I would think that to agree with antintalism, someone would have to think that either:

(A) preventing harm/suffering/lack etc. is good and warranted regardless of how minor the harm/suffering/lack might be, while no pleasure metric can override the merit of preventing any level/degree of harm/suffering/lack,

Or:

(B) preventing harm/suffering/lack etc. is good just in case there's a good chance that harm/suffering/lack will outweigh pleasurable experiences, and the person believes that indeed it's the case that the weight would fall on the "harm" side.

It's probably far more unusual to find people on the (A) side, there.

I'd be on the (B) side if we were talking about a huge imbalance, but I don't believe that that's the case.

So the distinction you're making is about what we call things?

Perhaps it is objectively true.. I wouldn't be able to prove it to you but that is an epistemological issue. How do I prove to you that harm is the basis for morality? It's pretty much where we have to depart ways. — schopenhauer1

Well,. no moral stance is true/false or objective. Morality is noncognitive/subjective.

I'm pretty sure I pointed out before that antinatalism doesn't work very well, from the perspective of arguing for it, if one doesn't assume some sort of objective morality.

I would agree that inuition is what people rely on, but we have differen intuitions, and really, there's nothing to get correct or incorrect. It's only intuitions, only the way we feel.

My intuition isn't at all that "harm" is a good place to start, for example. For one, "harm" is way too broad and/or vague in my intuition.

Not that I advocate a "principle"-oriented approach to morality, anyway. I think that tends to lead to absurdities instead.

What would make one moral consideration primary over other moral considerations?

In other words, what makes "whether we're creating (the opportunity for) adversity" the trump card and not something else?

This, for example:

What makes an action immoral, in the end, is that it adversely affects the interests of a being that is capable of having interests — Herg

Is not a fact.

If it's a foundational moral stance for you, no rational justification of it is possible.

Someone could just as easily say, "What makes an action moral, in the end, is that it adversely affects the interests of a being that is capable of having interests."

That wouldn't be a fact, either.

Objectively, it would be on an even playing field with your stance.

What I was seeking, from both you and Terrapin, was some rational justification for your belief that it's okay to eat animals but not humans. — Herg

There is no rational justification possible of foundational moral stances.

It is well known that life presents adversity. — schopenhauer1

I don't think it's at all clear that most people have adversity as their dominant experience or to extent/to an interpretation that makes them miserable, etc.

What's odd is the antinatalist idea in light of the above fact.

Just what sort of person sees any adversity whatsoever, whether it's dominant, significant, etc. or not, as being so overwhelming that it suggests just trashing the whole thing?

It seems akin to an artist who would see even the slightest flaw in a work as a reason for not producing the work in the first place, hence we have an artist who simply never produces any work. But what would that artist's mindset have to be like to make the decision that even the slightest flaw in a work suggests that they simply shouldn't produce any work? It seems like it would have to be an unusually neurotic person who is obsessed with "perfection."

Just curious what the image source is.

Side Note: Minneapolis is still (slowly) undoing restrictive laws on liquor sales put in place after prohibition ended. Loosening the grip of restrictive morality can take a long time. — Bitter Crank

The problem re the sexual stuff is that we've been going pretty backwards for the last few decades re "loosening the grip of restrictive morality."

I'm not sure what's driving the fact that we've been going backwards--it's surely a complex of factors, and one of them was surely the rise of AIDS, but one of the main controlling, "high-level" factors is that we've maneuvered to a society where (1) livelihoods can easily be trashed via moralizing social pressure, (2) People are more prone to moralizing, including bandwagon-moralizing than ever, (3) and we've fueled this via the ubiquity of social media, where a few crazy, squeaky wheels can have a bigger impact than ever.

Facebook, Apple, etc. are just trying to watch their asses. They're not really making any moral decisions. They just want to stay in business and remain as profitable as they've been. What we need to do is change our culture so that we don't see moralizing and victimhood as virtues, and it would help if we had a different economic structure in place, so that social pressure from moralizers doesn't matter.

Gorilla, chimp, etc. sure, if we're simply talking about food. I wouldn't kill species that are endangered, but not because I have a problem with eating them for food.

Re early precursor hominids, I'd have to meet them. It would simply be an intuitive matter.

Are you saying that it's morally wrong to eat any member of the species homo sapiens, but morally okay to eat a member of any other species? — Herg

Yes.

Couldn't what results in the emergence of ideas into our conscious minds be something that's quite different than the ideas that emerge in your conscious mind?

In other words, consider this. To have water, we need atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. When we have those atoms combined in a particular way, under particular conditions, we have water.

Prior to those atoms being combined that way, we could have a cache of hydrogen atoms and a cache of oxygen atoms held separately. Let's say they're in two separate rooms, A and B. In that guise, they're not water--and they're not anything like water, really. The atoms separately have quite different properties than they do when combined as water..

Then, in a different room, room C, where the atoms arrive via a delivery system into that room, we combine them in the right way, under the right conditions, and they're water.

Now, some people say, "The atoms are water prior to arrival and combination in room C." Other people say, "There's no evidence of them being water prior to arrival and combination in room C. They're something different than water prior to that."

In a similar way, couldn't it be that prior to being aware of an idea (a la water in the analogy) in your conscious mind (a la room C in the analogy), there's nothing like an idea (a la the prior rooms A and B in the analogy)? That doesn't imply there's nothing in rooms A and B, just that it's not anything like an idea in rooms A and B. Those states have very different properties.

You're assuming that they're "cogitations" prior to you being aware of them, right?

Why are you assuming that?

I'm not saying that the tree is an idea, I'm saying that matter is an idea. You sense the tree as a tree, you do not sense it as matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

A couple different questions here, but I'll start with this one: what's the difference between the tree and matter?

How do we get to the point of saying that matter is an idea?

You know, so phenomenally, there's a tree say (not as a tree--that is, the concept, etc.--but "that thing"--I have to call it something to type this), and then how do we go from that to saying that the phenomenal tree is an idea?

Doesn't have to do with "mental normalcy" but species membership.

I don't live in the UK, but I'm in favor of there eventually being world unification/a one-world government, and I'm not in favor of restricting how people can choose to move around the world. I'm okay with screening for wanted criminals, known terrorist associates, etc., but that's it when it comes to immigration screening.

This just explains the initial responses you had to my questions. It's nice to see that you eventually came around to seeing and agreeing with what I've said all along. — Harry Hindu

If you're saying that realists and idealists are saying the same thing, I don't agree with you.

Which is one of Berkeley's crux points. You have no more proof for materialism than for immaterialism. — Jamesk

A fortiori because there's no proof of any empirical claim, hence "proof" is a red herring. We don't endorse or reject any empirical claims on proof. We endorse or reject empirical claims for other reasons.

So first, the criteria are going to have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anything that WE do. It's not as if anything's ontological nature changes because of how we think about it, whether we can interact with it in particular ways that we have particualr understandings of, etc. It's important to remember that.

The criteria are the ontological nature of the "thing" in question. As a property cluster, whether it consists of material, whether it has mass, a charge, a location, spatial extension, etc.--those sorts of things. Whether we know how to measure those things in a particular case is irrelevant.

This has yet to be proven. — Jamesk

You know that empirical claims are not provable, right? (Assuming that you're using "proof" in a more strict sense of that term.)

Material is made up of atoms that we can empirically measure. Mental states produce thoughts and ideas which cannot be empirically measured. — Jamesk

"We know how to measure this, and it's relatively easy to do so" isn't actually a criterion for something being physicall. You don't think that neutrinos aren't physical, do you?

Poetry is fine in literature class.

I'm open to this. I think it's fair, however, to question whether it makes sense to talk about a primary substance. Maybe it does. The mind (or matter in a mind-like mode) seems to aim at unifying experience this way. Let's grant your point. Then all the apparently plurality (all the different kinds of things) would seem merely to be renamed as 'arrangements' or 'modes' of a primary substance. So there is 'really' just one kind of thing. But it's the nature of this primary thing to express itself not only in different modes that ask for useful and illuminating categorization but also this categorization itself.

The primary substance has to be the kind of thing that can mistake itself as a plurality. Moreover the primary substance has to be able to exist in the form of the question too. The primary substance unveils itself as primary substance, within time, by having a conversation with itself. — sign

<Turns down the poetry knob>

I'm not getting him to say that. He's avoiding the questions I'm asking. — Harry Hindu

lol--"you get" not in the sense of "you personally are producing this." The sense is akin to "one experiences."

Consciousness does not appear to be material. — Jamesk

See, Harry, you get people saying things like this.

That's what I've been asking all along. If there is no difference (You've finally come around to seeing that they're the same thing), then it doesn't matter what we call it. — Harry Hindu

It doesn't matter what we call it, but it matters what think it is/think what its nature is, etc.because we don't want to say things that are wrong, incoherent, etc.

don't mean edgy as in disruptive. I mean that the weight of the idea is reduced as matter swallows what used to be called mind. At most the distinction can be theoretically abolished. We live 'toward' two basic kinds of entities, persons and non-persons, in very different ways. I talk to persons. I care about what they think. I don't talk to beer cans (usually). We live a certain dualism in a way that makes any reduction highly theoretical and secondary, one might say. (Really we have something like a continuum, because we don't experience dogs as we experience clouds or stones.) — sign

The point isn't for it to have "weight," though, either. It's just to accurately describe the world in a way that's coherent/that makes sense. The ideal would be for that to be completely mundane because no one is saying anything wrong/stupid/incoherent/insane/etc.

If we say that everything is matter and yet that matter includes mind as a process, we aren't saying much in some sense. The drama or edge of the initial statement is quickly replaced by a sense of renaming the same old experiences. — sign

I don't think anyone is a materialist/physicalist to be dramatic or edgy. What we're saying is simply that mental stuff isn't something different than material/physical stuff, contra claims otherwise (for example, from Wayfarer).

But then matter is so mind-like that materialism loses it charge. — sign

What is its "charge"? I'm not sure what you're referring to there.

I wonder what the drinking license exam would be like lol. I imagine it would be a quite hilarious — TheHedoMinimalist

That could be fun :wink: but it would mostly just cover that the person has a reasonable understanding of things like the relevant chemistry, the risks involved, the relevant laws (such as drunk driving laws) and the risks involved in breaking the laws, etc.

The norm's basis in reality is that the state of affairs so engendered would either advance or retard the self-realization of various people. — Dfpolis

What's an example of mentally-independent advancement or retardation of self-realization?

But that's a category error. — Wayfarer

I've already explained why it's not a category error. What did I say? I don't want to have to keep explaining the same thing over and over to the same people. I want them to at least be able to understand and remember what my view is. So let's see if you can recall any of my responses to you saying the same thing again and again.

Of course you can. Wind has velocity, it exerts force, You measure it with a meter. Name me a 'physical thing' which has no location and no mass. — Wayfarer

So velocity is weight in your understanding?

Physical things aren't limited to things you can weigh. You don't think that you can weigh wind, do you? But hopefully you also do not think that wind isn't physical.

It's weird that people have these toddler-caliber understandings of things that they use to frame arguments on, especially when they're otherwise supposed to be working at the apex of intellectualism a la philosophy.

The theory of relativity is located at the brains of the individuals who are thinking about it.

So, you had just written:

"Some philosophers such as Jeagwon Kim have mustered arguments, such as the causal exclusion argument, in order to (1) infer determinism at the supervenient level of description (such as the description of the rabbit in functional physiological and/or behavioral terms) from (2) the determinism of the system being supervened upon (the set of the rabbit's inanimate material parts)."

I don't believe there's any need for an argument from (2) to (1), because there's no good reason to believe there's any ontological distinction to be made between (2) and (1).

The only thing I'm disagreeing with is that I'm not actually a determinist and I'm not a realist about laws--I believe there can be nondeterministic phenomena at (2) (and thus at (1)).

Reading what into it? :confused:

Fair enough, but can you describe a legal procedure which a young person would have to undergo in order to obtain the freedom to do something? For example, if I'm a 17 year old, where would I be required to go or who would I have to talk to in order to be able to obtain the freedom to purchase alcohol? What questions would they ask me? — TheHedoMinimalist

One thing we could do is just have a DMV-type organization that grants licenses for all sorts of things, not just driving.

Are you looking to create some sort of distinction between causal chains/events? — DingoJones

"Temporally" because the events occur "in time." If I don't specify "temporally antecedent" folks might have something they consider a non-temporal antecedent in mind instead, like the "If" clause of a conditional.