these progressives ..... - all they want to do really is impose their values on society — Agustino

Dead right. Which is exactly the same as what the conservatives want to do. So we are in honourable opposition to one another in the marketplace of ideas, and the one that can wield rhetoric the most effectively will win. I hope it's my side, and I expect you hope it's yours.

they can care less about the religious folks, — Agustino

This too is true. I care a great deal about some conservatives, despite my disagreeing with them. Some of them are friends, some are family, and I love them. So it's certainly true that I could care less than I currently do about them.

Or did you mean to say 'they can't care less about the religious folks', which would be a way of saying they don't care about them at all.

Yes, and because it will be a massive waste of public money, whose sole purpose is for Turnbull (the PM) to avoid a rift within his own party between the hard-right and the moderates. There is no reason why the Australian taxpayer should fork out 182 million to help the Liberal Party (Aust Conservative Party) avoid making difficult decisions. Bear in mind that the only reason the plebiscite becomes an issue at all is because the Coalition refuses to allow a conscience vote.

@Wayfarer. I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that almost anybody can launch a lawsuit, for almost any reason. Assuming that the pamphlet did not actually express any hate (and I doubt it did, though I've not seen it) I am confident that, if the suit had not been withdrawn, it would have been denied and costs awarded against the litigant.

If the pamphlet was a sincere and non-hateful expression of deeply-held beliefs, I would class the litigation as 'excessive' political correctness. It's on the other side of where I'd draw the line.

I think the 'excessive' is crucial.

I would like there to be able to be a mature, non-hysterical debate, without either side casting aspersions on the character of the other. But I don't want a plebiscite.

Nobody has offered a plebiscite on right-to-die legislation, an issue that is very dear to my heart. Based on polls, it seems that right-to-die legislation would easily be approved if a plebiscite were held, while it will be a very long time coming if it has to go through parliament, because of (1) the unrepresentatively high number of Christians in parliament and (2) the fear of all politicians of the power of ginger groups like the Australian Christian Lobby.

But I don't blame the failure of governments to hold a plebiscite on this issue on political correctness, or on anything else. I just accept that it's one of the many unfortunate consequences of living in a democracy. As Churchill said, it's the worst form of government, except for the others.

conservatives* tend to use the term PC exclusively as a pejorative i.e. they allow for no distinction between PC and excessive PC — Baden

Yes, indeed the OP is unclear on this point. The first sentence complains about excessive political correctness, and the video from Joe Rogan is a complaint against people who perpetrate such excesses. Nobody can reasonably deny that there are such people.

But then the last paragraph complains about political correctness without the 'excessive' qualifier. That makes somebody like me, who loathes excessive political correctness, and the sort of sanctimonious point-scoring activity that Rogan is talking about, but is passionately in favour of (what I consider to be) reasonable political correctness, CONFUSED.

So canning the plebiscite and passing the law by an act of Parliament is tantamount to 'outlawing debate' — Wayfarer

Really?

'Outlawing debate' means, literally, that those who debate it are outlaws, ie are breaking the law, and will therefore be liable to a criminal punishment.

You know that.

How many anti-(gay-marriage) campaigners have been arrested so far this year in Australia for expressing their views?

BTW do you like my parentheses? That's how far I'm prepared to go to make the point that I don't believe being against gay-marriage means that people are anti-gay! Hyphens are not associative.

So what the argument appears to be, is that any debate all is damaging, because, if there is something to be debated, then it must imply that there is some grounds for questioning marriage equality. And the marriage equality movement equates opposition with bigotry — Wayfarer

I am in favour of marriage equality, and I do not believe that being opposed to it is indicative of bigotry. I accept that most people opposed to it are opposed because of deeply-held religious views. Although I think such views are mistaken and harmful, I see no reason to judge the person that holds them. I'm sure I hold plenty of mistaken views as well, although I hope they are less harmful.

Regarding the damage of debating, let's start by acknowledging that debate is constantly happening anyway. Nobody with credibility in mainstream politics is proposing laws to outlaw debate on this issue, irrespective of the fact that they may see such debate as harmful. One needs a lot more justification than just 'harmful' to go so far as to legally ban an activity. What people are opposed to is creating an unnaturally large focus on the debate by making it the subject of a plebiscite, and maybe even pumping it up further by funding both sides with public money.

Would you agree that there are some subjects that it is harmful to debate? Would you for instance be happy to have a publicly-funded, national plebiscite on a proposal to decriminalise sex with children, or to imprison all Jews?

Assuming you'd agree that debates on those topics are likely to be harmful, the question simply becomes about where one draws the line as to which debates are considered harmful, rather than whether any debate ever could be considered harmful.

Most people would agree that a public debate on those two nasty topics is harmful and is best avoided (but not rendered a crime, in a country where free speech is still highly valued). At the other end of the spectrum, I think most would agree that a debate on whether to change the flag or the top GST tax rate (VAT or sales-tax rate for non-Australians) is not only non-harmful but potentially healthy. There is a big area in between, and different people will draw the line at different places.

In most cases, an accusation of 'political correctness' is simply a complaint that one's interlocutor draws that line at a different place to oneself.

So we have subtracted an infinite quantity from an infinite quantity. — Punshhh

We have done something, and that something has to do with the folk notion of 'taking away'. But subtraction is a much more precise notion than the folk notion of taking away. To be able to subtract two things they must be members of a set that has a binary operation, which we can call 'addition', such that the elements of that set form an Abelian Group under that operation.

Transfinite cardinals form an Abelian monoid, but not a group, under the binary operation of addition. So it is not possible to define an operation of subtraction for them.

So infinity is meaningless to you? — ssu

I didn't say that. What made you think that I did?

You mean here Cantorian set theory and cardinals and ordinals here. — ssu

Arithmetic with cardinals, not ordinals. See this wolfram page.

Arithmetic with infinite ordinals is also possible, but is different from arithmetic with cardinals. For instance cardinal addition is commutative, but ordinal addition is not.

Infinity minus infinity has the same meaning as blue minus blue - ie no meaning.

In transfinite arithmetic we have a collection of objects, called 'cardinalities', which is all the numbers, finite and infinite. Then we have a set of operations that can be performed on those cardinalities. These operations are addition, multiplication and binary exponentiation (x goes to 2^x). The first two operations take two inputs and give one output (binary operations). The last one takes one input and gives an output.

There is no operation of subtraction, so to talk of it is meaningless. Trying to talk about it is an example of inappropriate generalisation. That occurs when subset U of a set S has a property P that is not held by all members of set S, and one then asks a question that presupposes that P applies to all of S.

The subset in this case is the set of all finite cardinalities, for which we can define an operation of subtraction. We end up in confusion if we assume that means we can define an operation of subtraction for all cardinalities.

Another analogy: All primates have eyes. Primates are a subset of the kingdom of eukaryotes - organisms whose cells have nuclei. Fungi are eukaryotes. So let us ask ourselves

which is the left eye of a mushroom?

While I don't debate your personal experiences, and even that it may be so in your communities, it's clear that as a trend adultery and cheating are on the rise - clearly they are not diminishing. This is the case at least in the US and Europe where I have checked statistics. — Agustino

And neither will I challenge your personal experiences. We live in different communities and the cultures of those communities may be very different, in addition to which the history of our own particular interactions within our community may differ from those of others in our community.

But then you go on to make a claim that purports to transcend your personal experience, about what you say is 'clearly' the case. I am afraid the veracity of that claim is by no means clear to me. Further, I struggle to see how one could obtain statistics about what adultery levels were for instance amongst the 18th-century French aristocracy, miners in the California gold rush, or soldiers in the Napoleonic wars (or even World War I).

If you'll permit a brief digression: I have been striving for a while now to completely expunge the words 'clearly' and 'obviously' from my vocabulary, in mathematics as well as in philosophy and politics. Usually they are untrue, and are used to cover up the fact that I don't have a good argument to support my claim that P is the case. And in the minority of cases where they are true, they add no useful information to the communication. Especially in mathematics, using the word clearly is simply a slap in the face - an accusation of stupidity - against someone that is unable to see why B must follow from A.

In mathematical writing, there is a substitute that can add useful information without having to produce the entire proof, which is to say something like 'by considering the example of a X that has property P, and trying to perform operation N on it, it can be fairly readily deduced that condition C always holds'. If one is feeling especially friendly, one adds 'the proof is left as an exercise for the reader'. The point is that the sentence has given a guide to the reader about how they might set about convincing themself of the claim's verity. There may be an analog of that for philosophical discussion, but I haven't felt the need to find one so far, as I find that by removing my clearlys and obviouslys from philosophical writing, not only is nothing lost, but clarity is improved.

I commend this vocabularic excision to you and to any others that find that unwonted 'clearly's and 'obviously's keep on popping up in their prose.

I can't find the post, because this discussion has raced along so fast that I've lost track, but I just wanted to give my observation, Agustino, on what I think you said, something about society no longer condemning adultery, or nowhere near as much as it did. On reflection, I have to question whether that is actually the case.

If we compare it with the treatment of Hester Prynne in the Scarlet Letter, then that's certainly correct. But I'd say the Puritanical society of 17th century Massachussets was an aberration, not at all representative of views throughout the world at that time.

The impression I get from my kids is that they are really judgemental about what they call 'cheating' - a word that was never used when I was their age - but which covers adultery as well as sex with anybody that isn't your girlfriend/boyfriend, if you have one.

While they are much less judgemental about sex between people that are not in a heterosexual marriage, than people were 'in my day', I feel that they are more judgemental about cheating. I wouldn't dare to judge whether that increased judgementality is a good or bad thing, but it interests me that it is there. I wonder if it is peculiar to my little niche of society (upper-middle class, educated, left-leaning, inner-urban South-Eastern Australian). I'd be interested in what others' experiences are, in their local worlds, of young people's views of cheating. I love the French word for it, by the way, which is 'tromper', meaning 'to trick' or 'fool'.

Also, in assessing whether society has become harsher or more lenient in its view on adultery, we should focus on how it is applied to men, not women. Adultery of women was until recently, in most societies, regarded very harshly because the women were essentially property of their husbands and for a woman to make love to someone else was like a slave being disobedient - completely unacceptable. But my understanding is that, at least in Europe, adultery of a man was laughed off, if not actively admired, as long as the person they had sex with was not another man's wife. I do wonder whether, at the same time as societal condemnation of female adultery has abated (thank goodness), condemnation of male adultery may have become somewhat harsher than it was.

The two opposing directions could be for the same reason. If a woman is property then it is OK for a man to have sex with somebody else. One has no obligations to one's property. But when society rejects that view, perhaps it becomes more accepting of straying by the woman and less so of straying by the man.

I watched a French movie recently Detrompez-vous (English title 'Game of Four'), in which two people find out their spouses are having an affair with each other, and work together to try to break it up. Despite coming from the country that many people think of as having adultery as a national sport and ancient tradition, it seemed to me that the movie strongly directed the viewer's sympathies to the two cuckolded partners, rather than the adulterers.

Gday Agustino.
I find it impossible to accurately describe my stance towards the notion of reincarnation. It is not a belief in the sense of a proposition. I don't think it is even cognitive - although I sometimes wonder whether I am sure what I mean by cognitive.

All I can say is that, out of the various metaphors that are used to describe death, from the cessation described by reductive materialism, to the rebirth of Christianity and Islam, to the Kali Yuga destruction and reimagining of Hinduism, to the non-self of Buddhism, and many others, I find that reincarnation resonates in some inexplicable way with me. On a very banal level one could liken it to the Circle of Life from the Lion King. Perhaps it's a mix of the 'Brahman's dream' notion of Hinduism with the Buddhist non-self - notwithstanding that Nagarjuna's non-self (anatta) doctrine was apparently primarily intended as a rejection of the Hindu notion of atman, which I guess is associated with Brahman's dream.

I don't believe any stuff about persistent traits, dispositions, inclinations or memories. But I have been exposed to all those things I mention above, having been raised a devout RC, spent a few years as a passionate anti-religious person, read and listened to lots of Alan Watts and Buddhist podcasts (Free Buddhist Audio, Insight Meditation Centre, esp Gil Fronsdal, sometimes Tara Brach).

You're right that it's consciousness that I think of as being recycled in some way. I tried to describe it in this essay a while back. It's all so shrouded in metaphor and fundamentally inexpressible. That's why I view mysticism as the most fruitful approach to philosophy for me.

I'll have one more go (which will of course fail, because the subject is impervious to assault by mere words):
I am not important. It is not important that this body continues to live. What is important is that there be life. And every instance of that ongoing life will be 'I'.

I think I'm looking for some Aristotelian golden mean between the extremes — Erik

I think this is where ritual can help. The Stoics recommended once a day, preferably at the same time, briefly but deeply reflecting on one's mortality and that of those we love. I think I read about it in William Irvine's wonderful book 'A guide to the good life: The ancient art of Stoic joy'. That practice seems to work well for me.

I don't know if this is relevant but recently I've been finding my idea of death - which we can never understand in any complete rational way - gravitating towards an idea of reincarnation. Not as far as having conscious memories of a past life but in the sense of one's consciousness somehow merging with a universal consciousness which then re-emerges in particular ways in new consciousnesses.

It is 'only' a metaphor, but then so is every other belief or perspective that we have.

I'm not a consequentialist. — mcdoodle

I would love it if you elaborated on that. I think I am mostly consequentialist but I'm sure there are significant bits of other meta-ethical frameworks in my personal value system as well. I don't have any very clear idea of what they are and how they all fit together, and experience doesn't help me to distinguish because it seems to me that in everyday life (unlike in philosophers' armchair bizarro world thought experiments) most widely-held non-religious ethical frameworks make the same recommendations most of the time.

So if I give my billion dollars to a charity and the charity treasurer then embezzles or straight out steals a chunk of it am I not responsible for that? Did I not allow it to happen? — Barry Etheridge

You can rest easy. You neither are responsible, nor did you allow it. To allow something you need to know about somebody's intention to do it before it happens. You didn't know about that intention.

if feelings are notoriously illogical — darthbarracuda

I don't think feelings are illogical. That would suggest that they are in conflict with logic. Hume demonstrated convincingly (to me, at least) that there cannot be a conflict between logic and feeling, as logic is the servant of feeling and has no values of its own to set in opposition to the values inherent in one's feelings.

In moral reflection, one can use logic to work out the best way to satisfy one's moral feelings.

-Clearly if there is a punishment, less people will engage in the activity. — Agustino

It's not clear to me, unless by 'less people' you set the bar as low as 'at least one person will not do it that otherwise would'. As has already been pointed out, punishments exist already in the form of social disapproval and guilt. The onus is on you to show that a legal punishment would significantly increase the number of people managing to overcome their temptations

I don't see any negatives, except that less people will get married at least in the short-term. — Agustino

Any new criminalisation of any activity will have negatives, amongst which are:
- the costs to society of detecting, arresting, trying, convicting and punishing those convicted under the law
- the inevitable occurrence of erroneous convictions
- displacement effects, whereby a reduction in the proscribed activity causes an increase in another, more harmful activity. An easily foreseeable one here is an increase in spousal rape in the case of partners with highly mismatched sexual appetites.
- providing a breeding ground for organised crime. We only need consider the Prohibition era and the impact of the US's puritanical 'war on drugs' to see how criminalisation of activities generates a boom in organised crime that has a much bigger harmful impact than the problem they were intended to solve.
- forcing those that do the proscribed activity to take risks they otherwise would not take, at risk to themselves and others. A good example of this is how the criminalisation of drugs makes taking small recreational amounts of drugs much more risky because one cannot know whence they came or have a reliable way of knowing they are unadulterated and of a known concentration.

I agree with you, as would many on here I imagine, that adultery is often harmful and immoral, and best discouraged.

So is calling somebody an idiot.

But most harmful and immoral things are not illegal, because making something the subject of criminal law has huge costs and consequences. These things need to be weighed up with enormous care and diligence. To just say 'This law will discourage that harmful activity and clearly there are no downsides' is naive and dangerous in the extreme. It reveals a complete failure to understand the complexity and importance of the development of public policy.

This is not a left vs right or conservative vs progressive issue. I feel the same way about some laws that emanate from the progressive movement ('my' movement). In my country we have laws against racial and religious vilification. While I wish racial and religious vilification to be strongly discouraged, I think it is a bad idea for there to be laws specifically against it, because there are potential negative consequences that I do not think have been sufficiently taken into account. There is a very aggressive public commentator that lost a court case against him for racial vilification of indigenous people. While what he said is loathsome, I think it is regrettable that the response to it was via a court case rather than by public condemnation.

It seems to me that the arguments you have made in favour of criminalising adultery, or analogs thereof, can be applied just as easily to the harm of calling someone an idiot. Would you then also support the criminalisation of that activity?

I apologise if my questions have been covered somewhere in the five pages of discussion, but here they are anyway:

1. What would be the public policy goal of a law that made adultery a punishable criminal offence?

2. What reasons are there to believe that the goal would be achieved by such a law?

I have a third question which is 'How would achievement of that goal weight up against potential negative public policy impacts of such a law?' But that would be best left until the answers to the first two questions are clear.

So what to do? Retreat into solitary crankiness? Rail at the telly? I don't know - that is why it is difficult. But the answer is NOT that 'all opinions are equal', nor that everything is simply a matter of opinion. — Wayfarer

I don't think anybody is suggesting that all opinions are equal. That would be futile. Either 'equal' means 'identical' (ie the classical meaning of equal), in which case the statement can be shown to be false simply by finding two people with different opinions on a a topic. Or 'equal' means something like 'equally valid', in which case I'd say the statement is a category error, because validity is not a property that an opinion has or lacks, any more than blueness is a property that a number has or lacks.

My approach to the conundrum is to not judge those that do not share my opinions, but instead, in the case of an opinion that I treasure, such as tolerance, compassion or environmental protection, to seek to persuade people to share my opinion. Experience has shown that persuasion is a skill that I do not possess in any significant amount, but I still give it a go. I also vote my opinion in elections.

Turning back to the ascetics, I get the impression that most ascetics are not interested in persuading others to adopt their opinions and practices. Diogenes didn't seem to be. In fact, if everyone were like Diogenes, everyone would starve, as nobody would grow any food.

One other thing: In a thread about ascetics, I feel I ought to mention the middle essay (I think it's the middle one) in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality, which was about asceticism. As I recall he was negative about it. I can't remember his reasons. As I recall it was the most obscure of the three essays. But it was clear that he didn't think much of them.

It is insulting in the same way that somebody listening to classical music is insulting - ie it can be interpreted as implying a message to all the pop-music-only listeners that 'I'm so much more sophisticated than you'.

However, if the classical music buff / ascetic doesn't say they are better than others then that interpretation is solely in the mind of the one who seeks to be offended, and the ascetic / buff cannot be held responsible for it.

I think that goes for many things that some people consider 'better', including morals. I listen to classical music because I like it. I don't eat junk food because I don't like it. I give to Oxfam because I feel impelled to do that. None of these are in any way claims of superiority. They are simply actions that I choose because they are the way it seems to me to be appropriate for me to live.

There are sanctimonious and non-sanctimonious vegans, Buddhists, classical music afficionados and ascetics. To assume that somebody is sanctimonious just because some people that share a property with them are sanctimonious would be intellectual laziness.

Then again - some people are intellectually lazy and some are not. Who am I to judge those that choose the path of intellectual laziness?

Then again - some people are judgemental and some are not. Who am I to judge those that choose to be judgemental of others for their intellectual laziness?

Then again...

Crikey - does this regress actually ever stop??!!??

Thus the argument that I would mount for why adultery should not be punishable is simply based on the fact that it is too diverse and unquantifiable a phenomenon to be justly and workably punished. — John

That's a pragmatic argument and, to me, a compelling one. It is a mainstay of my 'multi-faceted' argument against criminalizing adultery.

I don't agree with you about the mutual imposition of values either, because the laws that we actually do have represent (at least in principle) the will of the majority; they embody (or ideally should, at least) the kind of society that most people would like to live in. — John

Indeed. That's why democracy is sometimes called the 'tyranny of the majority'. They impose their worldview on the minority. Fortunately for me, where I live the majority is in favour of laws mostly based on secular, utilitarian values, so to that extent my viewpoint is imposed on religious conservatives that would for instance like abortion to be illegal.

It is not uniform though. Currently our laws do not enable gay marriage or voluntary assisted dying - not because a majority of the public does not support it (it does) but because a majority of parliamentarians either oppose it or are afraid of the incurring the wrath of the socially conservative Christian lobby if they publicly vote for it.

But the disproportionate - and hence unrepresentative - number of committed Christians in our parliament is a separate topic. I have no ideas about how to solve that one.

Surely you would not agree that there could be any reasonable argument for legal sanctions in regard to adultery occurring within the context of de facto relations? — John

It all turns on that word 'reasonable'. What seems reasonable to you and me may not seem reasonable to Agustino and Wayfarer and vice versa.

I observe that some harms to others are punishable by law, whereas others are not. Examples that are not are insults, ridicule, social exclusion and, within the fairly weak limits imposed by libel laws, spreading nasty rumours. There are no doubt historical and practical reasons why these are not punished by law, but we can't claim that the law is consistent in its treatment of harms.

Somebody can be punished by law for stealing 50c bag of sweets but not for insulting and ridiculing someone enough to make their life a living hell.

In that context, I could not mount an argument based on fundamental principles as to why adultery should not be illegal while a woman slapping her partner in the face when she learns of his adultery should be.

I could, and would, mount an argument that it should be like that (and by 'should' I mean that I want the laws to be that way, and I am trying to persuade others to adopt that view), but that argument would be complex, multi-faceted and contain a large dose of rhetoric.

I reject the view that religious conservatives are trying to foist their morals on Progressives while the reverse is not the case. I believe that we Progressives are trying to foist our morals on religious conservatives just as much as they are on us. I hope we prevail, but I don't believe that there is any fundamental principle according to which we are right and they are wrong.

Same with adultery, the only difference is that one is physical harm and the other emotional/spiritual. — Agustino

There are other significant differences, For instance one does not need to know anything about a relationship to know that one party physically attacking the other causes them suffering. However, one needs to know quite a lot about a relationship to know that adultery causes suffering to the other party.

Another difference is that generally adultery only causes harm if the cuckolded party knows of it.

However, despite being one of those dreaded Progressives, I agree with you that adultery is often, possibly even usually, a harm, and that there is no logical flaw in somebody arguing for it having legal sanctions. After all, if nothing else, it is a breach of contract.

Personally, I am opposed to the criminalisation of adultery, but that's just a personal position.

I see what you're saying, but some of what you're assumes that we understand the consciousness of newborn babies and that is something that really can't be proven. — saw038

I said that based on my own memories, in particular that I have no recollections of consciousness prior to the age of four. It's possible that I was lucid at the age of one month but do not recall it. That seems implausible to me but you're right that I can't prove it.

I like much of Alan Watts' work. In this case I think there is a salient asymmetry though, that the saying, for all its poetry, overlooks.

That is that nobody ever wakes up - in the sense of being suddenly completely lucid - having never gone to sleep. We gradually attain lucidity over the first few months (or years?) of our life. For some people the process of death may be the reverse of that - particularly in the case of dementia. But for illnesses or injuries that attack other parts of the body than the mind, the symmetry is not there. One can be there and fully lucid one moment, and have permanently ceased consciousness the next.

"why did we ever look for CMB?"

To find out more about the early universe. The account that is obtained by studying the CMB is neither complete, nor is it of initial conditions. Rather it is a coarse-grained - ergo incomplete - account of conditions around the time of last scattering, which is some time after the earliest modelled time.

I have already explained why the photon cannot experience anything. — tom

Not in this thread you haven't - despite repeated requests that you do so. If you've explained it somewhere else, a link would be helpful.

All of them. — tom

Then it should be very easy for you to write a valid deduction that demonstrates that. Yet despite repeated requests, you have not done that.

I assume you are aware that 'Well then show me how P could be true!' is not a deduction of not-P. If it were, Goldbach's conjecture and most other unsolved conjectures of mathematics would be solved.

Any have anything to add? — Hoo

The bit about lovers seems to me to parallel Martin Buber's concept of 'Ich und du' in which he sees close personal relationships as a window into, or a path towards, a relationship with God. I've never felt that I understood very well what Buber was getting at, yet it resonates strongly with me, which is for me part of what mysticism is about.

The quote from Schrodinger is an example of a phenomenon I've noticed which is that many of the really great scientists and mathematicians have a significant mystical dimension. Others one might mention are Newton, Heisenberg, Einstein, Godel and Darwin.
[Hah! I just typed Heidegger instead of Heisenberg without realising it, and then had to correct it. That's an interesting slip. Freudian?]
In general the promoters of anti-mystical 'Scientism' - people like Hawking, Krauss and Dawkins - seem to me to be less impressive as scientists.

On the contrary, giving PowerPoint presentations appears to be negatively correlated with intelligence. PowerPoint is the death of effective communication.

The act of 'choosing' is to think about different alternative future actions while not knowing which one is going to execute, and to then execute one of them. Before that event, we say the person 'has a choice' After that event we say the person 'has made a choice'.

This applies regardless of what view one has on free will. or determinism.

So the question of whether one 'has a choice' or 'has made a choice' does not depend on one's philosophy on free will.

(The epistemological perspective saves the day yet again!)

Yes, the trouble as I see it with the free will debate is that, while non-libertarians like Hume have a definition of free will that is pragmatic and identifies a phenomenon that most people would agree exists, the libertarians reject that definition but do not have any definition to propose in its place that doesn't ultimately dissolve in undefinable terms.

The resolution of the undefinable term problem is to construct epistemological definitions of otherwise undefined terms like 'could have done otherwise'. But the libertarians do not accept such definitions.

As I see it, the compatibilist position is that a person 'could have done otherwise', based on an epistemological interpretation of that phrase and that, since that's the only interpretation that anybody has been able to suggest so far, that's the maximum sort of free will that anybody could imagine.

Art is for feeling things. — unenlightened

Nice.
I'll use that.

Beethoven and Tchaikovsky helped me through the sturm und drang of my adolescence.

Joni Mitchell helped Emma Thompson cope with the realisation that the gorgeous, expensive necklace that she thought her partner Alan Rickman had bought her for Christmas, was actually for his secretary.

It is correct that most ethical debates are vague. However, that is less often true in places like this than in the general community, because the discussants are more likely to be aware of concepts like premises, deduction, Hume's ought/is distinction, the Euthyphro and other relevant considerations.

I divide ethical disagreements into two types - disagreements over values and disagreements over methods.

Disagreements over methods occur when the discussants want the same end but disagree over how it can be achieved. Most political disagreements are of this nature. Both sides want to increase overall utility (material well-being of the population) but they disagree over how it is best achieved - lower or raise taxes? run a deficit or a surplus? open trade or restrict trade? In come cases these disagreements can be resolved, with goodwill on both sides, by careful investigation. But such goodwill is rare in politics and in disciplines like economics, the assumptions are so open to question that there is often no clear correct answer, no matter how carefully one analyses things.

A classic disagreements over values is the egalitarian vs libertarian one. If A values individual liberty more than material well-being and B has the opposite values, they don't share the same goals, and no amount of logical analysis can reconcile their aspirations. The only available tool is rhetoric, whereby each side tries to win over voters to their values rather than those of their opponent.

Most public debates are ultimately about one or the other of values or methods. But the confusing nature of public debate is such that it is usually hard to tell which it is. Sometimes its values for some participants and methods for others.

I hope you brought your cup!

At least that's what I think Andrew is saying. — Πετροκότσυφας

Perfect. Thank you for that. That was exactly the distinction I was going to point out, until I saw that you had already done it in your post. Yours is expressed better than I would have though.

Saying they are 'human words' is basically denying it. — Wayfarer

I couldn't follow this. Denying what, exactly?

It is the science that says that only human beings are capable of forming an intention, that is conceited.

Which science is that? It's certainly not biology, chemistry or physics, as 'intention' isn't even in the vocabulary of those sciences.

I too am drawn to mysticism, but I'm not conceited enough to say that I alone understand it, and the ancients didn't.

I wasn't implying that you had claimed that you alone understood God, or mysticism. I don't think you said that, nor do I think I ever said you said that.

But all of that overlooks the purported revelation of God in the Biblical tradition. I know there are plenty who will simply dismiss all of it, but I am not among them. So what I was talking of, in respect of 'idolatory', is the reification of deity into some supposed being or form. — Wayfarer

It doesn't overlook it. It recognizes that those books are composed of human words and that the notion that anything so gob-smackingly amazing as the explanation of the entire universe could be rendered in mere words is risible and yet at the same time conceited. It is idolatry because it makes out the words, or the childish images the words conjure up (and even sophisticated images such as Tillich's are childish compared to what any reality would actually have to be like), to be actual images of God.

IMHO this is no less reification than identification of God with a stick, mountain, statue or mantra.

That's one reason why I am drawn to mysticism. It is a process of contemplation of the unknowable rather than an attempt to construct a fancy pile of words that one pretends tells us something about the unknowable.

And it's a form of idolatory, a false conception of the nature of God. — Wayfarer

All concepts of God are false because, if there is a God, its true nature would be inconceivable to us puny mortals. Hence all concepts of God are idolatrous, which is why the ancient Hebrews started to lose the plot when they made their rules against idolatry, echoed by the Protestant iconoclasts of the Reformation. They were just switching one form of idolatry for another, without realizing it.

What seems a better approach to me is to acknowledge that any concept we have of God will be idolatrous, and to accept that that's not a bad thing. It also prevents one looking down one's nose at 'less sophisticated religions'. A tribesman's carved wooden totem is as valid as a Shiva lingam or a Pure Lander's chanting of Amitabha, or a Tibetan Lama's spinning of the prayer wheels, or Paul Tillich's Ground of Being, or Aquinas's First Cause. I suspect Tillich would agree with me, but I'm not so sure about Aquinas.