• Voting in a democracy should not be a right.

    That is quite a program.
    Who will execute it?
  • Voting in a democracy should not be a right.

    I do not recognize my comment in your reply. I will put it in other words.

    Every restriction of suffrage has been carried out by actual agents, duly assigned by whoever has the power to do so. The measures you call for have been called for by others. It was a central feature of the politics of the Jim Crow South.

    How will you make sure that your program does not suffer the corruption so blatantly on view in the past?
  • Voting in a democracy should not be a right.


    Unlike driving a car or shooting a gun, being a good citizen who understands the decisions that need to be made is not a skill that can be directly measured because the people holding the rulers have their own politics and bundles of interest.

    Unrestricted suffrage is the only way to get people to buy into results of elections. Otherwise, there is no reason to support elections when "your" side is getting the short end of the stick.

    It is true that clueless people are not helping the republic. The need to educate them for that purpose is not the central focus of our present system.
  • The N word
    My question is whether this social convention of never uttering the N-word is a reasonable act of respect or whether it's simply a politically imposed rule that can be used to divide and destroy?Hanover

    I grew up when and where never uttering the word was a part of my parents' resistance against those in their generation who did. The Civil Rights Movement divided every group, including my white family.

    So, growing up that way and seeing for myself how people tried very hard to stop calling people that name makes having some black people use it as a special word that belongs only to them quite painful.

    I don't have an opinion about whether the use of that language is good or bad against the background of some eventual historical end. But I have witnessed the degradation that is fused with the word and that is what it will always be for me.
  • Are any Opinions Immoral to Hold?
    Are we even responsible for our beliefs in the same sense as we're responsible for our actions?Dusty of Sky

    Maybe even more.

    "We" are the only person around while figuring out what is permitted for ourselves. The results of that calculation is what meets other people in the world. A lot of "action" happens without much awareness of what such a thing is or may be.

    The boundary is a presumption in every argument that brings the matter up, not an incidental side bar to the real thing.
  • Is there any Truth in the Idea that all People are Created Equal

    As the idea developed, being equal in the eyes of the creator was always a simultaneous acceptance of "our" limits as evaluators because none of us are going be creating universes.

    As a null set of human judgement, it excludes the divine right of kings along with regimes based upon "natural" principles. The equality is the horizon of distinction, not a replacement for it.

    While the idea presents many problems for us as a species and a community, it has demonstrated its value many times against the worst of those who would judge your worth by speaking for God or Nature.
  • Is Physicalism Incompatible with Physics?

    The element I have the most difficulty understanding is the matter of corresponding identity. If brain states are matches of cognitive events, the only way to check if that is the case appeals to something beyond either register.
  • Would a ban on all public religious representations and displays ease religious hatreds and violence

    The Establishment of Religion clause in the U.S. constitution was a result of centuries of people attempting to stop certain expressions of religious thought.
    The thought in the clause is to permit everything but not let any of those expressions become the basis of civil discourse in the formation of law.
    It may not be perfect but may be better than the state acting upon opinions regarding religious expression.
  • Does Marxism Actually Avoid the Problems of Exploitation Either?

    Your observation that the means of production has its own social requirements reminds me of Ivan Illich who said the use of tools can overpower us as the ones who use them. While that perspective obviously is at odds with the idea of markets as a process to find the best form of life, it becomes more ambiguous regarding what Marx thought was necessary.

    While Marx said that changes in the means of production allowed labor to become commodities to the degree that workers were in a position to understand that they could not purchase themselves or work for themselves beyond exchanging their value for other commodities, that did not mean that mass production was a benefit in itself. The easiest way to refer to that element is to note his emphasis that the fetishism of commodities created false demand. A more difficult way is to understand the development of the proletariat as filled with unknowns. In contrast to the rise of the Bourgeoisie, the supposed end to this particular arc of history cannot use what has been made before to make the future.
  • Quality Content
    As leader of the elites, I demand that you implement an exclusive forum for us, posthaste, or else I will continue to instruct my sub-elites to create more passive-aggressive feedback discussions like this.S

    It is a buzz kill but you have to accept that you just weren't invited.
    I left when it turned out that there were no virgins being offered.

    The brochure promised virgins.
  • Do we need metaphysics?
    So, asking about the use of something called "metaphysical" is on par with a problem of how we use language to describe something. There cannot be a problem in that situation since all that matters has already been addressed by the rules previously agreed upon. But the whole point of bringing special attention to those rules is to point to a desire that is not expressed by them.

    It is all about knowing what the creature is, not making sense of it.
  • Do we need metaphysics?

    Saying: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" is pretty enigmatic. I would not presume to follow such a remark with an exegesis of what is meant.

    On the other hand, it is direct and claims something by it being said.

    In any case, it is fair for me to ask in what way the Wittgenstein work relates to the question about metaphysics as is asked about here in this here thread.

    Represent.
  • Do we need metaphysics?

    Didn't Wittgenstein turn those questions into other questions? He never dismissed them as presented.
  • Do we need metaphysics?

    I take your point regarding the importance of presuppositions to any developed argument but isn't the OP more open ended than that?
    Now perhaps you are saying that one cannot ask that kind of question without answering some of it first.
  • Do we need metaphysics?

    Reflection is where we try to understand our desire to understand. You see, you are meeting Plotinus half way.

    Hmmmn, pizza sounds good right now.
  • Do we need metaphysics?

    Saying "thought itself" is a metaphysical statement.
    In so far as you framed the question as "do we need metaphysics", that cannot help but ask if it can be dispensed with. Before we can establish what the difference between a "justified" theory and a "working scenario" may be, your question has to be dealt with or it is accepted that anyway we proceed will leave the question unanswered at the beginning. Either of those paths is "metaphysical" in their desire to distinguish what is fundamental from what is not.
  • Do we need metaphysics?
    So posing that there are agents is a metaphysical activity? Why so?frank

    Because the desire to understand is itself information of a kind. The theory of the intelligible as an integral component of what exists is an expression of that thought. Cognitive agents orient themselves by differentiating what can and cannot be understood.

    This is made explicit in the writings of thinkers such as Plotinus but is also suggested in the logic of Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" or Bateson's Evolution of Mind.
  • Do we need metaphysics?

    Expressing the matter as a need is metaphysical in so far as the question recognizes that there are agents and they want to understand what the hell is going on.
  • Glamour Of Evil And Banality Of Evil

    The banality of evil was not presented as a doctrine. Arendt presented the trite affect and emptiness of Eichmann in the context of her analysis of totalitarian organizations. The process of terror is not just the outcome of certain beliefs but has its own physics. Consider this from part three of The Origins of Totalitarianism:

    "While under present condition totalitarian domination still shares with other forms of government the need for a guide for the behavior of its citizens in public affairs, it does not need and could not even use a principle of action, strictly speaking, since it will eliminate precisely the capacity of man to act. Under conditions of total terror not even fear can any longer serve as an advisor of how to behave, because terror chooses its victims without reference to individual actions or thoughts, exclusively in accordance with the objective necessity of the natural or historical process. Under totalitarian conditions, fear probably is more widespread than ever before; but fear has lost its practical usefulness when actions guided by it no longer help to avoid the dangers man fears. The same is true for sympathy or support of the regime; for total terror not only select its victims according to objective standards; it chooses its executioners with as complete a disregard as possible for the candidate's conviction and sympathies. The consistent elimination of conviction as a motive for action has become a matter of record since the great purges in Soviet Russia and the satellite countries. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any. The introduction of purely objective criteria into the selective system of the SS troops was Himmler's great organizational invention; he selected the candidates from photographs according to purely racial criteria. Nature itself decided, not only who was eliminated, but also who was to be trained as an executioner.

    No guiding principle of behavior, taken itself from the realm of human action, such as virtue, honor, fear, is necessary or can be useful to set into motion a body politic which no longer uses terror as a means of intimidation, but whose essence is terror. In its stead, it has introduced an entirely new principle into public affairs that dispenses with human will to action altogether and appeals to a craving need for some insight into the law of movement according to which the terror functions and upon which, therefore, all private destinies depend.

    The inhabitants of a totalitarian country are thrown into and caught in the process of nature or history for the sake of accelerating its movement; as such, they can only be executioners or victims of its inherent law. The process may decide that those who today eliminate races and individuals or the members of dying classes and decadent peoples are tomorrow those who must be sacrificed. What totalitarian rule needs to guide the behavior of its subjects is a preparation to fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim. This two-sided preparation, the substitute for a principle of action, is the ideology."
    -Page 165, Harvest Hill edition

    From this explanation, we can see the psychology of Eichmann as a result of this process in himself. This is a lot different than saying evil could just come from any "ordinary" person.
  • Multitasking
    From a task point of view, my work experience suggests to me that people don't actually perform acts simultaneously but some are agile at switching jobs quickly and others are not.
    Put that way, those who are agile at this skill are not always performing at the same level at all times. When one has a job with a lot of responsibilities, it becomes really important to understand and shape when work happens on each thing.
    Being able to change quickly is helpful but not always the best approach to solving actual problems.
  • On sex
    Long term relationships are odd. Tolstoy said that what was the easiest sort of thing to understand but he was wrong.

    Desire does not explain itself. It is mostly just there, like a homeless person on a bench.
  • "Free Market" Vs "Central Planning"; a Metaphorical Strategic Dilemma.
    Adherence to socialist or capitalist principles, like choosing a strategy for the survival of you or your tribe, is a gamble (a wager that following X principle will tend to lead to individual or overall success).VagabondSpectre

    Arguments against "planning", in the economic sense, are made in the "tribal" register used in your narrative. Hayek, for example, was not a Libertarian on the basis of saying restrictions upon individuals were bad upon principle but that it stifled productivity of the whole process. The language Hayek used developed to the point where the Reagans (he was cloned repeatedly) argued that the free market was the only guarantor of beneficial social ends.

    And so what started off as an argument about governmental involvement in the production and the marketing of goods became a view that all functions of government would be better served by commodities developed through a market environment. Resistance to that movement argues that forms of civic planning may be the only way to protect individuals from the unrelenting demand of being a consumable commodity.

    Kind of ironic, really.
  • Discussions About God.
    Tomorrow, then.
    I will try to represent.
  • .

    It overlooks, and often even suppresses, the potential genius of the slave population.whollyrolling

    You got to read Hegel.
  • Discussions About God.
    Active enough?
  • Discussions About God.
    Are you familiar with Aquinas's argument for Just War?
  • Discussions About God.
    Have you read the City of God?
  • Discussions About God.
    Ok. Is Augustine writing about the same God as Aquinas?YuZhonglu

    Well, my reading of the City of God does not fit with the idea of just war. Does that add up to a different God?

    If the relationship is so much dependent upon what I think is right at one point or or another, why bother at all?

    Just fold "God" into other stuff and carry on.
  • Discussions About God.
    Popes have a tough job. Management is a scam.
    I would direct your question to Augustine or Aquinas.
    They carried the water.
    There have been other developments.
    What do you want to know?
  • "philosophy" against "violence"
    There are lots of separations between the "political" versus the "ethical" in Greek philosophy.
    They were consumed by the topic.
    All of them.
  • Is the writer an artist?
    Matters of taste are things we are least likely to share. It is clear that you do not share the same criteria of excellence as has been expressed by the givers of these prizes.

    Why should I not accept this limit of what is appreciated by some people versus calling for standards where every judgment is correct?
  • .

    I am curious as to whether you have read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

    He more or less says that the dynamic between master and slave was the engine of history such that the poles of the extremes in the relationship were constantly turning into these other kinds of relationships.

    The question of who is depending upon who is proposed to be a mutable thing.

    In that context, your proposal is an override of such changes. It suggests an order outside of transactions of the kind Hegel underlined.
  • Ecological Crisis; What Can Philosophy Do?
    Well said,

    In regards to your first question, I was born in 1956 and can report that my generation bears a lot of responsibility regarding complacency. I will never forget my son's reaction (several years older than you) after viewing a speech by Al Gore. He turned a baleful eye and said, "You guys are dumping all this on us." I did not have a snappy comeback.

    I think there is a role for philosophical thinking to adjust to how what has been seen as strictly matters of "economy" are necessarily ecological at the same time. There are people who have been talking about this since humans started talking about ourselves as a species and not just the prodigal children of a creator who had given us the world to name and make of it what we will.

    Another element to consider is to what extent we are bonded to our tools and whether they can be made to serve us as maker of things. I was strongly influenced by The One Straw Revolution by Fukuoka because the book brings into question the limits of engineered agriculture. The age old questions regarding the best forms of association and uses of power now have to answer to the problem of sustainability in a direct way. No more wiggle room. People tend to do bad things when cornered. But sometimes it leads to new insights.

    In regards to your last point, I can't speak for your generation because I am just another old guy. But I wonder how much expressed "disinterest" is really just feeling overwhelmed.
  • What can't you philosophize about?
    One thing that can not be interpreted are experiences that either happen or not.
    We want these experiences that make other questions mute.
    The rest is a festival of disappointment.
  • Does “spirit” exist? If so, what is it?
    One way to approach the idea is through time.

    Hegel presented the spirit as something that lived both as a possibility and as an agent of history.

    In the religious register, spirit is either with you or not. Fate and devotion struggle to get the upper hand. I don't prefer fatalism but it beats creating the entire scope of existence with a single idea.

    But I mostly think about it as the traces of lost friends. And how I will join them soon in my own disappearance.
  • An Epistemological Conundrum
    I like Aristotle for marveling that a translation was made at all (especially in De Anima). His confidence that it conveys something essential is based upon it having happened.
    To imagine the process is meant to fool people is not the same thing as wondering what gets lost in translation.
  • On Psychologizing
    The old fashioned objection to ad hominem arguments is not based on whether they are accurate or not in regards to any description of the interlocutor but that any such depictions fail to take responsibility for one's own thinking.
  • Was Wittgenstein anti-philosophy?

    Point taken. More of a guiding action than a waving away.
    The fly could see all the motion either way.