Comments

  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    What I’m talking about , what the whole
    point of the OP is, is that how people ground their claims in terms of what ‘is’ has everything to
    do with how violently and punitively they treat other who violate their standards of what ought to be . What a person assumes ‘is’ in terms of an ontology of nature , the physical or the human, is profoundly connected with how they formulate their ‘oughts’ and the level
    of tolerance , the violent and punitive character of the enforcement of those oughts.     — Joshs

    Oughts provide motivation for action - for carrying out their imperatives. Either you have moral beliefs and thus have these motivations, or you are amoral - there is no other way. Tolerance towards moral transgressions, the will to punish transgressors, the methods of enforcement - these depend on temperament and politics, not on the nature of morality.

    Gergen’s version of social constructivism does away with the ‘fuel’ forviolent retribution and punishment , for righteous indignation , by removing the ability to believe that another’s choices were a deviation from a correct path. There is no ‘ought’ for Gergen for the same reason that there is no factual realism. — Joshs

    Right, the only way to remove fuel - not just for violent retribution, but for any moral action, good or bad - is to renounce moral beliefs altogether. But, except for a few psychopaths, no one is actually willing to do that, whatever theories they espouse in public.

    We have a moral realism if we , like Sophisticat, are a moral realist. — Joshs

    I am curious, if you are actually reading my responses, what in what I wrote made you think that I am a moral realist?

    What is common among PC culture is what Gergen is accusing it of , a blameful moralism based on a belief in a normative standard that is claimed to be superior or preferred to standards of other normative cultures. — Joshs

    This is confused. A belief, whatever its nature, origin and grounding, is always held to be superior to alternatives, however tentatively or transiently. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be a belief. (One can take a pluralistic stance on some issue, but then any isolated strand within that pluralistic web would not be an accurate representation of the whole.)
  • Which philosopher deals with conflicting world views and develops a heterogenous solution?
    ↪Trachtender
    In English-language literature a good keyword to search for would be pluralism. I don't know if there is an all-encompassing meta-meta theory of the sort that you outline, but there certainly are pluralistic positions in more specific areas - epistemic pluralism, ontological pluralism, pluralist theories of causation and so forth.

    Here is one example: Epistemic Pluralism, Annalisa Coliva & Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (eds.), Palgrave Macmillan 2017. Some of the papers in this collection are available on the web.


    Ohh and I would not advice listening to counter punch — Tobias

    And yet here you are doing just that...
  • Do probabilities avoid both cause and explanation?
    ↪Caldwell
    Gravitating many-body systems are chaotic in the technical sense.
  • Do probabilities avoid both cause and explanation?
    Chaos theory isn't really about disorder. Chaotic systems are completely deterministic, but extremely sensitive to their initial state and any perturbations. If gravity, for instance, was chaotic, an object of 1 gram might happily rest on the surface of the earth while one of .99999999 gram might be catapulted toward the sun. — Kenosha Kid

    Gravity is chaotic!
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    ↪Joshs
    Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. — Gergen

    Getting back to the topic, it's interesting to note that the constructionist, according to Gergen, is an objectivist despite herself, inasmuch as she grounds morality not in her subjective judgements of right and wrong, but in a social construct, because a subjective social construct would be an oxymoron. "Transcendental" or not, social norms exist out in the world for anyone to observe.

    And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition. — Gergen

    And if morality was grounded in some other foundation, then what? The complaint would be the same, only replace "traditions" with whatever moral foundation Gergen thinks would be more satisfactory.

    This is the problem with so-called objective morality: if moral responsibility rests on the moral foundation and that foundation is located outside the individual, then the individual doesn't bear any moral responsibility - she is just a passive receiver of norms, not a moral agent.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    That's what I thought, and what I was talking about. When you're not making a moral assessment, but just an assessment about something like ice cream flavors, you don't judge others as wrong just because they disagree with you. — Pfhorrest

    Because they don't disagree with me. Look, this is a silly argument and it doesn't have much to do with the topic, as far as I can see.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    ↪Pfhorrest
    No.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    Do you agree that moral claims cannot justify themselves to the extent that they attempt to ground themselves on the basis of anything outside of contingent normative practices? — Joshs

    This is a classic naturalistic fallacy, an instance of is/ought confusion. The natural origin of morality is not the same as the grounding for moral claims. A constructivist may believe (rightly or wrongly) that normative beliefs come about as a result of social construction. But that is neither here nor there as far as what that same constructivist believes ought to be the case.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    I would consider other people's assessments incorrect if and only if they are different from mine. — SophistiCat

    The point is that you don’t do that for all assessments about all things — Pfhorrest

    You are confused. Of course I do - how could I not? Assuming, of course, that they are assessments of the same thing.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    But whether you think that its wrongness is objective/universal, rather than just a matter of opinion, is a part of how you relate to it.

    I don't like strawberries. But I understand that liking strawberries or not is just a matter of opinion; I don't think anybody is incorrect in their assessment of strawberries just because they like them while I don't. But if someone asserts that your friend being beaten and robbed was perfectly fine and not wrong at all, you wouldn't just take that like you would take a disagreement in food tastes, right?     — Pfhorrest

    This example is a red herring. The contrast here is between moral and amoral (morally neutral) actions, not between moral simpliciter and objectively/universally moral (whatever that might mean).

    You would think their assessment of the morality of that situation is incorrect, not just different from yours, no? — Pfhorrest

    I would consider other people's assessments incorrect if and only if they are different from mine. This is a trivial tautology; you can't base any argument on it.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    Give me an example of what it could mean to hold someone morally responsible without a commitment to moral objectivism. — Joshs

    I will humor you with an example, if you insist. Someone I know was beaten and robbed in the street. That person suffered a concussion and a broken bone as a result. I hold the perpetrators morally responsible for what they did, because (a) they did it, and (b) what they did was wrong. Whether the act was objectively, universally wrong is simply beside the point; all that matters, as far as me holding people morally responsible, is how I relate to the incident.

    Once I have given a moral assessment of an act, it would simply be incoherent for me to then say that no one is morally responsible for it. An act can only be morally charged if it is performed by a moral actor, and a moral actor is morally responsible by definition. No one would be morally responsible if the person in my example was mauled by a bear instead of being assaulted by hoodlums. But that is why we wouldn't qualify that as a moral act - it would be an accident.

    More specifically , give me an example of what it would mean to hold someone morally accountable if we follow Gergen’s perspective:

    is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy?     — Joshs

    I intentionally led with an example that was not of this sort (I think we can all agree that violent street criminals are not "suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.") I can supply another, but my interpretation won't be much different. What matters is that someone did something blameworthy in my assessment. The actor may have a different take on it. You or Gergen may have a different take on it. But moral valuation is not a view from nowhere - it is personal. So you ask me and I give you mine; it can't be someone else's.

    Can we hold someone morally accountable if we believe that they acted with the best and most noble intentions , and that their ‘failing’ was not one of bad intent but rather of a limitation in their worldview that they couldn’t have been expected to recognize? This is Gergen’s perspective and one I agree with. Do you agree with it? — Joshs

    To some extent. Moral valuation is not a simple function of the facts of the case. Knowing the background of an act and the actors, sympathizing with their circumstances and empathizing with their feelings can influence how we assess culpability. What I don't agree with is that moral vision must be aperspectival, that as long as someone else sees things differently than me, I am not entitled to my own point of view.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    Could you elaborate on why it is a strained comparison? The point I am trying to make is that in order to assess moral blame one must have a justification for correctness that goes beyond mere local consensus.That is , one must believe local norma are rooted in something more universal. — Joshs

    I don't want to digress into philosophy of science and falsificationism. I think you made your point clearly as it is. What I don't understand is why you think that holding someone morally responsible requires a commitment to moral objectivism. I haven't picked up any clues from what you've said here.

    I really want to know how YOU make use of moral valuation in your own life to assess blame. Give me an example of a moral claim that you have made recently concerning some issue of significance and how you ground that claim. That will give us something concrete to go on in the discussion. — Joshs

    I am puzzled by this request. How would it help the discussion? The common ground for both moral valuation and attribution of agency is me. I may or may not perform some moral reasoning in arriving at the conclusion in any given scenario, but as long as some conclusion is reached on both counts, I just don't see how I could go on to deny that someone did something praiseworthy or blameworthy.
  • Is there such a thing as luck?
    Umm.... Gattier problems do not seem to suggest that coming to believe the truth by sheer luck is incompatible with knowing. For example, I believe that Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and I believe this only because I was lucky enough to be taught that in school. — TheHedoMinimalist

    Well, of course, if you search far and wide you'll find some luck being involved in some way in anything that ever happened in your life, but when people are talking about "epistemic luck" they specifically mean luck as a proximate and significant factor in acquiring a belief that seems to undermine its legitimacy. Like in Gettier cases.

    Anyway, I wasn't going to get into the discussion of Gettier - just pointing to what is probably the best known discourse concerning epistemic luck.
  • Can God do anything?
    ↪jamalrob
    Wouldn't have this problem if someone didn't unban this idiot.
  • Is there such a thing as luck?
    A platitude in epistemology is that coming to believe the truth by sheer luck is incompatible with knowing. — IEP

    I don’t think I’ve ever heard that sort of view being articulated before. — TheHedoMinimalist

    Gettier Problems
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    Yes, but the issue here is how such notions as responsibility and agency are to be understood from a social constructionist perspective. — Joshs

    Is it really? You disclaimed that you are not a social constructionist; I understood your post as an invitation to comment on a specific thesis that you did endorse, not on social constructionist position as a whole.

    By contrast , social constructionism abandons the notion of correctness as conformity to empirical objectivity. — Joshs

    Well, my response didn't assume or imply empirically objective moral standards, so I am not sure how this is relevant. As I said, all that is required for assigning praise and blame is (a) moral valuation and (b) personal responsibility. This should be compatible with most positions on the nature of morality.

    A useful comparison would be in the realm of philosophy of science. — Joshs

    Frankly, I find this to be a strained comparison, and I am not sure what point you are trying to make here with respect to blameworthiness.
  • Do probabilities avoid both cause and explanation?
    I don't deny this, and the use of probabilities in applied science is well known even in schools. They cover scenarios where events happen in uncontrolled conditions, but they still use Laws which I understood to be formulated on a deterministic basis.... which is why the senior scientists that I have heard lecturing default to a deterministic viewpoint, even if they acknowledge the experimental results show multiple outcomes for the factors they are monitoring. — Gary Enfield

    Historically, Law nomenclature has been used to refer to important regularities that can be formulated in a single statement or equation. You will find such laws both in fundamental physics and in applied sciences. And within that context a law can express a fundamental feature of a theory (e.g. Newton's laws of motion) or a phenomenological relationship (e.g. Hooke's law). Laws can be either deterministic (Maxwell's laws) or probabilistic (Boltzmann's distribution law).
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    Constructivism claims that all assertions of supposed facts are in actuality just social constructs, ways of thinking about things put forth merely in an attempt to shape the behavior of other people to some end, in effect reducing all purportedly factual claims to normative ones. — Pfhorrest

    Well, one can be a social constructionist about some specific area of human life, such as morality; it doesn't have to be a slippery slope. Being a constructionist about games, for example, wouldn't even be particularly controversial.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    ↪Joshs
    Blame is tightly linked to moral judgement, and this is not at all specific to identity politics. For the purposes of making a distinction, we can identity two stages of moral judgement: first, judging some action as praiseworthy or blameworthy (or neutral), and then assigning praise or blame to those responsible, where appropriate. One may argue that the second stage is not moral as such, and that it is detachable from the first. One can pass the judgement but withhold the blame.

    In reality though, the two stages - judging and assigning praise or blame - often bleed into one another (for better or for worth). More importantly, withholding praise and blame implies not holding people responsible for their actions, and that is a dubious position*. By not holding people responsible for their actions we rob them of their agency, dehumanize them.

    * I should emphasize that withholding blame, for example, is not the same as forgiving: only the guilty can be forgiven.
  • Do probabilities avoid both cause and explanation?
    I was beginning to get worried that this subject, which is a fundamental underpinning to most philosophical debates, would not be taken seriously. — Gary Enfield

    To be honest, your post is rife with misconceptions. Right from the start:

    The Laws of Physics and Chemistry are formulated through the use of traditional mathematics that provide only one specific outcome for any precise starting point/cause. — Gary Enfield

    One can perhaps get such an impression from high school science classes, but that is because they cover very basic material, and probability is taught little if at all at that stage. In reality there are plenty of probabilistic relationships and equations in physics, chemistry and other sciences.

    Yet in recent years younger scientists have tried to argue that true randomness does exist in the world due to the findings of Quantum Mechanics. — Gary Enfield

    Uh, younger scientists? You mean like Heisenberg and Bohr? Just how old are you? :lol:

    Seriously though, fundamental physicists do seem to favor determinism. Take so-called black hole information paradox: the reason it is thought of as a paradox is that loss of information implies indeterminism - the kind of indeterminism that doesn't go away in a suitable interpretation of quantum mechanics, because it violates QM's fundamental unitarity.

    But I am not sure that that attitude generalizes across sciences - even across all of physics, of which fundamental physics is a rather small niche.


    For philosophers who have tackled causality and explanation, probability is not necessarily problematic. Indeed, some theories of causation are explicitly probabilistic: the basic idea is that causes raise the probability of their effects. One well-known modern development of that idea with practical applications is causal Bayesian network.
  • Gender rates in this forum
    Yes, I agree, it would not be a result of any scientific value but I find it interesting at least to see if my prejudices and assumptions are correct. This is to say that I'm expecting that more than 90% of people attracted by philosophy are men. — Raul

    A quick Google found me this:

    Gender Distribution of Degrees in Philosophy: "In 2014, 31% of philosophy degree completers at the bachelors and doctorate levels were women, and 28% of master’s degree recipients were women"

    For comparison, Gender Distribution of Degrees in English Language and Literature: "Women have earned a majority of English language and literature degrees at the bachelor’s and master’s degree levels at least since the late 1960s, and reached a majority among doctoral degree recipients in 1981."

    (These stats are for US colleges.)

    As I said, if you want and can delete it go ahead. — Raul

    Don't mind him, he is not a mod.
  • Gender rates in this forum
    This could trigger a good discussion on: are man more attracted to philosophy than woman, the other way around? — Raul

    The population that posts on an internet forum is not representative of the global population in a number of ways, including gender. Besides, a dozen data points do not a statistics make.
  • A Technical Definition of Time
    My assumption is that temporality "is" something, that it exists as somehow instantiated in substance, not an empty, null set concept, and hence not any more "circular" than matter. — Enrique

    I am OK with the idea that time is immanent in the physical world, whether we think of it as fundamental or (as some hypothesize) emergent. But that doesn't avoid the issue of circularity, which refers to attempts to define time in terms of other, non-temporal concepts. It seems that all such concepts through which we try to define or explicate time are already entangled with temporality in our understanding: clock, process, change, rate, periodicity, simultaneity,synchronization (obviously), coordination.
  • A Technical Definition of Time
    All definitions are tautologously circular — Enrique

    You are misusing both words. "Ps are Qs" is a definition, it is not a tautology (it isn't true by definition), and it is not circular (it does not rely on the meaning of the definiendum). A definition reduces a concept to one or more independently known concepts. The problem with defining time (real, physical time, not a mathematical abstraction) is that any other concepts to which you attempt to reduce it already depend on time for their understanding. So the best you can do is contextualize time, connect it to related concepts. It won't be a definition though. But then why do you need to define time anyway?

    my definition's strong point is that it is maximally generalized — Enrique

    Your definition is incomprehensible. I guess you started with an idea of a clock and then tried to compress it into something that sounds like fancy academic-speak.
  • A Technical Definition of Time
    Time: systems primarily sculpted towards the role of coordinating systems that are divergent enough to be deficient in self-coordination. — Enrique

    Given your subsequent elaboration, I guess what this horrible mess is trying to get at is a notion of a clock, in its most general sense. In other words, time is what clocks measure. This isn't wrong, but like all other attempts at bootstrapping the notion of time, it does not escape circularity.
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    Name calling isn't helpful. — Book273

    Yeah no, it's totally appropriate.

    Here is cumulative COVID death rate in Sweden and its neighbors:
    Sweden:  1:942
Finland: 1:8734
Norway:  1:9835
Denmark: 1:3050
    Same for USA and Canada:
    USA:    1:804
Canada: 1:2031

    Of course, Book273 has already made it known that he's totally fine with there being more death and suffering, so this appeal to statistics is not only dishonest but hypocritical as well.
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    Sweden. Better infection rates, better mortality rates. No response other than wash your hands and take care. Last I looked the US was doing better than Canada, infection and mortality wise, but I admit, it's been a few days since I bothered to look. — Book273

    ↪TheMadFool
    ↪dazed
    The shit-stain is lying through his teeth.

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

    https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    I am pretty certain we're dealing with someone with some kind of mental illness. — Echarmion

    Yeah, I figured his posts were too lame and deranged to even qualify as dangerous misinformation. One would have to work to be misinformed by them.

    Compare to this so-called Great Barrington Declaration. As wrong and mendacious as it is, it at least makes some kind of sense and was competently written, which is what makes it dangerous.

    But more interestingly, why was it called Parler rather than Parlour? — Banno

    I thought it was French (par-LEH)?
  • How is Jordan Peterson viewed among philosophers?
    I see people using incel language and the like (e.g. calling women as "females"). — deusidex

    I don't think "females" is incel language. I don't like the word myself (but I am not a native speaker, so what do I know); however, I think it is more commonly used as a politically correct, age- and social status-neutral way of referring to, well, females - as opposed to "girls" and "women." Same with "males," of course.
  • Joe Biden (+General Biden/Harris Administration)
    So Obama got the Nobel peace price basically for not being Dubya. How are they going to top that with Biden now?

    The bad news is that the bar has been set so low, he doesn't even need to try in order to get approval from those who would support him in the first place, or even more broadly, those who opposed Trump. And those on the other side won't change their mind no matter what, so they don't matter either. So yeah, he could repeat that infamous Trump line about shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn't be wrong.
  • Fictionalism
    ↪unenlightened
    ↪unenlightened
    Good stuff. — ChatteringMonkey

    Agreed.
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    Don't healthy immune systems attack and kill invading viruses? — Roger Gregoire

    Only once the virus infects the organism and starts to reproduce and possibly (a) sicken the individual, (b) develop an advantageous mutation, (c) infect other people. The immune system response works to mitigates an already existing problem, a problem that could have been avoided through social distancing, among other measures.

    For the most part, healthy immune systems don't replicate and spread the virus, ...they attack and kill it. — Roger Gregoire

    No, immune systems don't replicate and spread the virus :roll: The virus takes care of that with the help of its host. And yes, even people with light or nonexistent symptoms replicate and spread the virus for many days after they become infected. This has been observed in numerous studies, including studies on young children.

    No offense SophistiCat, but the purpose of the analogies is to put a rational perspective on this whole situation. Right now, the general public is being fed misinformation in the form of "fear mongering" which is only making a bad situation much, much worse. — Roger Gregoire

    Your analogies only lead you astray. You are bone-ignorant about science and public policy, you can't formulate a sound argument to save your life, and yet you presume to advise experts and decision-makers. Normally I just ignore internet cranks, but I make an exception here, because bozos like you spread disinformation that does real harm.
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    SophistiCat, it seems that you view healthy people (those with strong immune systems) more as "spreaders" of the virus than as "removers" of the virus — Roger Gregoire

    People aren't "removers" of the virus. Once it is out of its host, a virus dies on its own if it doesn't find a new host, which is nearly always. You don't need people going around "hoovering" virus particles; just leave them alone for a few hours or days and they'll become inactive. If a virus succeeds in infecting a new host, even someone who for whatever reason doesn't show symptoms (it's more complicated than just having a healthy immune system), that by definition means that the virus is reproducing - increasing the probability of its further transmission (asymptomatic carriers are infectious) and of new mutations arising. The more hosts it infects, the more immune systems it encounters, the higher the probability that it mutates to become more infectious and resistant. This is what we are already seeing. It is probably no accident that a recent more infectious strain appeared in a country that had one of the highest infection rates to begin with.

    You need to stop thinking in terms of analogies and think about the real situation, which isn't so complicated that one cannot understand it otherwise. We are all, hopefully, familiar with the basics of the germ theory of disease. And educate yourself a little before pontificating on this topic.
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    I know, I know… your first thought after reading this title is “Wow Roger, now you’ve really lost your mind!”. But humor me a bit and take a look at this analogy first — Roger Gregoire

    You don't understand how to use analogies. An analogy can illustrate an unfamiliar scenario in more familiar terms to provide an intuitive feel for it. But first, you need to make sure that your analogy really does function the same way as the real scenario in all relevant respects. And second, an analogy is not a substitute for an argument, it's just a rhetorical aid for making the argument more accessible.

    What you do is make up an analogy (multiple analogies: blood cells, car tires, fire extinguishers...) without clearly and convincingly showing how it parallels the real situation, and then draw conclusions from the analogy (and then constantly refer readers to the analogy, as if it constituted an argument).

    This seems to be your argument in its entirety (paraphrasing to get rid of an unnecessary analogy):

    We fail to recognize that intentionally holding the healthy population (those with strong immune systems) on this planet from an infection means that the infection will grow and mutate unabated.

    This is ignorant on a very basic level. Population mutation rate is proportional to (virus) population size. That is to say, the more the virus reproduces, the more mutations will appear. Letting the virus run wild through most of the population is guaranteed to produce more mutations than restraining the virus spread as much as possible.

    Add to this the fact that we cannot practically separate the "vulnerable" population from the "healthy" population for many months, while we wait for the "healthy" to acquire herd immunity. "Vulnerable" people live among us (and for most people we don't even know the extent of their vulnerability). They have families and caretakers; they will come in contact with other people. Only by restraining the overall infection rate can we protect them.

    Government experts are quick to reject those that say we should allow the healthy cars to speed up and run free (i.e., implement “strategic herd immunity”) as being misinformed quacks — Roger Gregoire

    Expertise is not acquired quickly. It takes years of training an experience. And yes, they are right to reject random inputs from misinformed quacks.
  • Bannings
    They don't read the same to me, Chester was quippy, counterpunch is an essay writer. — fdrake

    So then you are not denying that @jamalrob is putin? I knew it!
  • Imaginary proof of the soul
    ↪SolarWind
    Physicalism is not a theory of everything, so you are severely misguided if you think you can "pound" physicalists with such questions. They'll tell you to go pound sand and they'll be right.
  • Imaginary proof of the soul
    ↪SolarWind
    Physicalism isn't married to the third-person perspective. If physicalism is compatible with the existence of first-person perspectives in general (it had better be, otherwise it would be immediately ruled out), then there's no reason why a physicalist cannot assume a first-person perspective when giving a description of the world.
  • Imaginary proof of the soul
    Where can I read up on the idea that they are controversial? Do you mean controversial in that it's a bad thought experiment? Or controversial in the sense of they are being discussed? — DoppyTheElv

    I just mean that there is a diversity of opinion when it comes to exotic imaginary scenarios involving personal identity. Our intuitions don't seem to deliver a uniform verdict. Some have strong (and divergent) opinions, others are uncertain.

    The teletransporting / copy-beam thought experiment shows that it is unclear what the objective solution is, not that there is none.
    Both the beaming and my thought experiment show the same thing: physics has an explanatory gap with personal identity => physicalism is incomplete.     — SolarWind

    Well, your thought experiment shows only that if you assume dualism at the outset, then dualism is what you will conclude. Same with identity thought experiments: they need not pose problems for physicalism unless you have already assumed that they do.
  • The Moral Argument
    Well, it’s possible for one to simply fail to see the connection between the premises and how they necessarily lead to the conclusion. Sometimes, seeing that connection may just give them reason to reject one of the premises of the argument but sometimes someone may reasonably just accept the conclusion. — TheHedoMinimalist

    That is certainly true with more complex arguments (or else mathematics would start and end with setting out axioms).

    The problem with the moral argument is that seeing the connection between P1 and P2 implies that P2 can only be defended by reasons that assume C. — TheHedoMinimalist

    Or the other way around, depending on which of the premises moves you most. Those who reject moral realism, especially former theists, sometimes associate it with theism, thereby acknowledging P1. But yes, if you already accept one of the two premises, acceptance of the other premise will go in lockstep with accepting the conclusion. Not saying that this cannot happen, but it's really a two-step process, not three.

    But do all syllogism have this problem to an equal extent? My whole point is that the moral argument is especially vulnerable to these conflicts and thus it should be regarded as inferior to other theistic argument. — TheHedoMinimalist

    I would agree that the argument, as presented in the OP, is weaker than others. It is a structural weakness. I actually mislabeled it as a syllogism above; a classical syllogism includes a general proposition (major premise) together with a specific proposition (minor premise), while this argument has just two minor premises.
  • Imaginary proof of the soul
    I think the original argument can be put easier with clones. — DoppyTheElv

    Thought experiments involving cloning or teletransporting differ in an important detail: they start with there being a single person, who then undergoes some transformation. More importantly, these thought experiments are (in)famously controversial; they are the opposite of an argument. If anything, their controversy suggests that there may not be objectively right or wrong answers to the questions that they pose.
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