My basic assumption is that philosophical thinking yields meaningful results. — Hanover

Is studying the history of philosophy the same thing as philosophical thinking?

If we start from the position, as I do, that there are two distinguishable disciplines here, then we can look at how they inform each other. For anything beyond textual work, I think being able to do philosophy, to think clearly about philosophical issues, is necessary for interpreting and explicating philosophical works. The dependency in that direction seems perfectly clear.

It's the other direction that is causing us trouble, and I think I can now gloss my use of "great" in previous posts: a work that is worth allowing yourself to be influenced by. That's still circular, but at least it's clearer that "greatness" is measured in how it informs your philosophical thinking, that it's about the chosen dependence of practice on history.

It's possible to reject the whole idea that there are two disciplines -- there are people who punt and just define philosophy as whatever philosophers do, whatever philosophers have done -- so there would not be two disciplines just one, and that would in effect make the history primary. It simplifies things, to treat philosophy as a kind of literature, but I don't think it's just that anymore than it's a science. We teach it nearly as if it's literature though, except for the logic courses which we treat as science.

I'll stop there -- but I do want to register my reservations about the word "results".

The part of that post I feel bad about is its reliance on the word "great", as in "great minds", "great works". I think West has a way to gloss that, and I might if I tried. As it stands, I'm only saying that we can derive value from studying the sorts of works value can be derived from, which blows.

Can't solve every problem in every post.

The question is whether philosophical thought is advanced by increased rigor, which would require one be intimately familiar with the underlying issues, the prior objections raised by prior philosophers, and what those responses have been. — Hanover

No. Leaving aside "underlying" --- because I don't know exactly what it's doing there --- this is like arguing that the only way to get from your house to the Waffle House is by studying all the routes people have taken from their house when in search of a Waffle House.

You may learn 10,000 ways of not making a lightbulb before you make one, but 100 would have done as well. There may be other things to learn from those other 9,900 ways not to make a lightbulb, some of those 'failures' may provide unique opportunities for insight, but there are always a vast number of ways to fail so you can't define success as trying all of the wrong ways. The last part of your sentence is just not so intimately connected to the idea of rigor as you seem to think it is.

Understanding the issue you want to address, yes, of course, and otherwise you're not addressing it. Knowing what everyone has said about it, no, not even what everyone thinks are the important things that have been said about it. That makes you an expert on what people have said about it, and that is not the same thing as rigor.

It is confusing that so much of the academic practice of philosophy, from coursework to publishing, is actually the history of philosophy, but that doesn't make them the same thing. In the sciences, from mathematics to physics to medicine, history is not the central focus of study as it is in academic philosophy. If that's our model, why don't we follow it?

If I have the opportunity to speak with Person A who has read the pertinent literature and has taken course work and written papers with regard to Issue X or Person B who has only generally considered Issue X, but has read next to nothing and has taken no coursework and not written on the Issue, I'd choose Person A for the more meaningful response. — Hanover

You'll get a response that is more comprehensive, more informed of the current state of the academic study of philosophy, certainly. Whether it will be more "meaningful", whether it will be "better", is unclear. This is just "looking where the light is best", isn't it?

If we accept the notion that we're all on equal footing just by virtue of our natural intelligence and worldly wisdom — Hanover

I'm saying it's possible to disagree with @T Clark's view without mistaking the current academic practice of philosophy for philosophy.

I like the idea of soul-forming education. — T Clark

Cornel West does claim that there is benefit to studying the great minds of the past, and makes that claim exactly in the context of a critique of the current state of academia.

In my opinion, knowing that this philosopher said one thing and another something else is of limited importance. What is important is knowing how to think along with and evaluate what is said. But by doing the former one may increase her ability to do the latter. That others have thought about these things, and often with more insight than we have is not a resource that should be ignored. — Fooloso4

Reading a great work of philosophy is not only of value for improving your own thinking, it is also a pleasure. Like all pleasures, a matter of temperament, even taste, but also one for which nothing else can substitute.

there are journalistic standards that one must adhere to in order to be published — Hanover

From the Cornel West piece that @jamalrob linked:

Howard University is not removing its classics department in isolation. This is the result of a massive failure across the nation in “schooling,” which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education. Education draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity. It is the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings.

The removal of the classics is a sign that we, as a culture, have embraced from the youngest age utilitarian schooling at the expense of soul-forming education. To end this spiritual catastrophe, we must restore true education, mobilizing all of the intellectual and moral resources we can to create human beings of courage, vision and civic virtue. — Cornel West

You offered @T Clark one of the standards for being a professional academic philosopher, but there's clearly room for doubt that this is the sort of standard he was asking for, and what Cornel West suggests here might be closer to the mark, something that might be pursued by academic institutions but that, West says here categorically, is not.

This whole discussion might have benefited from distinguishing two issues: @T Clark's regularly avowed discomfort with the Western philosophical tradition, and the professionalization of philosophy in academic institutions. It is perfectly obvious how the professionalization of empirical disciplines advances them, as those require tremendous resources to make progress, halting and uncertain as that progress may be. It is not obvious, not to me anyway, that the same model has been well applied to the arts or to philosophy.

The interesting comparison is mathematics, always the odd duck. Mathematics may not require expensive research facilities (no large hadron colliders needed) or hordes of grad students to do the grunt work of research, but to do original work requires a tremendous amount of quite specialized education. Is the same true of philosophy?

If I am to act in such a way that you will be affected by my actions, it is moral for me to consider how you will feel about my actions.

I may not choose to act in a way that you like: my actions may affect another or many others and I might weight their feelings more heavily; I may act contrary to your short-term wishes in furtherance of what I believe are your long-term wishes; and there are many, many other complications.

But not to consider you at all, in fact to refuse categorically to consider how you will feel about my actions, is not to grant you a status equal to my own as a fellow moral agent deserving such consideration, is, in short, not to treat you as a person.

if language games are ways of seeing how utterances can make sense, then theologies, religions and poetry would all count as language games, unless you wanted to claim that no sense is made in some or all of those disciplines. — Janus

You're still asking the wrong question -- as bolded -- at least as we're trying this out.

Early Wittgenstein had a doctrine -- I think, am I remembering this right? or is this just a Vienna Circle thing -- about what might make a statement senseless. Later Wittgenstein, it always seems to me, denies the presumption of sense, and instead of a bin marked "senseless" to chuck things in, he has an in-basket of things that have not yet been given sense, not yet shown to be meaningful.

Dumb example: a philosopher asks, "How do I know that tree there is real?" and presumes that the question makes sense, because, because, well, it's grammatical English. Does it make sense? There's no answer to that right off, not even the answer that it is senseless. You can say, well, if I lived next-door to a Hollywood backlot, I might very well look out my window and wonder if the tree I'm looking at is real.

That much you could get from Austin, showing you a situation in which it would be quite clear what is meant by asking if a tree is real. Since that's clearly not what the philosopher thinks he meant, the burden is his to show us a situation in which his meaning would be that clear. Insofar as there is a standard to meet, a paradigm to measure up to, it's ordinary language. It's not that only ordinary language is permissible, but that if you hope to be making sense, you hope to be making sense the way ordinary language does.

That would be the sense in which Wittgenstein is only offering reminders, not a theory. He doesn't offer a new standard, one he just made up himself and is satisfied with, of how to decide whether some utterance is meaningful. He's offering a way for you to see for yourself, a way of looking in which it will be perfectly clear whether it's meaningful.

I really think that means that Wittgenstein, unlike the logical positivists, gives you no grounds for dismissing religious speech, for example, as meaningless. But he does deny you the presumption that it is meaningful. If it is woven into the fabric of people's lives, if whether you say this or you say that is consequential for them, if it is as plain to the members of a faith community what their religious speech means as "Would you pass the salt?" is to 'us', outsiders to that faith, then what is there to say?

If, on the other hand, you ask your friend the believer a question about his faith and he gives you an answer that, let's say, "feels" like it's just as abstract or vague or insubstantial as your question, and as you question each answer you get some similar-feeling verbiage each time, so that you feel like you're digging a hole in mud, never making any progress... Yeah, you might begin to suspect that he doesn't know what his faith means any better than you. All he's got is words he says that you don't, and they only connect to other words he says that you don't, a machine that runs alright but has no evident function.

As a poet, you might want to build exactly that sort of machine. (William Carlos Williams defines "poem" as "a small machine, made of words".) --- No need to get into that here. --- But as a philosopher, you want to avoid doing that. I think part of what Wittgenstein is after is how it is possible to build such a useless machine, how it can be done without realizing it, and whether there are ways of thinking -- perhaps even ways we cannot completely avoid!-- that are particularly likely to lead to pointless machine building.

Around here I'm reaching the limits of even guessing though...

This makes me wonder whether, on your interpretation, Wittgenstein would count religions or theologies as language games. — Janus

That is exactly the sort of question I think might be wrongheaded, and it's the sort of question a lot of us have felt ourselves wanting to ask after reading Wittgenstein. (For instance, I believe he nowhere says that philosophy "is a language-game".)

But what if there's no ontology here at all, no saying this practice here, this is a language-game, but that one isn't? What if language-games are just a sort of flashlight (remember this, @Banno?) you can shine on the thinking and talking and so on that people do? What if, instead of saying that the language-game is that which gives sense to an utterance or a word used in an utterance -- what if we only said that language-games are a way of seeing how an utterance can make sense, how a word can be given sense by being used in such a way? Not a question of what's there -- is this or that a language-game? -- but of how we look at language use.

The methods used in the PI is more valuable than the theory expounded. — Banno

Than what theory?

Either there is no theory to be "less valuable" or Wittgenstein is wrong about what he was doing. Which is it?

@InPitzotl pointed out the intimate connection between space and vision. Something else worth considering is the relation between other sensible qualities and time. No sound without time, without movement. Gazing at an object we can imagine we are seeing the object as it simply is, not in its doing something. Persisting doesn't seem like something an object *does*.

I just don't think post-facto justifications like "it was worthwhile" justify actually starting those set of harms for someone else. — schopenhauer1

Somebody has to decide. You could say I must have children because they'll be glad I did; I could say you must not because they won't be. Is one of us right?

If I'm buying you a gift, I subordinate my tastes to yours: the question is not whether I would like this, or whether I think you *should* like this, but whether I think you will. With potential children, we have plenty of reason to expect they will think life worthwhile.

The asymmetry argument should be placed here. If we're right in thinking our kids will think life worth it, all good; if we're wrong, we will feel guilty. Reversing that: if we're right thinking, against the odds, that our children wouldn't think life worth it, then we've spared them that experience; if we're wrong, and they would've thought life worth it, we needn't feel guilty because by not existing they don't experience missing out.

There is a natural way to read "language-games" as an enlarging of Frege's context principle, and along with that you might see "grammar" as enlarging the idea of logical form. Frege and Russell demonstrated that surface grammar is not a sure guide to the logical form of a statement, and it's the logical form that shows you the role of a word. You could see LW doing something similar.

But there's a problem with that reading: it has Wittgenstein offering an improved theory of language, when he seems to be adamant that he's not offering a theory. Something's wrong if you end up saying, the problem with philosophy is an incorrect theory of language, here's the correct one, problem solved.

There's reason to think Wittgenstein was already convinced, at the time of the Tractatus, that philosophy is largely a confusion brought on by misunderstanding language, and in this he is not alone. He thought then that the solution was logical analysis, a process that reveals the underlying logical form of our statements.

One way to read the Tractatus is as an explanation of why logical analysis works, or at least showing what the world must be like for logical analysis to work. When we come to the latter Wittgenstein, we see 'grammatical analysis', the exploration of utterances through imagining the language-game they might belong to, but it does seem like the Tractarian 'metaphysical' bit, if that's what it is, is missing, or at least elusive, so we're tempted to grab "forms of life" and stick it in there.

But if that's right, why doesn't Wittgenstein just say so? I mean, he kinda does, here and there, but why does he insist he's not offering a theory? Is he mistaken about that? Is he actually offering a theory about language? If he's mistaken about that, surely that's pretty interesting, and we should all be talking about why LW doesn't think his theory is a theory.

I don't have a simple answer here, but one thing worth considering is taking language-games (and grammar and forms of life, all that) not as a theory but as a philosophical technique. A language-game is at least a way to show the reader what Wittgenstein wants them to see. (Just as Frege invented the Begriffschrift as a way to show the difference between concept and object, not as a claim that this is the notation everything is *really* written in.)

Actually, I'm hoping that someone will make a good case that I should be reading those books. — T Clark

I can do that, a bit.

There is at least this: you can read philosophy, even systematic philosophy, not with the intention of "getting the answers", but only with the intention of watching another mind at work, an interesting mind, one hopes. I could say you can learn to think "better" by doing this, but it's not a matter of picking up re-usable techniques. It's certainly not a matter of adopting or rejecting whatever specific doctrine the writer is putting forth, if any.

That might seem strange because, going by this forum, people seem to think philosophy is almost entirely a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with someone else, or with some statement, or with some argument. That's the least interesting part of philosophy for me, and I try not to spend much time doing that. The more interesting part is learning to think differently. Sometimes that's trying out different terms and categories, a specific change like that; sometimes it's seeing an entirely different sort of approach to an issue or a problem.

You can get, from a book of philosophy, some specific alternatives to try out, but more valuable to me, I think, is just the example of working out such an alternative, to show that it's possible and how it can be done.

There's an, what I like to describe as, arbitrariness to words. — TheMadFool

Saussure liked to describe it that way too. All of linguistics since Saussure likes to describe it that way.

And Shakespeare:

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

You can go back to the Cratylus for some arguments pro and con.

Grice distinguished between natural meaning (clouds mean rain) and non-natural meaning ("clouds" in English means clouds).

There's a bit more to Wittgenstein than recognizing the arbitrariness of the sign.

people believe they are doing what is best when they select some solution to their problems — Average

There.

Probably because they think that they already know what is best — Average

Well, no.

even if this is true I don’t think that it follows from it that people wouldn’t still try to justify their decisions with reasons — Average

Of course not. The issue is optimization vs satisficing.

Srap is right in saying — Banno

I was describing my guess at MU's view, so you agree with him rather than me.

Better a question that can't be answered than an answer that can't be questioned.

(I think that was Feynman.)

Ah, I misread you. — Luke

I habitually write in the voices of other people without making it obvious I'm doing so. Need to work on that. (Though I can't imagine giving up these little embedded dialogs. Can you imagine the Investigations without all the other voices?)

That is likely because you know you can do the same without knowing and probably have. — I like sushi

There are mantras of the programming community we might learn from:

1. There are only two kinds of programs: those so simple they obviously have no mistakes, and those so complex they have no obvious mistakes.

2. If you write a program as cleverly as you can, then, by definition, you are not smart enough to debug it.

I have come to believe that my fascination with formal methods in philosophy is, in part, a flight from the responsibility of thinking, a desire to be able to build a machine that answers will fall out of. On the other hand, the motivation for thinking in small, simple, verifiable steps is itself honorable, and to some degree a bulwark against nonsense. (This is one of those things the fellow next door, who thinks logic might be evil, doesn't get.)

working in psychology, we responded to the replication crisis quite well I think — Isaac

Agreed! I find I sometimes have to point this out to people who point to the replication crisis as more evidence that science is bullshit. It's more evidence, not less, that science is, at least, intended to be a self-correcting communal enterprise. That is its great value, not the supposed "scientific method".

One particularly nice example of this is "the blowback effect" that was very widely reported because it provides an all-too-neat explanation for the entrenchment of people's political views. Unfortunately the original study failed replication. I heard the principal author interviewed and he laughed, well, I have a choice now, don't I? I can retrench or I can admit that their study was a lot better than mine, so yeah, there is no evidence of a "blowback effect".

Why do you think that? — Luke

I was describing MU's views, based on dim memory of similar disputes before. And as it turns out:

If I don't have the type, and you don't have the type, then where is the type? I think you're wrong here. A type must be somewhere, if it has any existence at all. I think that types are within my mind, and they are within your mind as well. — Metaphysician Undercover

There's a surprising strain of psychologism in MU's thinking.

the point we now find ourselves, where one's conclusions are all that matter, not the diligence with which one has arrived at them — Isaac

Here's an example that horrified me, a few months ago I think it was.

The US Census Bureau had finally released some results, late. There had been a lot of concern about the potential of (another) minority undercount, because of the pandemic, funding and operational issues, various sorts of political interference in the process like the public debate over the citizenship question, and so on. The results showed a perfectly predictable decline in the "non-Hispanic white" percentage of the total population, in line with all other recent results.

The day these numbers were released, I heard a discussion on the radio in which a 'journalist' was asked for her reaction to the news and she said, "I was surprised that the census was so accurate." "Accurate" was her word. "Accurate."

I have a lot of respect for the statisticians at the US Census Bureau. It's my understanding that enormous amounts of social science and political analysis relies directly or indirectly on their products. As near as I can tell, their work is the gold standard. They were months late, needing extensions, to produce their report, and this 'journalist' glanced at a top-line summary, saw that it included the numbers she wanted to see, and immediately pronounced it "accurate".

I don't know how to react to that except with contempt and disgust.

He's the place we're trying to avoid ending up when talking about active inference. — Isaac

I can't tell you how relieved I am to hear you say that. That guy is full of shit. He seems determined to be the new Sheldrake.

Kind of like 98.6 fahrenheit is just an average of many bodies. — Joshs

It's not even that. I think there's a Radiolab episode about it... ADDED: Well, I mean, yes it is quite specifically "an average of many bodies", but it isn't and never was the "average normal human temperature" or something.

I don’t think that it necessarily follows from this that I’m wrong when I claim that people believe they are doing what is best when they select some solution to their problems. In other words they think that it makes sense. Otherwise it’s hard to believe that they would voluntarily choose to do what seems inferior and absurd. — Average

Actually there's plenty of reason to think they wouldn't bother to find out what's best. Google "herbert simon satisficing". Perfect is the enemy of good.

At first I thought you were stuck on the problem of the criterion, which most people prefer to ignore as circular nonsense, but in several posts, you seem to demand something like knowledge of the future in order to make a decision. I'll grant you, sometimes people pull in their horns too readily in the name of human fallibility, but some standards or expectations are still obviously unreachable. This for instance:

I don’t think that it would make sense to try something even if you feel fairly certain that it will succeed. What we need is some sort of proof or evidence that guarantees that we are making decisions that make sense. — Average

Proof? Guarantees? Ambition is commendable, but are you serious?

pain hurts/feels bad/is painful — RogueAI

I just don't understand what your point is in saying this. Do you think you're describing pain by saying that it's a sensation that hurts? It hurts because that's what pain is. Are you defining pain? Explaining it? Are you saying anything at all?

So you don't need to describe pain because we already have the word "pain"?

That's just a way of saying that seeing red and feeling pain are subjective — Marchesk

Well you're demanding a physical description right? How does it go when you avail yourself of the non-physical? Should be easy as pie now, shouldn't it?

The mental aspect of pain (that it hurts) — RogueAI

You said that before. Do you mean something besides "pain is painful"?

It makes no sense to say that we each have a type called "pain". — Luke

I think this is exactly what he believes. We each have our own type system, each have different meanings for the words we share.

Does anyone think they can describe "what it's like to see a red patch" or "what it's like to be in pain" in non-physical terms?

the salient aspect of pain isn't that it involves nerves and brain states x,y,z, it's that pain hurts. It feels bad. — RogueAI

That sounds to me like you're saying it's painful to be in pain. Were you hoping to say something more than that?

Knowing all the physical facts about the brain states of people having experience x (e.g., seeing red) won't lead to knowing what experience x is like (e.g., what it's like to see red). — RogueAI

But even if we grant that, is it an argument against some sort of naturalism or physicalism? Is there no difference between the brains of people who have read about swimming and people who have done it and know how to swim? That seems crazy, doesn't it? And only people who have done it know what it's like to swim. Knowing what it's like is a function of memory, isn't it?

but Mary's Room doesn't really address this very point — InPitzotl

Maybe not. It's clearly trying to, and a lot of people have taken it as having done so.

If we were to talk about Mary's room "as psychologists", the first thing we'd note is that her developmental environment was impoverished, abnormal, so psychologically all bets are off.

That's clearly not the intention behind the thought experiment, but it does raise a question: is there a coherent way to frame this thought experiment, so that it makes the point it's trying to make, the one that you believe it doesn't? If not, maybe that tells you something, but then maybe that's just an argument from poverty of imagination.

Will she learn anything or not? — frank

We can distinguish readily, at the person level, between 'knowledge that' and 'knowledge how':

WE can read about riding a bike, watch people ride bikes and maybe even dream of riding bikes ... but that isn't riding a bike. — I like sushi

Could you learn to ride a bike just by reading about it? No. Experience is required. — RogueAI

We could say something similar, distinguishing 'knowledge by acquaintance' --- there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to do that with just a preposition, again simply at level of a person's experience:

Surely you can picture the dramatic difference between sitting in your chair and pondering a 480,000 mile trip, and actually going 480,000 miles. — InPitzotl

We might think of this as the difference between physically interacting with something and interacting with it 'mentally', only thinking about it or imagining it. And we will want to say that the acquisition of knowledge how, say, how to ride a bike, requires that physical interaction, that it's no use just thinking about it. Of course we recognize there are causes all the way through in either version: if I read accounts of someone riding a bike, they are causally connected to the physical event of someone riding a bike, but we're connected as readers to that event differently than the person participating in it, and that's all we need for 'mental' here.

The question is whether all instances of an agent knowing how or being acquainted with can be reduced, without remainder, to something someone could know that. That is, can we pinpoint a difference in the structure or functioning of the brain of a person who knows how to ride a bike from the brain of a person who doesn't? Can we pinpoint a difference in the structure or functioning of the brain of a person who has been to the moon from the brain of a person who hasn't? Is it conceivable that those differences could be written down and read about? Is there any sort of ability or acquaintance not describable as a physical fact about the person?

I think that's the idea. At first it looks like just a sort of 'dualism of the gaps' --- just because neuroscience can't yet achieve these sorts of explanations, then it will never be able to. What we want is to isolate something that it looks like neuroscience couldn't explain in principle, something that would categorically escape it. I don't know why people think color vision fits the bill, but apparently they do.

Still thinking about this...

We can talk about the scent that a flower "gives off" as a sort of separate thing; we do, of course, say that we smell flowers, but we can think of the scent as something the flower, as it were, causes, as something it sort of does, but we don't think this way about how the flower looks. When we see the flower, we see it, not something it causes (its "appearance") or something it does.

Same for the sound of a horse's hoof striking cobblestones. When you hear that, you hear something the horse, or the horse's hooves, cause. But when you see the horse, you don't think of that as something the horse is just the cause of, but as just the horse itself.

Thinking about how we might catch onto any of sight or smell or sound first, and then have to match up other aspects to that, I was thinking that whatever privileging of sight was in your very first post here was accidental, in a sense. But now I think there's something to it. We do seem to think of seeing things as more directly grasping them as what they are than hearing them or smelling them, which feel like they're one step away from the actual thing.

But the same could maybe be said for touch and taste -- that those are more the actual thing. That would be very odd for taste since it's so closely bound up with smell. And it could be that the feel of a surface or the resistance we feel when hefting an object, maybe these are a bit too narrow an experience of the object and so, in a way, generic, realizable in many different objects.

I just don't have clear ideas about all of the senses, and might want to take back a lot of this, but I think it does turn out that we don't naturally distinguish how a thing looks from the thing, as we are inclined to do with at least some of the other senses.

Which brings us right back to your original version of the puzzle, that there's a potential for being surprised by perhaps any sensible aspect of an object except its appearance.

If true, that's very curious indeed.

I am emotionally sure my onw logic is evil too, that is why I started the discussion, after a life of watching what I do when I argue I have a very bad feeling about it. — FalseIdentity

Perhaps you have noticed yourself trying to win an argument. That's not in itself evil; it's not even a bar to discovering truth. But if your principal motivation is to win, rather than to seek the truth, you put yourself at risk of practicing sophistry rather than philosophy, or what the rationalist community calls the dark arts.

Being mindful of your motivation is a good thing, but don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

What about cases where you know that they'll appreciate the imposition later down the line? — khaled

That was more or less the starting point for this discussion, not with a claim that we know it for a fact in the case before us, but that we assume it and it's reasonable to assume it.

Can moral sentiments be misleading if they lead to bad conclusions? — schopenhauer1

I don't think of the moral sentiments as just a matter of the individual's reaction --- it's more like language: each of us speaks an idiolect, sure, but collectively, in the aggregate, those overlapping idiolects define a speech community, and the practice and intuitions about usage of each of us also carries some authority. There's no Correct English; there's only what English speakers by and large think is correct, and what they say. Each can speak, to some degree, for the entire community on correctness of usage, even though now and then they will disagree. And that authority comes not just from knowledge but from the fact that the practice of each us determines, in part, what counts as correct English.

As morals go, it's plain that there are differences among individuals, and between communities, but if you think of humanity in the whole as your moral community, then these are just idiolects and dialects. There are commonalities across communities and traditions as well, and they are considerable. I look for the basis of morality in what people feel is praiseworthy and blameworthy, what fills them with admiration, what they resent or find repulsive. I don't see any firmer ground for morality than that.

Happy slave. — schopenhauer1

That's an interesting example, and it's apparently pretty important to your view, so maybe we should spend some time on that. I'll just note, to start with, that my case doesn't rest on every individual slave feeling wronged by his master. It is true that slavery has been a common practice throughout the bulk of human history, in a variety of forms; but the fact that all of the modern world officially disapproves of slavery doesn't support either of us more than the other. If you compare, say, ancient attitudes toward slavery and modern ones, the fact of change shows that human beings can be brought, en masse, to finding slavery repellent. There's room for you to think of yourself as one of the first abolitionists, if you like, but it doesn't undermine my view of the task you face, to move us to find life itself repugnant, as we find slavery repugnant, and hold blameworthy those who place another in that situation.

I shouldn't punch people, whatever their later feeling on it is. It is wrong to cause suffering, period — schopenhauer1

But of course you can't mean this. A boxer does not feel wronged when their opponent punches them, even if it hurts. On the other hand, if you punch me after the bell has wrung and I've dropped my guard, I will feel wronged. There's an issue of consent here, which is important to your case as well. But there is a further counterexample: sometimes young men are in the habit of playfully punching each other on the bicep, and it's supposed to hurt, just not much. Whether anyone consents to that isn't quite clear. What is clear is that there will be cases where the punched party does not feel wronged, but cases, if the punch was in anger and hard enough to raise a bruise, where they might. Intention matters as well, and plays almost no role in your account of our being wronged by our parents. If someone takes a swing at your buddy, who's standing next to you at a drunken party, but hits you instead, do you feel wronged? Maybe, maybe not. If you feel very wronged and pull a knife, those around you will (one hopes) try to de-escalate the situation by getting you to feel differently about it -- he's just drunk, he didn't mean it, you're not even bleeding, it's just a party, shit happens. None of that is a denial of the bare facts that A caused harm to B, but it's an invitation to see it in a different light so that you feel differently about it.

Here's another way to think about my story's reliance on our instinct for self-preservation.

Do people who find themselves to be alive feel wronged by their parents? Overwhelmingly the answer is no, but there are obviously problems with that. Some, perhaps many, might feel that way sometimes, and that's a reminder that feelings are tied to specific events, to specific circumstances. People can have something like a feeling that is present across varying circumstances, but we tend to reach for different words there, something like "attitude" or maybe "outlook" or "mindset", though the latter have a more cognitive ring to me, more to do with expectations than affect.

I find it plausible that we experience our own instinct for self-preservation largely as an attitude that life is fundamentally a good thing. There are of course extreme experiences when we just want it to stop, and those powerful feelings might trump the general attitude. There's a sort of corollary too, that we may generally have a pretty negative and sour affect but if we find ourselves suddenly in danger (car skidding off the road, that sort of thing) then our instinct for self-preservation will come roaring back as a feeling, a powerful desire not to die in this moment.

Antinatalism is the claim that a person brought into being has thereby been wronged. Their being wronged might be accompanied by an attitude that they have or have not been wronged, or, more fleetingly, feelings that they have or have not been wronged. In other words, sometimes the antinatalist claim will align with the purported victim's own feelings or attitudes, and sometimes it won't.

To start with, then, we need to clarify in what sense someone may have been wronged without feeling that they have been wronged. That's certainly possible, but I'm not sure the usual cases are much help. For example, if you steal from me but I don't know it, sure, I've been wronged and don't feel that I have been. But that's a matter of knowledge; if I knew, I would feel wronged. Being alive isn't like that: we know perfectly well that we are, and, past a certain age, we know perfectly well how we came to be. I haven't been able to think of an example that's more like the wrong life is supposed to be.

Now for the wrong done. Is the wrong intermittent? That is, am I wronged by my parents only at the moments in my life when I am suffering? Taking that option, we could focus on whether, in those moments of suffering, I have feelings of having been wronged by my parents for bringing me into being. (And then, if those feelings are absent, we have to have ready an account of that, along the lines suggested in the previous paragraph.)

Another option is that the wrong is something like exposure to risk of suffering; in that case, the risk is persistent from the beginning of your life until its end, and you are wronged in this sense every moment you are alive, whether you are suffering at the moment or not. An analogy for this sort of wrong leaps to mind, that of a general who sends troops on a mission based on a preposterously faulty idea. The troops may come to no harm, through luck or their own ability, but they will still feel wronged; they will resent having had to run that risk because of someone else's folly. Here again, we need an account of why people mostly do not feel wronged as the troops sent on this mission do.

The conception of the wrong done can be strengthened, it seems, by noting that not only are you exposed to risk every moment of your life, but it's a near certainty you won't always escape harm. How should we think of the wrong done here? It's not clear to me. We have, in the first take, actual harmful events; we have, in the second, unjustified risking of harm. This third seems more about establishing culpability: if our general knew a certain sort of mission was risky and sent the troops out not once, when they might have gotten lucky, but over and over and over again, people might feel he was "tempting fate", relying on a faulty view of the chances of no one coming to harm. I'm not sure we even need that calculus here, because there's no question about whether the parents are culpable. (It might have some point if we take parents as a group, and stipulate that some of their offspring will be unlucky, and so on. Not clear then who we take to be the moral agent; when I suffer should I blame all parents, as a group, rather than mine?)

What's the point of all this? Twofold. On the one hand, insofar as I incline to any theory of morality, it's based in the moral sentiments, but I don't want to make too much of that, because I don't have much of a theory. On the other hand, most successful moral arguments succeed precisely by arousing the moral sentiments. It's no good telling someone that they should think something is wrong that they don't; you change their view by showing it to them in such a way that they feel it is wrong. (And obviously there's just as little point in telling people how they should feel.) I think this is what you are attempting with your favorite analogy lately, the "forced game": you want to elicit from your audience a feeling that placing someone in such a situation is wrong.

I don't think "optimism bias" is any help here. If it's real, it only explains why people think their lives have been, and will be, overall better than they actually have been and will be. But that's a cognitive issue. If people in moments of suffering, do not feel wronged by their parents, optimism bias doesn't explain that; if they do not feel wronged all the time because they are constantly at risk of being harmed, optimism bias doesn't explain that; and if you fail to arouse the moral sentiments of your audience, to feel that children have been wronged simply by being brought into being, optimism bias doesn't explain that either.

It's difficult to keep this discussion distinct from the antinatalism discussions elsewhere. I'm trying to avoid critiquing arguments in favor of antinatalism, and focus on why it's unpersuasive. Maybe this post makes it clearer how closely connected I think our experience of moral life is to what we find persuasive in moral discussion.

(As philosophers, we'll always be tempted to believe that the class "persuasive" can be identified with the class "coherent and logical", though we know perfectly well that it cannot. I am going to make an effort to connect any criticism I have of antinatalism's coherence to the goal of moral suasion as described above.)

Small point of interest: since antinatalism is sort of the Hippocratic Oath on stilts, I looked it up: alongside the original injunction to "do no harm" are injunctions against performing abortions and against administering poison "even if asked", which, depending on who's asking, means not aiding in suicide or euthanasia. That's slightly interesting.