Those who oppose using ostracisation and rhetoric to oppose extreme ideas seem to raise the argument that it is better to use reason and logic to oppose them to avoid martyring and to show that their ideas can be opposed in such a way (ie 'normal' ideas are not just zeitgeist, but carefully thought out).

The trouble with the latter of these two reasons is that it actually creates both problems in the first place. The more we perpetuate the notion that the grand political ideologies are the result of reasoned analysis, the more fuel we give to every distasteful fundamentalist group who demands their 'new' idea be given fair consideration. But we just don't seem to arrive at grand ideologies in that way, nor is it demonstrably possible to do so. Ideologies have been debated by intelligent groups of people for decades, no one's won yet. At least a sensible working presumption for the time being is that the "let's resolve this once and for all with a rational discussion" project, is probably something of a non-starter.

The idea, for example, that certain races are 'inferior' has been around for decades. Its been around that long (as opposed to, say, the idea that there is no gravity, or that jelly is a good building material), because it is possible to construct an argument, using evidence and logic, in favour of it. That doesn't make it right, of course, the evidence could be (and is) deeply flawed and logic is always fallible in any other form that obvious syllogisms, but pointing out that those flaws exist is just highlighting a general property of all ideas (that they contain sufficient flaws to construct a counter-argument from). So the extremist need feel no obligation to alter their view simply for knowing such flaws exist.

The alternative is to focus on some measure of the extent of the flaws. There's no doubt, for example, that the science claiming that certain races are inferior is massively more flawed than any science claiming the opposite. But then this suggests that, automaton-like, we are obliged to adopt those ideas for which the least flaws in the scientific or logical evidence exist, and again, this is demonstrably not how we find and hold ideas, nor is it possible to establish with clarity (in most cases). It seems clear that we almost universally form, or adopt, ideas and as a result of numerous factors (mostly social) and reject them only if they are overwhelmingly demonstrated to be unsupportable, or a more attractive idea comes along. Reason and logic play a supporting role from the sidelines at best, at worst, they barely get a look in.

So, given that most ideas are arrived at by social cues, what could be worse for an unpleasant idea than to give those in whose mind it currently festers the notion that there's an acceptable social group of people who also hold such ideas and who seem to at least be taken seriously enough to be part of the 'global debate'?

I can see no reason why any community should not be able to make a clear statement about the boundaries of tolerance within which ideas will be discussed and outside of which ideas are rejected as not worthy of consideration. Ridicule is a tried and tested method for making this boundary absolutely clear.

As far as 'free speech' is concerned, has anyone not heard of these ideas before? Especially with the Internet, I don't see the worldwide suppression of any idea being likely. The freedom to speak about your ideas does not entail the freedom to do so in any place and at any time.

Can we be clearer? "What" about sociology is "bunk"? Is it not a science? — Bitter Crank

Sorry, just being facetious. At my old university there was a little friendly rivalry between sociology and social psychology and I couldn't help indulge in a little dig, just in case any were reading. Excellent defence though.

I define science as 1) an activity using and governed by the scientific method, and also 2) organized thinking about a determinate subject matter. This latter allows for there to be, for example, a science of history. — tim wood

So firstly, I think I'm a bit more strict that you in my definitions. I don't take science to be a clearly defined set of activities, but rather (much after Quine) a set of properties an activity could have greater or lesser degrees of. Like 'tall', there are not only 'things which are tall' and 'things which are not tall', there's 'things which are more tall' and 'things which are less tall. So I take science to be more or less your first definition only, but things have that property to a greater or lesser extent. Your second part I would hesitate to include in 'science' because of the rather ambiguous 'organised'. Without an agreed definition here, you end up with just '... thinking about a determinate subject' which to me is too wide a definition to make the term useful.

Nonetheless, with the first definition. Research in psychology is a science. Being a psychologist (which I'm not) is not. In the same way as medical research is a science, but being a doctor is not.

A research paper in social psychology might start with a testable hyposesis, which, if good science, should be something along the lines of "people in situation X tend to exhibit behavior Y" and the experiments done will hopefully be more and more refined efforts to get at exactly 'situation X' and not 'situation X (plus a bit of A, B, and C, that we didn't control for). I know I run the risk of vastly over simplifying, but at its heart, science is simply asking what causes what, and broadly, its doing it by observing the effect with more and more control over the causes. Social psychology is just doing this with human behaviour, hence I consider it a science, just one whose results must always be presumed to be general guides, rather than the specific laws of something like physics.

Sociology, however, is bunk!

Not everyone self identifies as a philosopher here, you are aware of that? — Posty McPostface

Absolutely, I certainly don't, but that doesn't get around the fact that this is a philosophy forum. Presumably we're all here because of a shared interest in philosophy, from amateur to student.

There are loads of really interesting general discussions here, many of which I've enjoyed taking part in, but in a sense, that's the beauty of the system as it is. To have a specific sub-forum for a non-philosophical topic would raise that particular subject above other matters of passing intetest; anthropology, physics, biology, maths, all of which have yielded interesting, but not strictly philosophical, discussions.

Well, since one of my degrees is in social psychology I suppose I ought to try and mount a defence of it.

The best I can do is probably to liken it to sciences we all recognise as such. Take biology, for example. Recently there was some research into gene mutation rate and its effect on cancer. This was very careful and difficult research to carry out, and I'm sure I don't need to explain that this kind of research is crucial to many medical advances. The research (I don't fully understand it myself) found a specific rate of mutation with a particular chain of physiological response. The headline, however, was "60% of cancers down to nothing but bad luck" (or something like that). I'm not talking here about the headline in some tabloid written up from a press release, I'm talking about the title of the actual paper. A luminary no less than David Spiegelhalter himself was compelled to write to them pointing out that their results showed nothing of the sort. What they'd done is taken their careful measurements and way over-interpreted them in one biased direction. Their paper even opened with a statement that their intention was to reassure cancer victims that it wasn't their fault in any way. A noble aim, but not one appropriate to the detached approach science requires.

I understand physics even less than I understand biology, but I've read enough to be reasonably certain the same happens there. Careful measurements are reported in a way which goes significantly beyond what the measurements actually show, often by the actual scientists themselves.

Psychology is no different. It does make an attempt to gather careful measurements of what people actually do in certain circumstances. It does at least try to eliminate confounding variables, and people do try to repeat experiments with an aim of refining them, or highlighting flaws. It's also true that the conclusions reported, often by the scientists themselves, go way beyond what the measurements could reasonably be said to demonstrate, and usually do so with some bias. But, like the rest of science, I don't think we should let the reporting prevent us from taking those careful measurements, nor from using them to inform our own judgements. Wielding them like a gospel is certainly unwarranted, but I don't see what prevents us from making careful use of them in that which we readily acknowledge are speculative ventures anyway. No-one knows how or why humans behave the way we do, but that doesn't mean we have to be 'paralysed by hesitation' about it.

On the actual topic at hand - no, I don't think we should have a psychology sub-forum. We don't have an electrical engineering sub-forum. This is philosophy site and I think it's probably best it remains one.

We're going round in circles repeating the same arguments rather than refining, contrasting or altering the ones we have so I'm thinking that this has definitely run its course now. Given your extensive investment I thought it fair that I outline my reasoning.

I understand your argument to be, as expressed in your first post, that Western civilisation is a success because the average modern westerner is better off by any available metric than the average member of every other (or most other?) culture in history.

I counter that I believe suicide rate, egalitarian distribution of resources and opportunity, sustainable resource management and personal autonomy are metrics of success by which the average Western society is not better off than other cultures, specifically hunter-gatherers.

You argued that those measures are complicated and might not be good measures of success, but I think the same applies to your preferred measures. I think for any measure, demonstrating how it should rightly be considered a measure of 'success' is complicated. The simplicity (or otherwise) of the actual metric is not relevant, it is the difficulty with which it can be rationally tied to 'success' that matters, and I think here we just disagree in a manner too fundamental to resolve by discussion.

You also argued that Western societies actually are better off by some of those metrics, but I find the breadth of your knowledge of hunter-gatherer tribes too narrow to be persuaded by your arguments here. Your arguments, particularly with reference to justice, diversity, fragility and personal freedom are highly speculative and based on a very small subset of cases deliberately chosen for that specific purpose. I'm not interested in those kinds of arguments.

Your argument with regards to violence and infant mortality are sound as measures of the failings of many hunter-gatherer societies. We've already covered how I do not believe the success of the west in reducing these two things is enough to claim the whole enterprise a success considering the many failings I think should be accounted for. You evidently think they do.

You make the case that the success of Western society should be judged only by its current practices, with regards to exploitation. I don't believe that a society which is still benefiting from the rewards of such previous exploitation can be fairly judged without including the actions which gave rise to its current wealth. Conversely when it comes to sustainability, you'd prefer Western society to be judged not on its current practices, but on what you hope it will be able to achieve some time in the future. Again, it seems we have a fundamental disagreement about what factors should be taken into account when judging 'success'

There's obviously been some arguments about coherence, consistency and the accuracy of evidence where engagement in discussion is of value, but they're not worth resolving whilst we fundamentally disagree about the main issues outlined above.

do you think that other cultures would have been better, especially if they would have enjoyed similar technological advantage in the 18th - 19th Century? Or would they have been similar disasters? — ssu

I certainly think it's possible. Unless some biological evolution in neurology has occurred, then the people who care enough to advise against such practices today, much like your Chinese advisers, must have always existed. So the question is, how much power they have to control the direction of society relative to those with fewer moral scruples, and whether that power balance is any different in other cultures.

Obviously this whole area is highly speculative, but current psychological thinking is that about 30-50% of what psychologists label as 'personality' traits are genetic, the rest are generated by upbringing and the environment. I'm gathering (correct me if I'm wrong) that what you're asking is whether other cultures would have acted differently in response to the same environmental stimuli as the early western cultures had. So at a cursory analysis the answer seems to me to be an obvious yes, because 30-50% of the factors determining a response would have differed (although perhaps only slightly) as other cultures would have a different mix of genetic personality traits, and a substantial (although unknown) proportion of their response would have been the result of their child-rearing practices, which again would have been different. The environment, which in our example is the one factor we're keeping constant, plays the minority role, albeit a very large minority.

The huge caveat I would add to that analysis, is that it hinges heavily on the genetic differences in distribution of personality types making any aggregate difference to the culture's response. It may well be that different cultures have a different genetic mix of personality types (highly unlikely today given the widespread cultural mixing, but possible 10,000 years ago I suppose), but that does not automatically mean that such difference would have been in important factors. If one culture was more generally extroverted than another, for example, I'm not sure I can see how that would have affected their response to the environmental stimuli around at the birth of western civilisation in any significant way.

I'm much more confident, psychologically, in the effect child-rearing practices have on personality, and I think it highly likely that cultures who rear their children differently would have adults who react very differently indeed to the same environmental stimuli and so would perhaps have taken a very different path had they been at the same place as western civilisation when it began.

You seem to have just reverted to calling me prejudiced instead of comprehending or addressing the points I make. Not everything I say is a put down of hunter-gatherers. — VagabondSpectre

So why did you mention those specific measures of happiness which contribute to longevity in a debate about hunter-gatherer lifestyles vs Western ones? Either they are irrelevant because they are no different in either society, or you have prejudicially presumed that they are lower in hunter-gatherer societies without actually checking first. If there's some third explanation for your bringing them up that I've missed then please explain, but your posts are littered with examples where you subtly (or not so subtly) imply that the hunter-gatherer way of life is deficient in many areas in which there is no widespread evidence of it being so, and then when I challenge you on it you either say you were simply using it as an example or you ferret out some single source which backs it up (but which clearly was not the origin of your opinion). If the only expressions of prejudice we were entitled to call out were the of the extremely obvious "group X are awful because they're all black" sort, then society would hardly progress at all in the field. Prejudice is presuming a negative about a particular culture just because they are different from your own; you presume hunter-gatherers have poor diets, you presume hunter-gatherers have 'backward' traditions, you presume hunter-gatherers perform FGM, you presume hunter-gatherers have a secretly high suicide rate, you presume hunter-gatherers have no fair justice system, you presume hunter-gatherers burn witches, you presume hunter-gatherers kill children out of superstition, you presume hunter-gatherers get ill all the time, you presume hunter-gatherers get wiped out by the slightest change in their environment. All of this without a scrap of evidence first. The fact that you can look some up later does not change the fact that these negative views of a culture that differs from your own were presumed prior to that investigation. Anything other than prejudice would motivate you to look at a wide range of sources (not just those that support your argument), anything other than prejudice would motivate you to give other cultures a fair benefit of the doubt until such time as the evidence was incontrovertible, anything other than prejudice would motivate you to try and understand how other cultures work rather than presume they're all 'backwards', based on a single example.

Your latest example is this;

... superstition that was originally made adaptive thanks to inadequate nutrition? — VagabondSpectre

You presume that the practice of twin killing has to be a 'superstition' that's evolved biologically because you just can't bring yourself to credit these people with the intelligence to actually work it out rationally each time. One of my colleagues in anthropology has actually had direct conversations with bushmen about infanticide and is is both heart-wrenching and definatly carried out with the full knowledge of the actual practical necessity. The stories around it are just there to make the whole thing slightly more bearable. The fact that you have to keep caricaturing these intelligent and caring people as backward savages driven by unquestioned superstition is what I find offensive.

So yes, I think your position is prejudiced. If you want to speak authoritatively about the practices and motivation of other cultures then at least do them the respect of a minimum threshold of research, not just the first negative ethnography you can lay your hands on and a popsci interpretation of what motivates them.

infant mortality has a lot to do with nutrition. Are you saying that when an HG people kill twin babies it's not a superstition that was originally made adaptive thanks to inadequate nutrition? — VagabondSpectre

This is another common tactic of yours which I don't know if it is deliberate or just poor argumentation. You take the specific logical point of an argument and then move it out of context to highlight the negative aspects of hunter-gatherer culture. The point I was arguing against was your assertion that hunter-gatherers might have been more unhappy because a good diet causes happiness and westerners obviously have a better diet because they live longer. This is not true because the surviving hunter-gatherers do not face a poor diet, so that poor diets cannot then go on to make them unhappy. This has nothing to do with the fact that total calories are often scarce enough to warrant infanticide. You were arguing about the link between diet and happiness, not the link between total available calories and infanticide. If it will make things simpler for you I will make it clear now - Hunter-gather lifestyles are not a bed of roses, calorie restriction leads to infanticide and this is an awful thing. In western societies children die from preventable causes too. According to UNICEF 25,000 children die every day from diseases largely related to poverty such as pneumonia, diarrhoeal diseases (both of which we have good reason to believe were absent in hunter-gatherer societies because newly contacted tribes seem to have little immunity to them), or poor nutrition. Again you're accusing me of seeing hunter-gatherers through rose-tinted glass, but you're consistently arguing in favour of this mythical version of western culture that you think we're headed towards, not the one we're actually in. Hunter-gatherer-societies kill infants because of low calorie availability. Western society causes the deaths of infants because of rapid population growth and poor resource distribution. You could argue that if we continue on our current trajectory these infants will survive, I could argue that if hunter-gatherers lived in the lush environments now dominated by western cultures instead of the most harsh environments know to man, they might not have to kill so many infants due to calorie restrictions, so where does that leave us?

"Individual-level"... Meaning in the analysis of a particular case of suicide and subjective-well-being, and preferences, which is different than suicide rate indicating overall average happiness/saddness. — VagabondSpectre

Did you actually read the paper you "cited"? — VagabondSpectre

paraphrasing the above: individual level analysis of why people do commit suicide (multivariate correlates at the micro-level) can be useful to determine the general preferences of the overall population, but says nothing of "suicide utility threshholds" or the average societal level of experienced/expected/reported utility) — VagabondSpectre

I don't know how much statistics you've done, but there's really no need to cite the whole paper if you didn't understand the difference, you could have just asked, rather than get snarky about it. You've misunderstood the nature of multivariate analysis. What the paper is concluding is that individual measures (not individual people) correlate with suicide well, but aggregate measures (when you put all the individual measures together in multivariate analysis) correlate weakly, which means they still correlate, just not so much. What this means is that suicide is well correlated with causes of unhappiness (i.e the link between suicide and unhappiness is strong), but that the reasons in individual cases vary widely such that no conclusions can be drawn about a general connection between all the measures. This makes the aggregate score of Subjective Well-Being a poorer correlate of suicide than the connection between suicide and unhappiness would suggest. The paper is an fact arguing that suicide is even more strongly correlated with unhappiness than the weak correlation between SWB and suicide rates would at first imply, it's just that the specific nature of the unhappiness varies widely making it difficult to measure across societies. This means that the suicide rate remains a very strong measure of a society's happiness (at least at one end of the scale), but the link will be masked if one aggregates all the different reasons for unhappiness.

But why do you think that the 1% who commit suicide are made unhappy so that the rest can be happy (as if there is an exploitative exchange happening between them)? That's very strange. — VagabondSpectre

How is that strange. If we have two societies, one in which there is virtually no suicide, and one in which there is 1% suicide, the most parsimonious explanation is that the nature of that second society is causing the suicides rate to rise. If the remainder of that second society are really happy (although your own cited paper reveals they're not in our case, but lets go with it for now), then again, the most parsimonious explanation is that they are being made happy by the nature of that society. It therefore stands to reason that a change to that second type of society from the first has made one group of people happy at the expense of another which it has made unhappy. It might not be the actual case for all sorts of reasons, but I can't see why you're having trouble understanding the theory.

The solution to this under your view would be to arbitrarily reduce the upper levels of happiness that average people experience such that those who are unable to achieve it don't feel as bad by comparison. — VagabondSpectre

You haven't answered my question on this from my previous post. It's hard to argue against your position when you keep changing it. Are you saying that happiness in rich western societies is unevenly distributed (which you seem to be saying here) or evenly distributed (as concluded by the paper you cited in support of the link between GDP and happiness). It can't be both as and when it suits you. Pick one position and we'll discuss that. At the moment I'm not prepared to engage in a debate about whichever position suits you at the time.

...do you then cede that suicide is not useful as a metric regarding overall or average societal levels of SWB/life-satisfaction/happiness because they don't inversely correlate? (in fact they positively correlate) — VagabondSpectre

Again, you're missing the statistical conclusion of these papers. It's not that suicide is not caused by unhappiness, no-one in any of these papers is arguing that, so I don't know where you're getting that impression from. It's that our measures of unhappiness do not seem to work in aggregate. The papers are all arguing that we might have our measures of happiness wrong, not that happiness is not related to suicide at all. The paper you cite here opens with "Suicide is the ultimate act of desperate unhappiness" and their tentative explanation is that "...suicide is more likely in response to short-term unhappiness." (although they caveat that strongly), or that "Life evaluation may refer to the long-term outlook, or to achievement as conventionally measured – education, income, marriage, and good health "[my bold]. Nowhere does it say that suicide might not be related to unhappiness at all. It's questioning how we measure happiness.

you have not shown that egalitarianism actually improves happiness overall. — VagabondSpectre

Not to your satisfaction maybe. Many of the studies I've previously cited have indicated a link between average happiness and income inequality. What's interesting about modern research in the field is that as income inequality goes up, average happiness goes down, but happiness inequality goes down also, indicating that even those at the top do not gain happiness from their privileged status, but very few people are challenging the concept the wealth inequality leads to unhappiness.

Because a cursory glance at the living conditions enjoyed by HG's and contemporary westerners shows immediate and vast disparities. High risk births, lack of comparable medical ability, lack of comprehensive education, lack of geographic/social/economic upward mobility, career choices, physical security (from elements and violence) etc... — VagabondSpectre

... are all the advantages of Western culture (though I disagree with some, like comprehensive education, and upward mobility, which is a joke). Since when has anyone ever carried out an analysis based on looking only at the advantages of only one side. What about the disadvantages? Inequality, chronic disease, lack of community, poor diet, suicide rates, a history of violent oppression and genocide, environmental degradation. The whole point of this debate is to assess the degree to which Western civilisation has been a sucess. You seem to just want to list its advantages, and bury its disadvantages in a load of wishful thinking about the future and self-congratulatory zeal about how we're not violently oppressing quite so many people as we used to.

My original post focused on the west's ability to escape disasters which otherwise affect our physical well-being. — VagabondSpectre

What ability? Colonial famines, dictatorships, two world wars, the great depression, the potato famine, the aids epidemic in Africa, diphtheria, influenza A, measles, mumps, pertussis, smallpox, tuberculosis, the black death, global warming, clean water shortages, cigarettes, toxic smog, obesity... Are you so blind to the west's shortcomings? Of course, we're still here, but so are hunter-gatherers.

Remember the Chumash peoples who experienced massive increases in violence caused by geographic concentrations of migrants and climactic events? — VagabondSpectre

Remember the Nazis who caused a massive increase in violence caused by socio-economic consequences of Western socities?

Remember the endless list of existing HG peoples whose ancient ways of life are being utterly decimated by the introduction of new technology or germs or outside pressures? — VagabondSpectre

But they've not been utterly decimated. They're still here. They're certainly under a monumental attack by forces hugely more well-resourced than they are, and yet reserves are being won, rights are being written into law. Small groups of individuals with nothing but spears are fighting the entire might of government backed multinational companies and occasionally they're winning. What exactly do you expect these people to do to prove their worth to you. They've survived the ice age, they've survived being pushed into the world's most inhospitable environments, they've survived genocide, they've survived epidemics, they've fought off entire armies and now fight the multinational companies. And they're still not robust enough for you?

I said that the absence of contemporary western ethical and legal standards leaves groups vulnerable to such practices in ways that the contemporary west is not. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, a point which is only true if you make the prejudiced assumption that hunter-gatherers routinely carried out FGM. Otherwise how can you argue that Western ethical and legal standards are required to defend against it? You've given an example of FGM being carried out in hunter-gatherers (though as you rightly say, not from their own tradition). I've given an example of it being carried out under a western judicial system. It is not practiced by the overwhelming majority of traditional hunter-gatherers (and there's no evidence it ever has been) and it is not carried out by the overwhelmingly majority of modern Western democracies. So where are you getting the idea only the west has sufficient ethical and legal standards to prevent it? All the evidence you have (without prejudice) indicates that hunter-gatherers have perfectly adequately prevented it for 200,000 years. You keep doing this. You say Western society is better because it doesn't do such-and-such a terrible thing, I say that it's prejudicial to presume such practices were widespread among traditional hunter-gatherers and you then either find a single isolated example, or claim you weren't talking about hunter-gatherers at all (in which case, what was the point?).

Really, if all you're going to do is take the very best example of Western civilisation and compare it to the worst possible practices in hunter-gatherer tribes then yes, you win. The very best practices in Western civilisation are definitely better than the very worst practices in hunter-gatherer tribes. I had hoped to have a more nuanced discussion than that.

If the west can perpetuate itself without exploiting or destroying people or nature, will it be more successful? Ethically or otherwise? It's a pretty simple question and I think you fear answering it — VagabondSpectre

Not at all, I just have. The very best practices of Western civilisation, if practiced in the absence of the worst, would obviously count as successful. But in what way does that not apply to hunter-gatherers too? Their best practices and achievements, taken apart from their worst, would seem very successful.

I feel like we're just getting nowhere here and I think you think I'm arguing something I'm not. My argument really is quite simple - Western civilisation has been a disaster because it has exploited, massacred and oppressed millions of people to get where it is. It has destroyed and degraded entire ecosystems to get where it is, and something about it still causes a significant minority of its people to kill themselves rather than continue living in it. It has slums, homelessness, widespread disease (caused by its own pollutants). It has people starving to death while others buy yachts. It's generated apartheid, the gas chambers, slavery and cigarette advertising. I think hunter-gatherers demonstrate that none of these things are necessary. I think some quarters of modern Western culture also prove that these things are unnecessary too. So if all that is unnecessary, how can it possibly be labelled a sucess?

Having a good diet, getting restful sleep every night, not overworking your body, etc, are all things which increase longevity and could also contribute to happiness. — VagabondSpectre

You seem to have reverted to just making prejudiced statements about these cultural differences without doing any research first. The modern Western diet does not contribute to our longevity, it detracts from it.

The diets and nutrition of hunter-gatherers are discussed with the !Kung Bushmen (San) of the Dobe area, Botswana as the example. In general they show no qualitative deficiency of specific nutrients though they are thin and may be undernourished (by our standards) at some seasons. They show little or no obesity, dental caries, high blood pressure or coronary heart disease; their blood lipid concentrations are very low; and they can live to a good old age if they survive infections or accidents.

Here

Human populations in modern, westernized societies exhibit patterns of diet and physical activity that are associated with increased incidence of chronic and degenerative diseases, such as diabetes mellitus, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers, among others.

Here

As I already stated in my previous post hunter-gatherer life expectancy is reduced almost entirely by infant mortality (and, to a lesser extent, accidents and warfare). There is no evidence supporting the idea that they had worse diets, none that they "overworked their bodies", certainly none that they slept less well. So what has the fact that these things (indicated by longevity) could contribute to happiness got to do with the debate? This is the reason I brought up the fact that adult hunter-gatherers do not live significantly less long than adult westerners. All these issues you mention affect adult longevity. It takes serious malnutrition to affect infant mortality, no infant has ever had their life foreshortened by lack of sleep or overwork.

Yes, if we shave off child mortality figures then longevity nearly equalizes, but why would we be shaving off child mortality figures? — VagabondSpectre

To get at what the cause of longevity is by eliminating possible suspects and see what remains. You keep implying (the above quote being just one example) that the increase in longevity in Western societies can be linked somehow to happiness in a way which is the equal of (if not better than) the suicide statistics. The reason I took away infant mortality is to show that there is no such link. Take away infant mortality and you have no further difference in longevity to account for, so all your further talk of nutrition, stress, fear, security, diversity etc is not having the net effect on longevity you claim. The increase in longevity of modern westerners is caused almost entirely by better medical care in birth, and antibiotics. Beyond that, westerners seem to suffer from more non-bacterial disease, and hunter-gatherers seem to be more likely to be killed in warfare, but the two clearly balance one another out otherwise there would be a difference in the adult life expectancy and there simply isn't.

missing out on life is something we consider unsuccessful. — VagabondSpectre

I don't understand what you are saying here, on the face of it, this is simply not true. If my parents could have had 3 children but instead had two, is that "less successful" because some potential life has been missed? This idea of maximising 'life' as being a measure of success seems bizarre to me, and as I mentioned, leads to the Utility Monster version of success.

You need to actually prove that suicide indicates or is representative of societal unhappiness. You're arguing that since people commit suicide when they forecast negative hedons, and since the west has higher apparent rates of suicide, the west must produce fewer average hedons per person, but you have yet to demonstrate to what degree people actually commit suicide because they forecast negative hedons — VagabondSpectre

Fine.

we find a strikingly strong and consistent relationship in the determinants of SWB [subjective well-being] and suicide in individual-level, multivariate regressions.

Hete

It will not surprise anyone to learn that low SWB predicts mental problems and suicide. For instance, Bray and Gunnell (2006) found across 32 nations that happiness and life satisfaction were inversely associated with suicide rates. This is confirmed in studies of individuals, where SWB has been found to predict suicide (Koivumaa-Honkanen et al., 2001; Koivumaa-Honkanen, Honkanen, Koskenvuo, & Kaprio, 2003). In addition, SWB strongly and inversely predicts deaths due to nonintentional injuries (KoivumaaHonkanen et al., 2000).

- citations within text.

The fact that you're even questioning this really shows you're clutching at straws. "Hunter-gatherers might be committing suicide in secret without anyone noticing", "suicide might have nothing to do with unhappiness". How many more obscure and unlikely scenarios are you going to come up with to avoid having to admit that the high suicide rate of Western cultures is a serious failure?

and then you may also wish to show that individuals who commit suicide because they are unhappy are representative of the rest of the population. I.e: that the factors which cause individuals to commit suicide act upon all of us to the detriment of our average hedonic intake — VagabondSpectre

Really? Then you have a very different view of a successful society to me. One in which most people are quite happy but at the expense of one percent who are so miserable they kill themselves, is not a successful society by any measure I can think of, no matter what the 'average' hedonic intake.

You can say that there will almost certainly be less happiness inequality when there is less wealth/burden inequality, but there are many egalitarian societies (many of them presently HG people) who despite being egalitarian are quite unhappy because of other circumstances (loss of territory, disease, etc...). — VagabondSpectre

I don't understand your argument here at all. Yes there are egalitarian societies who are nonetheless unhappy for other reasons, but not because they're egalitarian. If you're going to argue like that, I could just say that nothing in Western society brings happiness because some groups within western society are still unhappy for other reasons. If we're not even going to bother averaging and comparing then what's the point? It just becomes an exchange of anecdotes.

the overall boons offered by a wealth stratified society might far outweigh the relative unhappiness caused by the relative wealth inequality or lower basic standards (e.g: having good schools, hospitals, and many career options in life, despite being relatively poor, might still directly contribute to a significant increase in total or mean happiness) — VagabondSpectre

We're back to this again. Yes, I'm aware that you have an argument, I'm not yet so sociopathic that I presume you're not even going to make sense, but what has "might be" got to do with anything? Of course it "might be" it also might not be, I'm trying to establish why you think it actually is .

Here's a study comapring happiness/life satisfaction inequality in western countries against wealth inequality and rising GDP. — VagabondSpectre

I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but you make it hard not to just conclude that you're just cherry-picking evidence. The study you cite here concludes that happiness is more homogeneously distributed in wealthier socities, but that, to quote directly from the study, "None of our analyses of countries over time reveal a significant relationship between GDP growth and average happiness.". You've literally just argued that suicide statistics in wealthier countries might indicate "a very high average level of happiness but also has more outliers at the upper and lower extremes", then you cite a paper that says the exact opposite? Which is it that you believe? Or are you just believing whatever is convenient to defend your argument?

You've unambiguously contradicted yourself. If the "average hunter gather" who will live for approximately the same number of days as a westerner "has a lower chance of getting to be the average hunter-gatherer", then they are not the average hunter-gatherer, they're at best the mode hunter gatherer. — VagabondSpectre

Firstly, what do you think the mode is if not a form of averaging? Secondly, even if we were to use the mean, we'd add up all the current ages within a community and divide by the number of people in that community. Either way, the 'average' age would be somewhere in the mid to late thirties. What maths are you doing that gets any different answer?

That they have a lower chance of getting to be that age than a westerner does seems pretty unambiguous to me, perhaps you could explain a bit more about why you're confused by these statements.

My initial arguments rely on general well-being, not self reported or otherwise measured forms of happiness. — VagabondSpectre

So what is well-being then, as opposed to self-reported happiness. It seems to me at this stage that the only difference is that self-reported happiness is what people actually strive for and well-being is what you think they ought to want.

To conclude on this point, HG way of life is very sustainable within the environments it has evolved to operate in, but it cannot easily adapt to environmental change or the presence of many other groups. This makes HG way of life less reliable in the context of inevitable change. — VagabondSpectre

No, that's just restating the same argument, I asked you for evidence to back it up. Hunter-gatherers have lived everywhere from the Sahara desert to the Arctic ice sheets, they've lived through interglacials and the ice-age. They have done all this for 190,000 years longer than any Western society. Where is your evidence that all the transitional phases involved mass loss of life?

As extreme examples, being ostracized for not wanting to undergo genital mutilation is one such superstitious norm that is not justifiable from any reasonable ethical perspective, and the killing of those suspected of witchcraft is another such norm which is not only unreasonably superstitious but also unreasonably unjust given its arbitrary application. — VagabondSpectre

I'm really starting to get offended by your casual prejudice. Please try to do at least the bare minimum of research before making your baseless assertions.

https://www.28toomany.org/blog/2013/feb/19/what-are-the-origins-and-reasons-for-fgm-blog-by-28-too-manys-research-coordinator/

http://www.fgmnationalgroup.org/historical_and_cultural.htm

FGM probably originated with the Egyptians and spread via slavery. There is no evidence at all of it being a traditional practice of nomadic hunter-gatherers. There is, however, direct evidence of it being used in Western societies right up until the late 19th century and is still used in many Arab countries even now, all of which have/had full judicial systems. So where is your evidence that the lack of judicial system encourages FGM?

I don't know if you're just making this stuff up out of ignorance or prejudice, but it's tiresome. Which nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes kill witches exactly? And who carried out the mass slaughter of possibly up to 10,000 European women during the late medieval period? Did those evil hunter-gatherers sneak in and do it?

If the west can cease exploiting other nations, won't that amount to ethical success? — VagabondSpectre

How on earth do you twist that into an ethical success? If I go on a murdering spree, am I to be congratulated when I finally stop for my ethical success? This seems to be your entire argument in favour of western culture - we may have completely destroyed almost everything in our path to here; enviroments, cultures and billions of individuals at the bottom of the ladder, but we're doing a lot better now so that makes us morally worthy.

Longevity infers a modicum of comfort, medicine, security, — VagabondSpectre

I did mention that we cannot completely remove longevity from an assessment of happiness as the prospect of a long life will itself produce happiness in the reasonably optimistic person.But it's important in this respect to recognise that this would not then be average lifespan. If we're talking about this effect of longevity increasing happiness (which is then multiplied by lifespan) then we cannot use average lifespan any more. This is something we haven't even gotten into yet because it's not yet been relevant, but it is very relevant to the discussion about the effect of predicted lifespan on happiness. The average lifespan of the hunter-gatherer past five is not radically different to that of the average westerner.

"Post-reproductive longevity is a robust feature of human life and not only a recent phenomenon caused by improvements in sanitation, public health, and medical advances. We argue for an adaptive life span of 68-78 years for modern Homo sapiens based on our analysis of mortality profiles obtained from small-scale hunter-gatherer and horticultural populations from around the world."

from - here

The problem is that high infant mortality rates drag the average down hugely. The idea of a hunter-gather adult having to face the prospect of not making it past 40 is a complete myth. The average hunter-gatherer adult can look forward to just as long a life as the average westener, it's just that they have a lower chance of getting past five once born.

This lower chance matters a lot when measuring the success of society (no-one wants a high infant mortality rate) and it will affect happiness overall, so it's not been appropriate to use the average until now, but when we start talking about longevity as an indicator of other things, it's simply not true to say there's any difference to account for. Aside from infant mortality, the lifespan of hunter-gatherers is approximately the same as that of average westerners, so the extent to which it reflects metrics like security, comfort, and lack of (potentially unrecorded) suicide do not vary between the societies.

if you feel that wanting to kill one's self indicates that people are unhappy (and is representative of other individuals) then why can't I say not wanting to kill one's self (which actually is representative) means people are happy? — VagabondSpectre

Not wanting to kill oneself is still measuring suicides. The percentage of births which end in suicide represent that proportion of the population that want to kill themselves, the percentage of births which end in some other cause represents the proportion of the population that did not want to kill themselves (up to that point). You can't say that life expectancy is somehow a proxy for people not wanting to kill themselves, we already have that data, it's the inverse of the suicide rate. To use it as a proxy without the suicide rate you'd have to fabricate a large proportion of hunter-gatherers secretly committing suicide despite the complete absence of any record of such a practice in the enthnographies. This really would show the sort of bias I've been on-and-off suspecting. It's one thing to seek evidence deliberately to support a position. It's another thing entirely to try and support a position by claiming that a phenomenon exists for which there is no evidence at all.

Once you travel rivers by motor and have a durable long lasting knife, going back to poles, paddles, and flint knapping, is hell. So, almost paradoxically, an HG way of life can produce X average hedons per day, and by giving them technology which temporarily improves their hedonic circumstances, we can be doing negative hedonic damage in the long run. — VagabondSpectre

Absolutely. You touch here on something you keep coming back to later but never reach the inevitable conclusion. A society in which wealth and advantage are unevenly distributed is less happy than one in which they are evenly distributed. This is something almost universally acknowledged by psychologists. I can cite a dozen articles in support of this notion, but it sounds like you already subscribe to it. So the egalitarianism that you acknowledge marks out hunter-gatherers, becomes a key measurable component of happiness. We may not be able to say with any certainty that improvements in technology will make a person happier because (as you say) if they didn't know such improvements were possible they won't miss them. But what we can say with almost absolute certainty, is that if one visible section of society is benefiting from some improvement, the section that is not will be significantly less happy no matter what their absolute level of comfort is. So we have at least one metric of happiness on which you, I, and the majority of the psychological community agree and that is wealth equality. Would you seriously try to argue that western societies are better at wealth equality that hunter-gatherers?

There are good reasons to believe that humans can psychologically and emotionally adapt to environments such that they're still motivated to flee discomfort and pain (but not consumed/hindered by it) and also motivated to chase pleasure (but not stalled by reaching it too easily).

Is there a maximum number of hedons any given individual can experience? Is the value of 1 additional hedon to someone already rich with hedons the same as the value of that hedon to the impoverished (diminished returns)? (same questions for anti-hedons). — VagabondSpectre

Very interesting point. From psychological research there is absolutely a limit to positive hedon value. Again, there is almost universal agreement on the diminishing returns of increases in hedonic experiences. I don't think you'll find a psychologist who disagrees, but if you're interested, the seminal work on this was by Daniel Kahneman. The same is also true of gains as they stretch into the future (called hyperbolic discounting). But both these points seem to argue against your emphasis on longevity, not in favour of it. If there's a limit to the value of additional pleasures, then any which modern society can provide will produce a diminishing return.

I think the magnitude in difference between the average happiness of the west and HG peoples is certainly not great enough to overcome a near doubling of days lived. — VagabondSpectre

As I mentioned above. There is not a near doubling of days lived. There is a doubling of life expectancy. the two are completely different measures. I you want to talk about odds (as in exchanging
happiness for odds of survival) over a whole society, then it's a useful metric as it is, but now you're starting to talk about the effect it has directly on the prospects of those experiencing the happiness, it's inappropriate. The average hunter-gatherer is not facing a halving of the number of days lived. The average hunter-gatherer is facing almost exactly the same number of days as the average westener, they simply have a lower chance of getting to be the average hunter-gatherer in their first five years of life.

If I can show that humans have the capacity to be generally/similarly happy across a wide range of environments, then it will stand to reason that a doubling of lifespan increases the average amount of happiness an individual will attain. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, this is the correct use of lifespan (I know the difference is subtle, but it's important), but I don't agree that you can achieve such a demonstration, that is also fair and sustainable.

I'm still not getting this dual use of happiness as a metric, we have;

"The metric of happiness, which is not exactly central to my initial and overall argument, is something I criticize as hard to measure, along with the entire concept of rudimentary hedonic maths as misleading and presumptive."

and

"If I can show that humans have the capacity to be generally/similarly happy across a wide range of environments..."

These still seem completely contradictory to me. How do you propose to show, 'strongly' or otherwise, that humans have the capacity to be happy across a wide range of environments without being able to measure happiness? You could perhaps show that the mechanisms which cause happiness are not related to external factors, but I think you'd be onto a losing task there as they very clearly are. You could perhaps explore mechanisms to do with tolerance and it's effect on happiness, but, as we've explored, that relies on relative equality and using this as your metric certainly undermines your argument. I can't see how else you could avoid having to supply, as evidence in support of your theory, two human groups who were equally happy despite radically different environments. But this would rely entirely on your being able to measure happiness, which you say is not critical to your argument.

if something is less sustainable or less just but has high returns on happiness, is that society more successful? — VagabondSpectre

Interesting question. I think that this next stage of the measurement is even more fraught with undecidable assumptions that the first and be even more fruitless as a consequence. If we don't agree on the ethics of our debt to future generations then we might as well stop here. 200 years of debate has shown pretty conclusively that there does not exist a method by which one person can convince another of the 'rightness' of any ethical position. My position is this. We have a diminishing duty to future generations as they go further into the future with regards to unforeseen harms, but we have an absolute duty to all future generations with regards to foreseeable harms. If our use of some resource might diminish it's availability in twenty generations time, then we have a relatively low priority duty to investigate further, but if our use of some resource obviously will case big problems for future generations, then it is unethical for use to continue to use it regardless. Basically, we would be denying our very nature not to assume that there will be future generations, therefore these people exist as moral entities, therefore we would be behaving immorally if we deliberately gained some inessential pleasure at their expense. If you disagree with this general position we might as well give up as I cannot support it rationally, it's just the way I feel.

While it's true scattered humans somewhere will always tend to find a way to survive, it comes at the cost of the death and obliteration of the many. Not only within groups as individuals die younger, but whole groups themselves that are for whatever reasons unlucky or maladapted have been wiped out and replaced by others (or by nobody at all in desolate regions). HG people are subject to the whims of nature to a greater degree than the west thanks to our technology and agriculture. — VagabondSpectre

You will need to support this assertion, as I simply disagree with it entirely. The idea that whole groups are wiped out to be replaced by others is not supported by any evidence I'm aware of. If you're arguing that a society is it's culture (such that you could say, for example, the Inca's were wiped out and replaced by the Aztecs) then you'd have to make the same judgement for western cultures. where are the Calvinists, where's feudalism, where's the Babylonian culture, where's state communism, where's the Shakers... Cultures get replaced by other cultures, this has nothing to do with sustainability. Sustainability (in ethical terms, which it how it is being used here) is about resource depletion. otherwise it's not an ethical matter and happiness could be obtained at it's expense without causing a problem. To be unsustainable in the ethical sense, a lifestyle has to be impossible to continue indefinitely by virtue of it choices, not by virtue of the vagaries of nature which are outside of it's control. We cannot become ethically obliged to control nature. There is a categorical difference between a society whose well-being is dependant on oil, and one whose well-being is dependant of clement weather. When oil runs out, that society will no longer benefit from that particular well-being - ever. During periods of inclement weather, the latter society may suffer, but when the weather returns to clemency, it will again thrive. These are two entirely different forms of sustainability, and have very different ethical connotations.

You will surely be forecasting the demise of the human race brought about by western hubris (climate change, disease, end of oil, or nuclear war) to thus show it is unsustainable, but rather than offer preemptive rebukes I'll let you make your case. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, but only if you are close in terms of ethics, if you're not there's no point in debating. One cannot prove ethics.

Acephalous groups have no wise leaders who can arbitrate disputes and actually make informed decisions about what is just (such as a modern judge might), instead altrustic punishment amounts to the often superstition informed whims of the mob. I've met some wise judges, but I've never met a wise mob. — VagabondSpectre

Again this is mere supposition at the moment, I'd need to see the evidence you're basing this on to believe it's not simply prejudice. Where are the examples of hunter-gatherers being treated unjustly because of 'the mob' where their treatment would have been more just under a state judicial system? So far, all you've provided that is on this subject is the practice of ostracisation as a punishment for lack of sharing (with more severe punishment being present but rare). How would this be any different if non-sharing were illegal in a state justice system. The perpetrator would still be ostracised (imprisoned), and treated violently (either in prison, or in states which still have forms of capital punishment). I'm not seeing how the one is more just than the other.

You will surely raise the objection that the west unjustly exploits the rest of the world and many of its own in order to sustain itself. While this may have been true throughout the west's colonial era, much of the rest of the world has freed itself from the grip of European colonial powers and are joining the ranks of growing economic powers. Global trade isn't the one way street it used to be, and even if one lane is still wider than the other, every nation engaging in international trade is still benefiting on average (six of the ten fastest growing economies this year are in Africa!) — VagabondSpectre

Did the Iraq war pass you by unnoticed? Did you miss the news broadcasts about Russia's invasion of the Ukraine? The invasion and control of weaker states fro their resources is still very much alive and well, it's just conducted differently now, less flag waiving and more tactical missiles.

You also seem to have slipped from focussing on justice to focussing on GDP. What has the fact that previously colonised countries, having been stripped of most of their natural resources, are now gaining in average GDP got to do with justice? Justice, in this sense, is about the extent to which the gains of one group are bought at the expense of another. The gains of modern western societies were definitely bought at the expense of the colonies, and the average GDP of the now former colonies completely masks the fact that the gains of the few (within those countries) are still being bought at the expense of the others. Income disparity is undeniably increasing and Tanzania, for example, which ranks in your top ten fastest growing economies, ranks nearly the bottom of the UN's World Happiness Report

As I think we might have mentioned before, happiness is complicated but a necessary metric. As pointless as it is seeing longevity alone as a measure of total happiness, it is equally pointless seeing justice in terms of average GDP.

I was always under the impression that Collingwood rejected the whole idea of revolutions. In The New Leviathan doesn't he say something like the term revolution being just an admission of the historian's lack of understanding about the continuity of the historical process? Its a long time since I read anything about him so I may be wrong, but this line of argument has always been a point of diversion for me, as I outlined above.

I agree with your analysis that APs are usually so deeply set as to be outside of the matter of day-to-day discourse. That's really the point where I start to doubt the correctness of the classification of many of the examples I've heard of, as many beliefs overturned during revolutions (political or otherwise) become necessarily part of day-to-day discourse. I'm not sure whether to call this the method by which absolute presuppositions are replaced (that which was unspoken becomes a topic of conversation, thereby questioned and thereby no longer an AP), or is it more correct to say that this is just such evidence which the historian could use to show a belief not to be an absolute presupposition afterall, but merely seeming so? Not sure myself, but I'm tempted by the latter as I think it preserve the 'absoluteness' of APs better. To make real use of them in our historical understand of different societies (as well as our contemporary understanding of those with different world-views to us), it's important that they really are absolute and not a kind of 'conspiracy of silence', where everyone knows the belief is on shaky ground because they've questioned it privately (meaning it isn't really an AP) but no-one dare say so because of social taboo, or fear of ostracisation (causing it to appear to be an AP to the casual observer).

As you say it's more about picking apart the way absolute presuppositions work because without this knowledge of mechanism it will be impossible for the historian, or contemporary analyst to know what signs to look for, probably more psychology than philosophy, but I'm interested in the overlap.

Interesting idea! If you're a student, you're on to something! — tim wood

Thanks, though my student days are way behind me.

@TheWillowOfDarkness

From this discussion

The problem with defining attitudes as bigotry in a debate where the propositions are related to what is real, is that it begs the question. Bigotry, according to my dictionary, is when "a person has strong, unreasonable beliefs and does not like other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life". To accuse others of bigotry you would have to have already established what qualifies as reasonable (for a belief), and which beliefs are 'strong' (which I take to mean outside of the normal mileau). Yet both these measures are exactly what the debate is trying to establish.

It's this kind of approach which promotes the alt-right's sense of 'righteous indignation' which then fuels proper, well-established bigotry. The sense that any discussion about these issues is a foregone conclusion, that you're not even allowed in unless you tow the party line.

You say "Discrimination against and rejection of trans people at the deepest conceptual level" basically you're saying that the concept cannot be disputed without bigotry.

The debate around transgenderism, in the thread being referred to, is simply around the view that a person's feeling that they would be happier appearing (and being treated as) something society widely agrees as indicating the opposite sex, should be mandatorily (or at least with severe peer pressure) supported by all other members of their community.

That's all.

Some consider that matter too insufficiently conclusive to warrant the mandating of societal support, others think the potential loss of well-being of any other action for the transgender community sufficient to outweigh this uncertainty.

No one's being bigoted and your insertion of these accusations into the debate is not helping.

There's no rational point in characterizing me as uninformed and I would rather not waste time defending my education. In the context of our discussion, doing so amounts to an ad hominem attack because it fallaciously persuades that my position is incorrect by appealing to an aspect of me instead of an aspect of my argument/evidence/position. — VagabondSpectre

I'm not asking you to 'defend' your education, nor am I implying that your position is incorrect by virtue of it. If I have stated that at any time I was wrong to do so, but I don't think I did. The claim I'm making in this regard is only that it was reasonable of me to not engage with an argument that I have already heard coming from someone who appeared to be less well-informed than I am. That's not making any claim about the veracity of your argument, it's making a claim that I'm very likely to have considered it already. My consideration may well have been massively flawed (I'm no expert myself), it's not about the veracity, it's about that fact that I've already done it once and see no value to me in doing it again.

Considering an alternative theory that I have already heard, presented by someone less well-informed than I am, is simply not something I'm interested in spending my time on, it's no reflection on either you, nor the veracity of your theory. It's an (entirely reasonable) decision of mine about how to spend my time, I simply explained my reasoning to you out of courtesy.

This is all moot anyway since it seems I'd simply mistaken what I took for your lack of comparative analysis as meaning that you were simply presenting an alternative theory for my interest rather than attempting to critique my own. In fact you are attempting to dispute my theory, and that is something I am interested in and which is not borne upon by the extent to which you are well-informed. I enjoy trying to defend a theory of mine from intelligent critique regardless of the extent to which the critic has prior knowledge of the subject, hence my renewed involvement.

I'm not sure having a meta discussion about the epistemic or ontic nature of reason and evidence is going to get us anywhere... — VagabondSpectre

Fine, we will have to agree to disagree on that one, but I'm happy to leave it for now.

___

I understand from the rest of your response that we have some significant misunderstandings, so I'd like again, if it's OK, to try and draw together some of them to make sure we're on the right track rather than respond point-by-point.

Firstly it seems that I'd mistaken your emphasis on longevity as being unsupported by an argument about hedonic value where you consider that argument to have been laid out already. We are in agreement then that longevity acts only as a multiplier of hedonic value (with the caveat that the number of future years one can expect to live may well have a hedonic value of its own)? That is to say that if a person gained 2 units of hedonic value from every year of life they could live half as long as someone gaining only 1 unit from each year and would have been objectively no more or less successful.

Presuming that's right, our argument should really have been focussed on the various hedonic values of the socieites (the boons, as you call them) rather than being sidetracked into a discussion about mortality rate. Mortality rates are not that different between the two societies in a mathematical sense. A life expectancy of 45 is not quite half the average life expectancy in Western societies, so hunter-gatherer society would have to demonstrate just less than twice the hedonic value of Western societies to make up for its lower life expectancy, yes? I'm not suggesting we put numbers to this, just trying to find a way to shelve mortality (other than as a hedonic factor itself) for the time being until we've established that it is a factor at all. It is only a factor if hunter-gather societies are much less than twice as happy as average westerners, otherwise it is not relevant because its multiplying effects are outweighed by the increase in hedonic value of each year.

So the argument in this respect is - are hunter-gatherer societies enough happier to justify their lower life expectancies? You're arguing they're not, I'm suggesting they might be.

I want to also bear in mind at this point that my argument here is expressed in weaker terms that yours ('not' vs. 'might be'). The reason I've done that is that I don't want to lose sight of the arguments about justice and sustainability. To my mind, a society which has a higher hedonic value to each year (or an equal value but more years to get it) would also have to obtain this boon justly and sustainably to be classed a success, it is not sufficient that it simply increases the happiness of it's current citizens. It must do so with a realistic chance of providing the same value to future generations, and without exploiting other societies, or minority groups within their own society, to gain this happiness.

The corollary of this, is that we're stuck with assessing happiness regardless of how slippery and difficult to measure a concept it might be because assessment of mortality is pointless without knowing the hedonic value of each year. We cannot simply presume that it is equal just because it's difficult to measure, that would be a fallacy. If we really cannot get a measure of it, then we must presume it is unknown, which means that the whole debate is undecidable. We've just agreed (I think) that longevity simply acts as a multiplier, not really a factor of its own. Any number multiplied by an unknown quantity just yields an unknown quantity. The only caveat I would accept to this is that at some point a society might yield such a massive improvement in life expectancy that it simply becomes extremely unlikely that any gain/loss in hedonic value enough to outweigh the multiplying effects will ever be possible. I don't think we're there, but I suppose it's possible you do. If so, then the discussion become one not too dissimilar to the Utility Monster. Would we be willing to admit that a life which had a million years of barely more than tolerable happiness was actually worth more than one which had only a hundred of moderate happiness, simply by multiplying factor alone?

___

The next bit I'm a bit stuck on. You seem to have agreed that mortality is (mostly) only a multiplier for hedonic value. This, to me entails that you're having decided the two societies are of at least roughly equal hedonic value is absolutely crucial to your argument, without it you are comparing two unknown quantities. You then go on to make two seemingly contradictory statements - firstly that your argument is strong, has good predictive abilities and conforms to the evidence, and secondly that happiness (hedonic value) is so hard to measure as to be virtually useless as a metric. Given that your argument relies entirely on demonstrating that the two societies have at least equal hedonic values, how can you claim it to be so strong yet still claim that hedonic value is virtually impossible to measure?

This seems to me to be the main sticking point, and where I keep misunderstanding your argument. You seem contradictory in your valuation of the measurement of happiness, on the one had agreeing that it is a vitally important measure (one half of the 'degree of happiness' x 'years of happiness' equation), but then on the other hand suggesting that we can't possibly measure happiness so we might as well not bother.

It seems to me that there are four inextricable factors - longevity, happiness, justice and sustainability. At it's most trite, it seems sometimes your argument is "we can't measure the last three very well so lets just ignore them and say that western society has won on longevity alone" and that's just not good enough for me. If someone were to offer me an extra thirty years of average life expectancy, admitting that they might be bought at the expense of my overall happiness, the survival of future generations and the well-being of other societies and minority groups, but we can't be sure about how much, I don't think it would be moral for me to just take them unquestioningly.

Surely one of the things it is reasonable to take away from Collingwood is that some presumptions which seem to be absolute presuppositions turn out, on analysis, to be either relative presuppositions, or not to be presuppositions at all, but propositions. That is, surely the point of analysing them? — Pseudonym


Yes, this is where I'm trying to get. How are we going to distinguish an absolute presupposition from a relative presupposition? According to tim woods' description, there is a substantial difference between these two, so there must be some defining principles which we could identify within presuppositions to distinguish them, if the various presuppositions are described properly. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, according to Collingwood, the principles are relatively simple. They are the same as those of any assessment of behaviour in an historical enquiry - the answer to the question "why did they do/think that?". As soon as that question no longer seems to have an answer you have an absolute presupposition. I think the mistake you're making is in not treating the classification as a theory. Like any other theory, it's a best guess until something better comes along or some evidence disproves it. Collingwood's conclusion (at least in my interpretation) is not to treat the classification of a belief as an AP as if it were a final indisputable fact, it's to treat is sufficiently like a fact that one does not get hung up on keep asking the question "why?" when it's just not yielding an answer.

In my interpretation, one asks of a belief "why would they believe that?". Sometimes one will find a set of empirical evidence and a rational argument but these will always be accompanied by another belief (the belief that this evidence coupled with this argument leads to this conclusion). So we ask the same question of that belief. At some point in time we do not find empirical evidence and rational argument forming part of the justification. At that point we propose the theory that this is an absolute proposition, and move on with investigating other things until such time as new evidence arises, or a better theory comes along. It's pragmatism as much as metaphysics really.

Yeah, I think it's at least half to do with definitions. Taking Quine's scale of metaphysical enquiry, I'm simply defining an enquiry as 'science' by it's place on the scale, so the question of some science being difficult to ever agree on doesn't arise for me. If it's the sort of thing that's unlikely to ever yield agreement, no matter what sense-based evidence we use, then it isn't 'science' for me, simply by definition. To be clear, there's a very important distinction between 'agreed on' and 'agreeable on'. Some scientific theories might be very widely dis-agreed on, but they're still science because they are widely agreeable on, even if such agreement is not yet forthcoming. Metaphysical theories I'm defining as those which are not widely agreeable on even though some of them might be very widely agreed on.

The metaphysical analysis that's supposed to identify APs is according to the author an historical science. I understand that to mean that he, the historical scientist, aka metaphysical analyst or just analyst, after suitable research, publishes a statement to the effect that this bunch of folks held such-an-such as an AP during that period of history. As such, it is a fact supported by research - or overturned by subsequent research as you suggest is possible. If true and accurate, then that bunch of folks actually did hold such an AP and presuppose it in their endeavors.

Likely most APs, once identified, and especially if ancient, likely don't cut it in modern science, or politics, or religion, or whatever. But this doesn't touch them as APs. Rather it evaluates them as current propositions. — tim wood

Absolutely, I hadn't intended to give the impression that this would necessarily be a metaphysical analysis. In fact, I'm fairly convinced it would not be. Maybe a psychological at the most analytical end, but, as you say, mostly simply historical, or anthropological. My concern really is that whilst I agree entirely with Collingwood's concept and his method, I find myself disagreeing with many of the classifications I've read used as examples of APs from a psychological point of view. By this I mean that when someone says that such-and-such a society simply held belief X as an absolute presupposition, I don't doubt the existence of such a concept, nor the fact that, once found it is simply an historical fact and should be treated as such, but I do find myself often asking - did they though? Or were they really trying to answer a question? It may be my rather broad streak of cynicism, but I just get the gut feeling (not entirely unsupported by social psychology) that a lot of the practices and beliefs held by prior cultures which to us seem strange were quite consciously invented to create and maintain power structures, and belief in them merely professed out of fear of ostracisation rather than genuinely held.

So I take a more social psychology approach to the analysis of APs which finds far fewer of them in the sense they were (I think) intended. I find that in many cases people merely act as if they held an AP but in fact quite often question it internally, or ask the question to which it is an answer (and so render it no longer an AP), it's just that externally doing so is something of a taboo for their social group so you don't often see the behaviour which the historical analyst would otherwise use to discard it as an AP.

The push to regard APs as ordinary propositions is strong and naturally so. One form of innoculation against the pressure is to remember that the AP is always (formally) a statement about what some person or group of people in fact did. — tim wood

So basically, this is the point I'm tempted to want to modify, by introducing some small element of psychology. I think the value of APs is in understanding human behaviour, but in order to do that, it does have to allow at least small element of psychological analysis of all behaviour, both private and social. Take revolution as an example, in any revolution where an AP is overturned (for example the AP that 'the king has been appointed by God to rule the country'), there must have been a period prior to the revolution where the society was still acting as if it held that particular AP but in private it was no longer an AP, it was a proposition made by one class which was being rejected by another. The rejecting class, at least, held it to be a proposition, but at some point in the revolutionary process, they must have done so without any external sign that this was the case. This doesn't just count for political revolutions, but all revolutions and paradigm shifts.

So the key question that needs to be answered for an investigation of APs is - how long does this period last? Do people act as if beliefs were APs, when in fact they're treating them as propositions, for only a short period before the revolution, or does it go on for years, decades even?

I think this has important implications in modern society for things like religion, but also, at the other end of the scale, things like advanced science where the question would be - do people actually understand the position well enough to hold it as an AP or are they actually holding some other AP but acting as if they hold the AP in question because they've been told by those more intelligent than they are to act that way? For example, can you hold an AP that space and time are all one unified dimension if you don't actually understand what that means?

Of course, one can over-think this and risk losing some of the wonderful simplicity that Collingwood introduced, and I hope I'm not guilty of that, or perhaps only a little.

Do you recognise a difference between intellectual bravery and arrogance?

Depends how you enumerate them, but that's not the point is it?

Problem: There is need we feel to show why each problem matters
Solution: The relevant work showing why some problem matters

Problem: We don't know what purchase a problem has on what it aims to come to grips with.
Solution: The relevant work showing what purchase can be had on what a problem aims to come to grips with.

Problem: We don't know what happens when such categories are distributed in this way rather than that.
Solution: The work showing what happens when such categories are distributed in this way rather than that.

It's all very interesting exploring different ways of describing the same issue, but it's in bearable arrogant to go around claiming every other way is 'infantile' and not even proper philosophy.

So how do you describe 'sucess' in such a way as it would not be possible to re-phrase as a solution to a problem?

As an aside, I don't think quietism qualifies as philosophy. It's intellectual failure hardened into pseudo-philosophical position. — StreetlightX

Failure to do what? I thought philosophy was not about solutions?

I'm a big fan of Collingwood, and I've enjoyed reading your erudite exposition of his concepts, even in such a challenging environment as 'the lounge' (which I hardly ever venture into for this reason), but I'm not sure where you're going with this last post, particularly "... If you identify an ancient absolute presupposition for the purpose of mocking it and laughing at it and the people who held it, you can do so if that's what you think is valuable. But are you prepared to mock and laugh at modern natural science? Or everyone, for that matter. ". Surely one of the things it is reasonable to take away from Collingwood is that some presumptions which seem to be absolute presuppositions turn out, on analysis, to be either relative presuppositions, or not to be presuppositions at all, but propositions. That is, surely the point of analysing them?

It is in this sense that one can mock (or critique, depending on one's disposition) those presumptions which appear to be ancient absolute presuppositions, by revealing them to be, in fact, relative presuppositions, or indeed propositions posited as an answer to a specific question (and if shown to be a ridiculous answer, then one deserving of all the mockery it gets).

You seem to be implying (and I'm open to the possibility I've simply misinterpreted you) that if a presumption appears prima facae to be an absolute presupposition (such as that of your virgin-sacrificing volcano worshippers), then it must be fairly treated as such without question, and I'm fairly certain that is not what Collingwood is saying.

Furthermore, I realise you must be tired of the harassment you've had for trying to explain these ideas, but I think you have gone too far in dismissing possible criticisms of Collingwood's terms, even within his own framework. A philosopher will rarely define a term as being simply 'all that with property x'. It is more usually (and certainly so in Collingwood's case) that terms are defined as 'all that with properties x, y and z'. It therefore leaves open the possibility that one does not need to take his definition of terms as fact prior to critique. If one could, for example, demonstrate that there are no x's that are also y's then his definition is incoherent. I'm not saying that Collingwood's is, but that your refusal to acknowledge that the definitions themselves can be analysed for their rigour goes too far.

I hope you don't take these as excessively negative. It's just that defending the concept of absolute presuppositions is something I think is quite important and I wanted to plug any gaps I thought might be there.

You don't need a full history of the evidence I've been exposed to engage in this discussion, and the evidence (in the form of anthropological journals which you've requested) that I have presented should be sufficient (there are probably no academic studies which concisely capture the main thrust of my original post (that western civilization has been the opposite of a disaster)). I've gathered my understanding of human cultures over a long period of time and from many sources (such as history books and documentaries, which I reckon you would merely ridicule as undisciplined); I made a myriad of points in a cumulative argument, each of which I've been happy to provide evidence for, but providing all my original sources would be a herculean feat of memory. — VagabondSpectre

I haven't asked for a full list. I'm merely defending my statement that your opinion was largely uninformed (in the academic sense), and supported post hoc with evidence you found by searching the internet in a concious attempt to support it. You seemed to take great offence at the suggestion, so I presumed it wasn't true. This would mean that your opinion was, in fact, supported by some academic information and that you searched the internet for new sources to support it for some reason other than your lack of previous sources. If you're now saying that that wasn't the case, then my first assertion, which you labelled ad hominem, was actually perfectly true. I'm not judging. I didn't at any point say "... and therefore your opinion is stupid and rubbish", just that it was reasonable of me to to not treat it's exposition as a learning experience.

I'm never going to be able to prove that there is a 0% chance I am wrong, or that no expert in a vast field of study hold conflicting views. However, the more rational merit I can give to my own positions, the less likely alternative theories seem to be. — VagabondSpectre

That's fine, showing that one theory has more rational merit than another is a reasonable way of comparing them (although I don't see any convincing ethical argument that we should then adopt the argument which shows most rational merit, but that's another debate entirely), but contrary to your later suggestion that we cannot discuss these ideas in the midst of a bias-laden debate, I really don't see how we can even have a debate (bias-laden or otherwise) unless we resolve what it is we're using as a measure of rational merit. You seem to believe in the (I think very much mistaken) notion that the ability to provide counter-arguments is just such a measure, but the history of ideas demonstrates with glaring empirical accuracy, that the ability to derive counter-arguments is almost infinite, limited only by the imagination. So then we're left with this unsatisfactorily subjective notion of 'compelling' counter-arguments. You don't find my arguments 'compelling', I don't find yours 'compelling' so where do we go from there?

We're more than capable of forming and informing evidence based opinions, even if originally they may have started as anecdotal or evolutionary preconceptions. In the spirit of philosophy and debate I think it always best to try and confront evidence and arguments directly (unless they're obviously absurd). — VagabondSpectre

I agree entirely. The difference I'm trying to get at is that presenting your argument, together with the rational process and evidence by which you support it, is not sufficient on it's own to do anything more than offer someone an alternative (which they may then adopt or reject). If you want to go further, then this you'll need to do some comparative work. My criticism of your argument so far was mostly based on the fact that it is rarely more than a just-so story. It lays out how something could be the case, not how something must be the case, nor even how something is more likely to be the case than any alternative. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I presumed at first that this was intentional, and you were simply laying out an alternative for me to consider (which I why I said that I wasn't interested in reading an alternative presented by someone who was largely uniformed, when I could read alternatives presented by experts). Now that you've made it clear that you're not simply laying out an alternative, but are attempting to argue it's relative merits, I'm focussing my criticism more on the fact that I don't see any such comparative arguments there.

My second post attempts to draw out where I expected to see some comparative arguments.

The most important point you're missing, which covers the first three of your responses, is a simple mathematical one. You're treating survival as a binomial factor when it is in fact variable. Hunter-gatherer tribes do not fail to survive (where modern societies achieve survival). Hunter-gatherers survive for less long than modern people's on average. This treatment of a variable as a binomial causes all sorts of problems for your argument...

If life is worth living, and I'm saying that it usually is to most people, then survival is intrinsically important as necessary to preserve the value life contains. — VagabondSpectre

So here, 'survival', is not a binomial factor (one you either have or do not have), it is a variable (one you have a certain quantity of). The decision we're talking about is trading a certain quantity of this variable for an increase in the variable 'happiness', yet this argument here treats it as if the only choice were to either have 'survival' or not have it. Treat it as a variable and your last assertion "survival is intrinsically important as necessary to preserve the value life contains" ceases to be true. Only when the 'survival' variable is zero does the 'value life contains' variable become impossible to obtain. At all other values for the 'survival' variable, it is still possible to obtain any amount of the 'value life contains' variable depending entirely on how 'valuable' each moment of that life is.

...(the point is to get repeated doses, which requires you to go on living). I'm not saying that mortality rates are the one true and ultimate measure of societal success, but they are a necessary and major part of any broad and comprehensive assessment of societal success. — VagabondSpectre

Again, same error. It does require you to "go on living" to get repeated doses of happiness, and lack of mortality is definitely necessary for a society to be successful. But both modern societies and hunter-gatherer societies have that. Hunter-gatherers do not instantly drop dead the moment they're born, so both possess this necessary quality 'being alive for some time'. The variable is the amount of time. The point I'm making with the sky-divers is that statistically they will be (as a population) reducing the amount of time they spend alive (sky-divers have a shorter lifespan on average than non-sky-divers). They trade this shortened average lifespan for the adrenaline rush their sport gives them. This is also true of absolutely any of the risks we take in life. We trade the shortened average lifespan of a group taking that risk for the benefits that risk gives us. This is no different to the argument I'm making about hunter-gatherers who choose to remain so. They're trading a shortened average lifespan for the benefits their lifestyle gives them.

If a given society is rife with such boons, then being alive longer within them would indeed be valuable/sucecssful — VagabondSpectre

Here, bizarrely, you've basically undermined your own argument and replaced it entirely with the one I'm trying to lay out. "If a given society is rife with such boons, then being alive longer within them would indeed be valuable/successful". Do you see... The variable 'being alive longer' is only of value if a given society is 'rife with such boons'. If a given society is not 'rife with such boons' then the variable 'being alive longer' is not worth anything. So why are you suggesting we judge the worth of a society in any way on the variable 'being alive longer' when we've just established that such a variable is only worth anything if such a society is 'rife with such boons'? The first job is to establish whether a society is rife with boons, before we've done that the variable 'being alive longer' is of no use to us as a metric, as you just stated.

It doesn't exactly matter that some societies offer better odds of leading successful lives: statistically, if you have a higher chance of dying, you have a lower chance of leading a successful life, whatever that may entail. — VagabondSpectre

No, you've completely ignored the maths. You do not automatically have a lower chance of leading a successful life if you have a higher chance of dying. That's not the way probability works. With two variables the one is multiplied by the other. If you live in a society with an extremely low chance of achieving happiness, it doesn't matter how long you live for (presuming infinity is not an option), because your chances of happiness are so low that getting to roll those dice more often is not sufficient compensation. Imagine I have a ten-sided-die and a hundred-sided die, and my aim is to roll a one as often as I can (the size of the die represents how easy it is to achieve happiness in a given society, rolling a one represents happiness being achieved, the number of times you can roll a die represents your lifespan). I need to roll the hundred-sided die ten times more to have an equal chance of obtaining a one, than if I roll the ten sided die. So if someone said to me, would you be prepared to trade a loss in the number of times you get to roll the die for an opportunity to swap dice, you would be best taking that option.

This is what I'm suggesting makes hunter-gatherer societies compare favourably to Western ones despite their lower life expectancies. This is why sky-divers accept a lower life expectancy on average than non-sky-divers. This is why anyone does anything remotely risky. People are, and always have been, prepared to trade a loss in expected lifespan for an increase in the happiness of that lifespan.

By necessarily and exhaustively you seem to be supposing that an individual metric ought to occupy a universal and immovable place in a hierarchy of values that all humans agree with. I cannot tell you the exact point at which security becomes a greater concern than freedom, or precisely chart the many factors which influence individual human happiness. — VagabondSpectre

And yet that's exactly what you're doing because you're presenting the fact that Western societies have a higher life expectancy as a metric which is sufficient to outweigh any advantages hunter-gather societies may have in diet, child-rearing, equality, community, exercise, purpose, freedom etc. You have decided the place life expectancy has in the hierarchy of values.

It's more misleading as ametric for societal happiness because as I understand it suicide often is the result of clinical depression, an affliction not necessarily caused by society itself. I've put forward and supported many good metrics, but I don't exactly feel the need to show why all other possible metrics, including suicide, are more misleading. Hell, maybe suicide is actually the closest proxy for societal happiness that we have, as you say it is, but until I get ahold of some reasons as to why this is the case (as opposed to not the case), I have no reason to assume its merit. — VagabondSpectre

This seems to go back to the 'laying out an alternative' approach rather than any comparative work. I'm not asking you to assume the merit of suicide as a metric. As far as I'm concerned you can take it or leave it, but it was my understanding that you wanted to engage in arguing the relative merits of your theory, which would make it necessary for you to show how your metric compared relative to mine, how it improves on mine. So if we're talking about the property of a metric's clarity (it's failure to mislead), then a comparative argument would show how your metrics had less tendency to mislead than mine. Without that you're just back to saying that you have a reasonable theory and I already don't deny that.

I have to keep pointing out that inductive arguments which establish conclusions as likely rather than deductively necessary can be just as philosophical (better in fact). — VagabondSpectre

No you don't because I have at no point denied that is the case. I haven't at any point claimed that you do not have a valid philosophical theory. We're not arguing about validity, we're arguing about relative merit. Why are your conclusions more likely than mine?

Are you essentially suggesting that we would be equally happy if we were all forced to do the same job? — VagabondSpectre

Yes. So long as the 'force' you mention is simply the force of naturally occurring circumstances and not some dictatorial government, then that is exactly what I'm saying. Your job does not determine who you are, two bakers could be more diverse in personality and approach to life than a bank clerk and a soldier who might approach their respective jobs with exactly the same world-view. What matters is your personal identity, not what you do for a living.

Being alive is definitely required to be mentally and spiritually healthy, therefore low mortality rates improves your odds of being mentally and spiritually healthy. It's not a presumption... — VagabondSpectre

Back to this again...I refer you to the discussion on how probability works above. 'Being alive' is not a binomial value in this. Hunter-gathers achieve 'being alive', western societies achieve 'being alive'. The binomial value 'being alive' does not vary across the societies we're comparing as both have it. What varies is the variable value 'length of being alive', and 'length of being alive' is not directly correlated with mental and spiritual well-being as our population of sky-divers, soldiers and all other risk takers proves.

Again, I'm not going to take your comments on evolution individually. Suffice to say they conform to the same approach. You've given me a perfectly cogent argument as to why genetic factors determining what makes us happy might have evolved more quickly than, say, dietary requirements. Once again proving that you have a perfectly logical and reasonable argument. But you have not done any comparative work. Is it more likely that our genetic predisposition to causes of happiness has evolved quickly to take account of modern life? Because if not, then we simply have two equally valid alternatives.

From an evolutionary perspective, those who suffered too much due to their physiology/psychology will have tended to reproduce less, but it would also be true that evolving to be completely satisfied would also cause you to reproduce less successfully. Having insatiable desires keeps us motivated. — VagabondSpectre

Absolutely, but this is no less true of a modern society. If we satisfy all our desires easily, we will have nothing to strive for and will ultimately feel less satisfied in the long run.

---

To sum up. You're arguing that mortality rates are a good metric because you need to be alive to enjoy anything else life has to offer, but this mistakes a variable for a binomial value. Both hunter-gatherer tribes and modern societies achieve the binomial value 'being alive'. Mortality rates are a measure of the variable value 'length of being alive', and again, both societies have a positive value in this measure. It is clearly, and I think fairly irrefutably, not the case, that a particular value of this variable is a contingent necessity for enjoying life, (one could potentially really enjoy a single year, or fail to enjoy a hundred years) so your arguments about necessity are irrelevant.

What is relevant is the trade and this requires us to measure how valuable each year of additional life in modern society is, and at what cost those additional years are purchased. My use of the shockingly high suicide rates in modern societies means to show that the value of each additional year is really not that high. Dozens of additional years are routinely thrown away to avoid misery. My example of sky-divers and other risk takers further reinforces this. Again, many potential additional years are thrown away for what seems like the most trivial of benefits. We really do not value additional years that highly.

What we do seem to value highly is happiness, the tiniest potential increases are pursued doggedly; advertising companies, peers and our own desires get us to do all sorts of risky behaviours for the most trivial, ephemeral and often completely illusionary gains in happiness.

On second thought maybe I've been to harsh expecting it to be obvious how the way in which you've raised your argument leads to the conclusions above without specific reference, so here is an attempt to do so.

nearly all humans want to go on living. — VagabondSpectre

This is simply an assertion. It may be the case, but it also may not. Those who find themselves in circumstances not conducive to going on living (very miserable with no prospects), clearly do not wish to go on living as evidenced by the fact that they kill themselves. This makes your assertion that humans all(or nearly all) want to go on living circumstantially proscribed, those circumstances being happiness. So you haven't avoided happiness being the primary metric, your secondary metric only applies in those circumstances where the human concerned is sufficiently happy to want to go on living. So the extent to which this is the case is the difference between our theories. You have presented a rational possibility (that the fact that most people want to go on living makes survival a good metric), but you have not shown that it is the only rational possibility (which would involve showing how it is definitely not sufficiently contingent on happiness to make happiness the primary metric). Without this second comparative measure, all you've shown is that a second viable theory exists and seeing as I don't disagree with that, I don't see the point in continuing to do so.

survival is both the most ubiquitous of significant human preferences, and also the most fundamentally important in underpinning every other preferred human endeavor (at least to a point) . — VagabondSpectre

No. Clearly, desire for sex, fame, children, adoration of peers, adrenaline rushes and objects of desire all frequently cause people to take actions which are huge risks to their survival. If the desire to survive was so ubiquitous and important as to trump all other desires, then why would anyone base jump, sky-dive, go to war, or even drive to work. Why would anyone do anything when one's survival chances are maximised by staying at home with an en-suite gym on a drip feed of antibiotics? The fact that a thing is necessary does not make it the most fundamental thing. You have to demonstrate that other things are not equally necessary.

As direct measures of survival, mortality rate and lifespan are therefore intrinsically valuable for enabling access to all the other boons of life. Mortality rate and lifespan also partially represent the cumulative effects of many other possible metrics (medicine, affluence, violence, security, etc...), which does make them additionally useful in assessing the overall success of a civilization. — VagabondSpectre

You've quite literally stated here that mortality is an intrinsically valuable, and useful metric. I have not argued that mortality is not either of those things, I've argued that it is not sufficiently valuable or useful to act as a measure of the success of a society on its own. To respond to that by simply pointing out that it is valuable and intrinsic is not a counter-argument. Imagine we were trying to establish who had most oranges. If you simply argue that you definitely have some oranges, and I argue that I too have some oranges, we have gotten nowhere. We must do one of two things, either quantify our batch of oranges by some comparable metric, or directly compare our batch of oranges. I am aware that mortality is a useful measure of a society's success, what I disagree on is how useful.

Having a high chance of being dead on arrival or dead relatively shortly after arrival because of high mortality rates and shorter lifespans reduces an individual's chances of living a more successful life in all respects. — VagabondSpectre

This is simply statistically wrong as you are confusing a metric's necessity with the extent to which it is exhaustive. If a person has a 1:100 chance of being successful in any given year in one society, and a 1:1,000,000 chance in any given year in another, then a smaller number of years in the first society yields better odds of success than a larger number of years in the latter. It's just maths. Unless, as you do, you ignore other contributory factors. again, it's about comparison, so you must provide some quantitative metric, otherwise all you're doing is demonstrating that your theory is a viable possibility and I already agree with that.

Physical health beyond survival is another nearly universal human value (held by nearly all individuals) which must therefore be considered high on the list of important attributes of societal success. — VagabondSpectre

Again, you're simply presenting your case as if it were an argument. I don't disagree that physical health must be considered high on the list of important attributes, but in rejecting my theory you need to argue that it must be considered higher than metrics of happiness, not just high.

Access to wealth, security, and medicine play important roles in maintaining survival and physical health, and while different individuals and societies can have unique needs and desires with respect to these endeavors, these resources none the less make objectively valuable contributions to the success of a given society in terms of physical health and beyond. — VagabondSpectre

Again, this is without comparison, demonstrating that these things are important is not the issue, no-one disagrees with that. Demonstrating that they are more important than happiness is the issue. There must be some quantitative or comparative measure, which you have not provided.

I won't quote directly from your section on mental well-being, but suffice to say you have again simply declared that something is the case which I do not disagree with - various factors influence mental well-being including fear and inequality. I fail to see how this has any bearing on it's use as a metric for the success of a society either necessarily or exhaustively.

it could be very misleading to use overall suicide rates as a discrete metric. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, I don't disagree. Again, you have failed to carry out any comparative analysis. Is it more misleading than other metrics, if so why?

Physical and mental variations of all kinds may render some civilizations more or less appealing to individuals. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, they may... or they may not. Providing an argument that they may has no bearing on whether they actually do.

Some environments can lead to convergence of adaptations (when selective pressures are stringent diversity between individuals shrinks overtime as naturally selected individual adaptations converge toward a singular adaptive strategy) and others can lead to divergence in adaptations (when selective pressures change, especially when a previously limiting environmental factor is removed, then a massive increase in possibly successful strategies is made available, and diversity between evolving and adapting elements can increase as natural deviations are no longer destroyed by rigid selection). — VagabondSpectre

Yes, they can. So you now need to demonstrate that hunter-gatherer societies experience mostly convergence whereas modern Western societies experience mostly divergence, and again, if you expect this debate to resolve it is not sufficient to show how that could be the case, by some metric you've chosen, but how it is the only conclusion from any rational metric. Otherwise, all you've shown is that your theory is a rational possibility, and I already don't disagree with that notion. You've presumed, for example, in your measure that diversity of job is correlated with diversity of personal expression. I don't see any evidence that this is the case. One could be a fire-fighter, or a bank clerk and basically have the same neuro-typical outlook on life. Equally one could conceive of two hunters who have diametrically opposite outlooks and understandings of the world, yet both have the same job.

Assessing the mental and spiritual well-being of any society seems too complex a task to satisfy. Aside from some very basic factors which contribute to mental health and happiness such as freedom from fear, it's unanimously unclear what all humans ought to do to be happy. — VagabondSpectre

And yet your argument relies heavily on the presumption that low mortality rates are definitely one of those things. If they're not, then why bother achieving them, if they are then it is clearly possible to arrive at some reasonably firm conclusions about what contributes to metal well-being. We've already explored some - freedom from fear, relative equality, freedom of expression, freedom to choose one's own path, food security, a supportive community, I don't really think any of these things are in much doubt.

There is however the noteworthy observation that a given environment and culture will tend to naturally select individuals who are well suited to being happy and mentally healthy in the adaptive niches which it offers, and so overtime a given population might come to be well suited to the arbitrary circumstances they happen to be in. — VagabondSpectre

Right, so just how short a timescale do you think evolution acts on? Because this seems key to your argument. I don't see any evidence that evolution acts on the genome at anything other than very long timescales, which would mean, by your own analysis, we are broadly speaking adapted to be happy and mentally healthy in the hunter-gather cultural environment in which we evolved. If you think evolution acts faster than that, then why is it do you think, that our biology still requires the levels of exercise a hunter-gatherer lifestyle provides and not that which a modern largely sedentary lifestyle does? Why does it still require the sort of nutrition provided by hunter-gather lifestyles and has not evolved to be more tolerant of the refined-carbohydrate-rich diet modern society provides? Does it not seem more parsimonious to presume that likewise, our mental well-being relies on the sorts of cultural environment, challenges and activities that hunter-gatherer lifestyles provide? You have provided ample argument and evidence to show that it might not, and there's certainly nothing biological to my knowledge that prevents mental well-being from adapting faster than physical biology, but you've failed to provide any argument to show that it must not, that we must reject the most parsimonious theory that our mental well-being is dictated by the same evolutionary pressures at the same pace as those which dictate our physical well-being and so we are as mentally well-suited to an idealised hunter-gather lifestyle as we are physically suited to it. In other words, why would we have evolved to strongly desire things which were completely out of our reach for the first few million years? Do you not think that evolutionary pressure would have removed the stress that desiring something unobtainable causes, in favour of individuals who do not desire such things and so suffer less stress?

I provided you with evidence when you asked for it, and I can assure you that I've been "informed" by many sources prior to our discussion. — VagabondSpectre

Well that's very confusing behaviour. If your opinion was informed by some reliable sources prior to my request for evidence why didn't you provide me with those sources in response to my request? That's really what I meant by asking for evidence - asking for the sources behind your opinion. I wasn't just asking for any sources, that would have been ridiculous (of course there are some negative anthropologists out there). I was asking for your sources. Why would you keep your sources a secret and provide me instead with one you looked up post hoc?

I apologise for presuming on the basis of your action here that you were relatively uninformed, but It seemed pretty conclusive behaviour to me. So, perhaps you could answer my original request now. What are the actual sources you used to inform your opinion prior to this discussion, and more importantly (to me) why on earth didn't you quote them when I asked, or indeed at any other time in the whole discussion, rather than trawl the internet for some others?

The part where instead of addressing the positions, arguments and evidence you initially criticized as wrong, you just assume that I'm uninformed, prejudiced, biased, etc... — VagabondSpectre

You're still not quite understanding (or perhaps simply vehemently disagreeing with) my position on this, so I'll try to be clearer. As far as I'm concerned, you have provided ample reasoning and evidence to show that;

a) using longevity as a metric for a civilisation's success is a reasonable thing to do,

and that;

b) even if we used happiness in some way, it is reasonable to presume that hunter-gatherer tribes are not happier than us.

So there really is nothing to address, you're presenting arguments and evidence aimed at showing that these two positions are well reasoned and well supported and I don't disagree.

What you've provided no reasoning, nor evidence, for is the contention that these two positions are the only reasonable and well supported positions it is possible to hold, which seems to be what you're aiming at achieving. To do that it is not sufficient to simply find evidence to support your theory, nor experts who agree with you, it would be necessary to demonstrate a complete absence of evidence to support any alternate theory and a total lack of experts who support them. It is not sufficient to show how you have followed a reasonable, logical route from some agreed absolute presuppositions to arrive at your theory (as you have perfectly adequately done), it is necessary to show how that it is the only reasonable logical route from the agreed absolute presuppositions (which you have not even touched on).

I do not believe that either of those two demonstrations are possible to achieve so I do not attempt them. I do, however, like my theories to be relatively robust, and I like to have answers to the criticisms that might be levelled at them, so I express them to other people, listen to their critique and provide counter-arguments. As I said above, the fact that you find these counter-arguments to be unsatisfactory (or, it seems completely absent), is totally immaterial. As would be my opinion of your counter-arguments. A theory you hold must satisfy your requirements, not anyone else's.

So...

If you aren't willing to engage in the actual discussion at hand (argument and evidence), and instead insist on having meta-discussions about the shortcomings of my education or character, why bother? — VagabondSpectre

... because this is a philosophy forum, not an anthropology one. It is necessary, if I wish to support my theory, to demonstrate that there exists some evidence that tribes are largely non-violent (by some metric), egalitarian (without needing to resort to violence to enforce it), happy with their condition (without being happy only out of ignorance) and feel as free as the majority in the west do. This I have done to my satisfaction. I presume it is also necessary for you to do the same for your theory, in order for you to be satisfied with it, and this you have evidently done to your satisfaction. The further matter of settling what tribes are actually like in terms of violence, equality, happiness, freedom etc. is a matter for people vastly better informed than either of us. Why would we debate that particular matter on a public philosophy forum when there remain literally tons of papers and full length books on the subject which neither of us have read? I suggest that if you're truly interested in resolving that issue you read at least the large part of the available literature on the subject, rather than speculate and argue with those who are more-or-less as uninformed as you are on the matter.

There are two philosophical points that I can see have developed in this thread.

1) How should we measure success in society? We have both presented theories on that, I'm satisfied that mine has answered your critique, you appear well satisfied with yours, there's no more work to be done there unless someone else chimes in with a new critique of either.

2.) How do we handle conflicting theories and evidence? This is the more interesting question to me as it crops up in almost every discussion, but I'm guessing it holds little interest for you as you've not engaged with it.

So unless you wish to engage with the second question, or you still think I've misunderstood (rather than simply disagree with) your theory (or critique of my theory) as to how to measure success in society, then there's nothing left to say.

This may come as no surprise to you, but it's not uncommon for those with whom I'm engaged in some discussion to come away feeling like they've been personally attacked. I'd defend myself by saying that it's not my intention, but I'd also have to admit that it's not that I put as much effort into avoiding it as I should either. For what it's worth, I'm sorry that you feel I've mis-characterised you in some way, the meta discussion is what interests me far more than the actual topic (which, quite frankly is in the most part a matter for experts more well informed than either of us), and so my view of the means by which you come to have and maintain your beliefs is the more significant issue here for me.

With regards the actual topic, as I said, I just thought the approach I'd learned from my exposure to the evidence might be of interest to someone and that there might be some value in explaining it where it seemed to make no sense to you. I'm not particularly interested in your opinion on the matter because you seem no more well informed than the sources I've already been exposed to. That's no reflection on your person, I'm not claiming your opinions are worthless or stupid, or even wrong (except in few directly factual instances), it's just that they are not sufficiently interesting for me to want to examine them.

What I am interested in, is the development of my own thoughts on the matter, and defending them in a way which I find satisfactory is important to me. Defending them in a way you find satisfactory is of no interest to me at all. Not that that wouldn't be useful, I imagine the already oppressed lives of the few tribal communities we have left would be considerably easier if fewer people thought they knew best how to give them a 'better' life. It's just that I see the exercise as a complete waste of time, for the reasons I've given previously - there is no possible argument I could bring that you could not construct a counter-argument for and there is no possible evidence I could raise to which you could not find contradictory evidence.

All that I've stated in my post which you took such offence to, is the facts that explain this position. To take them one claim at a time;

"You have simply provided me with the largely uninformed opinion you already had...". This seems indisputable as your opinion came first and the only evidence you provided me with was a paper you found from searching Google Scholar, after you'd given your opinion. Unless I've missed something really important, these just seem to be irrefutable facts, not ad hominem attacks. Again, I'm not suggesting you did anything wrong in this regard, just that a less well informed opinion based on evidence I've already read isn't of much interest to me.

"... an opinion which is pretty much exactly in line with the commonly held view of hunter-gatherers that I'm already well aware of, having spoken to plenty of non-anthropologists already". Nothing in there makes the claim that your opinion is of the 'inferior savage' variety (although I think it tends to that at times), only that it seems common to me. I don't think most people think that hunter-gatherers are awful savages, I do think that most people think our society is better than theirs because of medicine, democracy, less warfare and more freedom to do what we want. Which is, unless I'm mistaken, pretty much exactly the view you're espousing.

"...you've backed it up post hoc with evidence that I've already read.". Again, unless I've missed some step on re-reading the posts here, you did indeed look up the evidence after I asked you for your sources, and that evidence does indeed consist of a paper I've already read. In fact I think it was my Google Scholar link which lead you to them.

So what part of it is "one big silly ad hominem attack"?

If indeed I have, as you suggest, failed to comprehend and appreciate the full scope of your position and it's nuances, then I look forward to a fresh exposition of it in some future thread. There may be some level at which I feel it would be rational of me to take part, but It will unlikely be simply to try and convince you that you are wrong using argument and evidence.

It seems to me perhaps that the key issue around the extent to which science and metaphysics differ is the extent to which agreement can, or should, be found. Afterall, my opposition to much argumentative debate in metaphysics is that its pointless. If argument might reasonably yield agreement on some matter which requires it, then it's worth going through the process.

So the scale I see with pure science at one end, metaphysics at the other (and perhaps the 'softer' sciences in the middle) is one that measures the extent to which agreement is readily achievable. This is largely a psychological issue. There may be deep metaphysical reasons for it, but it's sufficient for me that for some reason we seem to readily agree on the things we see, hear or measure, whereas we tend to disagree interminably on things we think and feel.

Another, completely separate scale measures the extent to which agreement is important to one's ethical objectives. Here we might have fundamental ethics at one end (it's really important that everyone agrees murder is wrong), and the density of a black hole at the other (everyone in the world could quite feasibly have a different opinion about that and everything would still be basically fine).

Where an issue is located on the two scales determines whether it is better to argue the point rationally, argue the point rhetorically, or not argue the point at all but maybe just listen and talk openly to others.

Having laid that out, if you don't mind putting up with my framework for a moment, it seems like you're saying that some science is actually quite far along the 'difficult to get agreement on' part of scale 1, and plenty of the sort of metaphysics I might dismiss as pointless is actually quite far along the 'really important to get agreement on' end of scale 2. Is that a fair translation of your view into my framework?

That's a really interesting post. One of my main interests was (still is, in an amateur sense) in how people hold and defend ideas, and places like this are irreplaceable as a resource for that. What's interesting for me about what you're saying is that I see so many similarities between the young would-be geniuses and some of the more seasoned academics, in terms of the way in which beliefs are held. The more seasoned simply have better rhetorical skills.

The whole discussion about post quality (though I get the feeling that it's really not quite about what I first thought it was) reminds me of certain team meetings where everyone agrees collectively that there needs to be improvements only each individual is nodding along sagely without realising that all the others think the improvement needed is their immediate dismissal.

As I said, I think the discussion on measures of a civilisation's success has run it's course, but I think there may be some value in clarifying what I mean by my comments with regards to the nature of the debate itself and the use of argument and evidence therein.

At the outset, we don't know what each other thinks. I've studied a small amount anthropology at university, I have colleagues I speak to regularly in the anthropology department, and paleopathology (particularly mental health, implied from hunter-gather tribes) arises in my professional work. It seemed like a reasonable supposition that the ideas I subscribe to in this regard, though not mine, are sufficiently unusual and reasonably well-informed (though I'm certainly no expert myself) that they might be of interest to others. I don't know you at all, so equally I presumed that your view of these ideas might be likewise interesting. I asked for your evidence on the presumption that you had some to hand which had already informed your opinion on the matter. Not on the presumption that you would go away and look some up. I can (and clearly have) performed several Google Scholar searches on these issues myself, so there's really no advantage in my getting you to this for me.

The trouble is, once these ideas have been expressed and we each know where the other stands, I can't then see the value of then continuing to provide counter-arguments to each other. This issue is not a new one and scholars more well-informed than either of us still disagree about it so it's clear that our ability to come up with counter-arguments is not going to be constrained at any point. If it were, then the matter would have been settled among those more well-informed scholars beforehand.

You seem to feel that your having provided argumentation and evidence for a thing being the case is sufficient for it to be presumed to be the case, or at least that you and I are in the same boat in this regard, but that's not the case as I see it. I've formed an idea, or set of ideas, based on what I've read, experienced first hand and spoken about with colleagues. The information came first, the ideas formed from it. That doesn't in any way make them right, it just means that I have a reasonable presumption that they might be of interest to people who've perhaps not been exposed to the literature, experiences and people from whence they came. If you'd been exposed to a different range of literature, experiences and people connected with anthropology, and so formed different ideas, it might well have been interesting to explore them until such time as our base of evidence was fully shared. We might still disagree, of course, but we would at least have gone away better informed. But that's not what has happened here. You have simply provided me with the largely uninformed opinion you already had, an opinion which is pretty much exactly in line with the commonly held view of hunter-gatherers that I'm already well aware of, having spoken to plenty of non-anthropologists already (their being the majority of the world). Then you've backed it up post hoc with evidence that I've already read. This doesn't mean that your opinion is wrong, it may well be absolutely spot on, but it means that I've heard it before, as have (more importantly) the experts I've spoken with and read, who nonetheless still disagree with it.

Now if you were looking for new ideas on the matter, there might continue to be some value in my providing counter-arguments to your view, by way of providing another way of looking at things, but again, this is evidently not the case. If the only way would would theoretically change your previously determined belief is for me to provide an argument that is absolutely irrefutable then there is clearly no point in my continuing to provide the sketchy, uncertain and speculative ideas that actually the stuff or real scholarship.

They're just ideas, they cannot, and will not ever prove anything definitively. If anyone's interested in them then that's great, I've done something of some small use, if they're boring or you've heard them all before then I'm sorry for wasting your time, but if you want me to defend them ad infinitum from every conceivable counter-argument then you're going to be disappointed, that is clearly an impossible task otherwise it would have been done already.

The mere existence of a counter-argument does not in itself make the original argument flawed. There aren't now, nor ever have been, arguments for which there are no counter-arguments, it's a standard to which no idea in history could ever be held. I'm all in favour of poking an idea, picking it apart to see how it works and testing it against it's counter-arguments, it's an essential part of trying it out to see if you like it. I don't know if you've read any of my other threads, but I think of ideas like clothes, we try them on, see if we like the look, the fit, the material. We might then go away wearing it, or we might decide it's not for us and stick to what we're already wearing. But then there are some people who have no intention of changing clothes at all, they simply find flaw in other clothing to reassure themselves that theirs was the right choice all along and there's no need to change. Obviously there's no point in continuing to present the clothes you're selling to someone who has no intention of ever buying them because, as I said already, all clothes have flaws, it's not going to come as a surprise to any tailor that a customer can spot a flaw in their work, the question is whether the features they like outweigh those they do not.

There's no way of being sure what type of customer anyone you speak to is, you might be genuinely interested in my ideas but just incredibly demanding, but at some point in time, I have to make a guess one way or the other otherwise I end up wasting my time.

I'm not sure I'd feel qualified to decide. I don't want to provide a load of work for mods just on the basis of what might be an extremely unpopular view of what a quality post looks like.

I was really just following on from John Doe's post which lamented the loss of a more rigorous philosophical tone to posts across the site. My presumption from this was that there existed a reasonable quantity of posts in the main section which were considered by many to be of less philosophical rigour.

If its actually only me that thinks that, then I certainly wouldn't see much benefit to flagging them all, no?

The Greek and Romans who were two major players in the rise of Western Civilization. They were olive skinned and not white. They have been lumped as white, by a left wing racism scam. — wellwisher

You know you're absolutely right. Now I come to think of it, most of the people I know are sort of pinky-yellow. Some are positively tan. Where are all these 'white' people we keep hearing about. Damn those Democrats! I've been scammed.

Thanks for all the replies. I'm going to pin this one to my computer for the next time no-one replies to one of my posts.

I always wonder whether it is too feeble to worthy of response, or so incisive as to be unanswerable. — unenlightened

They'll be deleted. — Michael

I see, then it's just a matter of you and I having a very different definition of what constitutes trivial or politically motivated posts. Or else the mods are simply so overwhelmed with such posts they haven't time to delete them all.

I hope this will explain, though I'm not entirely sure what you're asking.

I'm vaguely in agreement with Quine with regards to the lack of a distinction between science and metaphysics but with a very clear idea that there is a grade from the very metaphysical to the very scientific. So when I say 'science' it is usually out of laziness, referring to the end of that scale which is sufficiently 'sciency' to be worth engaging in the process of getting it 'right'.

I see philosophy (from a therapeutic point of view) as dealing with varying degrees of uncertainty. So to use your bridge example, there is very little uncertainty about the fact that the bridge stays up, so very little work for philosophy there, mostly engineering. There's a small degree of uncertainty about why the bridge stays up, but by comparing theories to other things we know (as well as the fact that the bridge stays up), we can be fairly sure. It's probably gravity, and nuclear forces. It might be kind fairies, but that doesn't seem to be consistent with other things we're even more certain about. The question of whether we should have a bridge at all is, by comparison, a sea of uncertainty, a lot of work for philosophy to do, some work for science providing the sorts of facts we all agree on, but mostly philosophy providing possible explanations for people to try on, see if they like them.

So, yes, there's a lot of science where therapeutic philosophy comes in. The line is not clear, but I think two things are clear. 1) there is some progression from the very poorly agreeable metaphysics to the very widely agreeable science and 2) it gets less and less possible to come to any meaningful agreement and as to what is 'right' the further along that scale one goes in the direction of metaphysics.

To answer your question as straightforwardly as possible (though missing a good deal of subtlety in doing so), it's not that science gets a unique pass, it's that the more 'sciency' a matter gets, the less need there is for any therapeutic philosophy to help us cope with uncertainty because we all find it very easy to agree and to feel certain about that agreement.

If the objective is to improve the philosophical content of posts, are you not risking making matters worse by removing the lounge from the front page of those who want it there? Will not those who are inclined towards trivial or political posts simply be more likely to add such comments to any vaguely related thread they see on the front page rather than navigate to the lounge to do so?

As things are, those who have little interest in such comments can simply remove the lounge from their homepage themselves.

My post was intended to be entirely about ways to improve the site, or rather a warning about not going to far in certain directions. The fact that it contained a (very mild) jibe at the philosophy of a particular poster is wholly in keeping with a huge proportion of the posts on this site and if you're now deeming some of them to be so intolerable as to warrant deletion if repeated, then I think that the personal bias I feared in dictating which posts are acceptable and which are not is already here.

Interesting. I'd recently taken a break from posting in part as a consequence of what I considered to be the low philosophical content of posts (though also in part because of the low interest I had in what were perfectly adequate posts in terms of quality). I used to write for an in-house journal back in my academic days, and we had exactly the same problem with low submission quality. What I thought was interesting at the time, and is now writ large over the Internet, is the extent to which "low quality submission" simply acts as a proxy for "submission I don't approve of". Its like Tolstoy's happy families, the good ones are all alike, but the bad ones are all bad for different reasons, only here we will not even all agree on the reasons.

@John Doe's comments are a good case in point. I found myself going along with his analysis almost entirely in general, until he provided his example (Steelight). Personally, I find Streetlight's posts to be mostly nothing but either pomo mumbo jumbo, or posts arrogantly dismissing other threads (usually on the grounds that they're not pomo mumbo jumbo). No offence, of course, there's noting intrinsically wrong with that. This, though, is the problem with trying to 'improve' the quality of posts somehow. Unless we have a widely approved definition of 'quality' we have no target to aim for and any attempt will just be personal bias. Personally, for example, I'd shut down any post which uses the word 'narrative' more than is strictly necessary and posts which have more than three words prefixed with 'post-' or (worst of all) 'neo-' would be similarly expunged.

So, for what it's worth, I'm all in favour of removing the Lounge from the main page (I have my main page set that way anyway and never post there), but if there's any further move to try and improve post "quality", I'd like to put in an early request to ensure that 'quality' and 'quoting extensively from that latest fashionable philosopher' are not confused.

I'm sorry for the long delay replying. Interestingly (to me anyway), the reason I took such a long break is exactly the topic we're discussing here. I got a bit fed up with the pointlessness of the whole argument/counter-argument cycle which is pursued as if it were actually going to reach some conclusion despite the fact that it is infinitely possible to derive a theoretical counter-argument to any argument. It's like expecting all of cricket to one day end as we finally decide that the bowler is better then the batter. But the bowler's never going to run out of ways to throw balls and the batter's never going to run out of ways to hit them away. Anyway, cricket is nonetheless fun (for some) and this is nonetheless fun when one can rise above the morose disillusionment with the pointlessness of it all.

So,

Yes, I think I am proposing something of an ethic, but that's more to do with my approach to philosophy, than something specific to this topic. I think that there is really no other sensible question than "what should I do next?" which is ultimately (I think) an ethical one. I wouldn't characterise it quite the way you have though.

It's not so much about our shared world as about my personal future. If you hold a view which I think might impact negatively on me and my interests, then I will use whatever technique available to change your view. That might be rational argument, but that rarely works and it's more likely to be rhetoric, or even outright deception if necessary. The ethical component here is that I'm presuming an ethical person, and what I consider to be 'my interests' are derived from ethics, not hedonism (although I think the two are closer than most, but that's another discussion). So basically, argument (no matter what form it takes) in order to bring about some ethical goal seems justified by the ends, since the means are relatively harmless.

This is where what you go on to say about the vast quantity of subject matters which do have some investment in our shared experience diverges from the approach I'm trying to argue for. Simply being invested in our shared experience is not enough. There has to be some ethical goal in order to justify the aggressive approach. It seems legitimate, to take your example, for a committed Christian to argue with some fervor against abortion, or the sins of others, since they might reasonably consider that they're achieving some ethical goal (the saving of souls). It seems far less justifiable for that same Christian to argue with fervor over, say the cosmological argument (I'm presuming here that no one's soul is going to be saved by reluctantly admitting that there must be a god on logical grounds!). That seems far more about suppressing inconvenient arguments against a passionately held belief than about convincing others of anything at all.

My only interest is in philosophy as therapy. As I've said many times, I see little evidence of any progress being made on any argument about 'the way the world is' to the extent that those who passionately believe it is one way are forced to concede that it is, in fact, another, outside of science. And science holds this unique position not because of the magic of its method, but because it deals in things described by their effects. So, from a therapeutic point of view, I only see it as harmful to persist in the notion that some metaphysical positions can be demonstrated to be incontrovertibly 'right' in the face of the overwhelming evidence that it cannot.

It's taken me quite a while (evidently) to decide whether to reply to this, or indeed any other post. I get a bit bored from time to time with the treadmill of argument/counter-argument, it seems sometimes like such an inefficient way of refining one's model of the world. But then there doesn't immediately seem to be a better one, so I return to this. Anyway, just wanted to let you know that the long haitus has nothing to do with your post (which was interesting and deserved better than the long silence I offered).

No-one values longevity alone. It is a multiplier for how much they value their life and their future. People do not strive for physical or spiritual health, they strive for happiness (mental well-being) alone. They appear to strive for physical well-being, but only because being physically fit and able makes them happy. They appear to strive for spiritual well-being, but only because they imagine it will make them happy (perhaps even in the afterlife, it's no co-incidence that all afterlives are really nice places). If you're going to take intermediate goals as if they were ultimate then you might as well say people strive for money, or food, or winning at sports, getting a girlfriend, having a nice haircut etc. We don't say this because all these things are simply subsumed into striving to be happy.

So, no matter how it's dressed up in poetic rhetoric, it's relatively simple maths. If each year (and if my prediction of each future year) is going to bring me a net happiness of 1, then a hundred such years are worth 100 to me. If, on the other hand, the best I can predict for the net happiness value of my future years is 0 (just exactly as much happiness as suffering), then a hundred such years are worth no more to me than one, a hundred times zero is still zero. If my years (and my predicted future years) bring me ultimately only sadness (a happiness value of minus 1) then a hundred years are just going to make me even less happy. The result of this calculation is the result that approximately one percent of the UK population reach at some point in their lives - extending their lives is going to cause them more sadness and so their best course of action is to end it now.

In a society where 1% are so certain that their future years are going to yield net sadness that they don't even consider it worth finding out for sure, it's not at all unreasonable to presume that there is a much larger proportion for whom they consider (with varying, but lesser, degrees of certainty) that their future years may yield the same level of unhappiness. Hence it is not an unreasonable conclusion that we might be living in a society whose happiness value for future years is (on average) so low (zero or below) that increasing the quantity of years in their lives does nothing to increase their net happiness.

None of this is to say, of course, that people perform this calculation correctly. People may have an overly optimistic value to their future years only to be consistently disappointed as to how entirely mundane they actually turn out to be. This then raises the slightly separate question of whether policy makers should act upon what people say they want, or on what can be demonstrated to actually make people happier despite what they they say.

There is also a more positive corollary of all this. If each year (and you predict each future year) is worth a net happiness value of 2, then 40 such days will yield you more happiness than 70 years at a happiness value of half that. The important point here is that the person living 40 years (with each year twice as happy as his more long-lived counterpart) is still going to want to live for 80 years. In fact, they're going to be even more desperate to live for 80 years than the person whose years are less happy. So if you offer them a life which promises to be both happier and longer, they're going to want to take it, but the point is, that if it turns out that that life is in fact only longer (not happier), then they would be mistaken in taking up that offer - 40x2 is definitely more than 70x1.

I can't see how you could make an argument that a 70 year life at a happiness value of 1 per year is worth more than a 40 year life at a happiness value of 2 per year, simply because it is longer. It simply makes no sense to me.

What I can see, is how society might think they'd prefer the 70 years over the 40 if they're fooled into thinking that they're not going to be taking any net loss of happiness per year in achieving that longevity. So the reason why society has chosen Westernisation, is not a mystery to me, but how intelligent thinkers can defend it on the basis of longevity alone, is.

You seem to have raised a separate point about diversity within hunter-gather societies as opposed to Western ones, but again, like your earlier points, this seems to be nothing but speculation based on what you think hunter-gatherer societies are like rather than on the basis of any actual evidence. It's this sort of analysis that bores me. I have no doubt at all that if I demand evidence from you of the cultural homogeneity of hunter-gather tribes you will find some. A factor like cultural homogeneity is sufficiently vague that anyone who wanted to prove it could easily do so, and anyone who wanted to prove otherwise would have equally little trouble. The relevant issue for me is that you've arrived at this opinion first. If I ask you to back it up with evidence you will do so, but that doesn't alter the fact that your opinion arose from your prior prejudice, not from your years of anthropological research. You're writing at great length about things you 'reckon' are the case and then trawling through the internet to find evidence to support it when requested. We could do this forever and it would would become no less pointless. Even with something a coldly factual as physics or biology you can find 'evidence' on the internet to prove diametrically opposed theories.

Your posts have been valuable to me in that I have been able to test my view of the world against them. Maybe my posts have been of equal use to you (maybe not), but let's not pretend that we're on some journey where together we'll find the 'truth' of the matter by this mythical dialectic where we each points out the incontrovertible flaw in the other's argument until we centre on the one 'true' way. Rather we could continue indefinitely providing argument and counter-argument because theoretical counter-arguments are infinitely possible to construct. It's been interesting and I didn't want to leave the discussion with the unexplained silence I had previously bequeathed it. You may, of course want to reply for whatever reason, but It's run it's course now for me. Thanks.