I said 'fully' separate or someother verb. And we may find that when we decide this was merely a belief, it comes back later as a truth. And what we are now sure is a truth turns out later to not be or seem not to be. Which is generally why knowledge in philosophy is considered some kind of rigorously justified belief. A subset of beliefs.

Well, that was a bunch of posts in a row where you repeat, more or less, your position, but don't really interact with anything I said. I really did understand from the first time you asserted something that you believed it. I guess repeated assertion to wear down a discussion partner is probably effective. Trial and error might find other approaches more rewarding.

But I'll not wait around to find out.

In today's supermarkets people are overloaded with choice because the merchant believes that is what the consumer wants. Apparently research has shown this only make people unhappy. — ovdtogt

1) people often want things that make them unhappy 2) if they weren't choosing from a variety the companies would slowly choose to give them less of one, since it costs them money.

People don't like superfluous choice and end up going for the same item over and over again ignoring all other choices. — ovdtogt

Which is a choice. And it means one's life becomes an experiment - for those who are like you describe - where they have habits of purchasing. And this choice, this experiment, will have certain results. And they may or may not be what the people choosing and experimenting in this way hope for.

It seems to me you are conflating experimentation with trying a lot of different stuff, when in fact scientists are often extremely conservative in the range of choices they build their experiments around, even over long careers.

Trial and error is something we want to avoid psychologically. — ovdtogt

I think that's way too general. People get habits and then they have goals which they will attack via trial and error, limited of course by their creativity. Yes, people do try to streamline and tend not to SHORT-TERM! experiement with trial and error in the sense of trying a whole bunch of methods (note, not products). But where it seems to them their method is nto working and they care, they will try other things. To get jobs, to win over a particular romantic interest whatever. Most people have already experimented, in the specific sense you mean, and now have a pattern -w hich is the same for scientists, both in their personal lives and their professional lives (for example, heuristics for advancing within an organization). In the specific area where they do research, yes, they may use trial and error, though not necessarily at all. They may pursue one method to solve pulmonary embolism quick testing. Then when their hypothesis fails, try to find a less expensive pap smear. Rather than spending 10 years dealing with every possible method for a quick pulmonary embolism test.

To say scientists use more that other people trial and error approaches is something I would need to see research backing up.

Thankfully we have advertising that makes the choice for us. — ovdtogt

Which, for those who choose it, is a choice. And it is an experiment with their quality of life in the balance.

I see all lives where the individuals have any choice at all as constant trial and error. They may not deal with the data the way we would wish or consider rational and they may not

AS I mentioned in my previous post,

try to limit the variables and repeat exactly to draw conclusions

but they are constantly choosing (often to do the same things) and these choices will have effects. And it is an experiment, even if they think they are just following common sense or fashion.

Well, I don't know what to do with that. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

What's the difference between truth and belief? — creativesoul

The words are trying to describe two categories that, given our fallible in situ, in time, nature we will never be able to fully dimabiguate in practice. We can certainly come up with different definitions for them.

This is not quite an answer to your question, but I would say in practical terms that I choose to have a flexible idea of truth, flexible epistemological choices and flexible choice between heuristics. I think this likely indicates that I think all models are limited, but I think that's less important than noticing what we actually do (rather than the why of it).

I would say they observe and experiment while trying as hard as they can to limit variables and repeat. I don't think they observe and experiment more. We are all experimenting all the time and we are all observing (something) all the time.

I know it's not what your focus is but this post made me think immediately of mobile phones. I see them as a kind of drug phenomenon, passed off as a tool. Now these two categories are nto mutually exclusive.

According to Demasio, some of the ancients believed the mind was located in the chest, as the heart. — Enrique

And there is a complicated nexus of nerves near the heart. Also one near the gut. The idea that we have gut reactions (with a cognitive content) and heart values and cognitive processes are likely to be true, not just metaphors.

The fact that this belief (in God) remains useful, is because it can not be verified. — ovdtogt

Actually I would say that it does seem to be verified to most believers. They experience a presence. They are able to quite drugs. There will be some though nto entire verification. There is so much binary thinking around this issue, as if things are completely verified or not verified at all. Or completely true or not true at all.

Beliefs that are believed to be false have no usefulness. False beliefs that are believed to be true can be useful. — ovdtogt

Well, there you go.

Again this is the point I was making. Though it is not binary. A belief may work but be in part or nearly all false. Certain kinds of positive thinking in relation to physical skills can be useful even if we start using them when they are false. Saying 'my backhand is smooth and effective' to oneself can improve a tennis stroke, even when it is not true (yet). But it is not, obviously, fully true, though there must be some minimal truth or one will not be able to say the belief to oneself with any certainty. There is only so far one can wag a dog.

You say there is no such thing as a scientific method? Did Einstein not have data and then did he not formulate a theory and did that theory not get tested? — TheMadFool

Actually sometimes he worked with math and thought experiments and only decades later what he worked out in his mind and on paper was verified empirically. Data came late as confirmation.

"Useful" and 'true' clearly denote different properties, otherwise the idea of a false but useful belief would make no sense (and it clearly does make sense). — Bartricks

And again, if we know it is false but it works, it is also not working. Not predicting some outcome, not explaining something. It is not useful in some way or we would not know it is false. The situation we are in is not with a list of truths where we can check the useful items and say these are useful but false, these are useful but true. All we have are claims that are useful in a wide variety of ways. A subet is their explanatory power and allowing us to work with something we want to work with in some way. Any truth that is not useful gives us no way to know it is true.

I was arguing for a pragmatic version of truth.

There seems nothing confused in the idea that it may sometimes be useful to believe false propositions — Bartricks

I would guess this is true. But if we know they are false, that means they are not working in some way. They may be working in one way, but not in others. I think it is clear we might be wrong about some things we think are true. No idea of truth is going to eliminate this possibility. It seems like we are fallible. The other theories of truth, it seems to me, all boil down to some kind of pragmatism

for us.

Since it is we who will test these ideas.

Or find that they do not work.

Or find exceptions and need to refine.

Maybe we 'shouldn't' have a pragmatic idea of truth.

But in reality, here we are. What option do we have? we don't have direct access. The truth doesn't shine in a way so we can recognize those true propositions from false ones. So we are always seeing they work, finding out they don't, regardless of how we define them.

Here in our fallible in situ groping.

I suppose another way of putting this is: I think it is pragmatic to act as if the conclusions we make that work are true, until they do not work. We have no direct access to final knowledge, we learn over time, we are fallible. And further, as far as I can tell, pretty much everyone does this, though some fail to notice that some of their truths are not working, even for them.

The user can filter the list of hotels for a location, time period, amenities that you require, and sort the list from lowest to highest price. They save the customer an incredible amount of time. — alcontali

But users would have found other ways to do this or shaped their own platforms as they have with other things where the parasites can't come in and make a lot of money. The further these companies mislead the user. They push hotels that pay extra premiums, without telling the users that they do this. The kind of information you are talking about would have arisen on customer built platforms over time, must like many other non-profit user generated information sources on line. Big money got their first and blocked this possibility, that functions in many other areas of life, where there is less money to be made.

No, they are not. It is the large hotel groups that are parasites. — alcontali

These are not mutually exclusive. Both are parasites. But these companies are more damaging for smaller chains and independents, like the one I worked at, because the larger hotels have advantages of economy of scale and more flexibility with staffing.
So if you think the hotel chains are a problem, well, these parasitical uneeded, provide no service to guests, middleman companies like booking.com just make the market harder for other companies.

So these countries are selling drugs that Western research developed for low prices?
— Coben

Patent protection for drugs expires after twenty years. After that, you can freely sell the medical molecule. We are no longer paying patent fees for the use of the wheel either. That particular patent expired in the stone age already.

Furthermore, most of the expense is in bribing the FDA into ignoring dangerous side effects. The FDA accept applications for new drugs only from a very small cartel of oligarchs. So, yes, very often it is western companies who originally paid the corruption fees for the fake FDA documentation of these products. The newer the product, the more likely it is really bad for your health. — alcontali

I agree with all this. Pharma includes some of the worst companies in the world adn they have a revolving door with the FDA. What I was pointing out was the your smugness about the coming destruction of the West and the superiority of the East is based in part on a skewed image, since currently the East is, via cheap labor and copying, relying on the West for much of what it does well.

Once, I even ended up at the reception of a hotel, asking for the price, and they said $150, but at booking.com they had listed the same room for $65. So, in front of the receptionist, I booked the room on booking:com; after which he grudgingly gave me the key to the room. So, I also gave them a low rating for service. — alcontali

I've worked in hotels, so I know this from the inside. That hotel left too much of a gap and she or he should have handled the situation much better. But they have had their margins stripped down to nothing by these parasites and, yes, they try to get a better margin from a portion of their customers.

Once these sites booking.com being one of the two main parasites came in, Espedia being even worse for hotels, hotels had to cut staff and the remaining staff had to cover 1 and half to two jobs. This cut into

service at every hotel

you will ever stay at.

Because these parasites do not have to work, they are like protection rackets with restaurants and bars in a town.

With minimal labor and no direct service around the actual work of hotels,

they take a huge percentage of the room fee. IOW they take a huge chunk of your money to do very little of the labor of serving you.

So every single hotel now can serve people less. This margin loss cuts into staffing, unkeep of facilities, amenities, everything.

The hotels try to keep up with these losses and they have two main ways to do this. Cut staff and force staff to work twice as hard .But it gets harder to leave reception and help with specific issues if there are less people to answer phones, check in, for example.

These companies are a kind of protection racket.

You are applauding people who have reduced service in hotels worldwide. They have unemployed people. They have added incredible stress to the people who work in hotels.

I know this from the inside. I watched the effects direcly on myself and my fellow staff, as the hotel had to cut staff and the exact effects this had on customers and staff health and turnover. I had to work almost what had been two full jobs and these were not luxury lazy jobs before. I had less time to deal with anomoles. I was later coming to rooms to fix tv problems or whatever. Staff turnover increseased. Which means that your bucks are now paying more for trainng new staff than they would have. You are served by less well trained staff at every single hotel you go to. The staff can respond to you less calmly and are likely to make more mistakes.

All because these companies are getting a large percentage of the hotelier fee, without providing any of that service, and most of their service is streamlined by programming down to a near nothing.

They got via google between you and the hotels and they charge you and the hotel - you indirectly - for their services and they make those serrvices worse.

Everywhere.

When those companies really got a lock on, service went down. And I know this because the hotels in the city I worked in got together with each other to see how they could collectively deal with the issue. They all had to cut staff. They all lost the ability to put money into all facets of the business. They all had to pressure workers to increase workloads to a point where you simply had to make people wait for things or not get them at all, whereas a year before you could handle it because more staff was on, more inventory was in and so on. If they'd had the capital and the balls, they perhaps could have collectively refused. IOW a union of hotel owners. But now it is way too late for that. They had a small window and it's gone.

Well, you don't need a degree for software engineering. All programmers are essentially self-taught. — alcontali

Often, clients did not see me as an equal. I often found them quite arrogant — alcontali

Perhaps, but there's still a difference between a programmer and a taxi driver, probably even in Singapore. For example, Uber drivers are not able to increase their salaries or develop niches of expertise that they can advertise. You can. You can grow and it is your field of expertise. Probably most of these drivers either have no other skills that they can market or they do, but the economy does not offer them much opportunity. It's a fallback job, an extra income. You can actually pursue a career. Uber drivers, because they are 'customers' do not have the rights that workers have if the actual customers, the passengers, complain about them, rightly or wrongly. The companies need not have any process to see if the complaint is justified. There are hidden fees that can actually bring the commission up to 50%.

According to a study published by MIT, the median profit for drivers is an abysmal $3.37 an hour, and that’s before taxes. Ultimately, 74 percent of drivers earn less than minimum wage and, once vehicle expenses are taken into account, 30 percent actually lose money every mile they drive.

from...
https://www.otherworldsinc.com/uber-and-lyft-abuse/

Basically you have companies that found a way to come in between workers and people who work. There's a parallel in the hotel branch with book.com and other similar companies. They claim their service helps the hotels, since people find the hotels via the service. But people would have found the hotels on the internet anyway. And for doing next to nothing, but dominating google, they skim large amounts of money off the hotels. Which lowered wages, forced increased work per hotel worker, drove up prices for hotel nights.

They are parasites.

Upwork is just a middleman similar to Uber. — alcontali

With upwork, if you are earning a living through it over time, the percentage they take goes down. Uber stays at 25 or 30 percent. Period.

Just look up the molecule name for the brand that the doctor prescribed, and then order online Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, or Vietnamese generics instead. Instead of paying $1000, you can often buy the medication for $3 or $4, if you do that. Very little of that medication is still under patent. — alcontali

So these countries are selling drugs that Western research developed for low prices?

Before cashing out from my startup, I always worked as a contractor. For various reasons, I strongly preferred that arrangement. I never had a "boss". I always had a client. I cannot stand employment labour arrangements. Seriously, I hate employer-employee situations with a passion. — alcontali

This sounds like you were in a professional field, probably well educated, and your clients are seeing you are more or less an equal, not simply because of your qualities, but because of the type of contracting you were doing. Your work, it is very likely, allowed you to self market, direct to businesses or whomever the clients were. This is a very different situation for whatever an individual taxi contractor would be like. Uber's rates are low, saturates the market with so many drivers that individual drivers have to work long hours at low pay pay their bills. Uber is neither client nor employer, it's a middleman that creates a situation where indepedendent contractors can compete,since they will not have the infrastructure to reach clients, except by lining up outside events and stations and the like. It's not a parallel situation, at all.

Medication is up to 300 times cheaper here than in the USA — alcontali

I won't take up the Singapore vs. The West, since this is a bit like comparing bycicles and oranges. But it seems odd that Singapore's medication prices are 300 times cheaper, since pharmaceutical companies tend to price along national income level lines. I don't think it is government regulation that sets medication prices high in the West. As far as health care in general a quick look I took at the Singapore system makes it sound very interesting. It is heavily government regulated, with mandatory health care savings at the individual level, the tier system and so on. It seems to be working well. How well would be tricky to decide where information flows less freely, and a small country like this is dealing with a different range of issues.

I read this as agreeing with what I wrote.

ve 1) I didn't demand anything 2) I find it interesting you assume it does not pass falsifiability itself. Perhaps you are right. I am not so sure it doesn't but I wanted to raise the issue. 3) if it does not, this means that a hypothesis about what works to gain knowledge need not be falsifiable. I think this might say something about whether falsifiability as a criterion should have veto power if it is not met. Especially given, for example, some of what was written in the first link about the practices of scientists. 4) I am sorry you have encountered people asking if falsifiability passes its own criterion so many times. You may find that in philosophy forums a number of ideas are repeated and people explore things which they haven't explored before, while you have,

The proposition itself is not a scientific hypothesis or theory, so you can't turn it on itself. — SophistiCat

I can and did, I think it is interesting. If it turns out, for me, that it does not meet its own criterion and I run around saying it is useless and I've proven it, please feel free, in that case, to retort in the snarky, lazy dismissive way you did here.5)

Epistemology is usually offered as a foundational framework. — SophistiCat

No, it's a theory of knowledge. Now obviously falsifiability is not an epistemology. It's a piece of one. Unless someone thinks generating falsifiable hypotheses by itself produces knowledge. If one can produce knowledge via means not included in your epistemology, this says something about the epistemology. And I agree, in a sense, since I think epistemologies are always mixed, in practice, not pure. Or better put everyone uses a mix. There are no pure empiricists for example. But, a lot of people seem not to know this.
6)

take it if it works or leave it if it doesn't. — SophistiCat

But this isn't my issue. My issue is whether it should have veto power ,should hypotheses that do not pass the falsifiability criterion be dismissed directly or can they also be useful. Falsifiability has been and will continue to be a useful criterion, but should hypotheses that do not meet it be ignored?

Since you've been there, done that and can only see this all as common and cheap, please ignore my posts as I will yours. And let us neophytes who don't have it all down pat and want to explore stuff just go ahead and do that without the implicit insults.

It should also be added that

take it if it works or leave it if it doesn't.

is, ironically, a lot like verificationism, which Popper did not like. So, why this would be good as a metaepistemology but not as part of an epistemology, it seems to me, is at least worth teasing out, for those of us who haven't worked this all out, yawn, long ago.

Is the proposition

falsifiability should be a criterion for valid scientific hypotheses and theories

falsifiable?

And for a different take on falsifiability....

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/falsification-and-its-discontents/

Which includes an argument against the idea that

using verification is a good heuristic for scientific research and conclusions

has been falsified. In fact it is still pretty common.

Some other criticisms....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability#Criticisms

I have also been mulling over whether falsifiability should be considered permanent. Or the state of being falsified should be. Some things seem to come and go, and does this matter for the idea of falsifiability? IOW the falsifying may be get falsified.

To make it easy for you, I ask for one plausible case of the Sider variety where two people who are morally indistinguishable have different fates in re heaven and hell. — TheMadFool

You haven't really addressed my argument. First you are asking me to distinguish between two people where there is a fine line between them. I am not God. A god, it seems to me, could distinguish between just that tiny fraction over half good and that tiny fraction under. And then I continued the argument based on the long term consequences of having a net negative as opposed to a net positive.

The "Positive Egoism" comes to be projected in various ways by various people, yet most people make the sad distortion of the "Positive Ego" and end up judging it to be the "Negative Ego", thing that is not. "Positive Egoism" is one that affirms its position in the world, in history, and in its condition, without fear of the opinions of others, and ends up doing what suits it and what brings it well and success. — Gus Lamarch

We are social mammals, not monads, so our egos, healthy ones are conscious of and want have good social relations. Not with everyone, but with some kind of social network. This is part of what sets us apart from other species and we are, in fact, an apex social mammal. The ego, having to do with the identity of a social mammal, in this case a homo sapien will be concerned about what others think. This does not mean one must humbly avoid stepping on toes, or pretend to be less than one is, but any fully human homo sapien will be affected by the thoughts and feelings of others and will affect those of others.

So to speak, the "Positive Egoist" is one who knows that he is selfish, and accepts it as a virtue, and makes the best use of his ego ultimately to bear fruit — Gus Lamarch

Sure, though if he is only selfish, he is a partial human. Some people seem to think that any empathy and desire for closeness and real intimacy with others is just fantasy or guilt. But this is because they in fact have self-hatred. They hate their own limbic systems. They think that being a partial human is stronger, which is not the case, since what has made humans strong has in part been their social nature and this social nature is not just selfish. Empathy is not guilt. Wanting mutual relationships based on love, is not weakness or fantasy.

Isn't it annoying that the vast majority are "Negative" unknowingly? And that the "Positive" minority ends up judging themselves as "Negative"? — Gus Lamarch

You are creating a mirror imbalance to the one out there. Yes, guilt is often confused with actual care for others. Yes, people make themselves small. And now in reaction to that you want to cut people down in a mirror image way to the way traditional and Abrhamic culture has cut them down. Instead of guilt you want to create people who are cut off from the full range of their feelings and who are solipsists.

We also no longer need taxis, because we have things like Uber. We don't need hotels, because we have things like Airbnb. All these technologies and business models are being held up in the West by the same problem: outdated and counterproductive regulations. Countries that do not have them will simply leapfrog ahead. — alcontali

What Uber does is set up people to work for companies who can shut them off and tell them what to do, but the companies have no responsibilities for the workers because they consider them customers. So it is a worse kind of labor relation. And I am not sure how that relates to not needing pilots since Uber and Airbnb generally have drivers and people taking care of where people stay. And these companies are both american companies I believe. If Singapore is so much smarter in general, why did it need the West to come up with these services, and Grab has its Western counterparts.

Morality is scalable within each island like so: worst to very bad to bad in the island of the bad and good to very good to best in the island of the good. — TheMadFool

I think this is more or less what I was saying. If you lean towards the bad, even by the minutest degree over 50% bad, you will tend to create a net negative whatever. In an eternal colony, where life just goes on, you are a slow poison, whereas a person with a however slight tendency in the other direction, will create net good. There are a slow improvement in the way things are, even if they are just over the halfway point.

I don't think this can be evaluated by acts, since you might simply be lucky that bus hit you when you happened to slip over into the good a tiny amount. It would have to be a reading of your heart.

But if you are a slow poison, even if this is intermixed with goodness, you drag things down. and vice versa.

Now this is me playing devil's advocate, but I don't think the idea that 49.999% is simply a tiny quantitative difference from 50,001% so they should be in the same place holds.

In the long run they have very different effects. On a given day, they might be hard (for us) to distinguish. But for God and over what will be eternity, they are worlds apart.

It's a bit like a tipping point.

Yes. And all animal life also. We all make decisions every day that may cause harm in others who have not consented to it. You can't avoid this unless you are a shut in with very careful investments. And if you are in the West your continued existence could be seen as a drain on world resources even then.

It is a very anti-life non-theist but religious position, I think founded on a hatred of life and an anger at the universe. Sans God, it is hard to blame any agent, so it becomes parents. But I think there is a category error in here. People consent to life by living. We are not just the little lawyers in the mind with the words. We are the bodies that struggle to live, and struggle to live from conception. Consent is inherent in the striving to live and thrive. There is no fetus that has not consented to life. It doesn't make sense. It's like saying a squirrel hasn't consented to life. If you could manage to make the squirrel understand the issue, he'd still rush off to find food or mate. Life is that which wants life. Yes, some people reach a point where they no longer want to live and that which creates that we should struggle against, be it mental illness, cruelty, abuse, oppression and so on.

But part of the sickness of the Abrahamic religions was this pressure to be perfect. That's right. In life our choices may lead to unpleasance. We are not perfect. And the anti-natalists are not perfect either. And if they happen to be wrong, their project is horrific.

But since they are 100% sure they are not, they can happily have as a goal the elimination of all future life.

Yes, I've made a similar argument with both Schop and I think it was Batricks. Basically he is saying: Value X is the most important value. This is self-evident. Any action that would go agains this value is vetoed by this value. This is the truth, period. If, for example, we value the continuation of sentient life in the universe, this gets vetoed, because we are allowing for new creatures who can suffer.

And the really ironic thing is people advocating for the end of animal life,since all animals can suffer, is concerned about the consent of currently non-existent beings. Its actually a kind of selfish attitude. To make sure I cause no suffering I will try to make it so that no conscious life ever exists again. But more than that the radical outcome is not one that is being consented to either by these non-existent beings.

And then, yes, there can be no evidence that this Value X is the most important, or even more extreme, outweighs any other value.

The ego wants nothing more than self-liberty, — Gus Lamarch

This is a very idiosyncratic idea of the ego. The ego, generally, is the sense of self, sense of identity. It is protective. There are parts of the unconscious that want liberty, for sure. And the ego wants to do certain things. But the ego generally tries to maintain a sense of the self it thinks is good. And this can avoid all sorts of freedoms, impulses from the unconscious for example, actions, for all sorts of practical and ego-ideal reasons.

Nowadays, the sad memory comes to my mind that the masses of the "Last Man" denigrate their individual, their ego, in favor of a social structure, where collectively everyone ends up calling the State their dearest father. — Gus Lamarch

I don't see this as common at all. People seem skeptical about government almost as a rule. I wish they were more so, but this seems hallucinated. It's not North Korea everywhere.

Well, wouldn't we still think it right and proper to licence the pilots of these planes? — Bartricks

If the entities that manifested in the planes were the pilots' people, in the sense we think of children being the parents', and these appearing out of nowhere passengers were the creations of those pilots' bodies or actions somehow, and those are the only passengers on these planes, honestly I have no idea how to think of that. I don't know what that is. I don't know where to begin thinking about that.

I don't really want the government deciding who can have children, but again, if you have a proposal around what the criteria might be, I could begin to consider it. Maybe my concerns would not be there.

I still don't get it. How is it possible that two ethically similar people have contradictory outcomes (one going to hell and the other going to heaven)? — TheMadFool

If there's a 50% mark. If you are more than fifty percent ethical, Heaven. Less, Hell. And God can read ethical tendencies down below the ethical 'Planck length', so every falls to one side or the other.

Perhaps I can rely on someone else's mind. I think I can. In fact I think we do it all the time, we rely on experts, people who's minds are reliable (albeit in that specific expertise) — Wheatley

In the process of deciding who is an expert and that their minds are reliable (in that specific expertise) you are trusting you own mind.

That certainly makes sense in our universe, but must a universe move from instability to stability? IOW I am not sure this actually rebuts the OP, but rather simply says 'this is the way things work here' which the op is not arguing against.

Any response is speculative, but they would likely stand out for their brilliance, regardless. This would likely not be acknowledged by some or many of the other posters, but for some posters here would recognize people with both unique minds and extremely interesting responses. They would likely carefully respond to those points made that they were claiming to be rebutting. And this would set them apart from weak posters.

It's axiomatic in his system.
For good or for ill.

It's an argument. It's quite a strong argument against any form of utilitarianism. "Your joy cannot justify my suffering." — unenlightened

That's a particular kind of consequentialism. It's not an argument against consequentialism. In fact his arguments, like most consequentialist arguments, starts with deontological axioms - here, something like one shall not cause others suffering without their consent - and then uses this axiom and looks at consequences. Which is what pretty much any consequentialist does: Even the cliche greatest good for the greatest number will posit an axiom of what is good, then build from it.

Here he is arguing that we cannot offset unconsented to suffering with pleasure. Which some consequentialist positions do do, but one need not.

I have sympathy for this position. I think the problem comes in around what is a skill and what is a value. Adoption certain presents tests for parents. But they are asking to get kids that the government has custody of. The government is in loco parentis (sic, likely). So as an already existing parent, it wants to make sure it is handing over the child, who is also already alive and here, to someone who has the potential to do well. Biological parents create their own child. There is no one giving them that child and passing on responsibility.

I mean, I get it. Parents now have a huge responsibility and one where they right off the bat need the ability to learn and should have basic common sense. And we licence things that are much easier. But generally this has to do with protecting us.

Now we could say: we should be concerned about that child and protect him or her. But since the parents create that child, goverments have tended to assume they have no right to per se block this until criteria are met, but rather take the role of intervening when they 'fail' in their role.

And with misgivings I agree. I don't want a government that can prevent people from having children unless they pass through whatever test.

But if you could say how you would test the parents - perhaps I might change my mind. I think getting down to specific concrete testing procedures might clarify the problems and benefits of such a plan.

So, I'm open to seeing what I would think if you could make an actual proposal. (and yes, I can imagine varous psosibilities)

I wouldn't relegate it there, though perhaps you would. IOW you may like this notion, but he was not correct in relation to me whom he was responding to.