Not really.

The teleological argument says that the high amount of order in the universe (i.e. scientific laws) implies an intelligence designed the universe. The argument from miracles states that there are known events that violate the known natural laws to such a degree that the only plausible explanation is supernatural. I am not seeing why these are mutually exclusive.

No. The entire point behind Gettier cases is to show situations in which someone meets the three conditions for the JTB theory of knowledge, yet it appears that they do not possess knowledge. Gettier was not just talking about skepticism and luck- he was saying that our entire understanding of what knowledge is is incorrect.

In the above example, Al was not really epistemologically justified in believing Bob committed the crime. He may be justified in believing that Bob was the more likely culprit, but he should have suspended judgement until further information was gathered. Before the police report, Al was unjustified, so his belief was lucky, but in the average JTB sense, not in the Gettier sense.

If he had a few more lifetimes, or more interest in studying what the major traditions say about God, we could even imagine him saying that he has no problem with the Christian or the Hindu or the Muslim or the Cheyenne (etc. etc.) concept of God. — Mariner

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that Dawkins could change his views or that Dawkins' comment about deism is irrelevant to his overall stance?

Alvin Plantinga — some logician

Really? I am not trying to be mean, but you just listed a theist who came up with the modal ontological argument and believes we are justified in believing in God for other reasons. Unless you we can use his authority on various issues, I don't see how listing him helps your case.

Premise 1 is false. Not all good reasons for belief are scientific reasons. They can't be, otherwise there would be no basis for science.

I would probably label myself agnostic, though I may start saying I am an atheist to people I know are religious because I have found, personally, that they tend to read "I am unsure about whether a god exists" to mean "I am unsure about whether your particular branch of whatever religion you hold is true."

Many of the new atheists are annoying, though I think that this is a case of "the minority tends to be more vocal than the majority," such that many atheists simply are not vocal about their viewpoints unless asked about them or otherwise provoked.

Though I hope the woman gets help and guidance in order to get better, she cannot force her issues on everyone else. It is not cold or even rude to reject people trying to use you. Would it be considered rude to reject giving money to a person who lied and effectively stole money from you before by lying to you?

If you want to remain open, you can tell her you are willing to talk about her issues and potentially help her find out her direction. However, you do not owe her anything, especially if she shows no signs of actually trying to move into a better situation.

I did a relatively light reading on my phone right now, a couple of things:

1) Your argument needs to define what consciosness is and when it becomes relevant. Human mental development is continuous. This creates a problem, as there is no reason why abortion should be banned (at all) or why infanticide should be banned. As noted, there does not seem to be any difference between a conceptus a minute before birth and a conceptus a minute after birth.

2) Your argument regarding the future trajectory seems to miss an important distinction. In order to start a life, one must perform an action. As it currently stands, there is nothing in actual existence that will turn into life. However, with abortion, there actually is such a being that, if left alone, will become a life. In order to stop it, you must perform an action. There seems to be a difference between purely hypothetical beings that we need to act to create and an actual being that, in order to stop from achieving life, we need to act to prevent.

3) Keep in mind, the real reason we debate abortion is that there are competing interests and rights at play. A computer in a virtual world without any real influence or drawback to go against it is not really analogous to a conceptus in the womb a woman.

Some people do think too much, in the sense that they either 1)over-complicate existing issues or 2)completely block out competing views.

There's no correct answer to Mew's queries. In other words it's just a matter of opinion and speculation. Isn't that why there's ''difficulty agreeing''? — TheMadFool

Actually, to be quite honest, there are only really two motivations for believing in libertarian free will in terms of how we choose things- 1) it satisfies the unreflective intuitions we have about moral responsibility, and 2) we feel we have it.

First, the reason why we talk about the paradoxes so much is that they are interesting precisely because we cannot readily solve them. We ignore all the applications of reason that does yield positive results and allows us to move forward.

Second, could you provide the list you are referring to? I have a feeling a lot of what you call paradoxes are not logically paradoxes, but oddities that need to be explained with more knowledge.

You're taking the literal definition of philosophy to be what it is about.

You're ignoring the plethora of philosophers who reach conclusions that we would not call happy. These type of philosophers believe what they do not because their beliefs make them happy, but because they cannot follow through with lying to themselves. You might start off with high hopes, but, for a lot of people, once you know reality, you cannot ignore that reality, even if reality is horrific.

"Choice" is the term used to describe the product our minds generate when presented with multiple options, given the circumstances surrounding the scenario in which the choice is made.

Can we define "truth"?

Also, I am pretty sure that when most people claim to be relativists, the are saying they do not believe in morals or find them to be contextual. They are not claiming truth, as a whole, is relative.

First sentence is an assertion. Why should I accept that to be is the same thing as logical conherence?

If they are consistent, they exist. Apparently not on our planet. — litewave

The concept of unicorns is logically coherent. It is not like the concept of a square circle and does not automatically self-contradict itself, thus making it impossible. Therefore, unicorns are logically possible, and belong with all things that are logically possible. But there is no reason to believe unicorns actually exist beyond the mental. At the very least, they require a different ontological status, one I am not sure we would call "existence."

If we say that something being logically possible is enough to mean it exists, then we run into a problem, as it means anything that could possible be a concrete (non-abstract) object must exist as a concrete object in some way. This would mean that unicorns must exist in this world, as well as every counterfactual possibilities tied to our current existence. You would have to embrace multiverse theory and say that every single possible world is a real world, as real and concrete as the actual world. This leads to a contradiction, as it is also logically coherent (possible) that only the actual world exists and that the other possible worlds do not exist (or if they do exist, as mental objects only).

As such, we would have to maintain that multiverse theory is both true and false, as both possibilities are logically possible.

Yes. To my thinking, hypothetical ability -- that is, our choice would be different if circumstances had been different -- does nothing to satisfy our ability to do otherwise. 'Otherwise' pertains to an alternative, which by nature depends upon the "first" option (the option that will be chosen, if determinism). But under compatibilism, all that's changed is the first option, which the agent is still compelled to choose. — Sineview

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the last sentence. Could you please explain?

Do abstract objects (the form of square) exist?

Do unicorns, in some ontologically relevant sense, exist?

I would like to preface this with saying that is one of the issues in philosophy that I get worked up over and I have strong personal feelings over, even if I have not read as much as I would like to on the subject. Bear this in mind as you read any subsequent replies.

I hold that free will requires the ability to do otherwise. In other words, I hold that the free agent has a power of volition that enables them to will different options in an undetermined and nonrandom way. While I am sympathetic to the compatibilist pursuits as good philosophers (questioning unreflective assumptions about freedom and responsibility) and are sympathetic towards their interests (feelings of freedom and moral responsibility that are deeply human and practically unavoidable), I ultimately remain unconvinced by their efforts. I do not find an unfettered will (a will unrestrained or overridden by direct external causes) to be sufficient to have moral responsibility.

Though I am unsure of his thought experiments, I agree with Derk Pereboom that what we really want is some sort of control of the people we are. If we die and are allowed to see the entire path our life took, we want to know that the power, during the individual moments in our lives, that we could have done something different. If determinism is true, then we could not have done anything different than what we have done, are currently doing, and will do in the future. In a counterfactual sense, things could have been different if the parameters had been different, but that is irrelevant to the actual state of affairs.

We want something to obtain in the world. The will can be said to represent that desire. The will can be said to be powerless because it cannot actually influence the world. It has no direct force. So, for example, I may want someone to love me, but no level of desire will actually make that desire obtain in the actual world. My willing of someone's love has no direct power over the actual state of affairs of their desire.

So, in effect, no matter how hard we try, we are ultimately powerless. We may gain the ability to exercise our will in some circumstances, but this is not given. At any moment, the universe can block our desire from obtaining, despite our best efforts. And there is nothing we can do about it.

If something is "necessary", it implies there are no other options. This is intended to account for situations (for instance) where mutual survival/safety is impossible due to environmental circumstances (I call this a break-down of morality). — VagabondSpectre

Please provide an example. As it currently stands, I can argue that, for example, it is immoral to wear certain colors because the majority of people might not like those colors. Because these colors are unnecessary, I am causing unnecessary harm by wearing them and, therefore, am doing something immoral.

The "justifiable" part is highly ambiguous though, and purposefully so. Different people will have different standards of justification (which can change with the environment), and so to keep the razor simple I would rather not provide an omni-answer for all moral question by trying to give a formula for any and all "moral justifications". — VagabondSpectre

But at this point, the razor is effectively useless. Unless you ascribe to some sort of divine command theory that is completely devoid of any human welfare connection whatsoever, everyone agrees causing harm for no good reason is immoral. A razor allows one to divide something into two categories. For example, Occam's Razor allows one to divide competing theories- ideas that are simpler are more likely to be true because unnecessary parts are superfluous at best and dead wrong at worst. However, as you admit, the qualifiers for this razor are vague, thus making it not a razor, but really just the groundwork notion behind morality.

With utilitarian calculus you can indeed justify some horrendous actions, but I would reject them as unjustified and unnecessary. Killing one person to become an organ donor to save five people for instance is a hypothetical which fractures or breaks-down morality in general because when it comes down to it the five people or the mad doctor might be willing to use force to carry it out. Without mutual agreement and consent, (on the part of the victim in this case) all we have is the arbitrary use of force in a survival situation.

To live in this society with it's given laws, we give tacit consent to be incarcerated if we do crime. If we don't then the onus is on us to remove ourselves from the midst of society. If it was permissible to arbitrarily sacrifice the few to save the many in any positive exchange (per utilitarian calculus) then we would all probably decide to separate ourselves from that society lest our own lives be dispensed as the currency of another.

The answer is that the sanctity of an innocent life is high on the hierarchy of values. — VagabondSpectre

I guess I'll start with the glaring issue, as I have some many nitpicks with the above passage. A runaway trolley is going down a track towards five people who cannot get out of the way in time. You can flip a switch and case the trolley to veer down a different path, but on this path is one person. You can either let the five people die or kill the one person. What is the moral option? If you pick to kill one person, please explain why this logic does not apply to the doctor case. If you pick to let the five people die, explain your reasoning and how it does not prevent us from every taking any consequentialist stance, no matter the cost.

If something does not inflict unnecessary or unjustifiable harm, it cannot be immoral. — VagabondSpectre

As @andrewk points out, this a loose rule of thumb at best. The issue that sticks out to me are the terms "unecessary" and "unjustifiable". Via an act utilitarian calculus, I can justify some pretty horendious things.

Philosophy is not a straight forward major. You do not get a lot of direct career and future possibilities out of it like you would with something from the sciences, business, or medical field.

In other words, the future does not exactly unfold itself for you, and this becomes even greater if you pick a major that is not exactly in high demand. This is not to say it can't be done or that you cannot do things outside your major to a fulfilling future, but I would not bank on that. People in other majors get more direct and a wider selection of possibilities. They have all the same opportunities those in the humanities have and more.

Do you need to do philosophy, in the sense that you cannot feel complete without doing it for a large portion of your life? Must you have philosophy on your mind 24-7 or you will start to lose it? If not, I suggest a double major. I would heavily suggest thinking about the paths you want to have available and those you are willing to close.

What do you want to do with it?

This quite unfairly implies that those who self-identify as atheists are not open to arguments. One can be an atheist (in the common sense of not believing in any deities or the supernatural) with an open mind, and most atheists probably think of themselves that way. — SophistiCat

I did not mean to imply that atheists are not open to arguments. Rather, I think there tends to be a difference in thought between someone who identifies as agnostic and someone who identifies as atheist. A better way of putting it, I tend to put some kind of stock into theism, while atheists, who are open to new arguments, tend to find the category of beings labelled "gods" to have failed to meet up to a reasonable standard.

I'm currently reading through Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice, which appears to relate to what you're saying. The book deals with the notion of transcendental justice and how a portion of western political philosophy focuses on this "ideal state." He wants to criticize this notion of justice (Rawls, Nozick, Hobbes, Locke, and the like) and replace it with comparative justice- something rooted in actual circumstances and actual practices and make judgement calls about justice surrounding the actual possibilities in front of us. For example, he argues that we don't need an "ideal state" to make comparisons and value them. In other words, a comprehensive "perfect ideal" political doctrine is not a necessary condition in order to make judgement calls about which state of affairs is better in a lot of the cases we are facing in the actual world.

Define what you mean by "subjective" and "objective".

Keep in mind this is an American perspective:

I put moderate left because I generally find the answers to problems coming from conservative thought to be more problematic than the other side. Keep in mind that I would like to emphasize "generally," as the left can come up with some pretty bad answers as well.

Agnostic. I would say atheist but that is only really towards certain conceptions of gods inside popular religions. I consider myself generally open to some arguments for something supernatural and do not think many of the atheistic approaches to theism meet a good standard to label theism false. To be honest, I find some atheists to be even more annoying than their theistic counterparts.

However, I effectively live a secular life, so I am not religious.

Chany Is it actually a choice if you don't even know there are alternatives, or if you don't have access to those alternatives? — anonymous66

No, but nothing in the example you provided indicated that everyone in the child's life withheld information about all other possibilities for employment and lifestyle and that the only job on the market that the woman potentially qualified for and was made available was pornography.

On another note, we may not need to have access to alternatives in order to be morally responsible for our decisions, a la Frankfurt cases in which the agent does not have alternative possibilities and is still intuitively held responsible.

Imagine this scenario. A child is born to a prostitute. Her mother has always been a prostitute, she is paid $1 a year, lives in squalor, has one change of clothes.. you get the picture, it's an awful life. The child grows up believing that type of life is normal. When she becomes an adult, she choose to become prostitute herself, and allows people to create videos of her engaging in sex. Lots of people get satisfaction from watching her perform those sex acts. She gets paid $1.50 (she get 50 cents more a year in return for letting them make videos) a year, and has virtually the same quality of life as her mother. Did she actually choose to become a porn star? — anonymous66

If she did so of her own unrestricted will, then, in the relevant moral and legal sense, yes. Everyone fits that criteria in regards towards their own upbringing. Parents have a standard of living. They perform some kind of function for society. By the laws of supply and demand, most of those careers are going to be in jobs the parent does not really want, with a good chance that they barely tolerate the work. Children are going to be raised up in this environment.

Are these the sort of arguments you expect to see in philosophy, though? — darthbarracuda

These individual phrases? No. But there are people who argue for religious experience and feeling, pragmatism, and faith on philosophical grounds.

I'm siding with @darthbarracuda on this one.

To be honest, the only people I see bringing up this distinction between belief and knowledge are atheists who want to call themselves "agnostic" to avoid actually arguing for a positive position. Belief is a requirement for knowledge, but does not entail knowledge- this is true. However, when someone says they are an "agnostic atheist" or an "agnostic theist," all they are saying is that they are agnostics with a inclination towards one side.

To say one is a theist is to express a positive position. The theist claims that god (going to completely avoid how vague that word is and how it can radically change) exists. I would say that the theist believes that, in some meaningful sense of the word "know," they know god exists. They may not give traditionally philosophical answers of reasoned justification, but they still give some sort of justification that they accept as grounds to belief in god. Even when the theist bases their belief on faith or something similar, there is usually some justification for using faith in this context, either from the theist themselves or a theistic philosopher.

This is easier to see in some lines of thought within atheism. For example, when the atheist is saying the burden of proof is on theism to show it is true and that atheism is the default position, the atheist is really saying that they meet a requirement that allows them to claim that god does not exist. In other words, the atheist is saying they are epistemolgically justified in claiming god does not exist, and in a sense, know that god does not exist. They acknowledge they might be wrong, but, under their epistemological system, they can claim knowledge on the nonexistence of god.

I will go further into depth as needed.

You will no doubt be familiar from your readings of ancient philosophy, about the constant injunction to rise above 'the passions'. I think emotional reactivity, including anger, is the subject of those warnings. That is why the ideal state is 'apatheia', tranquility or equanimity, where 'the sage' is not perturbed by 'the passions'. I don't think it means sheer dumb indifference or not giving a toss, but a state whereby the churning of emotions and feelings no longer drives you.

There is a natural reaction to seeing crimes committed or other acts which provoke anger, and the feeing of anger is unavoidable. But I think what a philosophical discipline comprises is not being driven by that, and by being self-aware enough to recognise and dissociate from the instinctive reaction that will often follow. — Wayfarer

I second this. Anger will occur. Getting this feeling of anger in certain situations may be appropriate. However, anger should not guide our actions. In fact, much the idea of established law and legal protocol is avoiding the issues of hasty judgement caused by anger.

The bias is not necessarily innate. Reading through a link on Wikipedia, there seems to be cultural differences between how people access their abilities and how they respond to success and failure. Of course, American culture tends to produce people who are overconfident, given the anti-intellectualism and faux intellectualism this country seems to specialize in:

http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/overestimate.aspx

I also find that people, in general, tend to be overconfident in their abilities to access facts properly. This is why you have broken clocks being right twice a day and inverse broken clocks being wrong twice a day. One of the areas I like looking into is epistemic peer disagreement- how we should respond regarding our beliefs when we encounter a person who, for all intents and purposes, is your equal on a subject. Philosophers especially fall victim to ignoring the fact that the person whose position they consider so erroneous has the same level of education and read the same essays; it never occurs to people that they might be the wrong party involved, not their opposition.

If the claim, "it's immoral" isn't enough to persuade people to disallow something in our society, then it seems the next step must be to show that it is harmful. — anonymous66

We are really drifting towards political philosophy at this point, but two things:

1) The claim, "it's immoral," is not a good reason to ban anything. We allow immoral acts all the time. There is a difference between the right action and the right to an action. For example, it may not be morally right to be mean to another person for no good reason, but no one would say that I do not possess the right to be mean to another person, regardless of whether the reason is good or not.

2) Harms usually must be demonstrably problematic to a society in order to garner regulatory control and awareness. The fact that it might harm myself or be a stupid decision does not mean the state or similar body can prevent the action. There are a number of religions and ideologies that I find harmful overall, particularly in specific forms, but I do not see this as grounds to ban these religions and ideologies.

Regulatory considerations come into play in issues of public welfare and (more debatably) public safety. Actions that dramatically affect the welfare of others outside an agreement, such as pollution and other externalities, demand some kind of regulation or ban because they directly harm others not inside the consensual agreements between private parties. Of more a more interesting line of discussion, we can talk about restrictions on behavior motivated by the notion of protecting people from themselves. Sometimes, even though the action is relatively localized to the private individual, we put laws into place that protect people from themselves. For example, helmet laws, laws surrounding suicide, and many drug laws are usually justified to protect people from their own poor decisions. This is the hot button issue- even if porn is harmful enough to warrant consideration to restrict access to, can the state reasonably do it?

lust just seems wrong. — anonymous66

Having sexual desires is wrong?

taking acts so personal (the physical acts of sex) and making them public just seems wrong. — anonymous66

Why must sex be personal? Sex is often personal, but it need not be. Further, why is making actions public to consenting adults remove the personal aspect of sex? What is wrong with a couple who likes to do porn for others? What's wrong with an adult who likes to sexually arouse others?

doesn't the porn industry just promote the idea that people are merely a means to an end? — anonymous66

There is nothing wrong with using people as an end, but solely as an end. Whenever I hire somebody to perform some task, I am using them as an end. When I get a musician to perform at a party, we are treating each other as ends. The musician wants to get payed and get a chance to perform in public, while I want to have live music to enhance a party. We are both using the other to achieve ends we desire. There is nothing wrong here, so long as we do not treat each other as solely means. We still have to respect the wishes of others. I cannot force the musician to play, withhold pay, or anything of that sort. The same goes for the musician.

If someone is not being forced to do porn and submit it to the public, then they are not being used solely as a means to an end.

The phrasing of the Kalaam Cosmological Argument's first premise is worded as such to avoid criticism from infinite regress issues in the extremely basic versions of the cosmological argument (such as the issue raised by the rephrasing offered). It is allowed to do define its conditions for causation and I do not think saying, "it is odd" is going to cut it.

The only criticism about the first premise is this: the argument might beg the question and close out the possibilities by restricting explanations to what we observe in the current universe. For example, I see tables being made and coming into existence. However, there is an important difference between the creation of tables and the beginning of the universe. The table is being made by rearranging matter. The table is not "beginning to exist" in the same way the universe is supposed to begin to exist (assuming there was not preexisting matter before the universe that forms the current universe). The argument wants to conflate common events with an event we have never seen before and know relatively little about: the emergence of time and space. In short, the beginning of the universe is a special event and we have no reason to believe the commonly observed rules of causation apply- we may require a special explanation. This is, in fact, what the argument wants to try to do with God, but it ignores a bigger issue: we are talking about a state of affairs we know nothing about and that one can reasonably argue we can never know about. We would be talking about a time before time, a notion that does not even make much sense. As such, we have no reason to believe the special explanation must conform to the first premise, so the first premise might be false.

Of course, the argument faces several other issues, but are beyond the scope of the thread.

Consequences. I'm not a die-hard consequentialist, but intentions tend to rank very low in determining whether an action is good or not. Who cares if you had the best intentions to overthrow a violent dictator- if your actions lead to such catastrophe and loss of life that it makes the dictator's violence pale in comparision, in what way are your actions good?

Also, on a side note, I am unaware of any studies linking the increase in food allergies to GMOs. There is a correlation, but correlation does not necessarily mean causation.

It's simple. Free will is an illusion and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool. :P

Obviously, I jest. But I think one thing you should consider is the psychological aspects of belief. I am not just talking about biases and underlying beliefs, I am talking about how people probably think differently from one another. It is not just they that they started with different premises and reached different conclusions- the entire process is potentially different. Of course, those psychological needs cannot be ignored as well. I do not, however, believe all disagreement is a result of different base beliefs. In some cases, the person's beliefs can just be wrong or faulty. People have changed their minds on issues because of arguments and ideas being presented to them before. In fact, we do it all the time. How far this can go is a matter of personal context.