It's difficult though to claim that the internal reflections are "out there" and consciousness is like a mirror. — Agustino

Yes, it is difficult. It is as difficult as denying that one can see one's face in the mirror - as if one were a vampire. :naughty: The image is clearly me, clearly there, clearly real - and yet it is clearly not there, not me, and virtual.

“... I’ve long believed that a society can be judged by how we care for its most vulnerable, the aged, the infirm, the disabled, and the unborn.”

That’s a beautiful articulation of both the pro-life movement and political liberalism at their best: advocacy on behalf of those too disadvantaged to advocate for themselves. (One might add “immigrants” to the list of those for whom society needs to care, but the statement is still powerful as it stands.) — LostThomist

You, me and Mike are of one mind in these beautiful sentiments. But this is not what you have been arguing in this thread. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand you to have been saying that abortion ought to be treated as murder. Now I perhaps need to point out to you that this is an ad hom against women who have abortions and doctors who perform them. It is rather the nature of moral arguments to have this character; to say that X is wrong is to say that people who do X are doing wrong. So you are arguing that a bunch of people are murderers. But in my own view, that it is an ad hom is not a valid criticism of your argument or of mine, that's the way the morality cookie crumbles.

I agree with you that there is a vast difference between advocating what we as a society ought to do and not do, and mandating every individual on pain of imprisonment or worse to do and not do these things.

So I quite like that I have the right not to let the homeless man into my house and feed and nurture him for nine months, and I am not seriously suggesting that I should be guilty of murder if he wanders in and I boot him out with the assistance of my bouncer pal and then he dies of exposure. But neither do I think much of your argument that a woman who ejects a foetus from her body with the assistance of a doctor is guilty of murder.

So on the one side we have beautiful sentiments that we can assent to in a vague way, without being mandated to act on them personally unless we freely decide ourselves to make that commitment, and on the other, we have onerous duties that you seek to impose by law, and I do not.

Clearly you see the cases as being very different, but the difference is not in the right to life of the individual in each case. I hope you can put aside your outrage for the purposes of having a think about what the difference is.

Thanks! :smile:

So the dotted lines are not there, and A' is not there where they are shown on the diagram. So I am saying that neurologists are looking for consciousness behind the mirror of the brain, and it is not there.

my argument is that all human beings regardless of Age, Environment/location,Size, Level of Development, or Degree of Dependency, is entitled to the same fundamental human rights to life. — LostThomist

So in other words...........if I support life when it comes to abortion why don't I also agree on socialist issues? Is that what you are arguing? — LostThomist

Yes. If the old, the sick, the pathetic, the insane, the unborn, all have the same right to life, then you have the same duty to support them as you seek to impose on mothers to be. And that is socialism, distinguished from individualism.

Where are other minds in relation to your mirror? Do we each have our own mirror? — Harry Hindu

Here is a ray diagram. Perhaps someone will paste it into the thread. There are no rays, and thus no images behind, or 'in' the mirror. One can locate the image, but it is not where one locates it. I am saying that one can locate consciousness in one's head, but it is not there. There is no 'behind the mirror' or 'mirror world', but everything is happening in the 'real', 'outside' world.

And as long as one is the only person in the world, there remains only the world. It is precisely when one mirrors another mirror - when one is mindful of other minds - that weird shit happens, and you start to see an internal world with an internal self looking at it and a homunculus in the inner world looking at it, with a homunculus's homunculus looking at the homunculus's internal world, and so on.

So when one asks 'where are other minds?', one can say that they are in other heads, or that they are in other posts, or that they are illusions, or that they are in one's own head, and none of these really answers the case. Just as the image of the tree is and is not in the lake, in the eye, in the mind's eye, in your computer, in wikipedia, and so on.

So the neurologist looks for consciousness in the brain the way a diver looks in the lake for the reflection of the tree, and comes up empty, because the reflection is and is not in the lake.

I just did. The whole post is self-reflective. Yet these supposedly internal reflections have reached you.

What I described is probably, unwittingly, more like the spirit of scientific inquiry: we have the best answers that we can derive from the available evidence, not any definitive, absolute, final answers; and nothing is inevitable (no teleology). — WISDOMfromPO-MO

While there is nothing much I want to disagree with there, it seems one sided. Whilst there may be no final answers, there must be provisional answers that are accepted as the starting point of any conversation. If we are talking about astronomy, we probably don't want to consider the possibility that the Earth is flat.

Likewise, if we are talking about feminism, we need to acknowledge that it has a history roughly along these lines (this is UK history, there are other stories along similar lines). If it is agreed that there has been a progressive development of equal rights from a prior state of inequality, then we can discuss whether or not we have arrived at the destination of equality, or there is some way to go, or we have overshot the mark to female dominance.

On the other hand, if you wish to claim, as a certain ex-contributor recently did, that women should not have the vote, then there is not much to talk about. We must have some common ground, and that discussion has been settled a while ago; though there are still flat-earthers out there, they are not worth talking to.

I've said it twice now, and no one will engage.

If, you want to protect the helpless, If you want to uphold a universal right to life, to protection, If you are a closet socialist who thinks we have unconditional obligations to help, sustain, and protect each other, why do you pick on the on this one obscure issue, that just happens, if you are a man, to be the one that requires nothing from you personally?

The Great Programmer created Mario, the princess, and Bowser, and Bowser is evil, while the princess is good. We are Mario, and should try to defeat Bowser. But it is not possible for Mario to judge the morality of the programmer.

I'm against eviction, but I don't think it should be illegal.

Here, for example is what one might call "social abortion". Shall we argue the toss about whether or not he counts as human? Shall we make it a littering offence or murder to discharge anyone to the streets?

Now, in this country there are too many women in the same state of homelessness, and yet we expect the to care for another life when their own life needs some care from others? It is shameful; the whole premise of this thread is shameful. Show your own care first folks, before you legislate the care that others owe.

How's about a general principle that when a person's personal space is occupied by another - specifically that person A is inside person B, then person B is entitled to evict person A, even if person B is unable to support themselves or find a new home? If it works for houses, it ought to work for bodies.

Personally I am against abortion, I think it is wrong. I find it repugnant. I think it is an abuse. Arguments about what counts as a person seem largely irrelevant, and there seems to me to be no hard line to be drawn.

But there are many things that I find abusive and repugnant; that rich countries let people freeze to death on their streets, that bankrupt companies pay bonuses and pensions to directors while worker's pensions fall into a void and subcontractors go unpaid.

But while society does not value motherhood, childcare, and the life of every person in society, (when I say value, I mean with bonuses and pensions, with status and income,) I do not see it as reasonable to pretend that every fertilised egg is sacred and has full human rights to starve in the gutter.

Indeed, I am a fairly smart and articulate cookie who has chosen to spend his life doing odd things like working to teach children excluded from schools for no pay, living in a experimental commune, working for a homeless charity, working for a disability charity. Just like Uriah Heap. :roll:

You can’t voice conservative views of sexuality and gender without being depicted as a reactionary. — Wayfarer

Fate worse than death?

Or worse than being depicted as "a psychiatrically disordered feminist LESBIAN - a thoroughly bitter and twisted, abnormal individual."?

I am not remotely humble. I put my life where my ideology is. I am the downwardly mobile son of an architect, and exile from the middle classes. But feel free to resort to ad homs in your attempt to sustain the unsustainable. It's about all you've got.

Doesn't sound like much of a plan. — Agustino

Well you might well say so, but that is something that deserves it's own thread. I guess your plan is 'get rich, get powerful, then implement a practical plan.' My position is that that plan is what got us here in the first place. But if you want to discuss that let's go somewhere more congenial than this Pinker v pinko thread.

I agree with Kant that allowing womens' suffrage was an act of sheer madness). — Dachshund

Yes. There you have it.

I'm very serious. This kind of pseudo intellectual so-called radical truth-telling is influential and gives comfort to the ungodly. I'm a retired night-porter, and my influence is limited to making posts here and there. Do what you can.

Oh, if you mean the problem of people starving, food is the solution. And food is readily available if we are prepared to countenance some redistribution.

Stop paying attention to Pinker and Peterson.

My mother had to give up her job when she married, because married women were not allowed to work in the bank. My grandmother did not have the vote for some years. My great grandmother had to give up her property on marriage. Now you may think that for my daughter radical gender equality prevails, but it is hardly insane to dissent from this.

I propose that there are structural social explanations for such supposed racial differences. For starvation, and equally for crime.

political correctness gone mad.

The overwhelming majority of people who starve to death are non-white.
— unenlightened
Why is skin color relevant to the problem of starvation if you don't mind me asking? — Agustino

It's a fact; now as an honourable conservative liberal truth admitting liberal, you do not want to deny the fact. As a postmodern neo-marxist degenerate, I might think that there are structural social explanations for the conjunction. But such social explanations are anathema to the pcgm brigade, so it can only be a racial difference.

The overwhelming majority of people who starve to death are non-white. Obviously, whites have a gene for being greedy bastards.

Yeah, he's not allowed to say what he just said, and if someone disagrees, it proves him right.

I am of course not allowed to say what I just said, and anyone who disagrees with me is proving me right.

But in my case I don't have a book to sell.

It has been deleted and it will remain deleted, — jamalrob

I'm very glad of that, and there are no grounds for any complaint since, by hypothesis, it has also not been deleted and will remain undeleted. Unfortunately, though, there are also grounds for complaint.

"Does anyone else suffer from 'no ego'?"

Not me!

So inevitably on a philosophy forum there's a trolley, probably a hospital trolley, with a flask of fertilised human eggs on their way to be implanted in some eager would-be mothers, and of course it is out of control and about to crash down a flight of stairs and spill all these very small people into the janitors mop bucket. And there's a fat bloke with osteoporosis and a really bad heart condition just in the right place for you to push him in front of the trolley. Unfortunately he will fall down the stairs and die, but the very small people in the flask will be saved and the would-be mothers will be very very grateful.

Push, or push not?

"In sum then, the charge should be laid to rest once and for all that the pro-life movement is not active on behalf of women, children, and vulnerable persons generally."

But that is not the charge. The charge is that people who want to dictate to women what responsibilities they should take not only with their bodies but for years thereafter, are less willing to take the same responsibilities in their own homes and lives. "I dictate to you your morality, but my morality is voluntary".

Comparing "me giving money to someone who is homeless or poor" to abortion is basically making the following argument......... — LostThomist

That is not the comparison. You giving money is cheap. I am asking you actually to take responsibility for the lives of others, as you expect women to take responsibility for the life of another. Your home, your care over years, not your mere money. Think you can buy your way into heaven?

For these examples to be parallel with abortion, one would have to set the scenarios up so that a homeless man or a refugee has his neck snapped by a doctor and is sucked into a giant vacuum cleaner, otherwise, they bear no resemblance to abortion.

Also, these examples you've given are ironically emotional appeals. — Thorongil

Unlike your post? What a ridiculous claim to make. The resemblance is that humans are suffering and dying through no fault of their own, and it can be greatly reduced by moralists doing something about it that will inconvenience them; that is they can take responsibility for another life. But the same people who fulminate against abortion do not want to take responsibility for any of the many unwanted children languishing in care homes, let alone people whose lives they could save.

Well that's what you get for mentioning 'he whose name I am fed up of hearing'.

But perhaps one does not need to identify the socio-economic disadvantaged beyond noting that they are disadvantaged, and thus one can avoid the whole argument about positive discrimination, intersectionality and the rest.

There is already a widely accepted redistributive system in place consisting of progressive taxation, inheritance tax on the one side, and government social support on the other. It should not be beyond the wit of wealthy nations to extend this internationally, at least to largely peaceful and open nations.

Those who cannot see that all their wealth comes from others, will not be convinced by any argument, and history counts for nothing when possession is ten points of the law. Exorcism of some sort must be applied to dispossess them.

It seems to me that these arguments always turn on an emotional appeal, a line being drawn between human/person and not, and a sort of legalistic argument about slippery slopes or whatever. Personally, I am not one to sing the praises of abortion, nor to bang on about the rights of women or of the unborn.

But I wonder, I really wonder why so much time is spent on this issue. Why are there no philosophers and no threads arguing that when a homeless person freezes to death while there are warm places locked up all around him, that is murder; that refusing your spare bedroom to a refugee is murder.

If it wrong for a woman to refuse to sustain and house someone in her body who has need, then it is wrong to refuse to sustain and house any person who has need. People are being neglected, suffering and dying all around you, but men like to focus on the one issue where their own innocence is assured.

What does that music have to do with Trump? — René Descartes

Dude I am the official provider of hysterical historical perspective.

Without actually doing it, It seems to me that you might manage along these lines:
assume P
assume (P--> ~Q)
Deduce ~(P & Q)

A sort of reductio.

Linked in my first reply. Curiously, I also just came across this, which might be relevant to the op, though I haven't read even the available extract yet.

Dawkins admits at the beginning of that book that genes are not selfish, and that they have no interests; the whole notion is an analogy. It's a shame he forgets it in what follows.

But if you think self interest is rational, then give me the rationale as to why your interests are more interesting than another's? I have never seen it done, but only assumed. To say that it is human nature is not to say that it is rational, obviously. The prisoner's dilemma demonstrates what follows from rational implementation of self interest, not that self interest is rational.

Why is Batman such a violent, punishing teacher? I wouldn't have him in my school.

Are you familiar with the Prisoner's Dilemma? Now personally, I take it to be a demonstration that self-interest is not rational. But supposing that self-interest prevailed universally, whenever such situations arose, and they arise very frequently, we would end up with the worst outcome instead of the best.

So if you are willing to think of moral behaviour as that which promotes the best solution for the community, rather than the individual, with a bit of hand-waving as to what the limits of 'community' are, then I think you have a basis for the motivation moral action in identification with others rather than with an isolated 'self'. I have an old essay about it if you want to pursue this line.

Sorry, forgot the irony alert. Here it is now:

:love:

people who are more competent than Dachsund or Cuthbert do not have proportionately more votes — Cuthbert

But we know what's best for you better than you do.

The only downside is that we probably do not care about it as much as you do, or indeed at all.