This doesn't hold because in the case of selective breeding there is no question of survival advantage but merely of which animals are chosen to breed. So the direction of the breeding program is foreordained and this is not analogous with the Darwinian model where there is no goal. — John

I have to pull you up on this John. You made a bad mistake in your last post, irrelevantly contrasting the randomness of mutations with the directedness of selective breeding, but you haven't owned up to it, and here you just return to your original position, which I already addressed.

I see why you don't like the analogy and I can appreciate that. After all, the very problem with it that you've pointed out can sometimes be slightly misleading for people getting to grips with evolution, especially if they don't study it very deeply. Even so, it strikes me as the best analogy I have ever seen, and my suspicion is that those who treat it contemptuously--rather than critically--just don't really understand it.

So far there has not been even an attempt to define what that might mean. — andrewk

I attempted it.

No, the analogy does not fail, because while the mutations themselves may appear randomly, those which bestow advantages do so owing to the conditions, whether they be imposed by human preference or by nature. The mutations that a human breeder selects from are random too. The idea is not that selection is random, but that mutations are random.

And this is the purest anachronism:

I think it must have already been obvious to intelligent people long before Darwin that organisms that are more suitably equipped to survive in particular environments will be more likely to survive. — John

Yes, but the analogy takes account of that. Whereas the selection of the traits you want in your pigeons is deliberate, the selection that drives evolution more generally is not directed, i.e., it is natural selection. One can see why Darwin thought it was a good analogy despite this fundamental difference.

The first Superman comic came out the same year Seabiscuit beat War Admiral. It means that there's something Super that's latent in every regular everybody. — Mongrel

This.

But I think @Wosret's picked up on something in the air. If heroes give every regular everybody something to live up to, then some will fail, and isn't the experience of failure now seen in some quarters as something that people need to be protected from? I'm thinking of the notion that seems to be popular in education and parenting, that in a kids' athletics race, for example, everyone's a winner just for taking part, and you're amazing just for being you, and so on.

I see it as an ontological difference, and I don't think there are that many of them. 'Ontological' means 'pertaining to the meaning of Being' - it's not, as is often casually stated, the analysis of 'what exists'. So I think there's an ontological discontinuity, which actually is revealed in the fact that humans are referred to as 'beings'. The problem with this view, however, is that current philosophy and science doesn't accomodate ontological levels, as far as I can see; this is because it postulates matter~energy as the only real substance or existent. — Wayfarer

Yes I agree it's an ontological difference, because I think to be human is to be historical. But of course you're right to point out that I'm reluctant to say what I think the ontological difference most fundamentally is, because I don't like having to choose between history, society and personhood.

And when I said it's about what matters to us, I wasn't being entirely relativist. I have an opinion on what ought to matter, and on what ontology ought to be primary, even though I'm hazy as to how to put it. As for ontological levels, note that we do have the concept of local ontologies.

I see. Your question was more specific than I assumed. Broadly speaking I'd agree that abstract thought and thinking about thinking are unique and indicative of a difference in kind, but I don't know how comfortable I am with the implication that the mere sensation/abstract thought dichotomy is the central or underlying discontinuity between humans and animals.

Not to derail the discussion, but why do you think selective breeding is a very poor analogy?

I think the problem is encapsulated by the title of this discussion. "Regarding intellectual capacity: Are animals just lower on a continuum, or a distinct difference?" If the distinct difference between human and non-human animals is better put in terms other than intellectual capacity, then would this not be of interest here? Assuming it would be, the title reveals a restrictive assumption, namely that it's all about intelligence and the brain.

I think we can describe the difference biologically, in something like the way that @apokrisis and @Wayfarer have sketched out, but beneath these descriptions there is a deeper conception of human uniqueness directing the investigation, as if we already know what we're looking for. The biological descriptions do not stand on their own, because any biological capacity can be regarded as--and indeed biologically is--just another species characteristic alongside other unique capacities such as the dance of the bee, the problem-solving ability of corvids, or sonar-directed flight. What gives the biological descriptions sense in this context is that we are already looking for what makes us different. But crucially there is nothing here that rules out the conclusion that we are not very different after all. Because in a sense, we're not.*

Which is why I want to describe the difference differently. To begin with, it's more than a "distinct difference"; it's a radical discontinuity, and it has to do with society and culture, history and personhood. Framed in terms of intellectual capacity, discussions often end fruitlessly in debates surrounding intellectually disabled people, infants, and so on. The argument from marginal cases is made to show that humans are not unique in attaining moral status, and although I disagree with its conclusion, it does expose the fallacy of thinking that we can divide humans from non-humans according to certain properties of individuals, as if we grant rights on a case-by-case basis, checking off a list of characteristics, such as intellectual capacity, before we decide to treat a being as a person or not. If we rather see a human as a social person bound up in a culture, the intellectual capacity of individuals drops out of the picture and the intellectually feeble can be seen as part of the moral sphere, the sphere of persons.

History is important here too because it shows that how you understand the question of human uniqueness differs according to what you're interested in. You can discover that humans and animals are on a continuum if the continuity is what you're interested in, that is, if you restrict your enquiry to (ahistorical) biology. There certainly is a continuum in that descriptive context, and you can dismiss the discontinuities if you think they are not fundamental. Everyone would surely agree that our ways of life have changed in important ways over periods of time in which no significant evolutionary changes took place--this is history--so to avoid the conclusion of a discontinuity you would have to dismiss history as unimportant to what we fundamentally are.

So it's about what matters to us. Whether we decide on an overarching continuum or discontinuity depends on which level of description is deemed most overarching. If we see human beings primarily as moral and political agents with the capacity to change the world on the basis of reasons, we will see a discontinuity (this is not to say we cannot arrive at a discontinuity some other way). But if we see human beings as defined by neural capacities, or as determined billiard balls or hostages to their genes, then we will be tempted to see history, reason and morality as just another evolutionary endowment.

* Or, to the extent that a different kind of biology can include or gear into sociology, anthropology, and linguistics without the reductiveness of evolutionary psychology, biology itself could embrace human uniqueness. I guess that's where @apokrisis's approach comes in.

What you can take the old transcendental idealists to be saying is that roughly, life is like a video game in this way. The sense in which the unseen world is 'there' is the sense in which the material off the right side of the screen is 'there. — The Great Whatever

Yes, Michael could have been talking about Kant when he said...

Personally I think at first glance it's an elegant union of realism and idealism, gaining from their respective strong points and accounting for their respective weak points. — Michael

Similarly for the 'object' in scholasticism, the object, curiously enough, was that which was strictly correlated to a knowing being. The object, far from being 'the thing out there', always meant the intentional object or the object of 'intention'. The esse objectivm ('objective being') is that which strictly exists for awareness. As Paul Bains comments: "For [Duns] Scotus and [John] Poinsot, something was an 'objective being' to the extent that it existed in awareness. The sun and the sea were 'objective beings,' but so were unicorns - they also existed 'in' our awareness. So, within experience, all beings were by definition objective beings. However, not all of them were physical things or events." (Bains, The Primacy of Semiosis).

That in Kant, the relation between object and subject was reversed (to roughly what we know them as today) was something of a sore point for a few thinkers of his day, who complained about the confusion sown by the reversal. — StreetlightX

Since your description of the scholastic conception of objects and the objective looks a lot like Kant's result in the CPR, he probably wasn't guilty of the reversal, and could even be said to have effected a restoration of at least the objective side of the dichotomy.

But maybe this is because the distinction that Kant inherited from his precursors and that we use today was in a way latent in the scholastic distinction, in that modern philosophy could isolate according to its interests, from the wider scholastic conception of the subject, that subject that could intend an object, i.e., the subject of experience, thence 'subjective' as we use it today.

By the way, if you just see a "Thank You" page when you follow that link, then the system thinks you're already a subscriber. This is probably because you contributed a one-off payment back in the early days, which at the time made you a subscriber according to how the system worked before PayPal's recurring payments were integrated into the software. Your profile page might be showing your subscription as 'cancelled', which I think happened automatically when the subscription integration was upgraded.

So if you want to contribute more money and all you see is the "Thank You" page, just send me a message to let me know and I'll remove you from the Subscribers user group, after which you'll be able to revisit the link and subscribe (which will put you back in the Subscribers group with an active subscription).

4th on google.com and 3rd on google.fr.

I've added the ignore thing to the latest list of like-to-haves. It turns out I already asked them for it, back in November. I'll ask again, but I'll wait a while to gather some more requests.

See here: http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/30/feature-requests/p1

To exist, by definition, means to be different. I am not you. You are not me. If society is to work for all of us, then it must provide an work for these differences. Difference is exactly what we cannot remove if we are foster human potential. It is to take out the people or understanding of people society is supposed to be providing for and protecting. Our instinct must not be to place people (i.e. difference) apart from society, but to place them within it, treated as they ought to be. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Again, I don't want to indulge in name-calling, but I really have to say it: you can hardly get more traditionally conservative than this. In particular it reminds me very much of Roger Scruton, my favourite conservative (of course I disagree with most of what he says). Providing for? Protecting? As they ought to be? Really? It's straight one-nation conservatism.

I just noticed that Andy Shaw has since written another of his handy guides:

A handy guide to the Greens for the under 10s

I've a feeling this one may prompt you to have an even bigger rant. ;)

Yeah, I really like the whole notification system in general.

Marxist don't share this approach. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But some think that despite the shallowness of classical liberalism and its self-serving focus on property and formal freedoms, its emancipatory potential, such as it is, is under threat from identitarianism. From this point of view--my own, obviously--identity politics is conservative. And this is not just mud-slinging: one can see much in common between, for example, the identitarian notion of group rights, and communitarian conservatism. The reification of group identity is a related example: both the identitarian Left and traditional conservatives treat the individual as essentially black, white, etc., where these are understood as cultural essences. For both, the instinct is to slot an individual in his/her/etc place. Whether this is punching up or down is not in end fundamentally important, because they are reciprocally bound in the preservation of difference and the limitation of human potential.

But you and I are not going to agree on that, I know.

The classical liberal is considered "conservative" because they do not accept the distinctions of identity which allow the description of many social issues. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But there are those on the Left, such us many Marxists, who do not accept identity politics either. I guess you would then say they're conservative, I don't know, but if so then your idea of what it is to be conservative has diverged from mine.

I know a lot of left-wing people and read a lot of left-wing journals and stuff, and although the piece is a caricature of a certain type of left-winger, I think it's an accurate one, of a type that has come to dominate the left (even if it's a minority). And if you think Tim Minchin and Bill Hicks are funny, well, there's no accounting for taste!

It's true that conservatism is relative, and changes over time, but I think it's more complex. The Left has mostly abandoned the progressive and emancipatory in classical liberalism, without properly confronting its central conservatism, which is economic.

No. Seems like a reasonable thing to ask the developers for though. They've implemented a few of the things we asked for before.

It obviously lets me post, but not sign in or sign up. — noAxioms

You wouldn't be able to post if you weren't signed in, so I'm still confused about what your problem is.

To sign out you click on "Sign out". It's down below the left hand category menu.

The thought that some people are still using IE6 keeps me awake at night, so I try to ignore it.

Whether it's the computer or the local network, I wouldn't know, but my first thought is that it's a browser issue. Is it an old browser?

Either way there's probably nothing I can do about it.

It seems we have MathJax integration now, although as far as I can see it doesn't kick in till you refresh the page after posting.

$$x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}.$$

Cool. Trying to rustle up some enthusiasm first. The more people the better. And after scanning the Anscombe I've kind of gone off it. I'd like to do something by MacIntyre but all I know of are his longer works. A reading group for After Virtue would be great, if anyone is interested. With all the ethics on this forum and the old PF, I'm surprised he hasn't come up more often.

Anyway, in the meanwhile I'd like to see a few more essay/paper suggestions.

I'm having a hard time interpreting your comment, nA. Are you saying you can't log in from one of the computers or devices that you normally use? I've never heard of this problem before. I don't know what you mean by "entering London" and "the do-it button".

It's about time we had a reading. I've looked through this discussion and chosen three that appeal to me and which I haven't read:

Peter Sloterdijk - Rules for the Human Zoo
https://rekveld.home.xs4all.nl/tech/Sloterdijk_RulesForTheHumanZoo.pdf

Michael Thompson, Apprehending Human Form
http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/wittgenstein/files/2007/10/ThompsonApprehending.pdf

GEM Anscombe - Modern Moral Philosophy
http://www.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/mmp.pdf

Anyone up for it? Any more suggestions?

(Y) :B (Y)

You're not addicted. You're just always surprised that you don't stop having new things to say. 8-)

I largely concur, but I seem to recollect that the radicalisation of Islam was nourished and promoted by Laurence of Arabia, back in the day, and thereafter supported by the West as part of the cold war in Afghanistan and elsewhere. — unenlightened

Yes, but all the same, radical Islam is a genuinely reactionary theory of history and politics, and interpretation of Islam, that has been developed over many decades by Muslim thinkers. It is genuinely misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic, sectarian and violent, and while it is certainly not embraced by most Muslims, it stands substantially unopposed in the Islamic public sphere, and opposition to it in the West has tragically been left to the Right, who use it to victimize Muslims and immigrants in general. It's tempting for Westerners on the Left to portray it as merely a desperate lashing out, which is a view that helps nobody.

Of course the dominant economic and military power (formerly my country, currently yours) bears the dominant responsibility for the consequences of its interventions in foreign parts. No power, no responsibility. That's not hard to understand is it? I'm not saying that the US is entirely or solely responsible for anything or everything. Nevertheless the greater responsibility in general lies with the greater power. — unenlightened

It is a matter of the purest pragmatism and not requiring my lily-livered morality to observe that a man with nothing left to lose is the most dangerous of men. And therefore, as a matter of pragmatic, hard-headed policy, both domestic and foreign, it makes sense to ensure that everyone has something more than their mere existence to lose. — unenlightened

Let's assume for the sake of argument that the Allied Powers were primarily responsible for the conditions in Germany that led to the rise of the Nazis. We still hold Rudolf Höss more responsible for killing a million people at Auschwitz than the Allied Powers, no matter how much we might say that the punishment of Germany, and imperialism and nationalism in general, were causes. And although we might think that nationalism and imperialism and British misdeeds must be resisted and exposed, we also see that Nazi ideas are to be resisted and exposed, whether or not people fell for them owing to financial insecurity or humiliation traceable to Allied actions.

If you think Rudolf Höss is too privileged or empowered for the analogy, we could pick any number of formerly impoverished lumpenproletariat Freikorps, SA, and SS men, brutalized veterans of the First World War, who committed smaller atrocities throughout the 20s, 30s and 40s.

But the Germans are white and can be held responsible for their own actions, whereas the Muslims are brown and oppressed and can hardly be expected not to become genocidal murderers.

It’s what I call the racism of low expectations: to lower those standards when looking at a brown person if a brown person happens to express a level of misogyny, chauvinism, bigotry, or anti-Semitism, and yet hold other white people to universal liberal standards. The real victim of that double standard are the minority communities themselves because by doing so we limit their horizons; we limit their own ceiling and expectations as to what they aspire to be; we’re judging them as somehow that their culture is inherently less civilized; and, of course, we are tolerating bigotry within communities, and the first victims of that bigotry happen to be those who are weakest from among those communities. — Maajid Nawaz

I think one can oppose Western militarism and oppose Islamism and Jihadism at the same time (and incidentally I don't think the latter are a reaction to the former). One can seek to ensure that people have something to lose without at the same time treating Jihadist or Jihadist-inspired murders as inevitable, and without indulging the ideas of self-appointed conservative representatives of Muslim communities.

With a few exceptions, the Guardian is a fairly establishment publication, supporting the liberal managerial left that changed the political scene from 1997 onwards. Here's an editorial from January 2003, a lovely example of hand-wringing militarism:

"War with Iraq may yet not come, but, conscious of the potentially terrifying responsibility resting with the British Government, we find ourselves supporting the current commitment to a possible use of force. That is not because we have not agonised, as have so many of our readers and those who demonstrated across the country yesterday, about what is right. It is because we believe that, if Saddam does not yield, military action may eventually be the least awful necessity for Iraq, for the Middle East and for the world."

Lefties, it's time to accept that the liberal left is as much a part of the establishment now as Murdoch et al (perhaps more so?).

By the way, I'm not especially enamoured of Corbyn's politics myself, but I think he's pretty good for British politics in general and infinitely preferable to his opponents in the Labour Party.

Indeed. And I don't think the post-vote bitterness about Britain as a "rainy fascist island" is doing anything to help immigrants. On the contrary, it is whipping up fear and hatred. But I don't think the intention is to help anyway; often it seems to be just more virtue-signalling and the new snobbery--the need to mark oneself as a progressive, opposed to the culture of the white working class.

On the other hand, some Remainers are helping, by marching in solidarity with immigrants and so on. And I'm glad to see that some of the Remain-supporting commentators, such as Paul Mason and Owen Jones, are denying the narrative of resurgent racism and arguing for a positive Brexit now that the people have spoken, but I fear they may be in a minority.

Talking of agendas, there's this in Foreign Policy:

It's Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses

The headline is in earnest.

:D Just what I was thinking.

unanimously — Michael

What?

The issue of staying in or leaving the EU is far too important an issue to be put to a national referendum and voted on by the uninformed and those who might be motivated by emotions or bigotry. That's why we elect a small group of people to make these decisions for us. They can then actually discuss the issue in depth and seek expert advice before coming to a reasoned decision. — Michael

This is a laughable fantasy.

Good article: https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2016/06/21/beyond-the-brexit-debate/

Would you really be OK with a democratic decision that favoured slavery? — Michael

I guess this is the argument for a written constitution--putting human rights beyond debate and alteration--that can't be democratically over-ruled, i.e., over-ruled by Parliament. But anything consistent with such a constitution would be ultimately decided democratically.