like if they were people. But since they have no emotion or feelings like us, they need a method to assess good moral values.

What you are doing now is ignoring the actual argument and nitpicking irrelevant things instead of actually focusing on the argument at hand.

I asked you to look into the method and provide a counter argument for why it can't be used without emotion and feelings. So far you have not done that.

Let's say aliens came down and assessed the well-being of our species. With the method I presented, they would be able to act with good morals, even if they didn't even have any feelings whatsoever. They could use these guidelines to act like good people, even though they don't have any feelings or emotional reasons to do so.

No. What I mean is that if your ideas about morality include methods that are general to everyone, then it's not true that there are people in the world who you don't care about (in that respect). — Terrapin Station

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. It doesn't matter if I care or don't care, the moral system is still an objective assessment of what is good for people. If I lacked all empathy I could still deduce that food is good for a person in order for him to survive. Therefore, giving food to this person if he is hungry is a good moral choice, even if I don't feel anything in doing so. I follow the guideline of creating well-being without any feelings whatsoever. Therefore, this moral method is working for everyone, detached from feelings and emotions involved.

You're ignoring that "this fact rather than that is 'well-being'" IS a way that you feel. It's a preference you have. Objectively, there are no preferences for any facts (or counterfactuals) versus any other facts (or counterfactuals) — Terrapin Station

Are you saying that giving food to someone who is hungry so that he survives isn't a choice for the well-being of that person? In what way does emotion have anything to do with this? Well-being isn't emotional, it's what is good for a person, it has no emotional value.

I could boil it down even further and talk about dopamine in our brain. If dopamine makes people feel good and well-being as a concept has an essential ingredient with "feeling good". Then a hug, which has been scientifically confirmed to raise dopamine levels in the brain, is a choice I can make for increasing the well-being of that person without even have any emotional value linked to that choice. I deduced the well-being aspect of that person through their dopamine-levels without it having anything to do with my feelings of that choice.

I think you are grasping at nihilistic straws here and I don't think you are actually looking at the method I presented. Can you please do so?

Because Kant didn't write his philosophical ideas based on modern understanding of science. Therefore, I would argue that while his ideas might be interesting and thought-provoking, they are flawed because they lack all knowledge that came after him.

If there are people in the world who you don't care about, then your moral views are not going to be about them. — Terrapin Station

Do you mean that ideas about moral should not include methods that are general to everyone? Then you are essentially saying that we don't need moral guidelines, we don't need morals. I say that we can have a moral system that includes everyone, even those that lack empathy.

that would only be a credo that you feel. It's nothing like an objective fact. — Terrapin Station

You are ignoring the method I presented. The one that has nothing to do with feelings, but assessing the well-being for all, including the self. That is objective for humans. Are you saying that this method doesn't work, please make an argument against the method so that we can evolve it, otherwise you are just saying an opinion, not doing an ethics-dialectic.

You don't just have emotions/feelings about yourself. — Terrapin Station

That's not the point, the point is that there are people in the world that you might not even care about who is affected by your moral choices, therefore morality isn't about emotions and feelings. It can also be corrupted if you are a person who has mental health issues which makes you unable to feel normal emotions and empathy. Morality then, must be applicable to all people, even those with lack of empathy.

I think that most who think about this in this way don't have enough insight into how molecular science works or how cellular biology works. It's a non-argument for me.

Is it that the deeper you think the more the chances of insanity?

Is there such a thing as dangerous knowledge?

Are we better off not knowing some things? — TheMadFool

This is close to the fiction of cosmic horror, but no, I don't think so.

I think that the further away from the truth you are the more shocking the truth is for you. If someone has a mental meltdown because of knowledge, it's because they weren't even close to the knowledge in the first place and the distance between their understanding and the truth is what created the trauma.

No, there's no such thing as dangerous knowledge, there's only danger in indoctrination into the illusion that becomes the danger to the truth when revealed. The knowledge itself is not the danger, it's the human stupidity that is.

You can, but what you're explaining is about your feelings. It wouldn't make any sense to deduce what's good for you where the deduction results in something that you're indifferent towards, that makes you feel bad in the long run, etc. — Terrapin Station

Point being; can you deduce what creates the most well-being for the self and others in a situation? I argue that you can, based on my list of points. Morality has nothing to do with your emotions since morality is not about you, it's about well-being for you and within your relation to others combined.

What does it mean for a rule to be 'objective in it's intention"? — Echarmion

In that it follows something that is general for all people regardless of culture or situation. Well-being for someone else and the self, combined, does not have any change between cultures and different lives. What is good for the self and others is another assessment, but the moral intention is good if it is out of the well-being of others and the self. The other points on my list address the risks of when ideas about what is good come from a culture of, for example, "murder" being good for someone.

Making moral decisions is about using moral reasoning. Trying to find rules which can be applied consistently to all cases, like the scientific theory looks for theories that are consistent with all observations. — Echarmion

And moral reasoning is what I mean when I say moral thinking compared to acting in the context of a specific event.

And I provided such points that can act consistently in all cases. If you like, please test them out or expand, this is a theory in progress not a final solution for me.

Anyways as to the topic of "objective morality", I think it's just a misnomer. Or perhaps a case of asking the wrong question. The point of morality is, after all, not to provide information on some object. It's to provide practical rules. — Echarmion

Practical rules that are objective in their intention of the well-being of all humans (and maybe beyond).

Isn't what someone thinks is good for them based on feelings? — Andrew4Handel

No, you can deduce what is good for you. I can deduce that the death of my father put me in a terrible position mentally, but I have grown as a person to handle life more confidently and with better emotional balance because of it, therefore, it was an event that was good for me personally, even if that sounds bad. (This wasn't an example of moral, but of a deduction of what is good for me and what is attached to feelings.

The problem is that moral philosophy has failed to reach a consensus about morality or resolve moral issues. Materialism or the scientific don't appear to leave room for moral or value claims. — Andrew4Handel

This is because of two things; ethics philosophy ignoring science (psychology and sociology) and that you can't quantify specific moral events within that science. What you can do is to use science to create a foundation that can be applied to most if not all moral questions. This means you can create a foundation of morals that are based on a moral method of thinking, not specific acts to do in certain situations that are contextual. Many ethics questions in philosophy concentrate on specific events that get detached from a central moral method and focus on behavior and ideas about those single events.

Another aspect to take into consideration is that the current understanding of the human psyche within psychology and sociology is rather new, only a few decades, if at all decades. You talk about not reaching consensus about morals from philosophical dialectics and ideas from times when we didn't even know enough about how the human psyche and social interaction actually works. While we have a lot of scientific research left on the human mind, we have come a long way even measured within the last ten years. To form a moral philosophy at this time is vastly more rational than trying to pitch ideas that have been outdated for many decades and centuries.

Ideas outside of materialistic nature are unscientific and narcissistic compared to the rational notion that we are not special beings. We can define our perception through idealistic views, but we as beings aren't detached from the universe we are in and nothing points to it in any rational way. Therefore, the more we know of how things work around us, the better we can create methods that work rather than guesses and fantasies.

The result of the scientific progress in psychology and sociology can be witnessed in how we treat mental health issues, in how we can predict behavior and so on. To not be able to utilize this science to find a foundation for a more scientific and objective moral method of living is to ignore the progress we've had the last hundred years and that wasn't clear to those who've done moral philosophy through the centuries.

So now thinkers are resorting to the idea we should just go with our feelings of what is appropriate or harmful.

I think reason can be a useful tool and moralizing but it does not seem to resolve moral disputes. — Andrew4Handel

If the person who goes by their feelings are suffering from mental health problems, or if they were raised with questionable means and because of it becomes a murderer, I think that is argument enough for "feelings" not being any good measure of moral behavior whatsoever.

As I've described earlier:

1. Do what is positive for the well-being of yourself and others combined.
2. Morality is an evolving process and each situation must be assessed carefully according to point 1.
3. Assessing what is morally good needs to involve current knowledge about human psychology, sociology, and knowledge about human well-being for the individual and larger groups. — Christoffer

Is a far better baseline for assessing what is a good moral choice in a situation and if it fails it's not because of bad morality but because of a human error in assessing the situation. But the moral assessment will still be good; the intention was good. Moral behavior cannot access knowledge about the future, therefore a person cannot demand morals to be a perfect reflection of the result of behavior, only how to think within the behavior at the moment.

I'd like to hear someone expanding or trying to test my points above, I'd like a dialectic on those points because it's still a vague description, at the moment, of my moral theories in the works.

1. All memory stored information.
2. Skepticism Vol.1
3. Skepticism Vol.2
4. Skepticism Vol.3
5. Skepticism Vol.4
6. Arguments from skepticism Vol.1
7. Arguments from skepticism Vol.2
8. Arguments from skepticism Vol.3
9. Arguments from skepticism Vol.4
10. Conclusions of 8 volumes of skepticism and arguments based on all stored information.
11. Creative ideas and predictions on the universe.
12. Creative ideas and predictions on humanity.

All other experiences, emotions and the ego is irrelevant for the people who will use the knowledge in these lockers. I only leave that which I believe is of importance to others but put all mashed up memory in locker 1 to make room for further analysis of locker 2-12.

The feeling or experience of something as unpleasant but not immoral (like the taste of food you don't like). And the feeling that someone has done something wrong. — Andrew4Handel

Feelings of the one making a moral choice cannot be a foundation for morals, only the concept of what is essentially good for you and others combined can be used. Feelings distort, they're "system 1" in psychology, moral choices should be carefully assessed. If done over a long enough time frame, people can be trained so that "system 1" does these assessments as instincts, connected to our emotions. It's a fine-tuning of empathy that detaches itself from established morals by religion and political agendas into a working model for the well-being of the individual and groups/mankind.

We can feel something to be wrong, but we can train ourselves to understand and deconstruct that feeling to know if that feeling is justified or just a feeling detached from the logic of the moral choice.

Euthanasia is a good example of this. It feels awful making such a decision, but deconstructing our feelings shows us that the feeling is irrational to the logic of the choice. We suffer by the choice, they suffer from their sickness. We will suffer after the choice but we will feel good that we relieved them of their suffering. The conclusion is that you do something out of the well-being of both yourself and the one who is sick combined, even though all current emotions scream otherwise.

Morality is detached from feelings in choices but should generate positive feelings by the result of the choice.

Of course, sometimes our choices have to be made fast and we rely on "system 1", on instinct, but if we live by carefully assessing our morality based on the well-being of others and ourselves combined, we will train ourselves to have a better balance in those "system 1" instincts, just like we have trained our moral instincts to the moral values we have at the moment.

It seems that there are no moral facts or method for finding them. But a lot of people seem to think that feeling something is wrong is an adequate basis for morality. — Andrew4Handel

This is the difference between those who aren't schooled in rational dialectics and those with philosophical methods of reaching conclusions. It's like "system 1" and "system 2" in psychology. Most people live by "system 1", they rarely make time for "system 2" other than organizing their base knowledge into instinctual behavior.

This is why they cannot grasp the process of deconstructing common knowledge to find out if it's actually wrong or not.

I don't see morality to be anything we cannot find facts around or not having methods of finding them. The truth is that morality as a concept outside of religion or established institutions of power is a totally new thing historically. We've maybe been discussing this the last hundred years or so for real, with actual detachment from any former established "rules".

The problem is that people have a problem of detaching themselves from the established morals in order to find rational answers. I.e people aren't really discussing this with philosophical methods. I see it time and time again on this forum; people are not actually making rational arguments, only talking about their feelings on a subject. Many on this forum, maybe even academic philosophers it seems, abandon rational methods in favor of "system 1" irrationality and emotional outbursts.

Here's a baseline for morality.

1. Do what is positive for the well-being of yourself and others combined.
2. Morality is an evolving process and each situation must be assessed carefully according to point 1.
3. Assessing what is morally good needs to involve current knowledge about human psychology, sociology, and knowledge about human well-being for the individual and larger groups.

Points can be added, but the foundation is still well-being for the individual, the self and everyone else combined, not separated. Any other model is able to be corrupted.

This can invite utilitarianism into the picture, killing few to save more. But that is not something that I find morally good or bad, it's just assessing the moral of the situation. If you are in a situation of saving more by killing a few, there is no real good or bad choice, much like many other situations in life. You do not know if treating someone bad might be good for them down the line or not. But that cannot ever be the factor within moral choices since it's an unknown factor unable to be quantified within the calculation.

Therefore, you can only assess morality according to the things you know, i.e what is good or bad for people in the now. Morality should be about making that calculated choice and even if it turns out bad, the act of the moral choice was still done with good morals in mind. If the calculated choice was done with the points made above in mind, it's hard to make a choice on bad morals.

Now, of course, people can't walk around and always assess situations according to current scientific findings within psychology and sociology, but we can train ourselves to assess better than how we are doing it right now. Because right now, as you mention about youtube-comments, people make moral choices with "system 1" based on moral truths in "system 2" that has been corrupted by a society that is infantile in its moral system; a system past down from religion and political agendas.

People don't know how to act, because they have learned truths and ideals by other people who don't know how to act. This circle of anti-intellectualism is the established foundation when the contemporary methods of finding good morals should be a deconstruction of the morals we have established, erasing the fat and bullshit, scale it back to the basics and evolve it.

It isn't impossible, it's just that people do not do it for real. People do not think, because we act out of comfort, never out of careful thought. This can also be seen on this forum, where we demand careful thought, people write out of "system 1" not "system 2".

Deconstruct your beliefs and convictions, assume that you are wrong and falsify your opinion. If not, you aren't really making rational arguments or think in a way to evolve your ideas and theories. That is how you find answers and evolve things like morality into a more modern point of view.

That's where the difficulty lies. Morality has a rational basis on empathy but children are incapable of understanding arguments aren't they? That or their reasoning skills aren't developed enough to comprehend moral arguments. It's like trying to feed an infant with adult food. Infants simply lack the ability to digest adult food.

So, we must resort to a simpler method - reward & punishment. It's a language children understand. — TheMadFool

I'm not sure this is entirely true. It seems that abandoning reasoning with kids in favor of reward & punishment is the lazy route. It's giving up on actually preparing kids for life because parents don't have enough time to pay attention to their kids. It's one of the reasons I believe that most people in our developed society actually aren't equipped to have children because of the time constraints society have on parents.

I'm not saying abandon all, and do over. I do think there is a reasonable level of reward and punishment, but I wouldn't really call it reward and punishment. The foundation for these methods is basically teaching capitalism. It's hacking the reward center in our brain and using repetition to establish fear. I would say that a lot of the fears that parents establish in their kids could even impair their ability to think rationally later on, essentially making Orwellian thought-crimeesque pavlovian behavior in that as grown-ups they can't even, in their own private thoughts, allow themselves to think in certain perspectives on a subject. So I don't think reward and punishment is the way, the level of restriction and what's allowed by parents should be controlled with consequence and personal reward. I'm not talking about small children at the age of 3 but from 5 years of age. Children at that age start developing social skills and it's from this age parents need to pay attention to what they are doing. If the children do something bad, the consequence needs to be out of that context and not out of something else. Instead of taking away their candy when they do something bad, it should be a consequence out of the things they have done so that they start connecting the dots between cause and effect.

The biggest problem with having a punishment that isn't in context with what they've done is that they learn that if they do something, the consequences can be "whatever" other people can imagine. When choices later on in life becomes much vaguer and what is moral or not is cloaked in ambiguity, people can freak out since they've learned from an early age that punishment for doing something wrong can be something entirely different from what they actually have done. We essentially learn to distrust other people, especially in situations when we aren't sure what is entirely right or wrong. It affects relationships, business relations and so on, not just aspects of crime and punishment.

And this is why the following becomes a corrupted ideal...

As for the difficulty with adults, I think a punishment is justified as a deterrent and not as a process to exact vengeance. When people know they'll have to pay a price for breaking the law, they will think twice before doing anything illegal. If they still commit a crime then punishment is justified because they were aware of the consequences and yet committed a crime. — TheMadFool

First off, there's research that suggests that some form of crime and punishment is needed as a baseline for a working society, even though research is still ongoing on this. But the ideal you mention here is exactly how every one of us has been brought up to view morality.

Let me ask you, is it possible that you are wrong? Is it possible that the common knowledge outside of the scientific community, among the general public, is... wrong? That we have been so trained in thought about how punishment is a deterrent that most of us are unable to combine it with the actual facts on how our human psyche works?

The entire idea about it being a deterrent is not able to combine with the true nature of why people commit crimes. Those who commit crimes already know it's wrong, they do it because for most of them, they have no other choice or they have been pushed so far that reason is suppressed by strong emotions they cannot control. People aren't rational, no one is rational in their day to day life. If people were rational, commercials wouldn't work, but they do, they control people so effectively that businesses can steer people to do whatever they like. We think and act out of emotional choices, not rational ones. We are only rational when we use "system 2" of our brain, as we are doing now when discussing. We do not act out of instinct but out of slowly writing our balanced opinion on these subjects. This is one reason why I feel verbal discussions often fail since we are so focused on the social skills we need in order to maintain a conversation, while the process of writing is much more careful. Maybe that's why I write so much since I want to carefully address all aspects of the subject.

The hard truth is that punishment only works as a deterrent for those who already have no reason to commit crimes. It's the true paradox of crime and punishment. If there were no punishment or law, then people that have no reason to commit crimes could do it since there are no parameters about order in society, so a baseline is needed. But it does not have any effect on those pushed into a serious criminal life. It's an illusion that everyone who isn't a criminal has about criminals.

The best example of this is when people who aren't criminals watch a movie about a criminal. They get emotionally invested in that characters life, feel empathy, and feel that the character is treated wrong when they get caught. In any other context, in the news, people would spew hate over these people, but not when they've established an empathic connection to such a character because that is exactly the moral ambiguity that our irrational emotions have on us, have on those who commit crimes.

We cannot demand logic towards criminals out of the moral compass that we have since we are demanding them to act more rational and reasonable than even we do. We demand reason, balance, and almost inhuman rationality from them since our parameters is that of our own comfort in life. It's much harder to demand the same rationality and reason if we were in the same shoes as them.

Which leads to...

I guess it's assumed that by adulthood we're supposed to be in the know about moral rules. Is this assumption justified? — TheMadFool

No, we do not know about moral rules since our moral rules are illusions. It's either past down morality from religion or it's a twisted morality based on corrupted agendas by others. True discussion about morality need to be detached from everything we've learned about morals, it needs to be founded on scientific facts about human psychology and a baseline of the things that are objectively good for humans, which isn't as straight forward as it sounds, but it's the only true morality we can establish. Every other idea about morality is influenced by doctrines that have nothing to do with morality but by religious and political control.

Essentially, most people in the world today do not live by the knowledge we have about humanity, society, psychology, morality and so on. We live by our emotions, we live by the stupidity of comfort, by, in psychology, "System 1". We are irrational, we reject truth in favor of comfort. This is why our systems in crime and punishment, in parenting, in finding morality are so extremely flawed.

It's the reason I turn to philosophy in the first place because it has the means and methods of deconstructing our irrationality to find truths a priori.

The basic idea here, the question I ask, is what if you are wrong? What if every idea you have about the subject of crime and punishment is wrong, wouldn't you want to know that it is?
- Comfort says no, "system 2" says yes.

But philosophy doesn't allow "comfort" to be a factor in thought.

Children are morally pristine, innocent, but criminals are morally depraved and some are downright evil. — TheMadFool

This is a very simplistic summary of criminal behavior and behavior in general. There's a lot more to this than just singular labels.

The thing is that punishment is an illusion. It's a legacy from times when we didn't know anything about the human psyche and how we behave in social groups. At this time in history, we have a lot of knowledge about how we function as a species. But we still have punishment as a way of teaching and controlling morality. Without there being solid evidence at all about its effectiveness.

Children, for example, do not start acting morally because they have been punished for their behavior into good behavior. Its observed that it creates anxiety and fear of authority more than any balanced morality later in life. The more effective way is to show and really teach children why their behavior is wrong. The consequences for others, not the self. It builds up better empathy and better social skills than fear.

In crime and punishment, there's no real evidence for punishment having any effect on crime. It might be the difference between total chaos and the baseline for a functioning society, but there's nothing that proves it to actually be a factor for those that has decided on making a criminal act. It's basically a total misunderstanding of the mechanics of how why criminals do crimes. To fix problems with high criminality, you don't punish more, you fix the problems that nurture crime and criminals. You fix socioeconomic problems, segregation, inequality etc. Thos things that pitch people against each other and pressures in life that place someone on the brink of being homeless. Desperate people do not care if there's punishment or not, they do not see any other way forward but committing a crime. And if it's about violent acts that do not revolve around money, it's the desperation of the situation, the inability to see a way out, the anger of failure etc.

The psychology of criminals should not be ignored and punishment, as it exist today, is a very medieval and blunt tool for controlling crimes. The one thing that keeps it going as the method even today when we know much more about psychology and sociology is the retribution and revenge aspect.
Punishment is retribution and revenge, it is not a cure for crimes. But society has even wrapped the linguistic description of punishment in ways so that it doesn't come across like revenge. It's "the state against..." and "by the law you are punished..." etc. Never, "the victim's revenge..." "by the victims suffering you will receive their vengeance in form of...".

As soon as you really dive into the psychology, sociology and deconstruct what punishment really is, you will see that there is no paradox since punishment in itself is a paradox against what punishment is supposed to be in the first place. It doesn't reduce crimes, it doesn't teach children the right lessons, it does the opposite.

It's the message that stories like Judge Dredd tells. In that society, the police have the special force "Judges" that will punish on site, often by direct execution. It should be the perfect fear for criminals, but instead, crimes are on the rise and the criminal acts more violent. Because no one in Judge Dredd cares for the actual reasons crimes occur, they are blind to the punishment aspect of keeping control and it fails. That's the dystopia of that story. And that's the truth of punishment.

We just had a topic created about abortion, why start another one?

I'm not going to look them up but I understand your argument above. — DingoJones

From what I remember, I referenced my previous posts in this thread. If you didn't read those then I don't really know why you argue against me since my points have been argued clearly before this in this very thread. I won't repeat myself out of someone else's laziness in order to counter an argument I already countered. If that is the way you like to keep the dialectic I believe you are more interested in just pointing out your opinion rather than actually discussing the topic.

When you put in the restrictions on speech to prevent people being manipulated by hate speech, you also install the means for others to use those restrictions to suppress whatever speech they choose. — DingoJones

You haven't understood a word about the method I described earlier. What you are saying is falling in line of a false dilemma fallacy ignoring the nuances of what I've been saying.

Restricting free speech (to a certain extent, I'm not a free speech absolutist like Terrapin) is about control. — DingoJones

No, it's not. Only if your intention is control. If your intention is to promote well-being for the self and others while keeping the freedom of the individual you measure and calculate the methods according to those parameters. You straw man my argument into a binary idea of restrictions being just about control, nothing of what I said points to it being about control.

That control might be fine in the hands of someone who truly has everyone's best interest at heart (although I doubt it, as even the best intentioned person can be wrong) but the exact same logic and method can be used by bad actors with other, more nefarious interests at heart and has. — DingoJones

You misunderstand or intentionally misunderstand the method I proposed to make that argument. As I said, the method also makes it impossible for those trying to restrict free speech as a form of power, to be able to control free speech. In what way can a person use my method to do this? Give me an example and we can create a dialectic to improve the method further.

I have read all your previous posts, but I could only bother to clarify one of the errors they contain. — DiegoT

I do not disagree with what you wrote about color perception, it was merely a way to define my point. Maybe crude in its formulation, but it was not specifically about colors and perception, but about deduction. The idea that there is a certain scientific baseline for color and if the perception is way off, there might be something way off with the sensory observation of that color compared to the baseline of human biology. Maybe it was a bad example, but if you read behind the lines, I think the point was about something else entirely.

Perhaps in this media, we can keep the question more true to the biological aspects and philosophical aspects of the subject. — EpicTyrant

Good luck, even if I believe this forum is a bit better for debating complex questions, I think there are many here who don't even know how to keep a dialectic in any Socratic form whatsoever.

Why is this considered moral by human standards and not frowned upon? What is the difference between ending a premature state of life other than a fully developed one. Is it the lack of perceptive of reality and consciousness of the premature state of lifeform that makes it more bearable to perform an abortion for the carrier? Because the only thing that separates the premature life form from a fully developed one, is the passing of time. — EpicTyrant

In some situations, I think this is closely linked to how you would answer the question about euthanasia. In terms of painful deceases why would existence through that pain be better than ending it before it's even conscious of its own existence? It would be the same as euthanasia.

But I think this is about morality when someone is canceling pregnancy out of, for example, the decision to not being ready to have children in their life.

If we were to go by pure logic in this, it would become a bit horrific for some, but the logic points consciousness being developed so late and the ability to understand it's own existence that a super late abortion would be like removing an organ. It's a living thing, but it isn't anything yet. If you define it all by the concept of time, why not go backward? If time is everything, wouldn't the ejaculation of male sperm be like killing millions? And the menstruation killing the egg that should have become a new being?

I think this subject has so much emotion and religious/spiritual confusion around it to ever be put into a definitive answer. But if we are to carefully break down it all, an infant doesn't know its own existence really. A newborn baby doesn't have the cognitive function to understand anything other than mimicking and registering events. Right before its birth, it gets pulled out of a sleeping state which is the final stage of its existence before birth. So we could argue that it is its own person as soon as it starts working its cognitive journey to a higher cognitive state. But that would mean that you could abort a child right before its birth before it wakes up out of its sleep state. This is a horrible idea to many but its really not illogical. The baby isn't aware of its existence, it's not aware of anything. If a newborn baby sometime after its birth isn't conscious of its surrounding or existence why would an unborn baby have any notion of anything, especially since the only cognitive processes is sleep without anything processed through that sleep in term of dreams etc.

The conclusion to this is essentially that based on measuring an unborns cognitive ability and consciousness it will not even notice its own end. The trauma of losing a child at that time in pregnancy should not inform of the morality of the ending of its existence. All of this is about what is considered justified within the idea of the unborn child's existence. Through this idea, I cannot deny that it seems that the idea of a late abortion has emotional attachments to it that don't have any foundation in logic to the child's pain or existence when stopped existing. The event is measured by the pre-existing morality of the parents and society around them, the emotional trauma of the event of ending a pregnancy and spiritual/religious fantasies about existence. Measuring by the actual existence, a newborn child that's out of the sleep state should not be terminated, i.e after birth or after the awakening from that sleep. Before that sleep, there is no pain to the end of existence.

This would mean that up until awakening from that sleep, abortion should be "ok". This is the logic when looking at the actual biological process of pregnancy.

So the measurement of what is morally correct comes into contact with how we define a person. If we use euthanasia to terminate someone who is braindead and that is considered ok, why is it not ok to terminate a pregnancy for a child who has not even awaken from a sleep that has no cognitive foundation? Because that child has an entire life ahead of them taken away? What about sperms? With each ejaculation, there is one sperm that would have been a child with an entire life ahead of them. So how come we draw the line at some point?

I would say that the line is drawn because of our emotional opinion about a child. If it looks like a child we cannot abort. I think this is a problematic way of looking at this. The reasons to abort can be many things and I assume everyone is on board with abortion being a right for free people to be able to decide the course of their life.

But the morality of judging the importance of existence based on the physical form of something is just as irrational as judging the rights a statue that resembles a human has to exist. The value of existence should be measured by the cognitive completion of that being, otherwise, it's just an organ, organic matter, a statue of organic matter that we imbue with the importance of existence out of our emotional reaction to the form, not to the logic of its existence.

I would argue that existence isn't valuable as its own being until it starts coming out of the sleep stage right before birth. But in order to make room for any errors in judgment over the cognitive capabilities, I think the third trimester is the last stage to do it. In the question of doing it at all, I would argue that there's no point in dwelling about a fetus existence more than sperm ejaculation or passive organs consisted of living tissue. To think about the existence of a fetus in terms of the possible existence of a human later on, would be like dwelling on the consequences of all male ejaculations and sperm dying. There's no logic to this emotional attachment to a fetus because it's a form without consciousness. It has just as much future as the sperm ejaculated during sex. If it's about when a sperm and egg combine, there's so many impregnated eggs getting ejected as menstruation without many couples even noticing it as being an impregnated egg.

The problem people have with abortion has nothing to do with the logic of biology and is almost entirely about religious, spiritual and emotional irrational concepts about the topic bypassing any rational ideas because it's such a powerful topic. Birth and death is such huge questions when thinking about our existence that it's easy to understand why, but seriously, if you view biology in any scientific way, the answer is less powerful than our emotional reaction to it.

The worst part, however, is how society sets the parameters around this topic based on emotion rather than reason. We force people with more rational and mature concepts of this to act according to the ideas of emotional uneducated and in my opinion unintelligent voices of the public debates. In essence, a woman who still has the baby inside of them should not be considered a murderer or morally bad if they terminate their own pregnancy. Essentially it's still their own body they are manipulating, it's not detached yet and isn't conscious of its own existence. People force women to act in a certain way because of emotional responses to the subject rather than logical ideas about it. In my opinion, this is despicable to the freedom of individuals. It's a legacy from religious bullshit that's always been so emotional at its core that it manages to survive beyond the obvious religious existentialism and through that become an emotionally loaded taboo rather than biologically reasonable.

What doesn't kill you will try again later. — Bitter Crank

What doesn't kill you will grow stronger and be able to kill you later.

colours are not objective measures of anything, but subjective experiences. What is green or not depends on the observer, and this has been proven — DiegoT

I think you stumbled into a line of arguments that wasn't about this specifically. It was an example to a point about deduction outside of opinion based on emotion and sensory experiences. I suggest you read all my previous posts.

Ok, I understand all that, it doesnt address the failure of the process that necessitates the exclusion of exactly the kinds of things people call hate speech. You are familiar with the tragedy of the commons? As long as someone is able to ban certain opinions or expression of them, no matter how right they may be, someone will use that power to oppress. The worst atrocities in modern times emerge from this, and thats why free speech is do important. Besides, restricting what opinions people can express doesnt change thise opinions. The KKK wore hoods, they hid. I want my racists and crazies right in the open where I can see them. Shout your hate to the heavens at your discretion, so I know where to start looking when there is a lynching. — DingoJones

I'm not sure if you've read everything I've written in this forum thread, but I've pointed out examples of totalitarian states using restrictions as means of power and how the method doesn't give power to them, it rather takes it away from them. Be careful of false dilemma fallacies. The method doesn't restrict in a way that can be used as a tool of power, because if you argue through the method that someone should be restricted in their opinion and they then present an argument for why they expressed the opinion and it is a solid argument that falls in line of being constructive free speech, then you cannot use the tool of restriction as a means of power. The only way for someone to use restriction as a way to oppress and have power over others is if they restrict speech through their made-up reasons, not rational reasons.

The whole reason there is a discussion about restrictions is based on the common "Unlimited tolerance leads to intolerance". I agree I want to see the racists out in the open, but unrestricted free speech can also lead to manipulation of the population. It wasn't racists out in the open that built up the general populations opinions on Jews in Nazi-Germany, it was years of pointing them out as vermin that manipulated people into accepting the atrocities they went through. The way Trump is talking about Muslims and immigrants, totally breaking point four of my list, has changed how many act around immigrants. As someone who doesn't live in US, but has been there, it's easier to see the shift between a trip years ago and today. Not by the racists, but by how the general tension and day to day life looks like. I've seen it here in Sweden as well, how people were in defense of people in poverty but after the rise of right-wing populists who win votes by pushing fear and breaking all the points on my list, the general population has become colder against those in poverty. I've seen people who aren't racists who're slowly been shifting from trying to help the poor, to ignore them because they think the poor are criminals. When questioning them about why they shifted their point of view, they cannot pinpoint the reason, they "just know".

This is why unrestricted free speech can be truly destructive because keeping racists in the open demands that everyone is intelligent enough to not be manipulated by these people. The obvious ones are obvious, but some of them know how to manipulate. This is why populism has been growing so much because they use "freedom of speech" as their defense against anyone who criticizes their opinions. And because there is this idea about unrestricted freedom of speech, their voices has manipulated so many that a large portion of the world is infected by this manipulation of the population.

Unrestricted freedom of speech can lead to massive manipulation of the population by those who hide behind freedom of speech. As you said, the KKK hid behind hoods, but what happens when they hid behind freedom of speech and you cannot do anything to battle their manipulation of people desperate to find a black sheep for their problems? If you had a method to pinpoint when they are manipulating, when they don't have reasonable or rational opinions and through that be able to pierce their defense of hiding behind free speech, without restricting free speech. Isn't that a powerful weapon against the populism and growing common racism and polarization we see right now?

for the noseeum argument against the existence of God. — Rank Amateur

I'm more for keeping burden of proof towards any argument for God.
Otherwise there be teapots in space

The stuff in quotation marks. "There's a definition of blue by measuring the spectrum of light bouncing from that blue pen. The spectrum shows its green. You are wrong, it is green" — Terrapin Station

I'm done answering these vague questions. Write an argument against what I've been saying on the topic. I'm done wasting time on your lazy dialectics.

I think you are missing the point, the fact is that regardless of who is actually right, people will disagree even after going through your proposed tests of wrongness. When they do, an additional
appeal to what is objectively right isnt going to solve anything. The appeal that must be made is to an objective standard of some kind that functions in spite of peoples feelings about their rightness/wrongness. That way, no one can force their own standard on anyone else based on how convinced they are of the argument. For freedom of speech its the same reason that freedom of religion necessitates the seperation of church and state. Its a safeguard against when the process you are describing fails, and it does often fail. If it didnt, I would agree with you 100%. — DingoJones

It's not a proposed test of wrongness, it's a test of whether the opinion has solid grounds outside of the emotional reaction to something. If you test the opinion expressed, to those points, you are deducing whether it's based on someone hating black people out of an emotional response to what they perceive as unknown, i.e racism, or if they have a comment about a statistic that is predominant about black people, therefore a constructive thing to express in order to keep a dialectic about the problems the statistic points at.

If the method can pinpoint when someone is essentially talking out of their ass and when they have a solid and reasonable argument as the basis for their opinion, it's the closest I've yet to see answering where to balance between free speech and restrictions of harmful speech.

If you are trying to find an objective "to end all" standard, I think that's a simplified way of looking at something that is always evolving and changing. If you develop a standard of what is right and what is wrong you are creating a doctrine to follow rather than a method to constantly find the best answer.
The method I proposed does not say if someone is right or wrong, it points to if the reason they are saying it is unsupported by anything other than an emotional opinion. Anyone with little knowledge of psychology knows that emotional foundation for an opinion rarely has any valid merit of being constructive. It might point to a problem, but the opinion is rarely right when tackling complex questions. In terms of racism, emotional opinions are probably never correct, valid or of any value to constructive discussions. They will feed racism, divisions between people etc. If you use the method I proposed you can see which opinions that has value to discuss and be passed through free speech and which ones to discard as emotional outbursts that feed the problem.

The method demands serious deconstruction of opinion to find it's validity within free speech. I'm of course talking about opinions that might look like harmful speech because that is where the line gets hard to pinpoint what is and what is not free speech.

Some individual has to know this, and has to note it--that is, make a claim about it and so on, in order for us to take any action with respect to it, correct? — Terrapin Station

Has to know what? That the spectrometer has that as its definition of blue? Here's another definition of pure math #0000ff.
If you see it like #0000ff and the spectrometer sees #00ff00, then based on the facts about how the cones and rods in our eyes work and how they are processed in the brain, we can conclude there is something wrong.

We can move on to talk about the nature of perception, but that wasn't the point of the argument. This example was part of the argument you ignored because... whataboutism.

So once again, please form an argument to answer what this topic is about rather than irrelevant nitpicks about other topics. The example was about the deduction of something a priori, that a specific color is something defined and if suddenly experienced differently, it's not proven as an error of the senses by opinion, but by deducing where something is wrong. The one who said it was blue or the one who said it was green.

Answers have been given to your previous questions.

but be careful what you accept as proven theories. — Rank Amateur

Also, be careful using this as a counter-argument to arguments that use science as a basis for its conclusion. I've seen lots of counter-arguments from people that use this to counter anything science-based, however solid its foundation is, in order to put the argument into the notion that its a fallacy and by that create the notion that their own counter-argument is more or equally valid.

The rock thing was pure metaphor. — Rank Amateur

For proof?

You are not clear in what you are asking. Please form an argument that is taking into account what has been said and ask again.

You have been given answers to everything you asked, please re-read what has been said.

You start your post with a true observation of science, but you turn that into somehow trying to prove your validity in argumentation because you offer up something that should be swallowed just because science hasn't proved something yet?

The ones doing true science, the ones who are actually constantly in search of real answers are the ones never happy with the answers they get, but also, they do not take things with questionable logic as answers to anything. Just because scientists don't know something, doesn't mean they accept wild fantasies before finding the true answers.

It's also wrong to say that science is wrong all the time and build on correction. Answers in science that are proven theories are proven theories and they build new theories on top of them. This is why the unification theory is so hard since you can't erase the proven theories of either side, you need to find a theory that combines them all.

the proof isn't good enough, bring me another rock, and I'll let you know if that one is any better — Rank Amateur

This requires there to be proof in the first place. Questionable logic that is based on assumptions and fallacies does not count and all arguments so far, for any supernatural beings, have failed to reach that level of deduction.

This applies to all sides, but scientists are probably the only ones who keep demanding themselves to be better constantly. If religious apologists were ever that disciplined in trying to prove their ideas, things would look very different.

Even if "the world itself" can do all of that somehow, for us to know about it, note it, do anything about it, someone has to think and assert those things, right? — Terrapin Station

Somehow? We have spectrometers that define the color spectrum. We can conclude that if someone defines a color different to other people and to results of facts a priori, there might be something wrong with that person's sight or visual centers in their brain, hence further looking revealed the tumor. There are no assertions with this. It's a deduction and research. It's how you are able to write on your computer, someone researched and used facts we have concluded in order to create the computer.
As an example, in science, in order to reach a theory, you need to prove it. There are no opinions involved. Someone research, develop the theory, test it, it's there, a priori.

You are making a Reductio ad absurdum fallacy. You haven't really cared for the argument presented.