You are comfortable rolling up your sleeve for the vaccine, good for you. — Book273

So are millions of others. I guess they are all idiots in your eyes.

I, and many other educated individuals, are not so keen. Perhaps in five years, or ten, maybe. You do not know the long term effects of it, no one does, not even those that make it. We also don't know the long term effects of Covid. — Book273

So, because you are educated, as you clearly point out, you know the difference between an mRNA vaccine and for example the swine flu vaccine that had serious consequences?

Your "education" in this matter is not a foundation of proof that there will be serious consequences five years from now. Not only that, there are documented cases of serious problems for people who survived Covid that might last for years or their entire life. So you compare an outright guess based on your "educated" opinion. Remind me again what education you use as a foundation for your evaluation here? Or are you referring to anecdotal evidence through emotion based on the swine flu debacle and not really about how these vaccines actually work? Further disregarding actual documentation of long-term Covid complications that are far more serious than anything even remotely reported about the vaccines. So even if you survive Covid, there's a high risk of complications. That needs to be evaluated against any wild guesswork about speculative five-year consequences of an mRNA vaccine that no one who worked on the swine flu vaccine says is even remotely possible because of the basic differences in how these vaccines work.

A) Trust in my body to do what it has always done by responding appropriately to new pathogens and trust in the health of others' to do the same — Book273

Do you mean to die if you are unlucky? Or get serious complications?

B) Allow myself to be injected with something new, that has had testing time that numbers in months rather than years, to protect me from another new thing that has been known of for less than two years, which we also know not much about. — Book273

Wait, you say we don't know much about Covid but you dismiss the dangers of it and trusting your own body to respond to it in a predictable way? Compared to vaccines which have been extremely tested due to the importance of finding one and thousands of people have worked on and even more people have gone through human trials for and even more data compiling now that millions have gotten it? You mean to say that your logic is that because there are some unknowns left, you evaluate the risks of something documented to have a high mortality rate and that can create serious illness if survived as being lower risk than the vaccine with less risks documented? Nice logic there. Are you also thinking like that while driving? Only driving off-road because there's risks involved with having oncoming drivers going the opposite direction. Maybe you will hit them! You cannot use the roads they are unsafe, look at the statistics of deaths in traffic! Let's go off-road into uncharted territory so to avoid all other cars. Oh no, didn't see that hole in the gound

I go with option A. The second just seems too risky. The speeches attached to the vaccine are very snakeoil salesmanish. — Book273

I thought you were educated? Where do you get the education to spot snake-oil salesmen's speeches?
All I see is someone speculating and having emotional opinions based on fear. I see very little signs of any education... at all. And your risk assessment is extremely flawed and not very rooted in the research surrounding the virus. You have higher risks from Covid than any vaccine, but you flip it and think Covid is less dangerous. Maybe go to India and ask the burning bodies what they think about the dangers of the vaccine.

I have done the research — Book273

Oh, for fuck sake.

You are espousing the position that I should take the vaccine, or hide away, for the health of the species. I say that I should not take the vaccine, nor hide away, for exactly the same reason; the health of the species. — Book273

You have no idea what you are talking about. You have concluded that people should just interact with each other normally, not isolate and battle anything, not vaccinate at all because that will lead us to better health.

What are you smoking? The mortality rate is high and the only reason we do not see this in practice is that we've introduced restrictions and regulations in society to block extreme spread. With the Delta variant getting stronger at 70% higher infectious risk, it's even worse to break restrictions.

What fucking education are you referring to? Cherry-picking points that only prove your point?
You make conclusions about how people should act based on the fact there are still some questions left unanswered about the virus. That's NOT a foundation for any conclusions that we should just open up and not give a damn about restricting the spread.

Seriously, you

I have listened to the experts explain the value and then go back and change what they said as new information arose — Book273

This is the scientific process. You know, to examine, conclude, examine again, modify, adapt. The scientific process is about chopping away at something until the truth becomes more clear. This is why we have words like hypothesis and scientific theory (not to be confused with common tongue "theory"). Experts talk about their recent findings, media are uneducated and blow things up with click bait headlines. But if you know what the scientific process is about, you would understand WHY they change the conclusions they make, especially as everyone races against time to figure the virus out.

If you don't even understand how science works, how can anyone take your "education" seriously? This is getting seriously stupid.

I see the data, not what I want to see, but what is there. — Book273

No, you clearly don't. You don't have the knowledge of statistical analysis, you don't have an understanding of the scientific process and you don't understand how to evaluate risks. You don't see data, you have an opinion and you pick data to support that first.

But nothing of this has anything to do with the immoral act of endangering other people by disregarding the vaccine and disregarding restrictions. You are just trying to justify for yourself why you don't want the vaccine or need to follow restrictions, but even you admit to not knowing all the consequences of Covid in an unchecked outbreak.

So if you go out, unvaccinated, unknowing if you are a carrier, right into a public space in close proximity with other people and infect someone who later dies... you are guilty of manslaughter. Why wouldn't you? You disregard all health recommendations, all recommendations from actual educated experts and you disregard the potential hazard risk of infecting other people, even though there's tons of info supporting the dangers and how it spreads. By disregarding all of this and put other people at risk of getting infected, you actively cause someone else to die.

Even if there were more unknowns about the virus and even lesser mortality rate, it's still immoral to break what has become socially accepted norms of living in order to prevent damage and death onto others.

It's like the most basic example of ethics you can come across and you fail any sort of rational reasoning behind your stance. No one cares if you infect yourself through being careless, no one cares about idiots causing themselves harm, it's not about that. It's about them causing others harm. You cannot justify your own behavior in the light of risking other people. You either follow the same restrictions and regulations as everyone else or you are an immoral agent that should be judged accordingly. You can refuse the vaccine, but that requires you to follow the restrictions when vaccinated people can go out in public normally. If you don't get the vaccine, you have no right to the same level of freedom, because you are still a risk when you don't have the vaccine. It's just basic fucking logic here that you try to justify with extremely poor philosophy and rational reasoning. Why are you even on this forum if this simple logic goes over your head.

Or that, knowing how mammoth a global vaccine rollout is, that changing course at this stage would be impractical when the current course appears to be working okay? — Kenosha Kid

But this is not true. The Astra Zenica vaccine had extremely minor risks of blood clots and it was pulled instantly in most nations in order to evaluate further if it's safe or not.

What I see is that people don't know how to interpret statistics correctly. Most people fail at math, but statistics is not only math, it's logic and also requires situational data and a lot of further parameters for a correct interpretation.

The problem is media and social media. While normal media simplify complex data down to click-bait headlines, social media runs these headlines and people become afraid. This pandemic is the best example of the extreme knowledge polarization between the educated experts, scientists, analysts, and the common people who have no knowledge of how to interpret the data researchers publish and how that misinterpretation or skewed conclusion grows into mass panic. This is why I have little respect for uneducated people's "opinions", because if I had a cent for every bias, fallacy, and inability to fact check correctly when people pose their "opinions" I would be a billionaire today.

The vaccine manufacturers and reviewers of those vaccines take extreme care towards making vaccines safe. There's no interest in releasing unsafe vaccines. Even if you cynically think that they only think of revenue and public reputation, those are the first things to go if they released something unsafe. It's in literally no one's interest to release a faulty vaccine and in everyone's interest to carefully review how things go.

And then there's the talk about side effects. All substances you take have side effects, food, fluids, medication whatever. The main question is the severeness of the side effects and the risk of them. If you take a medication that has a 1 in a million chance of a serious side effect, that's a pretty safe medication compared to what you probably get out of it, i.e treatment. Vaccines have side effects, Astra Zenica's had serious ones, but by April 7, 20 million doses had been administrated and 19 had fatal blood clots. Compare that to the burning piles of bodies in India due to the failure in containing the pandemic. And Astra Zenica's vaccine was even pulled, only to be used in age groups that had no side effects at all. While other vaccines showed little to no such side effects.

People just don't understand basic statistical awareness and this fuels the fear that fuels the anti-vaccer bullshit. I would guarantee that the majority of things that people consume during one day consist of substances that have even greater damaging effects on their health and lifespan, but no one care to think about that because people are just uneducated and form opinions out of that lack of knowledge.

It's like the whole meme and old gag of getting people riled up and afraid of Dihydrogen monoxide.



As an example of its use

In April 2013, as part of an April Fool's Day prank, two radio personalities at Gator Country 101.9, a station in Lee County, Florida, told listeners that dihydrogen monoxide was coming out of their water taps and were suspended for a few days. The prank resulted in several calls by consumers to the local utility company, which sent out a release stating that the water was safe.

I absolutely love the response to this meme and joke. It's one of the best ways to show how easily fooled people are and how severe the consequences are because of people's stupidity and lack of critical thinking. And all anti-vaccers fall under this. It's so fun seeing these people shoot themselves in the foot but also very obvious as to why emotional "opinions" just don't matter in a pandemic.

To justify forcing your beliefs onto others, simply because you are afraid, puts you on par with pretty much every dictator ever. — Book273

Nothing of this is based on beliefs. It's like if you are in a position where you don't know if the pain in your back is serious or just some aching muscles. And instead of asking the experts in the field of medicine to reach a consensus about what it might be, in order to really know if it's cancer or something, you turn to a community of online self-proclaimed experts who are fundamentally uneducated, who are unable to reason past their biases, who analyze statistics and data without having any kind of education on how to properly do so and then trust their words completely.

It's the anti-vaccers who force beliefs onto others because they are afraid. It's like literally what they do. Because they don't go by the broad consensus in science on a topic, they cherry-pick their sources to support their fear-based arguments. It's actually pretty ironic that by pointing out that we should support our stance surrounding the pandemic and vaccines, on the science behind it, the proper analysis of the statistical risks and respecting other people's lives by following precautions that block yourself from accidentally spreading the virus to people who can literally die if you are not careful, it's instead me that gets criticized for forcing a belief out of fear. I'm actually laughing out loud at this because I cannot even comprehend the lack of logic that this kind of counterargument has.

I hold the stance that we need to listen to the consensus of science and we need to get past human error, biases, and fear to judge the course of action in order to fight this pandemic. There's nothing in this that even remotely follows the idea that I'm forcing my "belief" of fear onto others. How is this remotely true? Where's your support that positions your point of view as rational reasoning and not fear-based in comparison? Give me a fucking break.

"I will do this, and don't worry, you will thank me later" Said the church as they took people's children, burned down places of worship, and set about destroying "the heathen", "to save them from ignorance." — Book273

Care to explain what this has to do with any of this? What sources do you go by to form your stance about not taking the vaccine? Or should we just "thank you later"?

I assume you justify rape as saying that those who refuse to engage in consensual sex are against the continuation of humanity and are therefore guilty of complicit genocide, therefore, for the security of procreation, must be made to procreate regardless of their opinion on the matter? — Book273

This is a textbook example of what is called an appeal to extremes fallacy. You would fail basic philosophy with this kind of reasoning.
And to try and answer this because I'm not sure which quote you are referring to as I believe you just emotionally react and didn't read everything I've written in here:

Opinions don't matter if the following practice means an increased danger to other people. The question posed in this thread is about the vaccine. Anti-vaccers have "opinions" on why not to take the vaccine. And I've never said they can't have opinions.

What I've been saying is that if someone, an anti-vaccer probably, has the "opinion" that the vaccine is dangerous and refuses to take it, that is absolutely in his or her right. However, the vaccine is there to help fight the pandemic, it's there so that risks of infecting others through socializing and taking part in other social situations/encounters in society are greatly reduced and the dangerous consequences of the infection are reduced. So if someone refuses the vaccine they need to understand that they cannot be part of the equation of fighting the pandemic. They need to isolate themselves or live far away from dense populations in order for them not to be at risk of spreading the virus. This is just basic logic. If you choose selfishly, you have to be by yourself if the crisis is affecting an entire population.

If someone refuses the vaccine, and turns out to be the source in a super spreading event, and as a consequence people infected by that person ends up seriously ill with many of them dying. That person has effectively and willingly refused a way to prevent such a thing. If a person refuses the vaccine and then ignores restrictions and precautions, they are absolutely doing an immoral act. The logical causation from the active decision of refusing the vaccine to taking part in a risky act of socializing during a pandemic is unquestionably immoral. Any objection to this logic needs to be supported by something other than anti-vaccer's appeal to emotion and fear. Because there's no statistical support or data that can change the moral nature of such an act. Period.

And that pretty much captures your stance. Also nothing to do with ethics. Bravo. — Book273

Maybe you should include the entire quote instead of, you know, take things out of context.

This has nothing to do with the logic of how someone breaking restrictions actively becomes a danger towards others. — Christoffer

This was a response to a point that the restrictions and vaccines come at a cost. What those costs specifically are, wasn't actually pointed out, just that "people have opinions". And even if it's true that costs need to be balanced between each other, the argument was made as to for some reason position the risks of vaccine as high, which there is no broad data for whatsoever. The risks of the vaccine are extremely lower than the risks of the virus. And the deadly risks of an unchecked full-blown pandemic are extremely higher than the risks of restrictions. That's not to say that there are health risks involved with isolation and consequences of restrictions, but in comparison with an unchecked pandemic, it becomes clear what risk aversion is the best course of action and best for as many as possible.

But as I pointed out, if you include the context of what I wrote from which you quoted me, I pointed out that the cost comparison of restrictions and vaccines have nothing to do with the moral evaluation of someone who refuses vaccine and then still socializes and in turn becomes at risk of spreading the virus. It's not immoral to refuse the vaccine, it's not immoral to socialize past restrictions if vaccinated, but to refuse a vaccine and then socialize is definitely immoral as you cannot guarantee the safety of the people you meet. If you refuse the vaccine, break restrictions, socialize with others or go into public spaces and infect others that later die because of your act, that is, without a question, an immoral act.

I won't take the vaccine but I would have no problem with colchicine if needed. — Book273

Why would colchicine be safer than the vaccine? There's not enough data to conclude that it helps. What's your logic behind this?

And maybe explain how you morally handle and justify your refusal of the vaccine. I'd like to hear what your plans are going forward. You will refuse the vaccine and... then what? Are you gonna break the restrictions? Are you gonna go out in public? Socialize with people who are unknowing about your refusal?

Because if you only think that you will protect yourself and refuse any chance of blocking yourself from spreading the virus, you are effectively helping to spread the virus if you get infected and do so. How is that not immoral? How can you justify such an act against other people who don't know if you are infected? Please educate others on your ethical stance in this, because the way you write you just sound like you care for yourself and not others, and that's not really what ethics is about now... is it?

No, it isn't. Is there no such thing as common sense and using one's own judgement in your world view? — Tzeentch

Common sense without rational thought is irrelevant and does not function well with reality. It's also the common thing people fall back on if they lack the capacity to actually do the work of rational reasoning, which is... well, the foundation of philosophy. So I don't care much for opinions from people who just say their opinions without any care for being rational or logical. It's just noise.

You are ignoring the fact that science has been wrong numerous times during this pandemic. Remember how Covid-19 was initially ranked among diseases like Ebola, something which was in hindsight clearly wrong? — Tzeentch

Science is not "wrong", anyone who says this does not understand the scientific process. It's about chopping away little at a time to reach as close to the truth as possible. The reason people think science has gotten things "wrong" is because we've never had this level of media coverage of every slight discovery or hypothesis by scientists. Every discovery has been translated by stupid journalists who simplify something down to barebone clickbait headlines and then people get confused when things turn around. It's the same thing every time when people don't understand science or the scientific process. Time and data is the most important thing when researching. Back when this whole thing started there was very little data and very little spent time on analyzing that data. At the moment, both data and time are much better and more accurate than before. But the conclusion that has survived is still that this is a dangerous virus that has a higher mortality rate than other more common corona-type viruses.

The dangers have never been in question, we're more accurate now than ever about Covid-19. Your way of speaking about the process of research on this virus just shows how little you actually know about how science and the scientific process works. So you just say "oh, it's been chaos and no one knows really anything". This is simply not true and it's an extremely low-quality premise in philosophy to point out.

That is fine. That is how science works — Tzeentch

You don't know how it works, clearly.

Science also tells us the restrictions and vaccinations come at a cost, and opinions on whether the costs weigh against the benefits of (some of) the restrictions vary. But you seem to have a low tolerance of opinions other than your own. — Tzeentch

This has nothing to do with the logic of how someone breaking restrictions actively becomes a danger towards others. People's opinions are irrelevant if we have a virus that kills and someone just doesn't give a fuck about it. That person is hurting and killing others through reckless behavior. That we have a cost to restrictions has absolutely nothing to do with the logic of that. So once again, you show a failure to understand what this is all about.

I do care about facts, but I may weigh those facts differently than you. — Tzeentch

Facts are facts. The fact is that we have a virus with a high mortality rate. The fact is that restrictions and vaccines are tools and weapons to fight the pandemic. The fact is that the risks of vaccines have extremely low risks of side effects and even in those cases, those vaccines have been managed to even lessen those side effect risks even further. The fact is that the risks of serious damage and death by the virus are much larger than any risk of serious side effects.
These are facts supported by publications, they are facts of decisions being made, they are facts about statistical risks.

If you are unable to read into these facts and understand what they mean, that does not mean you "weigh those facts differently", it means you are cherry-picking facts or opinions or whatever supports your conclusion. A conclusion that still does not counterargue what I've concluded about the moral choice of someone not getting the vaccine and then ignoring restrictions putting other people in danger. You seem to be unable to understand any logical throughline here.

That's your issue, isn't it? What are you doing on a philosophy forum if you're incapable of accepting that people can look at the same facts as you do and come to different conclusions, let alone have a normal discussion about it. — Tzeentch

Philosophy requires you to create a reasonable and rational argument. If you fail to do that you are not conducting philosophy, you are just venting opinions. That is not philosophy. If you cannot back your conclusions up with anything more than "I have my opinion and I interpret things however I want", then it is I that need to ask the question what you are doing on a philosophy forum? Go to reddit if you need to vent opinions. I ask for rational arguments from you and you provide nothing of the sort.

"There is no subjectivity in my science". — Tzeentch

What do you even mean by this? I can't even begin to try and understand this low-quality bullshit.

Maybe you wouldn't burn yourself out if half your post wasn't angry ranting. — Tzeentch

Maybe you could start acting like you are on a philosophy forum instead of just venting opinions? You're today's poster boy for "low-quality posts" and you get the correct response accordingly.

And similarly, not being vaccinated and breaking regulations is not the same as killing or even infecting someone with covid-19. — Tzeentch

It's the same as driving recklessly, with a blindfold, or intoxicated. How can you not understand this? Or maybe you just don't want to.

"I agree with the rules and therefore everyone that doesn't follow them I label as reckless." Of course, anyone who disagrees on the science or the rules you would probably regard as being wrong, because you think the science is conclusive: it isn't. — Tzeentch

The rules are based on scientific knowledge and facts. To say that the science is inconclusive is not the same as the science saying that there is a pandemic, that the virus kills, hurts or cause serious harm and is deadlier than normal flu viruses. These are scientific facts, and disagreeing with them is disagreeing with reality itself. Just ask any citizen of India what they think of the smell of burning bodies if you don't agree with "the science". The scientific consensus on the deadliness and seriousness of this virus is absolutely conclusive. Just because people think they understand how science works and think they have the academic background to understand publications, doesn't mean that they actually understand them. There's no serious scientist in the world right now saying with any form of verification that this virus is harmless.

To disagree with the scientific consensus surrounding Covid-19 is not rational in any way and is the way of the moronic anti-vaccer movement.

If you are of the idea that this virus is harmless and the scientific community isn't clear on how serious this pandemic is, then you are fucking clueless and there's no point in even trying to make a philosophical argument with someone like you. Because you disagree with fundamental facts and can't even enter the question we are actually discussing.

Anyway, fine. You're putting a lot of faith in whoever made those rules. — Tzeentch

And you are a conspiracy nut if you believe the restrictions are there for any other reason than to stop the spread of the virus.

They may weigh things against each other and have different ideas as to what acceptable risks are. There's a subjectivity to all of this that you are not taking into account, that I am trying to make clear to y — Tzeentch

There's no subjectivity in science. The virus is dangerous, the way it spreads is proven and the vaccine is one more tool and weapon to battle this pandemic. People who disagree with this have a hell of a challenge to prove otherwise and so far they've only proven themselves to be morons. And an infected moron who runs around in a crowd of people thinking his covid-19 infection won't hurt or kill the people around him, should be treated the same as anyone driving around recklessly, intoxicated or with a blindfold. If they also make a lot of people sick, some of them dying, that person is guilty of manslaughter. There's no mystery here, it's crystal clear.

That you subjectively think otherwise is irrelevant. You don't give a shit about facts, you don't understand the science, you don't understand statistical analysis of different risk levels. I'm glad that we have serious restrictions so that people who are morons don't have the freedom to risk other people's lives with their stupidity. I'm fed up with the morons of this world thinking their idiotic ideas are a foundation everyone else should live by.

I don't care for anyone's opinion if that opinion has nothing to do with rationality, logic, facts and reason. It's just noise and bullshit. I'm glad society listens to the experts of their field. I'm glad the conspiracy nuts aren't the ones deciding the rules.

Different? Yes. Fundamentally different? Up for debate. Where I live it certainly is not fundamentally different from a heavy flu. — Tzeentch

It's not up for debate. Learn statistical analysis and understand that your single location is irrelevant as a statistical data point. You really show off your inability to understand basic science and the data we have about the pandemic.

No, that's your logic. Don't put words in my mouth. — Tzeentch

No, it's your logic. It's literally the same kind of logic. You compare the flu with Covid-19, it's like comparing a slap and a sledgehammer. You are just uneducated about this virus, simple as that.

I don't think we're at a standstill. You are, however, conducting yourself like a child. — Tzeentch

No, I'm desperately trying to explain simple fucking logic to a moron, that's what's going on. Someone who uses the current surrounding of his living location as proof of how Covid-19 isn't very different from normal flu. Someone who seemingly interprets the current scientific research of the virus in his own way, concluding the level of conclusiveness the research is at. Who disregard the actual facts we already know, who fail to understand statistical comparisons between vaccine risks and risks of the virus. Who doesn't think that someone who don't give a fuck about restrictions and getting the vaccine is in his right to break against everything and go around coughing on people because it's "up to them if they should fear it or not".

It's just stupid. With your level of logic and relation to facts and science, you fit right in with the other intellectual lowlives on Reddit who think they are educated experts while they spread anti-vaccer bullshit.

I'm done. I'm tired of this forum and how my will to discuss philosophy always gets hijacked by people like you.

When you step into a car, you may crash into someone. How is that not direct and serious, and not just as much of a reckless action as interacting with people without being vaccinated? — Tzeentch

The choice to "drive a car" is not the same as crashing into someone. Driving a car means you know the risks and follow the rules. To refuse a vaccine and then choose to break restrictions, you choose to not follow the rules and instead choose to "drive recklessly". If you choose to drive intoxicated, or with a blindfold, you choose in the same way to drive recklessly.

The choice "to drive" is the same as choosing to follow restrictions, vaccinate yourself and follow the rules of the pandemic.

This is the social code of a pandemic. The same as a driving license and the rules of the road is the social code of driving.

If you break those, you are reckless. You can choose to drive recklessly or you can choose to drive normally. You can choose to live in the pandemic according to the rules set to prevent spread, or you can choose to break it and be reckless.

It's crystal clear.

Because both cause many deaths, yet the flu is accepted as normal, yet in the case of covid-19 people start questioning fundamental human rights like bodily autonomy. — Tzeentch

They are fundamentally different in mortality rate, so that's why we have these restrictions and vaccines. You fail to understand the science behind it, but you can't argue against it, or you will argue against the science itself. They are not the same.

If I slap you with my hand and then slam you with a sledgehammer, that's two different types of hitting you, but the consequences are fundamentally different. If you only have the choice to use gear in order to prevent damage to yourself, you would probably choose to have body armor when I hit you with the sledgehammer. You argue that both hits are the same, so why would you need body armor if a slap and a sledgehammer are fundamentally just me hitting you? That's your logic right there, examine it.

There's a reason I didn't respond to the rest of your post — Tzeentch

The reason being you don't have an argument and haven't counterargued the logic yet. You tiptoe around it with zero philosophical insight or apparent knowledge about the subject at hand. So we're at a standstill until you can grasp the basics of this.

Quite. I wonder where the philosophers congregate? — Punshhh

Probably places like here and the halls of universities. But that doesn't help if there are thousands of people that just want to say their opinions and think that's philosophy. I guarantee that there's a majority here of people who don't know anything about philosophy, a minority of people who autodidact philosophy, and a fraction that are actually philosophy scholars.

But philosophical scrutiny should be applied to all. Regardless of the level of knowledge.

Explain the difference, then. — Tzeentch

I just did, in that very text.

Choosing to drive is not a reckless act, but choosing to refuse a vaccine and then socialize normally during a pandemic is a reckless act. One is an act that can have risks, one is a reckless act that can have direct serious risks.

It doesn't get any clearer than that. And ignoring the difference between an act and a reckless act is the problem. We make actions all the time that can risk someone else, but we know the risks of those actions and take precautions to not end up with those risks. Doing a reckless action that can risk someone else but we know of those risks and do it anyway, is immoral.

It's crystal clear.

Of course. I did not state it was the flu, however. — Tzeentch

So you just... compared the two... because of reasons... seriously, this is just ridicoulus.

And you, of course, a self-styled expert in all matters concering facts. — Tzeentch

The facts of the pandemic are out there in publications. And there are a lot of publications about diseases and vaccines, statistics, biases, and fallacies in general. Facts matter and statistical facts about the vaccine risks matter. Failure to use those logically when arguing about the Covid-19 vaccines is a failure in logic. If you want to ignore this, go to some reddit forum, I don't have time for sloppy wannabes of philosophy. You either use logic, facts, and reason or you are just puking out irrelevant opinions and there's enough of that going around.

I've actually asked you some pretty straightforward questions which you've been avoiding.

On a philosophy forum few people will be impressed by these sorts of proclamations of victory. — Tzeentch

I've been pretty clear, but you ignore simple logic because of the fallacies and biases you seem to have. I haven't avoided questions, I've pointed out the fallacies in your reasoning and you ignore those and you actively avoid trying to accept simple logic because it doesn't fit your narrative. It's crystal clear what you're doing in the way you are presenting your arguments. Just as an example, your comparison with the flu that you then point out that you didn't state that Covid was the same as the flu, but still use as a comparison to make... what point exactly? Why make the comparison to the flu? For what reason? You are the one who isn't straightforward.

You just try to prove your opinion, without regard for addressing to the science of the pandemic, to the logic of my conclusion, and when challenged you just go all over the place trying to find a way to question that logic.

The logic is pretty straightforward: Making a choice of ignoring the science of the pandemic and vaccines in order to refuse to get a vaccine but still choose to socialize without regard for restrictions and regulations that exist to stop the spread, you are then actively making a reckless action that can hurt or kill other people.

That is a logical statement and there's no getting around that. You need to disprove the logic behind it and there's nothing about driving cars or having children that disprove that logic. You make vague comparisons that really don't change the logic of that statement.

On a philosophy forum, few people will be impressed by your sloppy philosophical scrutiny. I'm asking for better philosophical debate around the subject, but you discuss this with the same level of logic and knowledge as any other anti-vaccer out there. That makes it impossible for you to reach the philosophical scrutiny needed for the discussion to be a philosophical one.

Whenever you step behind the wheel, you are actively accepting the risk of killing someone. The risk is small, sure, but your label of 'reckless' or 'not reckless' is obviously subjective. — Tzeentch

No, you don't take reckless action. All actions in the world have risks, but taking an active reckless action is not the same as taking an action that has potential risks. Ignoring the pandemic, ignoring the vaccine is actively a direct reckless choice.

I did not claim otherwise. — Tzeentch

You directly compared it to the flu.

Except that not throwing rocks does not incur any risks for the thrower. So it is not the same. — Tzeentch

What risks? Are you talking about the stupid anti-vaccer propaganda and people being illiterate on reading statistics about vaccine risks? But it still doesn't change my conclusion. Just because you are afraid of the vaccine and don't get it doesn't mean you can also enjoy social life like other people who got it. Your choice is either to get it and be able to socialize or you don't get it and isolate yourself. Any other choice of socializing after actively refusing the vaccine is a reckless act against other people, period. You haven't logically addressed this point at all.

As I said, I have no interest in debating with the uneducated. If this is gonna be about philosophy, facts matter. And you can get hit by your own rocks, there's always a risk, you say so yourself with the examples about driving and having children. This is why you are all over the place, you don't have a consistent counterargument to my conclusion, it's grasping at straws. Getting struck by your own rocks is close to the same probability of getting complications from the vaccines. Learn statistics.

I am taking the ideas you are proposing and taking them to their logical conclusions.

You seem to believe sometimes it is fine for people to suffer as a result of one's desires and sometimes it is not.

So far you have been unable to explain what the determining factor is. — Tzeentch

No, you are not taking them to a logical conclusion. Not getting the vaccine and risking other people is an active choice against the scientific logic and knowledge of the pandemic. By driving a car normally you do not actively do something reckless. Stop pretending there's a logical connection between the two.

And the body of one's unborn child, of course. — Tzeentch

So you're gonna do an argument to the extreme again. Stop trying to bait things, this has nothing to do with the conclusion I've done about the vaccine. Want to have a philosophical debate about abortions start another thread.

Of course it isn't. The flu kills hundreds of thousands every year but we don't infringe upon people's rights to bodily autonomy because they may carry the flu. — Tzeentch

Covid-19 isn't the flu. If you don't have knowledge about the disease this pandemic is about, then how can you make logical arguments about it? Covid-19 has a higher mortality rate, the only reason we haven't seen higher numbers is because of how the world has been fighting the pandemic. If we had been going about our days normally we would have an extreme situation. Just look at the surge in India where they literally burned bodies in the street.

I have no interest in arguing with uneducated people. There's no point.

But even so, if we view vaccines generally. The conclusion I've made is the same. You say:

I'll propose something radical: if one is afraid that being sneezed on will kill them, they're the one who should be isolating themselves. — Tzeentch

That is the same as saying that if I decide to go out and throw sharp rocks at other people, it's not my responsibility or moral issue because if people are afraid of being hit by rocks they should just stay home and not go out when I'm out. Their fear is not my fear, so I don't care.

It's fundamentally stupid logic.

Societies have functioned without cars for millenia. They are not necessary at all. — Tzeentch

Yes, everything is solved by going back to the stone age. Include removing horses and all forms of transportation. This kind of argument in relation to vaccinations is a fallacy of the extreme. It has no relevance.

Yes, and?

People don't have children in some sort of sacrifice to the human endeavor. They have children because they desire to have them. — Tzeentch

So it's just ok to do fallacy to the extreme when you do it, but if I point out the same kind of extreme there are all of a sudden nuances? Ok...

All these things can be said for driving and having children. You're simply labeling one as reckless and the other as somehow acceptable because of a form of cosmic necessity, which I will argue is nothing other than a guise for desire; not much different from a desire not to be vaccinated. — Tzeentch

You are all over the place now. No you can't say that this is the same. Not taking the vaccine and going out in public is reckless. Driving normally is not, having children is not. Your argument is built upon making those things extreme. Not getting a vaccine and going out in public is already the extreme. The only way to make your examples extreme would be driving under the influence, driving with a blindfold, giving a child a loaded gun. They won't end up hurting or killing anyone 100% of the time, but the risk is reckless and dangerous. Driving normally and having children is nowhere close to actively dismiss the vaccine and then live socially as normal. It's only rational for those who don't understand how the spread works.

I'll propose something radical: if one is afraid that being sneezed on will kill them, they're the one who should be isolating themselves. — Tzeentch

How is this in any way rational for anyone other than stupid anti-vaccers? This kind of argument ignores all the science and all the dangers of the pandemic. Seriously.

Seeing one's own fear as a legitimate basis to dictate how others should exercise their right to bodily autonomy; now that is immoral; no less immoral than pressuring a woman into how she should or should not have an abortion.

Your fear is not my fear. — Tzeentch

This is not even remotely close to being a rational argument. Listen carefully to what the conclusion is: Those who actively decide not to get the vaccine and then socialize as normal are a reckless risk against the people they meet.
By ignoring a vaccine and then ignoring restrictions in society during a pandemic, you will risk other people's health. You do it against them. Abortion is about your own body, anything that is about your own body is not the same as risking other people. Bodily autonomy is irrelevant if you risk hurting or killing other people.

How in any rational form can you compare something like hurting yourself only with the risk of hurting others through reckless behavior?

I urge you to understand this difference before just throwing out examples like that.

Harsh words regarding the membership of a philosophy forum there. Surely there are plenty of amateur philosophers here. — Punshhh

It's an open forum where everyone can join. There are far more posts made by people who don't know how to form arguments by philosophical standards. The whole point of a philosophy forum is to have a higher quality discussion that doesn't end up being "just another reddit thread". I would still say that amateur philosophers should at least know the basics of philosophical dialectics, it should be the minimum requirement in my book.

To be clear, there is no necessity for driving a car or having children; those are merely products of our desires. — Tzeentch

For the survival of humanity and for people to be able to expand and move around, they are a necessity. If people stopped driving we would have a hard time functioning as a society and if people stopped having children humanity would die out. Just because something isn't necessary when society is oversaturated does not equal an absolute unnecessary status of these things. It's a fallacy of the extreme.

Mitigating the risks does not change that. — Tzeentch

Getting the vaccine and following restrictions are the same as mitigating risks with the other examples.

Those behaviors affect other people, with a risk of hurting or even killing them. — Tzeentch

Not in the same manner as denying a vaccine and recklessly expose themselves to other people. It's the same as someone deciding to put on a blindfold and driving on a sidewalk that was assumed to be free of people. It's knowing about the risks of hurting others and still doing it. Driving normally and having children is not even in the same ballpark in terms of causality.

One could also claim to have attempted to mitigate the risks of them not being vaccinated. — Tzeentch

What do you mean by this? I have clearly stated that denying the vaccine but still going out into the public and taking part in society is an active choice of ignoring the dangers of hurting or killing others. There's no rational argument to be made that someone who doesn't take the vaccine then tries to mitigate the following dangers as existing unvaccinated in public is a risk. That would mean locking themselves in their apartment and never seeing anyone. They are a risk if they live in a place where interactions are unavoidable. And I also said that it's fine if people who won't get the vaccine live by themselves far away from other people as the risk of hurting or killing others is so low that it ends up being in the same statistical number as the ones who the vaccine doesn't have an effect on. As long as the people who don't take the vaccine don't use hazard suits while they are out they aren't mitigating anything.

Like driving a car? What about having children? — Tzeentch

How does that relate to this? You drive a car as a form of transportation, you have children for the continuation of our species. None of these are the same as denying vaccines but still benefitting from society. You do not drive around ignoring the dangers, we even have licenses that prevent people from driving without knowledge, and people who ignore this are committing a crime. And having children, how is that hurting others in the same fashion as these issues about people ignoring vaccines?

Analogies need to keep within the same kind of actions, not stretch things into a fallacy. Denying to take a vaccine is to ignore the dangers towards others if you exist in close proximity to them. It would be like driving with a blindfold, which is a crime. Driving with a license, following the traffic rules, having a child and caring for it to the best of your ability and raising that child to be a morally balanced person is in this case considered the same as following the restrictions and getting a vaccine.

You won’t find any Brexit supporters on a philosophy forum. — Punshhh

Haven't we seen them passionately debate that side in this very thread when things were still moving? Just noticing that there are very few of them left now that everything is done.

There are also very few philosophers on this philosophy forum. The quality of logic is rare.

So what do pro-brexiters think about the current situation? Happy? Sad? Biased?

is Stoicism a better guide to living than Christianity and should it replace the latter as a set of values to live by? — Ross Campbell

A better question would be: Do we need faith, gospels, fantasy, belief in God/Gods, prayers, rituals etc. in order to have guidelines to live by? Why is there a need for something that doesn't really relate to guidelines of living?

Yes. But to what extent are the employees culpable for the immoral actions the company demands them to perform? — MPhil

If they don't question the authority of the company when asked to do something immoral, they become part of the entity that makes the immoral act.

If they question authority but exist in a chain of command that can punish them by refusing or questioning, i.e military etc. and it's an act performed according to the orders they're given, they are not responsible because they are forced to by threat of violence if they don't.

If the company demands of their employees to do actions that are considered immoral by society, the company is probably breaking laws of that nation since the accepted morality of a nation usually informs the laws of that nation.

Like the smokers that need respiratory therapy, or the cardiac patients that are obese and smoke, or the alcoholics that need to be stabilized from GI bleeds or rampant high sugar levels...Oh wait, 95% of those are also based on a personal decision, so I guess they are also taking the place of someone who needed the care. — Book273

Except the minor detail that Covid-19 has put a strain on the hospitals to be able to care for enough patients. You are comparing the treatment of people in times when there are beds available.

And you're also doing a black&white fallacy here. Not taking the vaccine will put a strain on communities with a lot of people in close proximity. Whatever the consequences of the vaccine, it helps fight the virus. So comparing that to people who only hurt themselves by their choice is not the same thing as something that potentially can be lethal to others based on the choice of the carrier.

The best way to fight the pandemic is to vaccinate and keep the restrictions until it's contained. And the core of the argument is really that if you want to reap the benefits of living in close proximity to others, i.e live in a city and being close to other people with living standards according to it, then you cannot say no to a vaccine because it affects others, not just you. If you live alone in the forest, you are not really part of the herd immunity equation, so you are free to do whatever.

The moral idea here is that if you want to be part of a community, to be part of a crowd, and live in close proximity to others, you also have a responsibility to not risk other people's health. It's the same reason why, in your example of smokers, we have stronger laws around smoking, so people don't get secondhand smoke that can put their health at risk.

A person who chooses to not get the vaccine but still wants to go out and party and be around other people is not only a selfish person, they are actually dangerous. A person who disregards restrictions, who carelessly doesn't care about preventing the spread of the virus by all means necessary, is in my book someone risking manslaughter. It's just that laws and logic surrounding pandemics are seriously underdeveloped.

I see no difference between a person pushing a giant boulder down a slope that "might" kill someone in the valley, and someone who disregards restrictions and attempts at fighting the spread of the virus. If a link can be drawn between the act of carelessness and someone dying, they are guilty of manslaughter. If the vaccine is indeed (not fully confirmed yet) blocking the spread compared to not having the vaccine, then deciding to not take the vaccine and keep living like there was no pandemic is reckless behavior that should be considered as serious as driving under heavy influence or playing around with giant boulders over the valley. Stupid behavior that only affects the stupid person should be considered their choice, even if it hurts them (as long as the behavior isn't done because of mental disabilities that need treatment). But behavior that affects other people, hurts them, kills them, regardless of causal proximity, should never be accepted and should be considered a crime.

If one considers adopting the personal maxim, "I shall steal", this maxim only provides benefits in a world in which stealing is a no-no! — TheMadFool

How so? Stealing in a world where everyone steals and the foundation is built upon it and being good at protecting against it; could be the societal standard form of living in that type of society. We cannot judge it without putting into context what we already invented as moral law before judging it universalizable or not. So you already have judged it as morally negative or positive before thinking about it as being able to be universalized or not. You, therefore, need to have decided if it is morally good or not before applying any theory around it. You don't want everyone to steal, why? Why do you think that way? It's society that taught you this is bad so you think it is bad that everyone steals, but if that is part of the fundamental societal structure you wouldn't think about it as universally wrong and therefore it falls flat.

If something is supposed to be absolute, it cannot have flaws as soon as a society fundamentally change their invented values around different moral acts. What if killing is universally accepted in a society of warriors where killing or being killed is not considered negative? Then anyone can kill anyone at any time or defend against it and only the strongest survive. If that's the foundation of that society, their moral universal law is that killing is good. So then, is killing supposed to be good in the society we live in today? No, because our invented reality about "how to live" and what is important is fundamentally different, so for us, we don't see a universally positive moral choice of everyone being allowed to kill to be valid.

Kant's theories fall flat when society is fundamentally changed. We cannot have two universal maxims guiding us and we can't have two fundamentally different societies that come to different conclusions about what is universally accepted as good or bad moral acts. Then the entire idea of universalization falls flat.

If the theory requires pre-determined moral values, it isn't possible to act as a moral theory.

t's not that immoral actions can't be universalized. They can but you would be guilty of a crime against logic, contradiction. — TheMadFool

But there you point out the action is immoral before the examination of whether or not it is. If it is universalized in a society where stealing is the way we feed ourselves and being viewed as a good act that helps people and that anyone can do it or protect against it. You cannot say it is immoral because it is in our society considered so. This is why both stealing or not stealing can't be universalized because that would demand the foundation of society is universal, which it isn't, it is an invention by us.

A moral theory will operate just like a mathematical function; you input the relevant information regarding a particular moral question and it'll output the right answer and by "the right answer" I mean you wouldn't have cause to doubt its goodness. — TheMadFool

This is what I mean by the algorithm. It's closer to a point system, where each point represents a calculation of emotional and physical values for people. If you are about to kill someone, the points can be derived from different aspects of that situation. The only universal laws to any of this is human suffering and pleasure, basic natural concepts of ourselves as biological beings. So you are about to kill someone; will this hurt them? The person does not want to die, and the person is in a rational position to judge that will = yes, you will hurt them by this = -1 points. Is this person about to hurt someone else? no, they are in no position to do so willingly = you will not prevent a bad act by this person as he is not willingly about to do any bad acts = -1 points. Are you gaining something by killing him? Yes, you will gain resources that will help you survive = +1 point. Will killing him prevent you from gaining resources in the future by instead collaborating with him? Yes, resources are limited to what you gain from the killing = -1 points.
Total = -2 points on the negative, meaning the act is immoral.

Now, this is a simple example, but the point is that the epistemically responsible way to calculate an act is to look at each possible consequence in accordance with our basic human conditions. If we start at 0 as a morally grey balanced position. The number of consequences included in your calculation will increase the quality of the outcome/conclusion. The more you rationalize around the act, the more accurate you can predict its moral nature. The more on the plus side you get, the more morally good the act is, the more on the negative, the more morally bad it gets. But nothing can be deductively good or bad by itself.

Such calculation incorporates the grey areas of morality and the only constants used are fundamentals of the human condition. If the outcome is close to 0, then we can only conclude that it might be good or bad, that it is an unknown moral value until more data is input. We can also input a bonus value for doing the calculation. If the moral act is calculated to the best of the ability of the agent of the act, then that is worth a point in itself. Since that agent takes the epistemic responsible choice of trying to calculate the morality of an act.

- Human basic conditions are the constants
- Individual consequences are the variables.
- Calculate the variables according to the constants to find out their positive or negative value.
- The more variables there are, the more accurate the final moral score is.
- The act of calculating is itself a positive value and more valuable the more accurate the calculation
- Getting an unknown at 0 is also a valid outcome that incorporates the unknown conclusion as a conclusion in itself and at that point the choice is the same as a coinflip without valid positive or negative judgment of the agent.

What moral choice to take is therefore always consolidated down to "do the calculation". You cannot act according to anything that points out an ought. What is, is the constants and collective of consequences, what oughts are the conclusion based on the variables calculated out of the constants.

So the way to act morally good is to act according to a positive stance in the algorithm and by always calculating acts with this algorithm. But nothing of this becomes a universal law, if not the algorithm itself being closest to be one for the human condition.

To handle all exceptions is equivalent to having no exceptions. Put simply, the ultimate goal of moral theorists is to develop an absolute moral theory! — TheMadFool

But an absolute moral theory is impossible with extreme variables. It's a desperate attempt at trivializing psychology, behavior, culture. The only true moral theory is one that needs to be a legion of interconnecting ideas. A web of actions and reactions that without breaking the line of rational thought, balance each other into harmony.

You can universalize that murder is wrong, but you can also universalize that killing someone to help another is morally justified. If everyone killed someone to save another, that is a complex grey area that isn't as easy to prove to be impossible to universalize. The same goes for stealing food to help a child. If everyone stole food to help children, isn't that also pretty universalizable? We could speculate that this would make other people go hungry, but then steal more food to help those children and such a universalized law would be systemic without hurting any more or less than a system where the child dies of starvation because you cannot steal food for them.

Absolute moral theories can only be applied if the moral act is simplistically basic, and no moral acts are in reality simple. Therefore we have all the different analogies and examples proving against most fundamental moral theories.

While I think there are merits to most fundamental moral theories I think that the key to something universal is to create an interconnected web that creates a synthesis of them or parts of them. A neural network of variables that work in tandem rather than trying to be absolute in simplicity.

I'm generalizing, but the reason we never find out anything universal is that morality is a human invention that is changing through culture, time, and psychology. We can only find true similarities between different moral ideals by looking at the things transcending culture and opinion. Empathy, pain, suffering, joy, happiness etc. We can universalize these emotions and feelings, the core nature of a human. But we cannot universalize concepts based on inventions and ideas that we create. Those shifts too rapidly over the course of history. If a world breaks down and society caves in on itself and there are no agreed-upon laws and rules anymore, then you could easily universalize stealing as that is the only form of feeding yourself and your loved ones and if everyone does it in this context it can be an agreed law of morality that is as justified as anything else. If something is going to be universalized, it needs to work in any form of existence for the human race, it cannot be universalized only for the established status quo of society. Otherwise, you would need to establish that you can only universalize a moral concept based on a specific society it is built upon.

A moral theory that survives all different variations of humanity's existence can only be formed upon the basics of the human condition. That is the only universal law for human morality. Examine what it is to be human, then form morality out of that. A web that incorporates all parts of the human condition, psychological, emotional, physical, combined with our ability to rationalize.

I'm not talking about Sam Harris nonsense where we use neurological data to pinpoint a "moral landscape", but instead a way to universalize moral around the only concepts that are actually universal throughout history and culture. It's also the only way I can see past the is-ought problem. But it also requires having an active rational mind rather than fall back on a spreadsheet of moral laws. Because it's not a one-sentence formula, it is a web, a multidimensional interconnected "algorithm" that shapes according to the situation based on fundamental human cornerstones. I think that most things in ethics philosophy are fundamentally broken as it is built upon an idea that the human concepts is in itself universal. The only universal thing about humanity is the fundamentals of our condition, nothing more or less. Anything further becomes an invention, anything less becomes indifference.

I care for the future and I think idiots and morons preventing progressive ideas that will be norms and standards of the future is a futile mockery of humanity. I don't wish for immortality for fear of death, but would like to live long enough to witness what we will become.

I have hope humanity grows up, but right now, too many morons rule parts of our world. Let them die, by old age or stupidity, then the world of tomorrow belongs to the people who have gone past the ignorance of the past.

I have no sympathy for the bullshit of the current. It collapses in on itself and then I'll just eat popcorn and wait for the next show.

No one actually thinks about hundreds and thousands of years into the future. For most people, it's just masturbation to dive into such fantasies. A dream, something unreal. But for those who actually care about the future of humanity, it's hard not to despise the trivial behavior of humanity right now.

In the perspective of millennia before us, how trivial everyone becomes.

If someone lives by themselves, isolated with limited to no interaction with other people, they can refuse and have freedom of choice to get or not to get the vaccine as it won't affect herd immunity.

If, however, someone is living in close proximity with other people, i.e in cities and more saturated communities, they cannot. By placing yourself in a crowded area, you will have a mandatory responsibility for other people's well-being. If you are a risk by just existing and taking part in social and other interactions within a society, you will have a demand on you to lower that risk. You cannot demand to be part of a large crowd of people if you are at risk of infecting them without knowing it. Therefore you have to take the vaccine, it's not a choice.

You already made the choice by settling in a crowded area.

However, the vaccine for COVID-19 is actually not preventing the spreading of the virus. It prevents you from getting seriously and mortally ill.

Face masks protect others.
Vaccine protects yourself.

So in this case it doesn't matter if you get the vaccine or not. Maybe a little as we've seen a slight lowering of the spread due to the vaccine. So there might be some effect, but it's generally for protecting yourself. This means that if you refuse the vaccine you are at risk of becoming seriously sick.

So, if you are at the risk of dying, refuse the vaccine, and become a strain on medical personal, then maybe we can see it as putting yourself at an unneeded risk, and as a consequence, you take the place of someone who actually needed that care.


However we twist and turn it, vaccines help fight the suffering and in some ways block the spread. It is immoral to refuse the vaccine if you live in crowded areas, but it's even more immoral to get the vaccine and then just live recklessly without regard of the risk of spreading anyway.

The moral action to do, if you live in a city especially, is to get the vaccine but still follow the precautions CDC and similar organizations around the world have put out.

Refusing will risk other people, but mostly yourself, but even if you get seriously sick or even die you will block other people who actually needed medical care but couldn't because you didn't get the vaccine and became ill.

The risks of the vaccine are statistically low and most people pushing the seriousness of these risks don't have the necessary knowledge to analyze statistics or follow biased opinions with little care for actual reality.

Not sure your analogy changes anything or clarifies anything. The general point he makes is that in a society where everyone follows Kantian ethics, we would not have any murders, because everyone follows this moral thinking. It's too absolute. The same goes for utilitarianism, it's too absolute to work in practice.

Morality is a tier list. You can take a moral act and divide it into fractions of more or less acceptable. A brutal sledgehammer murder of an infant can with some certainty be positioned as an absolute immoral killing. But kill someone who is just about to do it is not. This tier of different variations is easy to sense within a human's capability of empathy. We can absolutely figure out if something is considered justified or not justified and in turn where on the moral tier of killing it ends up. It also guides us to sense what is right or wrong.

The domino effect of this also informs how to process attempts at influencing someone to kill. We are then able to spot the justifications and methods used by someone to influence someone else to kill.

The problem in ethics rarely has to do with figuring out what is a moral or immoral act. More often than not it mostly attempts at inventing thought experiments that put moral thinking into paradoxes through thought experiments. But such paradoxes are not possible to apply to actions, and judging someone's moral act by how paradoxical the event was is not how we process ethics in real life.

The traditional Kantian thought experiment of the murderer asking you if your friend is in your house so he can murder him and the act of lying can make the murderer by chance find your friend is filled with so many variables to the act of lying and murder that it is impossible to apply to any real scenario.

What makes something immoral is if we act with destructive biases, extreme selfishness, lack of empathy, randomness in choice etc. It's how we process morality that defines if something is immoral or moral. How we process each situation before a choice. We cannot be judged for the consequences of a choice since it requires knowing the future, we can only act upon what we know.

This is why I am fond of the idea of epistemic responsibility. To rate morality based on how much thought has gone into a choice. A person who evaluates, to the limit of his ability, what the consequences of a choice are going to be. If epistemic responsibility has been taken and an unbiased, empathic choice with low selfishness has been taken, and the act is justified to cause as little harm as possible. That's the only act a human can accomplish that can be considered highly moral. All attempts at simplifying a moral choice down to either Kantian absolutes or utilitarian math fail because of this need to simplify ethics into an ideal.

People should try playing these types of games. Many people go around thinking they are morally perfect, but when playing a game where winning means utilizing concepts like slavery, occupation and terror it might put the assumptions of morality the player have into a thought experiment.

It's more or less like reading a story about an SS soldier's perspective and justifications, you don't do that to agree, but to broaden understanding and testing your own moral values.

If people won't dissect their own moral values, their ideas, and only shield themselves by ignoring everything around them that is in a collision course with those ideals, then how do you truly know yourself?

Why am I not surprised? Feels like deja vu all over again.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-palestinians-un/un-rights-chief-bachelet-says-israeli-strikes-on-gaza-may-be-war-crimes-idUSKCN2D80YQ

Apologists of Israeli actions during this current conflict and the decade-old occupation rarely pass the veil of ignorance when forming arguments.

The responsible way to do this is to actively question your own knowledge. When doing so, the facts presented about the conflict, as it is today, becomes clear. Anything else is bias and denial.

My feeling is that the tolerance towards posts and threads that aren't even close to having philosophical quality has increased. Which means the kind of evangelical religious stuff, racist apologist low-quality posts, ad hominems, and BS posts that destroys any quality focus on a specific topic just keeps going. When I first looked for a forum like this and found this forum, it felt like a place that got rid of the usual internet idiots and morons in favor of a better quality discussion for complex topics. But it feels like since my initial experience, the tolerance of idiots and morons has gone up and it's close to impossible to see a discussion that doesn't just let some rabid idiot go on a crusade.

If I were to recommend moderators to improve on one thing, it would be to clean up the place. There are far better places for evangelical nuts, racist apologists, and people who don't even know what philosophy is. 4Chan-like forums and Reddit threads dedicated to that kind of stuff, instead of clogging up this place.

I'm surprised at the level of black and white fallacies being posted here. This is a philosophy forum and the biases and fallacies going on in this thread just make this whole forum look like garbage. Why is it that whenever someone criticizes Israel's killings of children, civilians, using banned white phosphorus attacks, the apartheid control, and the extreme magnitude of kills compared to what Palestinian rockets manages to do, all the Israel military apologists just screams "so you support the rocket killings by Hamas, huh??"

Never seen such fucking low-level discussion in a place dedicated to rational thought. Maybe 4-chan kind of forums is a better intellectual level for some in here. I thought this was a place to have a higher level of discussion, but I guess I was wrong about that.

Didn't Israel use white phosphorus attacks on civillians a few years back? Not only is killing civilians by targeting civilian targets a war crime, but the use of white phosphorus is also a war crime even against military targets.

Anyone defending the tactics and behavior of Israel against the Palestinian people either doesn't know anything of what is going on, or they are extremely biased to the western anti-Islam narrative and won't dare to comment in fear of being called an antisemite.

Not being able to criticize a nation's behavior in this way is the reason the conflict keeps going. If the world were to ignore the self-victimizing behavior of Israel and the black and white fallacy-driven apologists of Israel's behavior against Palestine, then Israel would be pressured out of its blatant crimes as a nation.

Maybe the media and people could pay a little more attention to actually asking and visit Palestine in order to get a balanced side to the whole conflict, instead of automatically just accept the Israel perspective first and maybe change that opinion later in the rare occasion there's blatant proof, like the white phosphorus attacks.

In conclusion, there's no denying the crimes Israel is doing here, there's no denying the unbalance of this conflict. The Palestinian people are extremely pressured and controlled by Israel that there's no wonder some shoot homemade rockets. You don't have to condone or condemn these actions in order to understand why it happens. People rarely ask the question "why" something is going on, only that it "is" going on. If we were to start with knowing why some Palestinians shoot home-made rockets into Israel and understand that it comes from a source of desperation, we would see the causal line of events.

If Israel keeps taking land, evicting Palestinians to build luxury homes, control the movement and freedom of the Palestinian people, harass, assault, and even kill Palestinians through their totalitarian control of them, then how can desperate acts of violence by the Palestinian people be a surprise to anyone?

And how can anyone even say that Israel is the one defending itself? How seriously skewed is the logical thinking if that is the conclusion to anything? Palestine acts in desperation, they want freedom and to be their own nation. Israel denies that to them. Even though there is a portion of people who rage religious battle about key land areas and parts of Jerusalem, most inhabitants just want to live in peace. But they are denied that.

It's like if Canada all of a sudden shut down all airports in the USA, no one in the USA is able to move around as they please, they need to have special IDs, they can't leave the country unless being put through months of paperwork and can only do so by traveling to Canada's airports. All while risk being shot or assaulted on the border by "reasons". All imports and exports are prohibited and controlled by rations and sometimes Canada cuts the power grid. If any citizen of the USA were to speak up or try to fight this thing by building their own weapons, the retaliation is to bomb major civilian city targets with white phosphorus causing massive civilian casualties with globally banned weapons of war. All while the rest of the world turns a blind eye because they have trade agreements and good diplomatic bonds with Canada while thinking the USA just have a lot of people who might be terrorists under a degenerate religion.

That allegory should really show how skewed this whole thing is. There's no denying the fact that Israel is in the wrong here. There's no tangible argument for defending Israel's actions. There really is no debate once people abandon their biases and fallacies and look at the facts. Period.

Mind is to brain as digestion is to guts. Digestion is not a single state of the gut, but what the gut does from teeth to arse hole. Digestion is not the very same thing as gut; mind is not the very same thing as brain. Mind is what the brain does. — Banno

The irony of this is that we have neuron connectors outside of the brain down at the gut level, which means a mind that's dislocated from the gut of that body might change into a different mental state. Our guts shape much of who we are as "part" of the mind. So calling someone an asshole might even be literal in some cases :rofl:

Other than that I think you are spot on with your allegory.

The mind is not a single entity, not singular nor "many". It's a result, a consequence of all processes going on. The problem is that we try to "view" our own mind from the outside, get a sense of where it is, but we can't because it is like viewing the inside of our own eyes. We can't invert our vision inwards to see how our vision works and even if we could we would only see details of what makes our eyes work, never grasp the entirety of it in a visual perceptive state.

I always find that talking about mind and perception works best in allegories of computers. In this case, think about a computer with all its components. We can examine each one of them, we know what the graphics card does, we know the power supply, the hard drives, processor, RAM, motherboard etc. But when we turn on the computer, there's this "magic" happening. We can see movies, play games, write philosophy posts online. What we see on the screen is the "mind". It is a consequence of all components working together, but we cannot find "where it is", we can only view it as a result of the components working. And if I were to rip out a RAM board or block the cooling fans, the computer will "get sick", it will not function well, even die completely. If I hit the hard drive with a hammer, I might see blocks of bad code corrupting the "mind" I see on the screen, but I don't know exactly why just that code gets corrupted, or why a part of the "mind" degrades while something else doesn't.

Thinking about our minds in the same way, we can both see how the brain works but not be certain of how the mind relates to all those functions. We just know that the mind and perception are a result of those components.

Our mind cannot view itself, because the mind is not something that can be viewed as a single entity. We have to think about it as a flow of consequence from our components functioning together. Our perception and rational reflection of this process get interrupted in a feedback loop of reacting to the thought of reacting.

We cannot view the inside of our own vision, but we know it is a result of the components linked to vision; the mind is just a bigger version of that same concept and because it's exponentially more complex as such a concept, we have a harder time grasping all of it.

Do atheists actively not want God to exist? — Georgios Bakalis

I would love for a just and good god to exist, I don't actively want there to be no god, I just interpret reality as good as it can be interpreted. But what I would want or what I think would be nice to exist has nothing to do with it really. As an atheist, you take reality for what it is, no more no less. Why give credit or blame to something that there's no proof of existence when we can arrive at conclusions much more rational and close to the truth by actually analyzing reality around us? It's not only nicer to actually know something, it's also more practical for human needs and wants.

So, I don't really want there to be or not to be a god, the question is really phrased wrong since it assumes there is a binary way of living with either wanting there to be or not to be. The third option is to not even think about it like that, just accept reality around as it is, in itself. There's no lack of beauty or lack of explanations for horrific things by ignoring the idea of a god. Reality and the universe is enough as it is.

So a death in this plane of existence would be analogous to removing a grain of sand from a mountain of sand? Theoretically speaking of course. — Steve Leard

Pretty much.

The problem is that the many worlds scenario, in scientific rationality, would mean that any event in the entire bubble of reality that we are in, in the entire universe, can split into two possible worlds. So any sub-atomic particle in the entire universe that moves in any direction means that another world has this particle move in another direction. By just calculating this in our head, there is an infinite number of worlds where the only thing different between them is one particle, in one part of the universe, moving in another direction than our own. So to have other worlds where we live other types of lives, are alive or dead etc. are notions that are so absurdly astronomical as differences that it's impossible to really find any relevance to them. It would be impossible to find them really.

Philosophy is the foundational questioning that ideas are built upon. Much of moral philosophy and modern politics are based upon philosophical ideas, questions and solutions. Philosophy is playing the long game, it shapes society over time.

In terms of the short run, like during this pandemic, there are numerous moral philosophers who help hospitals with how to judge who's getting treatment when capacity is over the limit. These kinds of hard questions rarely work without any kind of moral philosophy groundwork.

The problem with science is that all areas are niched. It's a spearhead that is focused directly at a small area that is then applied to fit into a whole. But you cannot get a full picture, analysis of the consequences, putting together the pieces and how they relate to totally other areas of existence. Take for example the nuclear bomb. It was developed by scientists, scientists utilized the splitting to make power plants, but no scientists truly analyze the consequences of any of it, other than a small remark here and there. It's philosophers who analyzed the post-bomb state of the world, who informed about the consequences and guidelines that are pretty much in place today that prevent total annihilation.

Philosophy questions and informs, science examines, then philosophy once again questions and informs and the cycle continues. Anyone saying science has made philosophy irrelevant doesn't seem to understand what philosophy is or how it works in academia.

Just a quick interjection... this statement suggests to me two things: (1) a non-repetitive robot is conscious, (2) a non-repetitive robot is incredibly difficult to build. Both 1 and 2 are dubious. — InPitzotl

Without context, yes, but a non-repetitive robot, in this case, is about non-repetition in adaptive behavior, meaning, it doesn't randomly repeat different things. It doesn't randomly repeat after each similar input, but based on the experience of past outputs, deliberately acts differently because of it. It reflects upon past outputs as reactions to the input and doesn't repeat the same output again, but instead adjusts the output based on new experiences and knowledge. Robots today can do this, but always in a quantifiable way, we can always see the iterations, even version them. But when a P-zombie robot mimics a human to the point we cannot measure it being different from a human, it is already to the point conscious that it cannot be a P-zombie.

A non-repetitive behavior does not equal consciousness, but adjustable behavior over time that leads to deliberate non-repetitive behavior that is unquantifiable over time, should be on the same level as consciousness in a human.

The point being, that in order for this behavior to take form of a perfect mimic of a human, it requires the same internal life that a human has, otherwise the behavior will be repetitive or so different it cannot be a mimic of a human, it would act totally different as seen in complex AI experiments.

In order to make a P-zombie, it requires a complexity of internal processes that by the time it reaches that level it is no longer a P-zombie, but another human, or consciouss replica of a human.

But the question is, what if there was a chatbot that passed the Turing test? — SolarWind

This is why Ex Machina is a good philosophical case study. The whole premise is that a chatbot can accurately be made to fool the Turing test, but the real test is to study a robot you know is a robot and determine if it is conscious or not.

We could argue that complex consciousness and choices out of it is just a form of synthesis between different inputs. The robot sees coffee for the first time, use data that informs that coffee is good, smiles and takes a sip, input taste, combines that taste with a recorded input from the past when a similar taste as coffee was tasted but spiked with extreme acidity, concludes that coffee is not good - reaction to tasting coffee is: "I just remembered, I don't like coffee".

Such a reaction might seem like a very complex reaction to tasting coffee. A reaction that includes memory, ability to be wrong in the first decision to taste something seemingly tasting good, The structure of this reaction sounds like how we perceive memory, but there's no indication of the experience being as we experience it.

However, the causal line of such internal processing of reactions and choices becomes an infinite web that by the time it creates a foolproof system, the complexity becomes the same as normal consciousness. It cannot, therefore, be less complex than consciousness and still pass as consciousness. By mimicking consciousness, it already has become conscious.

We have AI systems today that actually does this type of synthesis. All those "art by AI" images that are AI's taking images and creating something new, do this and without input as to how it should combine them. But it's not doing so in a way that is a reaction to an emotional request. If you ask it to paint a house that feels like a morning in spring when you have just fallen in love, it cannot create an interpretation of that request and even if it is more complex as a system and does so, it will do different versions every time you request it, or won't be able to change after a time of meditation on the nature of love.

A P-zombie does not survive the ship of Theseus, since it cannot adapt its behavior after a time of experience without having a consciousness that can process that time and experience. A P-Zombie is fixed in time and will always fail to simulate as long as it lacks consciousness.

Ava smiles in a scene when she is alone, no one observing her, reacting to nature. Why is she smiling?

Behavior can't exist without consciousness and P-zombies can't exist without behavior.

That is the right question. And the answer is: We can't know, because we don't have a bridge from the third-person perspective to the first-person perspective. Quite simply, both possibilities are conceivable. Likewise, p-zombies are also conceivable. — SolarWind

But we can make conclusions in third person, through studying the choices of the subject. Ava can't make choices that adapt over time without having a consciousness. Adaptive behavior requires internal processing and emotional awareness, otherwise, we get repetitive behavior that is easily spotted as having no internal thought behind them.

All that remains, that is the similarity principle. The more similar something is to us, the more likely we are to assume the first-person perspective. But the similarity principle is not a law of nature like others. — SolarWind

That requires us to attribute something to us that we assuming is missing in the subject. If the subject displays all the actions and behaviors that require the same foundation as our own behavior, it is the same as us. If they don't, they won't act as us.

If you copy my body into a robot form that is programmed to act entirely as I do based on a behavioral prediction algorithm of me. It will mimic me in the first minute, then start repeating itself while I adapt and change my behavior pattern. Without consciousness, without any internal mental processing of experiences, both emotionally and systematically, the P-zombie would not be able to behave as me at all, because we can't separate behavior from consciousness.

P-zombies require they can uphold the illusion of being a human over the course of time. But even the most complex P-zombie robot would not be able to sustain such an illusion for long. So by observing choices and behavioral changes, it would be possible to spot a lack of consciousness or not, and if not, they aren't P-zombies by that definition, because they can't be.