I'd need to understand the scenario better before commenting. Do you have in mind something like a war situation, where one has to kill enemy soldiers that have done one no harm, in order to pre-empt them killing oneself?

I was watching a movie the other day about the British raid on the occupied French port of St Nazaire in WW2, and was troubled by the commandos sneaking up on German sentries and killing them in cold blood. Given that the raid, if successful (and it was) would save thousands of lives by hampering German U-boat operations in the Atlantic, I think most consequentialists would conclude that the actions were ethical. But it still troubled me to see the sentries killed. As far as we know they were innocent, being just non-Nazi conscripts that would much rather have been hanging around in Berlin studying architecture and trying to chat up girls.

Rational, because it prevents her from starving and she doesn't want to starve.

This was already covered in this post. The ass rationally decides to base its decision of which way to go on the occurrence of some future event, such as a coin toss.

You make incarceration sound arbitrary. — Noblosh

As indeed it is, if it depends just on the will of only one person. The history of any dictatorship is testament to that.

Those of us that have the privilege of living in Western democracies have protection from that, in that incarceration is governed by laws which are, ultimately, required to be reflective of the will of the many, rather than just the few.

This reduces the arbitrariness, just as the variance of the sample mean from a large sample is much smaller than the variance of individual data.

"Andrew doesn't even know the meaning of the word 'cupidity.'" Something like that. — Srap Tasmaner

It's a really weird phenomenon. I must have looked it up at least ten times over the last forty years, understood the definition, realised its usefulness, and remembered it for a few days, maybe even used it a couple of times. Then it's gone.

Some words just refuse to stick in my head - or their definitions do, rather. The word itself hangs around to taunt me with my inability to remember the definition.

Is it just me?

Yes. The assessment of whether it is harmful is made by me, according to my values, and then subjected to my ethical deliberation process to determine what action my ethical framework recommends. Whether somebody else's assessment of what is harmful matches mine has no significant influence on the decision, as it is I who is making the ethical determination, and I will do so according to my definitions and frameworks.

Hence, if I were an arms dealer (hard to imagine) I would use my determination of what is harmful to decide to whom I would supply arms. I would supply them to the French Resistance but not to Daesh. The fact that Daesh consider themselves to be highly ethical is not significant to me in making that decision.

We describe something as random when we don't know all the rules.

By the way, 'chaos' is different from 'random', although the two are often confused, because both phenomena make something unpredictable.

Can you cite some examples of such rules — TheMadFool

The Kolmogorov framework for probability theory.

But, is it ethical to provide armament to an aggressor, even though aggressors themselves - such as ISIS - assume themselves to be defending what they believe? — TimeLine

It is not ethical for me to do so, if I believe the aggressor's actions are harmful. What the aggressor thinks about it has no significance in my moral deliberation.

illicit a first association — Benkei

Elicit is the verb needed here. Illicit is an adjective that means illegal or at least socially disapproved of.

I hope you don't mind this suggestion. Your English is enormously better than my French or German, and I have no Dutch at all, and I would like people to correct me when I get things wrong in those languages.

For me there is no first vs second order distinction. An ethical decision is one that (1) affects other people's feelings in some way and (2) I have considered carefully and (3) the course of action chosen is one that I would not expect, before the event, to regret later on [the word 'expect' is critical there]

When I take an ethical decision, it is because I want to be the sort of person that takes that decision (a Virtue Ethics perspective), or slightly differently, because I want to live in a world where that decision was taken the way I decided it (a Consequentialist perspective).

Khashoggi's statement makes no sense to me. It is the decision, not the reasons or the action, that is ethical, unethical or neither. Perhaps what he means is that he performed actions that other people would be likely to think stemmed from unethical decisions, but that were not unethical for him because of some other considerations he took into account.

A mafioso that kills an innocent person out of loyalty to their family is acting ethically according to their ethics, but not according to mine, which is why I want him incarcerated.

Randomness is also breaking rules — TheMadFool

That's where you're getting into difficulty. Randomness is not breaking rules. It's just a different set of rules from non-randomness. If you study probability theory you will see that it is formally logical in exactly the same way as other branches of mathematics.

Please clarify — TheMadFool

Sure. What exactly is it that you do not understand?

Yes, the two are definitely not synonyms. 'Irrational' applies to a voluntary action by a conscious agent, while 'random' applies to a process that typically does not require the involvement of consciousness, such as a coin toss.

I think of a word as a tool.

The skill of the user of a word could be divided into
- Knowledge that - the word exists in one's language
- Knowledge how - to use the word skilfully

The analogy with a physical tool works here. A skilled trades person knows (1) what tools are available to do a job and (2) how to use those tools skilfully.

Like with chisels, knowledge how to use a word is a continuous rather than binary datum. One can know broadly what a word means, yet not grasp all the nuances of it. A skilled wordsmith will make full use of those nuances.

There are some words that I know-that they exist, and don't forget that because they are funny-sounding, easy to remember words, but for which I keep forgetting the meaning (the knowledge-how bit).

Examples are crepuscular, crapulous, rebarbative, cupidity.

at best it's random — TheMadFool

It is rational in such a situation to decide to act upon the outcome of a random or pseudo-random phenomenon, because it will break the deadlock and prevent starvation.

Despite the ludicrous unrealism of this scenario, the solution of deciding to act on the outcome of a pseudo-random trial is used in real life, for the same reason. Two parties in conflict agree to abide by the outcome of a coin toss, because although each dislikes the other's plan of action, they know that the result of no action at all is worse.

I'd be very careful not to equate voting against an 'anti-terrorist bill' with not being 'anti-terrorist'.

That something gets called an 'anti-terrorist' bill tells us only that its promoters have been successful in convincing people that the measures contained in the bill will reduce terrorism. It tells us nothing about whether it is actually likely to do that.

Many of the measures that have been portrayed by Western governments since 2001 as 'anti-terrorist' will have had the exact opposite effect - ie they will have created conditions for increased terrorism. The classic example of that is the invasion of Iraq.

My starting point for evaluation of somebody who has 'never voted for an anti-terrorist bill' would be to observe that they must have tremendous political courage, which is a good thing. Of course I would then want to know the details of the bills that were voted against, but that's another matter.

I don't think it's a case of expecting something beyond the limit, but rather observing that there are phenomena that cannot be adequately analysed using reason. We are aware of the phenomena - eg consciousness - so we don't need to infer or expect them. But IMO Hume helps us understand that we have no hope of understanding these things using reason.

I don't know anyone here who identifies with Hume most for example — Agustino

I love Hume. I love him for:

• his clear, entertaining writing style
• his innovative thinking, finding things to question that nobody had ever thought to question before (eg that recurrence of a past pattern is evidence that the pattern will continue in the future)
• that while being essentially analytic in approach, he identifies limits of reason and thereby opens the door to mysticism
• that he does not glorify and worship reason, despite being able to use it as well as any contemporary
• that he liked people and enjoyed the good things in life - contrary to the gloomy, misanthropic character that is often associated (often unfairly) with philosophers
• that while sceptical about knowledge, he understood that that need have no impact on how we act ("I don't know that my dinner won't poison me, but I'm going to eat it anyway, and then I'm going to the pub to enjoy the company of people that I don't even know for sure whether they exist!")
• some of his writing has strong similarities to Buddhist thinking
• that he died as he lived, providing an example and inspiration to us all (read Boswell's account of Hume's death)

In terms of your analogy, the autopilot is evidence of an automated non-conscious manufacturer — TheMadFool

Some people think that - although I think they'd use a term like 'evolutionary process' rather than the somewhat loaded term 'manufacturer' (cf watchmaker). But some people look at the complexity of the autopilot and think 'Wow, this is so complex, somebody must have consciously designed it'. Which, after all, is what happens with autopilots in aeroplanes.

However, natural order and miracle are contradictory terms — TheMadFool

I don't see it that way.

One could believe that God had created a set of laws that are the universe's Autopilot, but that very rarely he switches the Autopilot off in order to make a manual intervention. If ordinary mortal pilots can do that, why not an omnipotent being?

In terms of the above symbolism, the argument that Miracles-> God is not that
~N->G. That would be claiming that there is no Autopilot. Rather they are saying the Autopilot appears to have been overriden, so somebody must have done the overriding - and who better to do that than the person that constructed the Autopilot?

While I don't find any arguments for or against the existence of a non-specific God sound, I don't see anything wrong with that argument.

Surely, we can't have it both ways. It'd be a hollow argument to say both miracles and ordinary events are evidence of God. Your comments please. — TheMadFool

It's a fair question. I think the answer is that they are different levels of evidence.

To see the laws of nature as evidence of divine design requires a great deal of interpretation. That will usually only be interpreted as evidence by a scientist that is already religious, like Kepler or Newton.

Miracles on the other hand are prima facie much stronger evidence for a god. In the stories they are used to convince unbelievers. They are not needed for those who already believe.

There is also a difference in time. The only miracles that modern scientists would accept as miracles are those related in ancient texts, such as the resurrection of the dead, multiplying loaves and fishes, turning water into wine, making the Sun stand still in the sky for hours on end. At the time those were reported to have been done there was no such thing as a scientist, so there was no 'look at this amazing set of natural laws' viewpoint to contradict.

There are events that occur in modern days that are claimed as miracles - eg an unexpected remission from cancer. But they are lame compared to those mentioned above, and do not require acceptance of the existence of a deity.

The modern-day religious scientist who sees natural laws as evidence for God can take the following approaches to reported ancient miracles:

- They are just stories, included in the scriptures for metaphorical reasons; or
- they were just God exercising his divine prerogative to break his own laws when he wishes;
- they didn't break any natural laws but are explicable by some more complex natural law that we have not yet been clever enough to discover.

Within the context of this discussion, at least, it implies that 0/2 yields the set {0,0}, — alan1000

In the standard set-theoretic construction of the rational numbers, each number is represented by an equivalence class of ordered pairs (p,q) where the numerator p is any integer and the denominator q is a positive integer. The equivalence relation is that

(p1,q1)=(p2,q2) iff p1 q2 = p2 q1.

Hence zero is represented by the equivalence class

{ (0,q) : q is a positive integer}

Hence 0/2, which is zero, is represented by that equivalence class.

The null set (empty set) does not represent any element of the set-theoretic representation of the rational numbers. It does however come into the representation of the integers, in which the empty set represents zero.

By the way, the standard way to represent an ordered pair (p,q) in set theory is as {p,{p,q}}. This distinguishes p as the only one out of p and q that is both an element of the mother set and an element of a proper subset of the mother set. The ordered pair (p,p) is represented by {p,{p}} which the assiduous set theory student will recognise to be different from {p}.

Is there a specific operation in mathematics for which the even parity of zero is a prerequisite — alan1000

Yes. Alternating series of the form:

sum (k=0 to infinity) a(k) x^k (-1)^k

are common. The Taylor series for e^(-x) is an example. The terms of even (odd) parity are positive (negative). Hence the term with index k=0 is positive, having even parity.

The fairness is based on deducing that Africans are as human as Europeans, a fact that had been denied by pro-Slavery lobbyists.

For example take ethics - logical analysis of the moral landscape has utterly failed in providing a satisfactory solution to its problems. — TheMadFool

Why do you think that? It was rationality applied to the question of whether it is ethical to own another human that ended the slave trade.

Surely that alone is enough to justify any area of inquiry.

Anyway, "deductive form" something like what I did? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes.

And thanks for the explanation. I know about Rayleigh scattering courtesy of a project I did on Monte Carlo simulation of photon diffusion through water bodies. But it never occurred to me that it was the same phenomenon going on in the atmosphere that made the sky blue. The water work was focused only on the amount of light that gets down to different depths, not on its wavelength.

There's a reasonable chance that I'll even remember that explanation now.

Darn, I was hoping nobody would ask about the 'why is the sky blue?' one. The embarrassing fact of the matter is that, although it has been explained to me in various ways at various times in my life, none of those explanations has ever stuck. I remember that scattering and maybe also refraction play some role in there, and there's something about those having more impact on shorter wavelength light (which is the blue end of the visible spectrum), but that's about as far as it goes.

What you have outlined is the sort of shape I would expect a satisfying explanation to take, but with all the 'such-and-such'es filled in. So, yes, that's the idea.

Are you saying that the force of gravity does not cause the apple to accelerate? — John

No. That would be a use of the word 'cause'. When being careful, I generally avoid uses of the word 'cause' (as opposed to references to the word, of which I have made two so far in this post) because it does not have a clear definition and, in my opinion, leads to confusion.

I neither accept nor deny what is in the quote above, but rather suggest that it is not a well-formed proposition, because the word 'cause' does not have a clear meaning in this context. Fortunately for me, 'Gravity causes the apple to accelerate' is a sentence that I cannot recall having ever seen anybody utter, except on a philosophy forum.

By the way, I wonder about your notion of 'explanation', that an explanation is an identification of a 'cause'. If so then it seems you use the word 'explanation' very differently from how those around me do. Under such a notion, explanations would be very short, consisting solely of a reference to the phenomenon that the explainer considers to be the 'cause'.

Q. Why does the apple fall? A. Gravity
Q. Why is the sky blue? A. Refraction
Q. Why do people with mostly African ancestors have darker skin on average than people with mostly European ancestors? A. Evolution (or Melanin, or Vitamin D deficiency, or Skin cancer - it's hard to know which one to pick)

In my experience, explanations are much longer than this. The explanations I have received, and have given, have been narratives, not mere references. The narrative (which as I have said, has the formal structure of a deduction that starts from premises that the explainee understands and believes, and proceeds by steps that the explainee understands and believes) will usually refer to many different phenomena along the way, with none of them distinguished from the others and having the special label 'cause' affixed to it.

I think if the explanations I had given my children when they asked about things had been like the examples given above, they would have been quite frustrated.

You appear to be asserting, without any detectable supporting argument, that somehow 'cause' is an inextricable part of the explanation, even though the explanation does not mention 'cause'. I do not accept that assertion.

That you are unconvinced is an observation on which I thought we had already agreed.

'Purpose' raises more dilemmas too. I have yet to work out whether finding a 'purpose' for one's life is the same as finding a 'meaning' of one's life. I tend to think that the only sensible way we can interpret 'meaning of life' is as 'my purpose in life', but I think there are many that disagree with that.

I haven't seen it put the way you put it before. It sounds like you are saying that Aristotle's aim was to distinguish the different ways in which people used (the ancient Greek equivalent of) the word 'cause'. If so, then maybe I have been too hard on him. I don't know how Ancient Greeks used words. He's likely to know much more about that than me. Also, even though there will be big differences between how they used a word and how we use its modern equivalent, I think I see some similarities between the uses he describes and the modern uses.

I don't see people around me using 'cause' in the sense of his 'final cause' though. Maybe it's just the society in which I live, but people I know just don't use the word 'cause' that way. I have no reason to suspect that Ancient Greeks didn't though. The closest I have observed is that people will use the word 'because' to explain why they did something. But I find the similarity between 'because' and 'cause' purely textual, not semantic.

In summary, if the main thrust of the 'cause' discussion is about final cause rather than efficient cause, maybe Aristotle and I are not at variance after all.

why not give an example of an explanation of any phenomenon which is not couched in terms of causality? — John

Newton wonders 'why does the apple fall from the tree?'.

He comes up with his gravity theory that there is a gravitational force F on the apple, whose magnitude is given by the gravity equation. He also comes up with his law of motion that F=ma. Putting the two equations together, he deduces that the apple will accelerate towards the centre of the Earth with initial acceleration GM/r^2.

There is no use of the word 'cause', or any synonym thereof, anywhere in that explanation.

A philosopher may listen to the explanation and say 'Aha! So the cause of the apple's fall is the force of gravity'. But that is the philosopher's interpretation of the explanation, not the explanation.

This is not true. In Communist times you were given a job, and you had to work it, whether you liked it or not. You had no freedom to move in society. This isn't the case today. You have a lot more freedom. — Agustino

It looks like you failed to notice the word 'political' before the word 'freedom'.

It looks to me like he's made Russia have the worst of both worlds.

With the Soviet Union, once Stalin had died and his after-effects had dissipated, Soviet citizens had a reasonable standard of leaving, but no political freedom. Almost everybody had a job and could afford a modest standard of living. For a while after the Soviet Union dissolved, there was political freedom, but a deteriorating standard of living - high unemployment, probably increasing homeless and so on.

Now, under Putin, they have no political freedom, and high unemployment and homelessness. It looks to me like, on the whole they were better off under either the Soviets or Yeltsin.

But all scientific theories do contain propositions that embody notions of efficient causation. — John

It is the interpretation that asserts that embodiment, not the theory. In its purest form, the theory is a bunch of equations.

There's nothing wrong with inserting words like 'because' into a presentation of a scientific theory, but it is purely optional. As I said above, an explanation is a deduction that starts from premises that the explainee understands and believes, proceeds by steps the explainee understands and believes, and reaches a conclusion that is a prediction of the occurrence of the phenomenon for which the explainee had requested an explanation.

Enabling conditions aren't enough to determine whether you commit the crime. — Marchesk

Yes indeed. And the same applies to the things to which people typically apply the term 'cause'. Hence I think 'enabling condition' is a better term - suitably modest.

You might wish to think of the fundamental forces in terms of their theories and how they explain things, but I don't know how you do away with causal aspect. — Marchesk

My position is that any attempt to use the word 'cause' must relate to a theory. This viewpoint is explained in detail in this essay I wrote a few years ago. That position has shifted a bit since then, and this discussion has helped that - given me new insights. But I still hold the central idea that reference to a 'cause' without specifying the theory to which it relates is as meaningless as the word 'here' when we don't know where the speaker is.

There are countless examples of the idea of efficient causation in science; in fact the notion is pretty much constitutive of the conceptual models that science consists in. — John

People interpret the theories as being about 'efficient causation'. That is not the same as the theories themselves containing propositions about efficient causation. It is very common for people to mistake the interpretations of scientific theories for the theories themselves. This is particularly prevalent - and comes into particularly sharp focus - in quantum mechanics. But it happens with other theories as well.

So, no mechanical forces are understood to operate in geology? Physical science doesn't posit four fundamental forces? Animals are not understood to be subject to climate and topography, and the forces and conditions attendant upon those? — John

I'm afraid I don't understand these rhetorical questions, but they sound interesting. Can you explain them, and how they relate to the discussion?

Are you really claiming that the concept of efficient forces can be done away with in science, or that the notion of agents acting for reasons could be dispensed with in the humanities? — John

References to efficient causes are absent from most science I have read, and the parts where authors have referred to them would, IMHO, be better off without those references. The product of scientific endeavour is theories and equations, which give rise to explanations and predictions.

I'm not so concerned about 'final cause', and certainly wouldn't want anybody in the humanities to have to change their patterns of speech. My concern in this discussion is about precision and logic, and I see the humanities as being about emotions rather than about precision and logic. If somebody can write better poems or novels by using the word 'cause' then that's great. I might make an exception for history though, as that is a bit like science in some ways. I find discussions such as 'what was the cause of the Great War' profoundly mistaken. I don't mind so much if they ask 'describe some causes of the Great War' although personally I prefer the talk to be about enabling conditions.

if you were just saying that causality is a mistaken concept to begin with then that's something else entirely.

It's closer to that than the other. But saying it's a 'mistaken' concept is a bit too strong. I see 'cause' as a vague term that can be perfectly safely used in cases where its vagueness does not present problems - which is in many areas of everyday life.

IMHO the 'mistake' is to take that vague term and then try to use it in areas where clarity is necessary - like philosophy, science, law and arguments over fault. There are much clearer and more precise terms available, as discussed above, and I am advocating their use in those contexts, rather than 'cause'.

Although causation necessarily implies correlation, correlation does not imply causation. — Mr Bee

One use of the concept, though, is to help us weed out spurious correlations. — Srap Tasmaner

In my work and in my play I have occasion to do many regressions - statistical analyses of the association between observed phenomena. In that context, for many years I have preached the gospel of 'correlation does not imply causation' and pointed to regressions that identify strong relationships between tea sales in Germany and rates of divorce in Canada as evidence of the difference.

What has changed in me is not that I think that there's no difference between useful correlations and spurious ones. It's that I think 'causality' is the wrong razor to use to make the distinction.

The most obvious reason for that is that a razor is - the etymology declaims it - something sharp, accurate, defined with excruciating precision. We have seen in this thread that nobody wants to define causality, and it has even been suggested that it's a mistake to try to do so. That's fine, but without a definition we cannot use it as a razor. We need a different concept - a clear, precise, well-defined one - to distinguish between spurious and non-spurious correlations.

My current thinking is that a good candidate for that razor is the persistency of the correlation under different circumstances. That is what I was trying to elucidate with the pharmaceutical example. Most spurious correlations will disappear if we can conduct the experiment under different circumstances.

An even better razor is if we can identify a mechanism that enables us to predict that if B occurs, C is likely to follow. We can't always do that, so we have to fall back on the first razor. Sometimes we can't even use that, so we remain in a state of ignorance as to whether the correlation is spurious or persistent. But we keep trying.

There's nothing illogical about saying 'the cause of your fever is that you have influenza'. It's just that I see it as an imprecise, slang statement that's great for everyday life but doesn't fit well in philosophy, or in law courts or other arguments about whose fault it was. Its meaning is usually something like 'you have influenza, and in the process of working through one's influenza, one usually develops a fever.' The latter statement has a precision that the former does not. If more detail is wanted, one can describe how the immune system typically reacts to its detection of the influenza virus, the rapid increase in the activity of T cells and white cells, the battles that take place in the blood stream, and so on. It's all about mechanism.

Another point - God I prattle on, don't I? The use of the word 'cause' as a substitute for mechanism seems to depend haphazardly on the history of the discipline. In physics we talk about 'light cones of causality' even though they are better described as 'light cones of predictability'.

Against that is the example of Credit Risk Analysis - the discipline of predicting how many borrowers are likely to default on (fail to repay) their debts. Poor credit risk analysis was a major factor in the global economic disaster that started in 2008 and whose effects are still being felt. In this field there are two types of mathematical models used to predict probability of default. They are called Statistical and Structural models respectively. Statistical models, as the name suggests, look solely at the characteristics of borrowers and do regressions to work out which characteristics are correlated with default. Structural models focus on the financial structure of the company - its assets and liabilities - and the movements of stock price indices and use an economic model to predict which companies are likely to default, based on the observation that default occurs when one's liabilities exceed one's assets. This type of model looks at what some would loosely describe as 'cause' of default whereas Statistical models do not. But interestingly, the word 'cause' is barely mentioned in the literature. The word 'Structural' is used instead, which has a natural similarity with Mechanism.