The outcome is no people. — schopenhauer1

Yeah. That is not a possible result for a "moral argument" if there is such a thing. Morality is for people dealing with each other; if you've got an argument that concludes with there being no people, either you've messed up somewhere or whatever that is, it's not morality.

Are you under the impression I'm defending the existence of the abstract object "set of all persons" rather than the existence of the individual members of that set?

And I'm not actually doing either; I'm saying if your vision of morality requires there to be no individual persons, or collections of them, then that's not what we mean by "morality".

If you want to call it "advice", fine.

The paradox is immediate: the only way to make sure others are treated as they should be is to make sure there are no people at all. (As I said a very long time ago, this is to prefer the vacuous truth: no balloons are popped if there are no balloons.) That cannot be a moral claim because it leads directly to the end of the circumstances in which moral claims make sense. (But if we allow the vacuous truth any force, we have paradox at best.)

I don't understand why social groups have to be in the equation, and not just how we treat each other. — schopenhauer1

Social groups are a byproduct of how humans survive, sure. — schopenhauer1

Many of us believe there is a pretty straightforward story that starts at kinship, which natural selection takes an interest in, to the great variety of human communities today, which are not products of evolution. This story gives us a basis for understanding the existence of moral sentiments and moral behavior. I do not believe morality is just ideas we have about right and wrong, and I believe the evidence supports this view.

Leaving all that aside, the result is that what engages our moral sentiments is other people, moral behavior is behavior that involves other people in some way, and that it doesn't even make sense to talk about morality outside the context of people interacting with each other.

Thus while you seem to take the admirable moral position of standing up for not mistreating certain individuals, something is clearly wrong because your position calls for there to be no individuals.

I do not have to pinpoint what's wrong with a paradoxical argument to know that its conclusion is absurd; figuring out how you got there is interesting, but we know something is wrong somewhere, because we know from the start that the conclusion is absurd. That's why it's a paradox.

humanity vs. individual — schopenhauer1

individual vs. society — schopenhauer1

And I claim that the substance of morality is how we must treat each other if we're going to live together in social groups, and nothing else. I don't know what else it could possibly be -- well, short of it being your duty to God or something I assumed is not on the table here. I don't see how ethical questions arise at all if not among groups of individuals. I don't claim morality is your duty to some abstract thing, but to the others you live with and among.

And that's why I conclude that whatever anti-natalism is, it cannot be a moral claim at all, because its only possible result is for there to be no people let alone groups of them.

People have a right not to be harmed — khaled

How are we to understand this?

If it's an element of the social contract, then other parties to the contract have a corresponding duty not to harm you. Neither are absolute, though; we balance them and the other rights and duties that flow from the contract. If you're harming someone, they have the right to harm you to make you stop. If you violate our laws, we may take away your liberty for a time, or some of your possessions, harming you. Those decisions aren't easy, but working out those trade-offs is what we do in order to live together.

But does this right extend beyond that? Beyond, that is, a duty of others like you to respect it? Do you have a right not to have a tree fall on you? Surely not, else the tree would have a duty not to fall on you, and we don't think of trees as parties to the social contract.

I've never seen someone reject the "deal" that is society. But if someone says "I don't want to live in a society where I must work to survive after I become an adult" they're welcome to leave. I always thought there should be some service that does that, allow people to just leave and dump them in some random jungle somewhere since they hate society so much. — khaled

People do reject their duties under the social contract all too often; besides simple criminality, it's the source of the tragedy of the commons that you and @Isaac have been dancing around.

But what you want is a right to opt out of the social contract altogether, and best of all would be for society to recognize your right to opt out and have a State of Nature Zone set aside where they could dump you if you so choose.

But if this is somehow related to anti-natalism, I would think the argument is something like this:
1. Being born is all it takes to be a party to the social contract.
2. By coercing someone to be born, you coerce them into becoming a party to the social contract.
3. No one should be coerced into becoming a party to the social contract.
4. Therefore, no one should be coerced to be born.

I can't say I really understood your suggestion, maybe because this mostly isn't my thing. I could understand what the confusion you describe would mean for self reports; I think I can see what it might mean for introspection; I'm not sure I understand how it could actually be the phenomenon of consciousness, though the idea of that being a sort of flickering between different functions or different layers is strangely appealing. Like I said, not something I've been devoting time to so not sure I'm the best sounding board.

Well, watching public hearings where elected officials clearly have no idea what the tech people they're talking to are really up to -- not encouraging.

Perhaps the central problem here is that the only people genuinely capable of understanding the issues involved are scientists and technologists.

Option 1: we get them to effectively police themselves. I think in practice that means some of them policing others, and that means providing institutional support to those scientists and technologists who have been forthcoming about the issues and take them seriously. The institutional support Bostrom has received is just a tiny start. We could actually institute review boards or something: you don't convince our representatives within your community that this is cool, you don't get funding and other resources. That sounds a little sketchy, and leaves the problem of how we could have the competence to select such representatives. And it could just fail -- the US used to garner Nobel after Nobel in high energy physics, then we dropped the ball and suddenly all of our postdocs and young researchers were headed to Europe and elsewhere. People can always pack up their science and go somewhere else.

Option 2: we raise our own competence and we make Mexico pay for it get scientists to help. Scientists themselves are aware of the problems of not communicating with the wider public about their work -- I think the fights over creationism left a mark and then the failure (what I was talking about above) to get the superconducting super-collider built left more like a wound. I think those two things, within living memory for a lot of folks, made it clear that communicating with the wider public is not something science as a whole can shrug off or leave to journalists.

I think we could really step up and support Option 2. Provide serious funding and support for communication efforts and in turn raise our expectations of what we laypeople will get in return. It could amount to "you don't get our money until we understand what you're doing, so explain it" in the best possible way. We all know academia has suffered from the current climate in which only research matters because it brings in the money (and oh yeah we also teach a little on the side). Think of science as being in a similar position: not much in the way of funding resources or prestige attached to public outreach, and specifically in communication that would make us competent to regulate this stuff. We can fix that anytime we want.

You're right, the alarm bell has been rung. — Hippyhead

But I am very far from dismissing your worries. Oppenheimer is heroic precisely because he was rare. But after Oppenheimer, it's pretty hard to hide behind "pure research" as a shield.

I don't happen to know what the debates look like around gene editing and the like, but I've been around long enough to know that the whole field has been steeped in ethical debate from the beginning, so I just have to hope it has had an effect. It's hard to imagine being in that particular field and not feeling you're under scrutiny.

For AI, things are a little mixed, but there are loud voices, Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky being only two that I happen to know a bit about, trying to get a hearing. I'm not sure that's going all that well honestly because my impression is that before some recent strides with new ML techniques the field had started developing a general defeatism that I think has left a hangover -- a sort of, ah, we'll never manage to do it anyway, so why worry. But the two I mentioned are among those who are very worried, and also worried about accidental "success", if that's what it turns out to be, and not averse to halting research programs until we're clearer on their impact. At least that's my impression, been a while since I read any of that stuff.

I agree with you, we are not okay. And I think there are areas where it just makes sense to have some sort of formal impact analysis required up front and some periodic review. With AI, we do have to be careful not to get too lucky.

One further point about AI in particular comes up in The Social Dilemma, that we don't have to have a war with the machines for things to have gone wrong: some of the algorithms running at Facebook and Google are no longer anything a human being can understand, not well enough to assess their impacts in a meaningful way. We were still on the edge of that when the problems with YouTube's recommendation engine came out and Google was able to take some reasonable steps to address that. It's no longer perfectly clear that the sort of action they could take then is possible now. In other words, we may already have reached the "shut it off, pull the plug" point for some of the stuff going on at say Facebook.

I'm still really glad you brought this up and it's a good reminder that we should all learn a lot more about what's going on.

one simply has to take it on faith that exists, like God or UFOs — Kenosha Kid

Hrmmmm. That doesn't seem like a particularly good analogy here. I mean, almost everyone seems to think they have something like a direct experience of, ahem, what they're experiencing. And we have resources for explaining away, if we are so inclined and put in the work, mystical experiences characterized as experiences of divinity, or visual experiences characterized as seeing a UFO or even the weird-ass memories people have of being abducted (I remember Michael Shermer describes having one of these).

Anyway a lot of the usual strategies don't seem to apply, and the conviction strikes me as much more wide spread, for whatever reason. It seems to me that ought to be explained right up front, that the almost universal misconstrual of consciousness, if that's what it is, ought to come from the theory itself.

Does that make sense? I haven't read any Dennett in forever.

"What if I had a brain lesion right there?" Introspection alone cannot answer that, and it is relevant. There are relevant data streams introspection alone cannot access absent experiment. — fdrake

Do you know anything about relevant research? I assume besides building competing models there are psychologists in labs doing fMRIs and such. I would have guessed that self-reports and introspection aren't so much tied to consciousness or even awareness but to attention, and I for one would expect to be able to make some progress seeing what's going on when attention is engaged and when attention is engaged introspectively, etc.

Yes, everyone will claim they already know it, they're already doing it, no need for feedback from the public, yada, yada and more yada, but...

The march for more and more and more knowledge (and thus power) continues full speed ahead. — Hippyhead

WTF?

Is that anything like what I said in the post as a whole?

I thought you brought up a really interesting issue; I pointed out that others have noticed related issues and even devoted much of their careers to it; and I suggested other steps that might be necessary if we don't get our shit together.

But it turns out what you really want to say is just, fuck science and fuck scientists, they're ruining everything.

Or maybe my paraphrase is unfair. Gee, what's that like?

Well I can say that your paradox had the sort of result I always hope for: gave me an opportunity to think through my ethical intuitions and understand them better; for instance, at the beginning of this thread I didn't know I was an anti-Kantian. Now I have many avenues to explore further, and I have a pretty good sense of what approaches to ethics are consonant with the rest of my views. I'm pumped.

Any takeaways for you? Anything you've learned from participating in this thread?

I was just citing an example to show that my way of thinking isn't this alien, confused thing you've never heard of before — khaled

Not alien, no, and not unheard of, but I still think the Kantian approach is wrongheaded.

And then from those feelings we come up with beliefs that explain them and inform us on what to do in novel situations. And antinatalism is one such possible belief. — khaled

But to me this is clearly a mistake -- it's just a case of the tail wagging the dog.

If the whole point of the underlying system is lost by abstracting principles from it and then spinning out new deductions from those principles, either your inferences are faulty or your principle-abstraction process has gone wrong. I think you can see the same thing at work in utilitarianism, but I've not studied it much.

Maybe someday somebody will come up with just the right set of principles that perfectly captures the moral sense we all have without any theory at all, but so far there's no evidence this is going to happen. I'm against the whole project.

But even if you're all for it, you have to have a way of judging how well you have reconstructed our moral sense as a system of principles and anti-natalism will fail any such test spectacularly.

If you must develop moral theories, because like Kant you want a Newtonian science of morals, hold yourself to the same standards of model building that scientists use.

The problem, as I see it, is the scale of the destructive powers being generated by the knowledge explosion, nuclear weapons being the easiest example. Genetic engineering and AI etc may pose similar existential risks, though that is far harder to calculate. — Hippyhead

Oppenheimer.

For AI: Yudkowsky and Bostrom spring to mind.

For genetic engineering: like, everyone, it's been part of the discussion all along.

This is the point I tried to make in my first response. You're absolutely right that not all nuclear physicists thought through what they were doing, but it is possible to do so and we have an heroic example of doing so.

People worried about the AI alignment problem have been ringing exactly this alarm bell for a while. Bostrom even managed to get a think tank for studying existential risks to humanity created at Oxford.

And noting that we have all too many examples of scientists not recognizing the risks their work gives rise to, we could consider mechanisms for formalizing the feedback, so that we put effort into increasing our ability to use new technologies responsibly or we deliberately dampen the pace of development until we can do so, perhaps forever.

I just recently watched Thomas Schelling's Nobel acceptance speech, which is really curious because he doesn't talk at all about the theory for which he was receiving the prize but about the history of not using nuclear weapons, in part to show how far we've come. Back when he was trying to prevent such use, in the fifties and sixties, everyone thought nuclear war was a near certainty.

But you have the "correct definition" of morality so I guess Kant was just confused too. — khaled

Well spotted -- but I wouldn't say he was confused, just wrongheaded. He had the example of Hume right in front of him, but was unable to follow it because of his religious convictions. So he tries to reconstruct the sort of thing he believed God hands down to us but without mentioning Him. I know almost nothing about Kant, but yes, in the trade my view would be considered "anti-Kantian". I've got some big hitters on my side too though: besides Hume (and Smith), there's Aristotle and Confucius. My guys also find it quite natural to talk about politics and to see continuities there. Don't people read "Freedom and Resentment" anymore? You can also see my way of thinking on display there.

It's neither here not there, but I'm going to tend to think the sort of code Kant had in mind is largely my kind of thing, just attributed to divine authority. Have a peak at the ten commandments:

1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image...
3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain...
4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy...
5. Honor thy father and thy mother...
6. Thou shalt not kill.
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
8. Thou shalt not steal.
9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s. — God

1-4 are a reminder of Who's boss, but what are the rest of them about? To me they look like the sort of maxims you might come up with if you wanted a community of people, not all of whom are closely related, to last more than a couple months.

I think sustaining the society is a byproduct that has to come out of individual action. — khaled

Your idea is that people act out of their convictions about what is right, not with the intention of maintaining stable communities, even if that's a typical side effect.

Well yeah. My position is that the "conviction" that kin-harming is wrong almost certainly comes wired in, but it doesn't come wired in as a belief. It shows up in our behavior (and in the behavior of ever so many animals), and it shows up in our feelings: we feel mistreated when wronged and uplifted when we help someone, we are disgusted by callous and selfish behavior but moved by heroic altruism, and so on. We bring up our children to find these feelings and accompanying ideas appropriate not just within our immediate family, but in all their dealings with members of our community, whether that's just our neighborhood or all of humanity. More or less. That's just what it is to live a moral life.

The rules, as above, aren't really the substance of the thing at all, and you end up in a mess if you take them for absolute and universal. Even God only made those up to teach His children how to behave properly.

Insofar as a club or a voluntary association relies on morality to be possible, that's indirect: to be a member of the club, you have to be a member of a community, of a society. And the point of morality is to make those social groups possible. Clubs just piggyback on that.

As for species -- humans spread across the planet behave to some degree as if they are members of the same community. There's obviously some fine points to that, but we recognize all other humans as moral agents or as falling into a special category, children for instance.

Even if that were not the case, and humanity were segregated into distinct social groups, each of those groups would certainly have moral practices that make the group possible, and each of them would reject anti-natalism as a possible moral principle.

This is my argument all stripped down:

Morality is social. Always has been. The whole point of morality is to make social groups sustainable.

An idea that, if carried out by the members of a social group, would lead to the disappearance of that group, cannot count as moral for the members of that group.

Don't know what it is, but whatever it is, it is not a moral idea; it's just not the right sort of thing.

What I’d like to know is how, in Dennett’s model, there can be ‘an illlusion’ as an illusion is ‘ an instance of a wrong or misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience.’ — Wayfarer

but this is an illusion, a philosopher’s illusion — Dennett

I don't think Dennett is defending something rather like "we think we're thinking but we're not". It would appear to be the philosophical theory that's at issue.

heh, crossposted with @Andrew M

Dennett actually studied under Ryle, IIRC, but he updated the "ghost in the machine" to the "Cartesian theater"

This is fascinating.

You do leave out exactly what's in your post, and which could show up in more restricted domains, which is precisely the knowledge you could generate as you go of the capabilities for action you're developing and your capacity to control them. You might want more feedback.

Of course we can still do some things even without a formal feedback system. Just look at work on the AI alignment problem.

Science, if it's going to offer explanations, needs something to explain. Our everyday understanding of things is a starting point; our sophisticated philosophical understanding of things is a starting point.

But I don't see much point in reading Kant and just substituting "because evolution" wherever he says "a priori".

We are all Kantians now, if by that you only mean we recognize that our experience is in some sense constructed by systems that we are in some sense born with. That's fine; all it leaves out is the science.

You can attempt to construe Kant's use of a word like "appearance" or a word like "perception" in a way that is consonant with the science, if you know what it is, but you cannot assume that it is so consonant out-of-the-box, and you certainly can't substitute it for the actual science.

Which brings us back to the acquisition of concepts and language.

Through a regularity of observation and reasoning, we combine these parts to create an understanding of more complex objects, such as a wrench, and more complex concepts, such as wrenchhood. — RussellA

You've stocked the infant's toolbox with a starter kit, courtesy of evolution, but you're still talking like an empiricist. Where's the evidence that this is how children acquire concepts?

Language must follow the same principle, in that we are born with a basic innate a priori linguistic knowledge. .Chomsky has argued that children are born in possession of an innate ability to comprehend language structures, where language acquisition occurs as a consequence of a child's capacity to recognize the underlying structure at the root of any language, as all human languages are built upon a common structural basis. — RussellA

Was language on the list you got from Kant? Will Kant settle the disputes that have been raging within linguistics for the last fifty or sixty years about what exactly is innate? Then why didn't he, centuries before they started?

As the basic concepts of language as representing the world is already innate a priori within the brain (having evolved over over millions of years) — RussellA

Where does Chomsky, who you seem to think is on your side, say this? Chomsky's views, or lack of views, on semantics are the central source of controversy in generative linguistics. And for the record he also thinks nothing worth taking seriously has been said about the origin and evolution of language. I just can't see him endorsing any part of this.

I recognize that I'm no expert in linguistics or in any of its subfields, because I have the example of actual research to compare my thoughts to. Kant didn't. Insofar as you want to take Kant as doing conceptual analysis, or descriptive metaphysics along Strawsonian lines, you can think of it as a starting point for science, something for it to offer explanations for, and that's worthwhile if only to keep the science from trying to explain something we don't actually do. But you have to be careful, because the early moderns generally offer a psychological explanation along with the phenomenon they're calling attention to.

nobody answered schop’s question — Albero

I thought I was answering a version of "no", but mainly pointing out that his question was based on a misunderstanding of the difference between "I brought this on myself" and "I don't deserve this".

That the question he asked was not the question he actually wanted to discuss is not my fault.

So being logical when it comes to ethics is a problem now? If that's what you think then I don't really value your opinion much. — khaled

In a sense, actually, yes, but not in the sense you think, because you're also confused about philosophy.

Are there genuine moral questions? Questions we might work out the answer to logically from moral premises? No. But there are things that look like that.

Being primates, humans have lived in social groups from the very beginning, millions of years ago, but no other primates live in communities counting among their fellows millions or billions. The core of social groups is always immediate kinship. (You might note here: no reproduction, no social group.) Beyond that, natural selection alone is enough to extend your group capacity to near kinship. (Enter game theory.) Beyond that?

Beyond that, it's hard to say, but it's obvious that by the time you get to communities on the scales humans handle, we must be talking about culture, Human civilization itself has had many thousands of years to evolve moral customs and institutions. We moderns have a double moral inheritance.

Genuine questions arise when we face situations never contemplated before in the long history of our living together in communities. We're talking about medicine mostly, and bio-ethics, but other situations where our forms of interaction have changed dramatically due to changes in the material conditions of our lives have a claim here too. (Thinking here of debates over social media, for instance, but that's muddled because a lot of the issues that arise there relate more broadly to human psychology. Big changes in technology often take a while for our collective psychology and morality to adjust)

When we explore such a novel problem, sometimes we feel our intuitions, derived from the double inheritance, come up short. We can, then, think through things carefully, calling on maxims and principles that summarize our moral practice in a rough and ready way ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," that sort of thing). But this is not really a logical exercise, and moral situations are not logic puzzles. When a thought experiment is proposed ("What if it was your daughter?") the idea is to activate our intuitions, give them something more concrete to work with.

The premises in such exercises simply do not have the sort of standing that you think of the premises in a logical argument as having. We know from the start that they are not exactly what we believe, but are a sort of rough generalization. "Don't take other people's things" is not a rule for behavior; it's something you tell a child as they're learning how our community works.

No one expects to work through the puzzle and just get an answer. The answer itself must be tested against our intuitions. If it doesn't feel right, or if several of us, or millions of us, reach different conclusions, all we can do is try some other starting points we think generally right and talk to each other.

That hasn't been enough to resolve debates over abortion, but that failure is instructive. Participants in that debate sometimes take the moral principles they reason from as actual rules, for reasons we needn't go into here, and thus take their conclusions as logical results, much like you. I suspect one unintended consequence of those debates is that many people who might not otherwise have held commitments to moral rules as absolutes come to think this is how morality normally works: you have your premise, I have mine, and we try to out-infer or out-thought-experiment or out-premise each other. But remember: we wouldn't be having this debate at all if it weren't for advances in medicine and other opportunities due to the changes in the material conditions of our lives. (Putting a child up for adoption by total strangers, who may live in another city, is not an option in hunter-gatherer societies.)

What is the question anti-natalism is offered as an answer to, and where did it come from? Is having children a new phenomenon among human beings, something our double inheritance has left us ill-equipped to deal with? Compare it, again, to end-of-life decisions, or the effects of human population growth on the planet, or the effects of the technology by which we achieved that growth, and it's clear how genuine moral questions arise. The answer in every case is about what kind of community we are, what we want to be, what we will pass on to our children. That's why it's one thing to say we should be having fewer children than we do so as not to force future generations to live in an ecological hellscape, and another thing entirely to say that humanity should make itself extinct. One is a genuinely moral position, concerned with how we live together in communities and can go on doing so; the other is either a renunciation of life or a logical toy.

The first statement doesn't lead to the second. — khaled

This is actually your problem, right here.

Anti-natalism is not a moral position at all. It is, as I said before, a logical paradox. It might also work as a paradox of game theory, but I'm not going to work that out.

What is morality anyway? What is it for?

There are some aspects of morality you can describe as rules, but the rules aren't much, and they are not the fundamental thing. Those are just summaries of our moral practices, maxims to quote or rules of thumb to remember or something for philosophers to misconstrue and argue about. Practice comes first, and theory after. (Thanks again @unenlightened for reminding me.)

And what is the practice?

It is us living together in communities. Morality is how we manage to do that, and how we manage to go on doing that, generation after generation. It is the web not just of choices and actions, but of expectations and obligations, of sympathies and resentments, of approbation and outrage. It is how we raise our children.

What you present as a moral idea is a bit of logic and a few words borrowed from morality, but it's clearly no part of morality. It's not about how we manage to live together and how we can go on doing that; it's about all of us dying together. There is no room for community in your theory; there is barely room for people: a couple of them get a walk on part, one stays offstage, and soon enough the curtain comes down.

See there you go. Your post is a mix of cognitive psychology (Chomsky) and evolution and Kant and empiricism. And it's a bad mix. "Kant because that's how we evolved" is vaguely reasonable, but it's not much, and it won't hold up for long. It leads you to say things like this:

We are born with certain basic innate a priori concepts such as time, space, causation, colour, sound, etc — RussellA

Is that an empirical claim? Could we have evolved otherwise, maybe with no concept of space? (See the no-space thought experiment in Individuals.) Are you absolutely certain that sentence is even meaningful?

I'm sympathetic. It has been getting harder and harder to tell what's left for philosophy if we turn over some of these questions to psychology, but that's no excuse. Just so stories about how we learn, how we acquire concepts and language, are not good enough when we can do actual research.

Kant's "synthetic a priori" judgements gives an insight into the apparent circular problem of the fact that I am only able to recognize a wrench if I already know the concept of wrenchhood, yet I can only learn the concept of wrenchhood if I am able to recognize wrenches. — RussellA

Kant is no help here at all. Going into the lab is.

As to what parents are reponsible for, they are partially responsible for every kind of suffering their child experiences except in the case where the child willingly brings harm to himself despite being warned by them that that would happen. If the child is harmed in any way that he didn't bring upon himself fully they are partially responsible. — khaled

Suppose while I was at the store you finished building a model of the Eiffel Tower out of popsicle sticks, and left it sitting on the kitchen table so that I would see it when I got back. I come in with bags of groceries and put them on the kitchen table as always, in the process knocking your model, which I hadn't noticed, to the floor; it will need considerable repair.

You might get mad at me for knocking over your model, and I might defend myself by saying you shouldn't have put it there in the first place. You say it's my fault; I say it's yours. One way people resolve this sort of dispute is for both sides to admit they were "partly responsible".

What's going on here? Is there a fact of the matter about who is responsible?

We can analyse what happened, in the old-fashioned sense of splitting up the sequence of events that led to the model's injury: it's clearly only on the table because you put it there and you could have done otherwise, so that's on you; it only fell to the floor because I knocked it over and I could have done otherwise, so that's on me. Neither of us intended the final event in the chain to happen, and the final event in the chain would not have happened if we had not both done things we accept responsibility for.

Is that a proof that we each bear "partial responsibility"? Are we both logically compelled to accept this answer? I think no, and no. Either of us could dig in and argue that it's "really" the fault of the other. (I'll spare you the arguments, and assume you can fill them in yourself, though I find them pretty interesting.) I think both accepting some "share" of the blame is just a way of saying we've decided not to argue about whose fault it "really" is.

But is there a fact of the matter about whose fault it really is? If so, is it something we could discover? (Maybe we abandon the search not because there's no answer but because we know it's probably out of reach.)

If a drunk driver kills somebody, is the bartender who served them partly responsible? What about the dealer that sold him the car? If a man shoots some people at a nightclub for some idiosyncratic reason, is the gun dealer who sold him the weapon partly responsible? What about the company that manufactured the weapon? If I'm prone to take your books without asking, and you know this, and you leave a book you know I want in the living room, are you partly responsible for me taking it? I'll bet most people who read such questions have a gut reaction of yes or no to each, but that they're not all the same, and some people would think they need more information before they can judge. There are so many "variables", and your judgment of responsibility can swing back and forth with each detail I could add to a story; why is that?

It seems to me you feel compelled by logic to say that parents are partly to blame for any suffering their child experiences because the child could not experience that suffering if they hadn't been born -- though you also carve out a really precise exception to that. (And exactly the same argument could apply to any joy that child experiences, any harm that child does to others, any good that child does for others, and so on.) Are you compelled by logic to specify that exception? @schopenhauer1 isn't. Is one of you right? What about the grandparents? Partly to blame? I think you'll say no, but schop will say yes. Same for the grandkids. And so on. Whose fault is everything really?

I think you have it in mind that genuine responsibility can be assessed, though in practice it might sometimes be impossible, through a careful analysis of causes. And you're willing to make distinctions: people are only responsible for a subset of what they cause -- namely the subset that nothing else would have caused if they hadn't. And you'll keep going like this, making finer distinctions if necessary.

So what's wrong with that? Don't we have to analyse causes to assess responsibility?

Broadly, yes, but it's nowhere near all we do, and we certainly don't think we can just derive our moral positions from a completed analysis of causes, not in the way you expect to be able to. How we go about analysing causes is shaped from the beginning by our moral intuitions, and this is clear in the disagreement I posited, accurately or not, between you and schop over your exception to the rule. Why that exception? Why in that form? You've clearly iterated here to add the "parents explicitly warning against" bit. Are you sure you're done? Couldn't we parse that further? Couldn't I still be partly responsible if I warn you not to do something but I'm not certain you understood me? What if I give you a blanket warning to do nothing that might lead to you suffering, is that okay? Am I now absolved of all responsibility for you?

On top of that, our moral intuitions are themselves part of the story of what we do and why we do it. But not on your approach; you intend to complete the analysis of causes first and let the chips fall where they may. Neither you nor schop are willing to consider our intentions. Sure that's a minefield for ethics, and some people choose just to go around it, but from a strictly causal point of view you could take into account beliefs and where they come from. If I tell you something and you believe it and act on it, why am I not partly responsible for what you do? Or am I? Oh wait! We've already been here, because this is precisely the territory of your exception.

If you need further proof that there is more to moral judgment than a moral principle (do no harm) and an objective analysis of causes, consider anti-natalism. It's a dead simple argument that almost no one accepts. Your explanation is, I believe, that people just don't think about it. (And if your mood or personality is especially pessimistic, you might explain that by their selfishness or stupidity or laziness when it comes to thinking about anything. Or not.) But you know for a fact that's false, because hardly anyone you've ever presented the argument to accepted it, right? So now you need to claim that they're not logical, maybe not even capable of being logical (again, some extra pessimism), or that they're capable of it but engaging in motivated reasoning that blocks the inference they really should make.

As far as you're concerned, the only option available for rejecting anti-natalism is denying the principle that is applied after the causal analysis is done: if someone wants to say, yeah I'm down with causing unjustified suffering, you pack up your argument and leave. They can fail morally, fail intellectually or they can agree with you. But you're wrong. It's a stupid argument, and that's the reaction you're getting from almost everyone you present it to. It is literally stupid, in the sense of not knowing or pretending not to know something everyone knows, that if you're going to talk about who caused what to happen you're already swimming in moral seas.

That claim wouldn't have been made if the topic of the thread hadn't drifted to antinatalism. — khaled

It's pretty clear I don't believe it drifted anywhere.

And I never made that claim. I never said that if your child bangs his head against a wall despite you warning him of the consequences that you were responsible for that. — khaled

I know. I quoted you.

What is your claim anyway? You must consider parents responsible for something, or you'd have nothing to say. I could guess, but you could just say what that is.

Premise 2: Perceptions have no intrinsic temporal order. — Dusty of Sky

I'm afraid my comment is not based in Kant, but what if this is just false? Or, rather, what if it is false given a disambiguation of the word "perception"?

Suppose you're designing a video game engine. The internal representation of an object might include not just its current position and properties, but its recent short term history. You might fold in every event that affects the physics of the object until that effect has worn off; or you might use a cheaper system that just tracks some amount of history that turns out to be good enough, say the last 2.5 seconds.

If you were to just directly render these objects onto the screen, then when the player and everything in view is perfectly still, all objects would be sharply defined, but as soon as an object moved, it would be smeared out as it moves, or blurred, or sharp at its instantaneous position but leaving a sort of shadowy trail. And if the player moved, everything would be smeared or blurred or leave a trail.

You needn't render the entire internal representation and games generally render only the most recent position, even though internally that's only a piece of the real object. What happens on our end so that we perceive motion?

Psychologists have done experiments to show that we interpret sequentially flashing lights as a single light moving, and we even insist we could see an invisible obstacle that the light goes around if that's what makes sense of changes in the light's "course" (there being no such thing actually).

These experiments start, like you, from the idea of their being sequences of static perceptions that we somehow link together into the perception of motion, and of course this is the natural way to construct the experiment. But it could also be that internally we represent objects more like the video game engine, with slots for the object's recent history; consciousness then would not be like the sequence of frames of a motion picture, just one complete visual field after another, but more like the visually rendered part of a video game, continually letting you know where objects are and what they're doing, but internally, below the level of your awareness, you might be tracking every object's recent history as well.

"Perception" could refer either to the taking in of data that updates our model of an object, or to what we experience consciously. That still leaves the temptation to say that the taking in of data is after all exactly like a sequence of of filled visual fields, but it may be possible to resist that temptation.

*

Perhaps not exactly on-topic, and I won't be offended if you say so, I just often have this problem with the early moderns that there is so much psychology swirled in with the philosophy I don't always manage to separate the two.

In my defense, I would ask what is the justification for Premise 2, and the assumption that experience is a sequence of static moments of experience, separable at least in theory, except that it's the way empiricists were talking at the time? Is it a psychological assumption or a philosophical one? Is it intrinsic to our concept of experience? Or does it derive from a particular conception of time, which is in turn an "ingredient" of experience in the one sense (sequence) but not the other (moments)? Does experience mean whatever we are aware of?

Less than a day.

I thought of pointing out to him that this is not a social media platform and that responding with a meme is not a good idea here, but even longtime regulars do it now and then. I suppose we just let that slide if it's part of an otherwise substantial posting history, or so long as it doesn't seem to be dragging down the site so that a lot of people do it a lot of the time. Is that the feeling among the admins and mods? I have a little puritan reaction to it even when I find myself about to do it. I guess it's all context, just like all philosophy, damn it.

I'm not sure there's any grounds for making "facts" the exclusive province of rationalization.

Even if the reasons we give for a decision are generally an after-the-fact story we tell, and even if that story is one we tell ourselves first, unless you want data itself to be an artifact of that story telling process, then there's no reason to think that your habits and gut feelings are not just exactly dealing with data on your behalf. They select and scrub and massage that data in ways you may never hear about -- you get a thoroughly munged version -- but your habits and gut feelings are still responses to data.

Some data manipulation we know is down to how we're built -- no one ever learned color constancy, it's a gift from Darwin we have to work around sometimes. But some of your habits of data manipulation are the result of effortful and conscious thought repeated enough to become habitual. If you want to use the word "fact" for that kind of rational packaging of data, then your distinction holds, but only if you don't identify facts and data.

However, I can only distinguish between a wrench and a hammer if I first have the concepts of wrenchhood and hammerhood. — RussellA

I'll take this as a synecdoche for the whole post. This is not a problem I can solve but I'll tell you roughly why I think you're wrong.

This is the whole "two aspects of language" problem that we flogged through the Davidson thread. Your position is that the "formal" aspect, language as a sign system that can represent the world, must underlie the "practical" aspect, the use of such a sign system to communicate.

I strongly suspect this is false, but of course I can't demonstrate that. You're in good company, of course, and I would single out David Lewis as having done about as much as anyone could do to knit together the two aspects while preserving the primacy of the formal side. (That is, showing how we could formalize the idea of a such a sign system being used for communication by a population.)

I, on the other hand, suspect that the mechanisms that underlie language use, which may indeed be susceptible to some formal description, are much more, let's say, "operational". We were always right to sense there is something mechanical within language use -- though it isn't "just mechanical" -- I'm just not convinced that the system there looks anything at all like the sort of models you get from formal semantics.

So I believe I have settled in the "communication first" camp, which is no rejection of system, but it is a rejection of the expectation that there is a Tarski-style or Carnap-style system that, as Davidson puts it, we acquire and then "apply to cases".

(Damn, which thread am I in??). — Baden

There is only one thread. The manyness of threads is an illusion created by the PlushForums software.

It's actually a very curious experience going over things like fractions and exponents with someone who has a very rich conceptual apparatus -- he's absorbed a certain amount of philosophy from me and we have long conversations about art and politics with many fine distinctions.

One of my younger sons just independently discovered Tom Leher and excitedly sent me a video of "New Math", where Leher jokingly points out that in new math it's not getting the right answer that counts but understanding what you're doing! Tim can follow the various conceptual explanations I give of what we're working on (and I usually end up trying several until I find one that helps even a little) but it's really true that the concepts don't mean much until you have practiced the skill enough to more or less master it, which I think would come as a surprise to most philosophers (or would have in the past, anyway, with a very blinkered understanding of how people think).

In one way, this makes it a lot like what he did when learning various musical instruments, but it's also quite different because he was listening to music (and thinking about it!) before he could play, and later could understand (and try endlessly to explain to non-musician me -- here he goes back to the tonic, see?) music he still could not quite play. There's not all that much math he could just experience without doing it. (I mean, I used to make Moebius strips for the kids and have them draw a line that ends up on "both" sides of the paper, but I don't think my attempts at describing how crazy it is that Newton's method converges so quickly really landed.)

I should think about this a lot more because everyone knows there are connections of all sorts between math and music, but learning them has noticeable similarities and differences.

It's the Village Green Preservation Society trying to clutch its pearls and scream of the indeceny. — schopenhauer1

If you thought Ray was only holding up the VGPS to ridicule, you could not have more totally missed the point of that record. I take umbrage, sir! On Ray's behalf.

Terribly odd that you invoke the Kinks because when @khaled first mentioned genetic engineering I had the same two thoughts I always have on that subject: Gattaca and "God's Children", Ray's great anthem against such things from just a few years after Village Green, and yesterday I listened to "God's Children" for the umpteenth time, one of the most beautiful recordings ever made.

And everyone knows @Baden is a well respected man about town, doing the best things so conservatively.

So we were talking about accountability in regards to decision-making:
I was trying to get at:
1) Though I recognize that the locus of accountability is at the individual level
1a) Decision-making itself is part of the ecology of harm, similar to natural disasters in that it is part of the human experience. — schopenhauer1

But you'll recall I challenged you on bringing up "being born" because no one thinks this is the free choice of the then non-existent person, so for the purposes of the OP even if being born is a harm, our only interest would be to classify it as external, or as an external source of suffering. There is no need in this thread to consider the choices of others who might be responsible for that putative harm.

You made a post I believe I never responded to which included this:

Yes you created some ridiculous scenarios, but that's not how these things usually go. — schopenhauer1

Considering some of @khaled's thought experiments, this is priceless.

I made a post neither of you responded to which included this:

Even granting, and I see no reason not to, that everyone makes poor decisions, does it make any sense to say that being alive caused those decisions? — Srap Tasmaner

See how I'm still talking about the OP?

As it turns out, @khaled sort of responded, but to you not me, and I think I missed it:

I would say that it's not fair to put ALL of your suffering on being forced to play the game. Birth is the first cause of all suffering but not the only cause. Currently people don't count suffering they inflict on themselves as suffering at all but I don't think it's fair to go from that to counting all suffering as a direct result of being born. — khaled

Only he doesn't address my very first claim in this thread, that it's just not true that "people don't count suffering they inflict on themselves as suffering at all". It's patently false. Of course people think suffering is suffering even if they brought it on themselves. The distinction people are making, I submit, is between harm to themselves they feel responsible for and harm they don't; and people make the same distinction about others, that indeed those other people are suffering but either brought it on themselves or didn't deserve it. Neither of you have ever substantiated the claim that anyone thinks it doesn't count, or it's not "really" suffering, or whatever. The premise of the OP was never actually defended by anyone apparently. (And note how @khaled is talking here about the first-person perspective, whether the person suffering counts it as suffering, but at the end of that post says this part isn't even philosophy just "attitudes toward life".)

What both of you did want to talk about -- not with each other but with the rest of us -- is that there is someone else who is responsible for that harm, someone who is motivated to deny that this suffering is suffering because otherwise they'd have to admit that they are the cause of it, someone who has to argue that it doesn't count if you brought it on yourself long after I brought you into existence.

So it turns out the OP was being defended, but the OP was in fact always about a single group of people in one particular sense: parents.

You said to @Albero:

Its not meant to blame parents per se — schopenhauer1

because he also immediately saw the point of the OP and said so:

Personally, it seems a little too reductionistic for my tastes. To me, it may imply that if something terrible happens the event can all be traced back to your parents for being responsible since they brought you here in the first place. — Albero

But when you responded to me with this

They are claiming that if you just made better decisions you wouldnt be so bad. — schopenhauer1

it turns out there's only one group that's a plausible candidate for being "they" and it's parents.

It was an anti-natalism thread from the OP.

The only classrooms my children have ever been in were part of "co-op" programs -- homeschooling parents who form groups to have something like school a couple days a week. For one of these, I was drafted as the math teacher for the older kids. I've always said this happened because what we had here was a bunch of ultra-conservative Catholics, but luckily one of them had married an atheist nerd who knew some math. (This period of religious zeal is now well behind us, thank god.)

I don't know if I did those kids any good at all. I used to call my class "Guided Head-scratching" because their levels of math attainment were all over the place and I couldn't just pick up at Chapter 9 and carry on, so I did stuff like ask them why the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180, and we would spend days figuring out the deep connection between triangles and circles, or we would derive the quadratic formula from scratch and figure out the connection between algebra and geometry. It was fun for me, but I have my doubts any of them caught the wonder of math I was trying to get across.

Lately my oldest son and I have been filling in his math gaps so he can get a GED. At the moment it doesn't look like any of mine are headed for college, but you just never know. Life is twisty and unpredictable, and there's no one right way to do it.

But Richard Dawkins was one of the so-called 'New Atheists', the others being Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, who launched a series of anti-religious polemical books in the early 2000's. None of those books were informed by evolutionary biology so much as by a visceral hatred of anything religious and weaponising biological theory to attack it. That was what Mary Midgely - who was also not a religious apologist of any stripe - was criticising. And she was right on the money, in my view. — Wayfarer

Yes thanks but I already know who Richard Dawkins is.

What I didn't know, and am frankly gobsmacked to learn, is that Mary Midgley attacked Dawkins back in 1979 (when Sam Harris was 12) on precisely the grounds that in the coming decades he and those other rascals would get up to all this mischief. That's not only prescient, but awfully generous of her to object so strongly to their future weaponising of biology against religion despite not having a pony in that race. What puzzles me though is why she would cast her objection in the form of a tendentious misreading of The Selfish Gene.

That all sounds fine, and pretty typical for how science, ahem, evolves, particularly the Portin quote:

Our knowledge of the structure and function of the genetic material has outgrown the terminology traditionally used to describe it. It is arguable that the old term gene, essential at an earlier stage of the analysis, is no longer useful.

What I don't see is

1. Any evidence that Dawkins was misrepresenting the consensus of the early 70s.
2. Even if he were, that his doing so was "unscientific".

It's (2) that matters, that you have repeatedly accused Dawkins of, and you could be right, I just still don't know why you think that. If by the early 70s all the cool kids were already abandoning the idea of "the gene" and Dawkins was some fuddy-duddy who insisted no, the genetics he knew was good enough for his grandfather and good enough for him, you'd have at least part of a case -- still just that Dawkins's views were old-fashioned or outmoded, and even then you'd have more work to do before it seems fair to say there's a commitment to the old framework that amounts unscientific religious idolatry.

I'm still pressing this because even in this post you call Dawkins's view "unscientific" and "theological" and I still have no idea why that is what you want to say, instead of just saying genetic theory has moved on. Who else goes on the "unscientific" list? Everyone who contributed to the modern synthesis? Or is it just the work Dawkins was promoting -- Williams, Hamilton, Maynard Smith, Trivers, et al. -- or just Dawkins himself?

It would be as terrible an idea as is pedagogically teaching children about anything. Children are not mindless vessels to be filled with the 'wisdom' of adults, they are active, interested and insatiably curious. — Isaac

Completely agree! My youngest son even learned how to read with no formal instruction at all.

The trickiest thing is math because it takes training.

Before the first page is even out it had become about antinatalism, — Isaac

This is true @schopenhauer1. (I've decided I like it on the sidelines better, but I'm still watching the game.) I hadn't read back so I wondered if somehow I had started it. But @Isaac is quoting your very first response to my very first post in this thread. (My post was the 4th response, yours to me the 6th.)

I knew what you were getting at with the "thrown in a game" bit, but I addressed it anyway as if it were on-topic, gave you a chance to talk about what you claimed the thread was going to be about -- whether there's a distinction between suffering we bring on ourselves and suffering we don't.

Then you responded to that. Remember what your second post addressed to me was?

And so his suffering is justified? I guess the price of being a human born in existence right? Shame indeed. — schopenhauer1

(9th response in the thread)

So maybe this was true

For example, this thread is intended as more just a general pessimism theme — schopenhauer1

for the OP and the first few posts, but you are the one who almost immediately dropped what you claimed the thread was going to be about and turned it into an AN thread.

I mean, I understand that your views all hang together, and that you might start off intending to talk about one thing and but everything else is connected to it, but the very first things you said to me weren't "general pessimism" but went full-steam-ahead toward an argument about AN.

So what's up with that?

For example, if you stated that you thought harm was acceptable to place upon other people unnecessarily — schopenhauer1

Good point. That seems totally fair.

In a broader sense, it's also a discussion of the influence of evolutionary biology on society and culture. — Wayfarer

Which you would prefer evolutionary biologists not participate in. Cool.