Dude is mentally ill, he’s psychologically incapable of stopping. Thats my guess. Some sort of personality disorder. So its a waste of time, but whatever floats your boat, just din’t let me catch you complaining he’s still around :wink:

My mistake, apologies.

Yet still you engage. Just stop feeding him and he’ll go away.

Nothing worse than a well fed troll. I don’t understand the masochism displayed by some of our more educated members to engage. I havent seen a single productive response from him.

Whats comforting is that death isnt the end. Fear of death is at the heart of every fairy tale about an after life. The exact nature of the afterlife is irrelevant to the comfort the fairy tale provides in this regard so I think the point you were responding to still stands.
Also, both Sumerian and greek mythologies have pleasant afterlife fairy tales to accompany the harsher ones, just like christian mythology has heaven and hell.

None of those are unanswerable. The question of whether god exists is answered, its just people who believe in god and certain types of fence sitters still carry on regardless, attached for whatever reason to the indefensible believer position.
Free will is a bit trickier I’ll grant you but I feel like its mostly a problem of definition of free will. If its defined as something outside deterministic forces, cause and effect but if the definition isnt magical and accounts for deterministic forces then sure, free will exists. As Hitchens used to say, we have free will becuase we have no choice
Lastly, life after death. Like god, this has been asked and answered. No, we have no good reasons to think there is life after death.
There is certainly things beyond human understanding, but none of the things you mentioned are. All understandable, all have fairly clear answers. Whether or not those answers can overcome indoctrinated belief or strong emotional bias is another matter.

Lol, ok.

I don’t know how to respond to that.

I was actually asking which courage you were referring, not being sarcastic or snide if that mattered in you decision to ignore the question.
Anyway, Can you elaborate on why lack of trust is a real moral problem? I don’t think of trust as a moral/ethic, so I’m curious.

What courage are you referring to?
Also, Its not cowardice to not trust someone in fatmans position. He has good reasons to sabotage if he is the type to sacrifice a bunch of other people to save himself.

True but he could act selfish in two ways: not deciding killing himself because he doesn’t want to or probably he could torch the dynamite and then kill the folks — javi2541997

And if he does the latter, who can blame him? He’s trying to survive after all.

Nah, just as for his consent. Giving him the dynamite only risks sabotage if he makes the wrong decision. :wink:

You’ve still done nothing more to defend your position.
Anyway, which assertion and why exactly is it insulting? Also, I cannot follow how your food scenario is analogous to the fatman blocking the cave scenario or my answers to it.

Im not a utilitarian, my reasoning wasn’t dependent on the greatest amount of good for the most people. I would say the same thing if it was fatman and only one other person stuck in the cave.
If you refuse to abandon him then that is your decision, you can die righteously beside him if you want.
If there are rescuers then dynamite is no longer the only option, so my answer would change depending on the details of the rescue. If I didn’t know there were rescuers my answer wouldn't change. You can change the scenario however you like and I will always be able to answer, right up until you change the scenario to become nonsensical or self contradicting at which point I wouldn't be able to answer without likewise being non-sensical or contradicting. Garbage in garbage out.
If the dynamite kills rescuers and I still cannot get out the indeed, bad luck. It wouldnt be due to the morality of using the dynamite.

:up:

The most egregious moral violation is fatman, who is clearly acting immorally and selfishly. The second worst violation is the man stopping the others from using the dynamite, for the reasons stated. The least egregious is the dynamite users as their action have good justifications both ethically and practically.
The only person who has clean hands and has made no moral violation is the person who abstains from dynamite use, doesn’t interfere with the others use of dynamite (except to offer his views I suppose) and does not exit the cave once the dynamite is used. He would die with full moral virtue.
That’s how I’d rank the moral decisions.

That doesn’t address what I said nor justify your position which you’ve been kind enough to repeat once again.
Is there something confusing about what I’m asking you?

What you shared is very important because it is something I was waiting for. Exactly, what can happen if we pass the buck? Imagine we do so and them there are different criteria. 8 hikers would think it is good to blow up the fat man but the other 8 not. This a dilemma inside the dilemma itself but as you perfectly explained one will do it anyway because at least one of them will give up about morals and them would blow him up.
Another scenario here could be if the losing of time debating if they should or not exploding him can actually kill them because they do not take solutions in extreme context — javi2541997

Its possible none of the people want to kill the fatman and in that case I see no moral violation, except that of the fatman. A moral person would volunteer to die to save the others and if fatman doesn’t then fatman isn’t acting morally.
Losing time to debate is more mismanagement and costly hesitation rather than a moral issue. Ideally the hikers will have spent some time on a philosophy forum discussing moral dilemmas to avoid the consequences of inaction :wink:

I simply hold they cannot morally kill the fat man without his permission. — ernest meyer

I understand that is your position, but it isn’t a morally sound position for the reasons I stated. You state your position but haven’t defended it.

:100:

Well stated sir.

If you choose to defend the fatman, which I take to mean preventing others from using the dynamite, then you are asserting your own morals not only over the morals of the other people but also over their lives. You are defending one persons right to life by violating the right to life of all the other hikers. This doesn’t seem at all different in principal than deciding to use the dynamite.
The only moral option if you truly feel like its morally wrong to use the dynamite is to abstain from the decision, making the decision not to use the dynamite for yourself. Then, if you are truly committed to making the correct moral judgements you would have to struggle with another moral dilemma; whether or not it is morally correct to exploit the dynamite use and exit the cave to save yourself. If you truly prioritise morals over life then you wouldn't exit the cave. If you do not, and instead exploit the immoral (in your view) actions for your own survival then you might as well have used the dynamite in the first place. You end up making the same moral violation anyway except the initial moral violation (using the dynamite) also saves the lives of a bunch of people. The latter moral violation (exploiting the immoral actions of others) only saves yourself. (Since you didn’t actually do anything to save the people, they saved themselves).

So I think in the end the fatman dying is the only morally sound way to do it. The other solutions simply pass the buck, shift the moral burden.

You blow the fat guy up. If he is willing to let so many others die so that he may live then he isn’t the kind of person worth sacrificing so many other lives for. Fat man would either choose to die to save the others or he is a cowardly, selfish person not worth saving.

Surely you realise how weak an explanation “its just how the universe works” is...
How do you know the lessons will save millions? By what metric did you measure the bad and good?
In what way can you even say the lesson has been learned? By who? There are still genocides, still horrors of all the kinds so where exactly are these lessons saving millions?
And again, how do you know it ends up equal?

If you loose your sense, never had past experiences of your reality but maintain your own awareness does reality still exist? — SteveMinjares

It may or not still exist, you would have no way of knowing. The reality you could confirm would be your experience of your own mind which requires no experience or senses to detect.

What role would logic, knowledge, faith and wisdom play to bring meaning? — SteveMinjares

Bring meaning to what?

Sure but opposites existing isn’t the same as “an equal amount of good and bad in everything”.
Even if you want to claim there is some good and some bad in everything, how did you determine that the amounts are equal?
What is the equal amount of good to the bad in the Holocaust for example?
Even if you want to change your claim to just a general one about good and bad existing in a ying/yang sense as opposed to a specific thing like the Holocaust then you still need to explain how you can draw the conclusion that the amounts are equal.

Really? How so?

Totalitarianism is always coming, will always be coming. The herald for its arrival is people thinking it’s not just around the corner, lurking.
We will know it has arrived in full force when what's around the corner is called by another name, disguised as benevolence.

True, though I would call that misinformation rather than ignorance. That there are bad actors trying to keep people ignorant is a whole other can.

I don’t think people are getting more ignorant, I think people seem more ignorant because the breadth of human knowledge is so much greater than an individual can know. Its not that ignorance of things is growing so much as the knowledge of things is growing. It’s the contrast of the individual humans ability to know things vs the breadth of the knowledge humans have breached as a species/civilisation.
Take technology for example...its advancing much faster than people are able to adapt to so there are huge gaps in peoples technological knowledge and expertise. I think other knowledge (facilitated by technology/internet) is like this too. There are so many frontiers of knowledge, so many areas of knowledge that humans seem to know so much less.
Basically human knowledge is leaving the individual behind.

:100:

Right, or any number of other examples. Good point.
Ok so say in Ireland then. You don’t think the hate was useful? I think it helped motivate, helped justify and helped the general fight. You could probably say the same of both sides, that hate had it’s uses.

I always thought that (the war) was more fear based. I agree hatred and fear often show up together or lead to each other...maybe those are two ends of a spectrum.

Hmmm, not sure. Having an active hatred isn’t the same as recognising evil so maybe not. You could just be a good person (recognising Hitler as evil) who doesn’t spend enough energy thinking about Hitler that they could be said to “hate” Hitler.

Was that hate or fear?

I think you’re overthinking it. Whats significant about hate is the reasons for it. Most people have recognise it’s ok or good to hate Hitler. Most people couldn’t care less if you hate the taste of Milk.
It’s the basis of hatred that is significant or not, most of the time.

I’m not trying to win, just asking a question and didn’t see where you really answered it. You avoided directly answering. Also, You don’t find discussing things fun?
Anyway, sure take a good mental note of my name and you can avoid wasting both our time in the future.

:chin: Some people believe science can be applied to the god question and some do not. But certainly, we can apply philosophy to the god question. — Athena

Basic logic and critical thinking, haven’t come across a god concept that passes even that simple test let alone a scientific one.

Now, what boundaries do you think we should set for the god question and why? Or, instead of boundaries, should we expand our understanding of the god question? Does not it begin with a desire to understand all of life? I certainly prefer expanding our understanding of the god question. I absolutely what to avoid the futile argument of if god exists or not because that is so repetitive and boring after several years of the same arguments again and again. — Athena

Well the right answer is always going to be boring and repetitive, that doesn’t mean we should ignore the right answer and make one up instead.
Also, the “does god exist question” isn’t futile. It’s actually really easy to answer. What might be futile is trying to get someone committed to the idea after a lifetime of indoctrination to listen but even that I dont agree with because people reason their way put of that delusion all the time. I couldn't call it futile for those reasons.
Again, you aren’t really answering my question. You want to talk about understanding all life and what that might mean then great but why call that a god question? Just make it the “life” question... that conversation doesn’t require “god” at all but you keep wanting to put “god” in there. Why?

I want new arguments. What is the unified force? — Athena

Is there a unified force? How do you know?

Ok, but I’m not asking why someone might use the term “god”. I’m being more specific, I want to know why you, a person who recognises that the term “god” is being used to describe not the usual characteristics of “god” but to describe something else for which we already have a name for yet instead of using that name still insist on calling it “god”.

I would say the shirt.

A complex series of variable repetitions. The way the thread is not the shirt.