are you saying that you would not accept any of these historical justifications for anti-natalism as a proper moral argument, or are you focusing exclusively on the the ones in this thread? — Joshs

I do not know what normative force (NF) is, but maybe we don't need to go that way. I will assume there is such a thing, and that it is somehow, someway, more compelling than mere collective agreement. So, would you allow that arithmetic has NF? the idea being that if NF, then relativism is ruled out. — tim wood

And let's block here any form of nihilism. He or she can deny up is up or down is down, represent that up is down, or say that 2+2=5. But the nihilist annihilates truth, and in this truth is presupposed. Our job then, as best we can, to identify it, and to satisfy ourselves that what we think is true, actually is; and then to see if in virtue of being true it possesses NF. — tim wood

No doubt feeling can add verisimilitude, but is itself an imitation of NF. What is left? I find reason. Do you find anything different? And reason must be before experience, because experience cannot create reason — tim wood

"We hold these truths to be self-evident." We had better, or we hold no truths to be evident at all. — tim wood

We can sample it, but for immersion you have to go there. — tim wood

The helmetless rider in traffic harms no one, until he is subject to the routine accident that every experienced rider assumes, knows, will happen sooner or later. But for the helmetless rider, the accident that may have just scraped some denim and maybe some skin, that he should bounce up and walk away from, is instead death, whether a living death or a dead death. At the least is a devastated family. And nearby is a rehabilitation hospital that takes on brain-injury cases, and that care is so long and expensive only the state and federal government can afford it, i.e., me for sure and maybe you!

The helmetless spirit inhabits every level where there is ignorance or stupidity. And in a crowding world, mere personal moral failure becomes offense in fact. — tim wood

I’m assuming your formulation of moral consensus based on natural
grounds wouldn’t be accepted by someone like Rorty because he would consider the notion of the natural
to be itself ungrounded in anything but contingent pragmatic use. — Joshs

Reduction of harm seems a good place to start, as I think both parties agree that in some respect, this makes sense. It is more about the context and circumstances and thresholds of how much that difference start taking place. — schopenhauer1

I can't make out the point of your post. As to "normative force," — tim wood

I think the logic of the thing compels agreement. — tim wood

it's literally just you trying to say that antinatalism is not a moral theory. — khaled

Any definition of “morality” in the descriptive sense will need to specify which of the codes put forward by a society or group count as moral. Even in small homogeneous societies that have no written language, distinctions are sometimes made between morality, etiquette, law, and religion. And in larger and more complex societies these distinctions are often sharply marked. So “morality” cannot be taken to refer to every code of conduct put forward by a society.

In the normative sense, “morality” refers to a code of conduct that would be accepted by anyone who meets certain intellectual and volitional conditions, almost always including the condition of being rational. That a person meets these conditions is typically expressed by saying that the person counts as a moral agent. However, merely showing that a certain code would be accepted by any moral agent is not enough to show that the code is the moral code. It might well be that all moral agents would also accept a code of prudence or rationality, but this would not by itself show that prudence was part of morality. So something else must be added; for example, that the code can be understood to involve a certain kind of impartiality, or that it can be understood as having the function of making it possible for people to live together in groups.

As we’ve just seen, not all codes that are put forward by societies or groups are moral codes in the descriptive sense of morality, and not all codes that would be accepted by all moral agents are moral codes in the normative sense of morality. So any definition of morality—in either sense—will require further criteria.

Let us take the question: Ought I to wear black shoelaces or brown shoelaces to the market? I would say this is 100% not a moral consideration. However an elder of the Latter Day Church of Black Shoelaces might strongly differ with me on this. — Kenosha Kid

I think that my definition of a moral premise perfectly fall within that range. At least one other guy here thinks so: — khaled

I've given you my defintion already. You then ask me "where I got it from". I don't know how to answer that question. Where did you get yours from? — khaled

Now we know something is the case: either you're wrong or Kant's wrong. And for Kant to be wrong, it must be on his terms. — tim wood

Where it is legal, many motorcycle riders do not wear helmets. (As a long-experienced rider I am well aware of the charms of helmetless travel, and recognize that there are limited situations when it is relatively safe - traffic not one of those situations - my bona fides and biases up front.)

But what is wrong with it? Simply the heightened risk of being killed or catastrophically injured in an otherwise minor accident of the sort motorcycles are subject to, at a cost the victim cannot himself bear. That is, he, usually a he, hurts everyone, and some greatly. There can be no such freedom to either cause or unreasonably risk such harm.

And I think the logic of the thing compels agreement. — tim wood

You make it sound like there is some set definition of the word. — khaled

That it can be a moral commandment? Because it is talking about what you should do, and is done for its own sake. — khaled

undoing 10mm nuts can be a moral commandment, though a very stupid one. — khaled

freedom is not at all freedom from duty. — Echarmion

So "you should use a 10mm spanner if you want to undo a 10mm nut" is a moral claim? — Isaac


If you were to also propose some moral duty to undo 10mm nuts, then yes that would be a moral claim. Otherwise it is instructions. — khaled

moral rules are followed for their own sake — khaled

Ah so that's where the misunderstanding is. I've been using "moral" in the descriptive sense. — khaled

Firstly, It's not my claim - I'm using it as an example (one I have a good deal of sympathy with, mind). — Isaac


My claim is that it is community co-operation. — Isaac


Sure.... — khaled

There are clearly reasons (natrualistic explanations) for why we favor this or that moral premise but there are no justifications to favor any. To say those are the same things would be a naturalistic fallacy. — khaled

In the normative sense, “morality” refers to a code of conduct that would be accepted by anyone who meets certain intellectual and volitional conditions, almost always including the condition of being rational. That a person meets these conditions is typically expressed by saying that the person counts as a moral agent. However, merely showing that a certain code would be accepted by any moral agent is not enough to show that the code is the moral code. It might well be that all moral agents would also accept a code of prudence or rationality, but this would not by itself show that prudence was part of morality. So something else must be added; for example, that the code can be understood to involve a certain kind of impartiality, or that it can be understood as having the function of making it possible for people to live together in groups. — SEP - The Definition of Morality

a) what features of certain normative claims make them 'moral' ones — Isaac


If they are about how you should act. — khaled

So I guess "ethical egoism" is not about morals then? — khaled

A fourth argument against ethical egoism is just that: ethical egoism does not count as a moral theory. — SEP - Egoism

And neither was whatever Kant was doing. — khaled

I think your claim is ridiculous because many (if not most) things we call "moral theories" do not have the community co-operation as an end goal, and often have cases where they favor other values (freedom, sanctity of life, whatever) over the community. — khaled

No, my claim is that the "if you want..." component is arbitrary. "If you want community cooperation" works. So does "If you want to respect the freedom of the individual". etc. — khaled

How is this a natrualistic argument? I didn't say "We should not want to harm others without their consent because it is natural".

If you mean to say that we have no reason to favor "Avoid risking harm to others without consent" over "Ensure the harmony of the community", I'd agree with you. — khaled

here is Professor Sir David Speigelhalter himself saying the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you are saying. You can make country comparisons, of course you have to understand how rough those comparison are, which I DO understand. Please listen the following interview to the end. — ssu

Where did you give the contrary evidence? I and you have not discussed or if you have given it earlier, so could you give a link to what you are referring to. It's an informative way would give links or simply to give the exact reason why and what is wrong. — ssu

I've not gotten the stuff you refer to, that governments can make statistics just what they want. — ssu

In my view Spiegelhalter isn't refuting or contradicting the pandemic. — ssu

Frankly, I find your whole "Let's follow this moral rule purely because it makes better societies" repulsive. — khaled

why do you make these features definitional instead of circumstantial? That's really the crux of the matter. — khaled

if the US would share similar percentages as Canada, it would have now only 125 000 deaths, not 330 000. Hence the simple fact is that policies taken DO MATTER. — ssu

Sure, we would need some sort of drive to do something to ever consider it moral or immoral, but simply having such a drive doesn't make the thing moral. — khaled

All he says is that were we a solitary species, the question of whether or not to steal would not arise. In that I am agreed. However, this does not indicate at all how a communal species (like us) should act. — khaled

it does NOT follow from that that the goal of morality is to establish such a community. — khaled

To think that since moral impulse X arose naturally due to [insert explanation here] therefore we must all believe in moral impulse X is textbook naturalistic fallcy. — khaled

Definitely not randomly. But that is different from having a justfication. All moral premises are by definition unjustified. Some work better than others at preserving the society. The societies that adopted the ones that work better have survived longer. — khaled

I can't understand why half the world is still crying, man, when the other half of the world is still crying too, man, and they can't get it together, man. — Janis Joplin

that that statement cannot be concluded from the mere fact that we have a drive to take what we want or from the fact that we have a drive to cooperate. — khaled

Which should be favored when? That's an interesting question. But restating that we have different impluses over and over again (like Isaac is doing) is not adding anything to the conversation. — khaled

At some point we determined some drives and responses as "better nature" and others as "selfish". This was not done by looking at our impulses. — khaled

What they were trying to do is find an inconsistency within the system itself. Failing to do that — khaled

Which seems counterintuitive. As a parent, I sacrifice for my children's future, I do not sacrifice my children for my future, nor my parent's future. I am baffled why the governments seem to function in direct opposition to this concept. I do not not of one grand parent that would sacrifice their grandkids' future for the chance to live another year. — Book273

Thanks for that. Looks pretty bad and a bit predictable. — Benkei

Yeah, there aren't statisticians in the World who would notice the differences in the reporting fatalities — ssu

hundreds of thousands of deaths can be simply reported just how the powers that be want them to be reported as so. — ssu

As if those doctors don't care what they write down as the cause of death — ssu

those who gather these statistics cannot be relied upon. — ssu

Has any research been done on that anywhere? — Benkei

Even temporary disruptions can cause long-term increases in TB incidence and mortality. If lockdown-related disruptions cause a temporary 50% reduction in TB transmission, we estimated that a 3-month suspension of TB services, followed by 10 months to restore to normal, would cause, over the next 5 years, an additional 1⋅19 million TB cases (Crl 1⋅06–1⋅33) and 361,000 TB deaths (CrI 333–394 thousand) in India, 24,700 (16,100–44,700) TB cases and 12,500 deaths (8.8–17.8 thousand) in Kenya, and 4,350 (826–6,540) cases and 1,340 deaths (815–1,980) in Ukraine. The principal driver of these adverse impacts is the accumulation of undetected TB during a lockdown. — The potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the tuberculosis epidemic a modelling analysis - The Lancet — Isaac

It's not a job if the standards are arbitrary. There's nothing to be done. Plucking a rule out of thin air is not a 'job' in any normal use of the term. — Isaac


I think the standards are arbitrary. Moral objectivists think they're not. Also there is no job called "ethicist" for this reason. — khaled

It's so bizzare to me that we are 17 pages in and you keep saying "Well actually, your view and my view are both caused by natrualistic means therefore there is nothing to talk about". — khaled

The mere fact that antinatalist premises make claims to be moral and that we can understand what those claims mean does not make then automatically right about that claim. — Isaac


Agreed. Now, we check the premises and check the reasoning. If we agree with the premises and reasoning then the conclusion must be true. — khaled

a) how this 'job of ethics' is to be done - what do we use to judge — Isaac


Arbitrary standards, again. — khaled

In the same way, figuring out why you favor this or that moral premise while I favor a different one does not say anything about the premises themselves, or which is better (if there is such a thing), or which is consistent. That is the job of ethics. That is what we are debating. — khaled

clearly we have had hundreds of uses of the word "moral" in context of antinatalism. So I'm not sure where your objection that the conclusion is "not moral" but is "just a plan" comes from. It could only come from arbitrarily deciding that one use of the word is "illegitimate" even though we have had threads going into hundreds of posts using it in the context of antinatalism.

We cannot 'work out' what counts as moral, it is already worked out by the ways we use the word, all we can do as individuals is describe that meaning. — Isaac


And as we said, the word has some room for error. And I think "having children is immoral" falls squarely within legitimate bounds of its use. You also think this, or you wouldn't have understood what was being said. It would have sounded like "having children is 134". But it doesn't. — khaled

'm quite confident that if the cause of any particular autoimmune disease was the presence of one type of molecule, that cause would have been found by now. — Metaphysician Undercover

Millions of doses were purchased by the federal government prior to the FDA approval. Should this be concerning? — creativesoul

Citations can always be cherry picked from diverse sources to support just about anything — magritte

What do we do when those clash? The answer to THAT is not natrualistic. You can explain the instincts and evolution behind both incentives but that doesn't tell you which one we should favor in which circumstance. That's the job of ethics. — khaled

the definition of the word, which is a community reflection of some grouping. — Isaac


What do you mean here? Just sounds like word salad to me. — khaled

Isn't that the reason for long term studies? I mean, isn't it the case that the reason we'll probably never know(this time around) is because we've neglected public safety protocols that have been in place for decades because we already know that such measures are necessary to insure we're doing everything we can to provide the safest possible treatment(s)? — creativesoul

Effectiveness is established in the labs in thousands of test tubes by mass laboratory techniques. Before they ever take a vaccine outside the lab effectiveness is already solidly established. — magritte

Viruses do not attack individuals or communities or the poor. — magritte

Long-standing systemic health and social inequities have put many people from racial and ethnic minority groups at increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19. — CDC

Viruses attack the entire extent of the human genome anywhere and everywhere even in the most remote regions of Earth, sooner or later. — magritte

Well then it's not arbitrary, is it. — Isaac


Arbitrary in the sense that there is no reason you should favor it over another one. — khaled

There is a naturalistic explanation for why we have the starting premises we do. However that does not invalidate using alternative premises. — khaled

Vaccinations have been disrupted for several reasons. Some parents are no longer taking children to clinics because of movement restrictions imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus or because they are scared about the risk of exposure to the virus. Health workers who provide vaccinations have also been diverted to help with the response to the pandemic. A lack of protective equipment means clinicians are reducing the number of people they treat.

Lockdowns and cutbacks in commercial flights have also led to delayed the delivery of some vaccines, leading Gavi to devote funding to ship vaccines around the world.

Then how does anyone learn what the word 'moral' means? — Isaac


By sharing the same arbitrary starting point. — khaled

On what grounds do we decide? — Isaac


Arbitrary ones. I think. — khaled

But not everything we are inclined toward doing is moral. That's the naturalistic fallacy. We are inclined to steal. We are also inclined to help the poor. One is moral one is not. Deciding which is ethics. — khaled

How can science shorten field trial periods from multiple years to less than a year, and remain confident that any significant, possibly deadly, side effects from a treatment have shown themselves?

If there are side effects that do not show immediately, but rather take years, and a very broad sampling size, to show themselves, then it is literally impossible to know about them over a much shorter duration with smaller less diverse sample sizes... — creativesoul