your objections are good ones. Natural selection is not about who is the most viciously competitive. The only thing that's relevant is spreading your genes to the next generation. Cooperation helps with that not only because it helps you survive, but because family members share some of your genes. So the survival of family members is a direct advantage. This concept is called "inclusive genetic fitness".

They didn't just pick any random philosopher, and there's a reason that the first section (not just essay) is "The Kantian Legacy." — Terrapin Station

There's also, presumably, a reason why the first section is specifically about Kant's legacy and not Kant's work itself.

If it's because "Kant is the jumping-off point for continental philosophy" somehow despite not being a continental philosopher in their estimation, how does that work rather than picking some other philosopher, like Hume? — Terrapin Station

It works just fine to say that the jumping off point is not itself a part of any branch. Though ultimately it's irrelevant anyways, since everyone agrees Kant is important. I was just wondering whether there was something specifically continental about Kant's philosophy.

Why wouldn't Hume be? A lot of Kant's work was in response to Hume, after all. — Terrapin Station

Why not pick any random philosopher? The first essay in the companion you cited isn't titled "Hume's legacy".

Holy moley. So why, in your view, was the entire first section of that continental philosophy companion about Kant/"The Kantian Legacy"? They just wanted to ramble on with some off-topic stuff before getting to the main subject matter? — Terrapin Station

Because Kant is the jumping-off point for continental philosophy?

Read that section of the Blackwell Companion that I referred to. — Terrapin Station

Were you referring to the introduction or the first essay? I read the parts of the former that were available, and it didn't seem to consider Kant a continental philosopher.

Im asking about choosing between death and death row. You implied that death row was the worse punishment, did I misunderstand what you meant? — DingoJones

The idea is that, as a punishment, death is absolute, so doing torture + death would just be adding gratuitous cruelty. It is, however, not possible to administer the death penalty without added cruelty, and that's one reason I consider it generally immoral.

That's leaving out the question under what circumstances it might be permissible to enact an absolute punishment.

Kant is considered the start of the division a la being the first continental-style philosopher, where other continental philosophy carried on in his wake, at least initially. — Terrapin Station

What's specifically "continental-style" about Kant? It seems to me he'd be among the more "analytic" philosophers of his time.

Do you think that people on death row would choose death over death row? If not, then doesnt that pretty clearly show which is the worse punishment? Why would people routinely choose the more torturous option? (Death row, according to you) — DingoJones

That's not really how the human psyche works. People can be extremely miserable and still also afraid to die. I don't think there is a good justification for inflicting that extra pain.

Anyway, so you don’t think life has intrinsic value but because you think personhood has intrinsic value then human life has intrinsic value because personhood is intrinsic to human life? (Excepting cases like being braindead where personhood has gone away)
Is that right? — DingoJones

Well the value of life wouldn't be strictly speaking intrinsic. But the distinction is fairly minute in most practical circumstances, unless we go beyond biological life.

Ok, so how does that inform your views? If life has no intrinsic value, what are your thoughts about suicide, or imprisoning the Mansons or Hitlers of the world rather than just killing them? — DingoJones

I think personhood has intrinsic value, so I am going to respect the life of people as a basic requirement for that. I think suicide is not a moral issue in and of itself, though it's problematic if you have a partner or children who depend on you. As to the issue of a death penalty, I think there are plenty of reasons not to have it - it's hugely costly to do properly, misjudgements are irreversible, it causes psychological harm to the people administering it and, perhaps most importantly, I consider being on death row a form of torture. That more or less leaves lifelong imprisonment as the harshest available sentence.

Well, I consider personhood to have intrinsic value. For the purposes of this thread, I'd stick with a standard concept of personhood, so humans have it, and maybe some other animals.

Whether or not that personhood is based on biological life or some other substrate is irrelevant in my opinion. So in that sense, I wouldn't say that life itself has intrinsic value.

I am, in fact. What I disagree with are the statist prescriptions. — NOS4A2

You're denying capitalism leads to escalating income inequality without some form of outside influence. That's a factual claim that made in the articles, not a prescription. You need to deal with this factual claim somehow.

What I agreed with is that income inequality is inevitable in a free market system. I do not think free markets result in the poor getting poorer. The poor are much richer than they were, say, 50 years ago, especially in societies built on free market principles. — NOS4A2

Then you are not, in fact, giving the quoted articles the "benefit of the doubt" as you claimed.

To me if you are framing it as about people having intrinsic value then you are talking about the merits/demerits of that life, where as Im curious about what value life is supposed to have absent those specific things that are encompassed by personhood. — DingoJones

So, to clarify, would your question apply to something like a synthetic mind? An uploaded brain or similar? That is are we talking about something specifically biological?

If you say making this about personhood is making this about merits/demerits, do you consider personhood itself a merit?

The basic idea of the golden rule is pretty useful, yes. — DingoJones

So, for something like the golden rule to function, you need to define who is and isn't a subject under the rule. And that is going to be a form of intrinsic value, since the golden rule won't function if you can arbitrarily exclude subjects based on what you consider merits / demerits.

So long as you continue to use terms like "white" "black" to describe humans, you continue to support the existence of racism as you sustain the categories of differentiation needed for racism to occur. — dazed

Does this also extend to other genetic expressions, such as eye and hair colour?

Describe their physical characteristics. — dazed

Pretty sure skin colour falls under physical characteristics.

If we taught our children that it was bad to use terms like "white" "black" "brown" etc, racism would eventually end. I have transformed my own conceptual world this way and it works! — dazed

As far as evidence goes, "it works for me" is pretty flimsy.

Do words not physically exist? Can we not say Harry Potter physically exists as a word in a book which is attached to our idea of Harry Potter? — Mark Dennis

That might get us down a rabbit hole concerning where the meaning of words resides. But yes, the Harry Potter books are physically real.

There's also a sense in which Harry Potter is a real character in the books, as opposed to, say, fan fiction.

Can anyone defend the assertion of this intrinsic value life is supposed to have? Why is my position, that the value comes from some kind of merit rather than from the life itself, the wrong one? — DingoJones

It sounds like what you're actually asking is "do people have intrinsic value". Life has the status it has because it's the most basic prerequisite to "being a person".

There's plenty of investigations into why people have intrinsic value. Do you disagree with the basic idea of the "golden rule"?

No amount of statism and legislation can correct inequality, and worse, we risk burying ourselves beneath more regulations and rules designed by technocrats, most of which already hinder our chance at income mobility. — NOS4A2

The linked articles make the opposite argument: That State intervention is necessary, because there is no intrinsic mechanism in a capitalist economy to keep inequality from rising.

How do you account for that finding?

When we say "fictional", we usually mean that something is not physically real, and the method to tell what's physically real is the scientific method. E.g. there is no evidence of a physical Harry Potter living in physical England, and hence we conclude Harry Potter doesn't exist. But "supernatural" means the same as "non-physical", so the answer to your question would have to be "no" by definition.

But what do you think? — jorndoe

Since this is a philosophy forum, I am obliged to ask what you mean by "real". Harry Potter is "real" insofar as I have a mental model of him as a character in my head.

I mean the definition at the time and now of Nonetheless and Notwithstanding to mean “Not hindered or obstructed by” seems pretty clear to me. — Mark Dennis

Sure. But I don't see how that supports your argument given the context it's used in.

Then there is the opinion of Lawrence Tribe of Harvard university to take into account. Experts in constitutional law would all point to this being an originalist, historic and contemporary literalist and Democratic interpretation, which are four of the standard methodologies used to interpret constitutional law by the judicial branch. I can’t even begin to think of what the modernist perspective might be and I’ve tried but I can’t think of a semantic counter argument to “Not hindered or obstructed by”. — Mark Dennis

As per the article you linked, Lawrence Tribe makes the same point I do: that Article 1, Section 3 merely clarifies that being convicted in an impeachment trial doesn't bar other legal trials. He brings up double jeopardy, which would be another reason for such a clarification.

He also goes on to argue that the lack of an explicit immunity for sitting presidents suggests that no such immunity was intended.

The whole DOJ line “Presidents are too busy to be answering to criminal indictments” but are not busy enough to not attend their senate trial is ridiculous to me and has no constitutional basis. It’s entirely undemocratic and completely compromises the systems of checks and balances put in place since the constitution was put into effect. — Mark Dennis

I don't think an immunity for the sitting president would be patently ridiculous, as long as this immunity could be removed by Congress.

Upon examination of the language used, we see the term “Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment”. Some defenders of the DOJ opinion have pointed to the past tense use of “convicted”, to mean after impeachment can come indictment. This comes from a complete misunderstanding of the word “Nevertheless” in both the times the document was written, and the usage of the word now being quite remarkably unchanged in modern dictionaries. — Mark Dennis

I don't find this line of reasoning convincing. The subject of the sentence you're examining here is "the party convicted". So the rest of the sentence refers to that, and it does indeed seem reasonable to point out that the sentence therefore makes no statement about parties that are not convicted. Adding "nevertheless" doesn't change the meaning of the sentence.

Now, from a systematic perspective, it seems very likely that this sentence doesn't want to make any statement at all about whether a sitting president can be indicted. It merely clarifies that, while impeachment has limited repercussions, these limits do not extent to other forms of legal prosecution. One can argue based on that that other forms of prosecution must be possible. But this doesn't provide a clear answer to whether prosecution is possible at all times.

Probably the best legal argument you can make is a very simple one: The US Constitution says all men are equal before the law. It contains no explicit exception for sitting presidents, and there is no clear case for an implicit exception. Therefore, the president is just another man, subject to criminal prosecution.

It’s a pretty common take on reality, that it exists independently of us. What can you not make sense of? — NOS4A2

What confuses me is having no notion of a "subjective" reality that every individual lives in. After all, any information we process must be in our heads.

These sorts of questions can apply to all people instead of just the one asking it. There is no point in retreating into solipsism, — NOS4A2

Going back to my metaphor with a long line of people: You can ask yourself where you are in the line of people. But if you ask where everyone is in the line, you no longer have a line that's already given. What you're trying to do is take an observers point of view and figure out what the line looks like from the outside. And if you had that kind of information, that would make the problem moot, but usually, with questions like this one, that's exactly the problem: You don't have information on how the line looks from the outside.

So the question is, is it fair to judge everyone by your own standards even though everyone is different and has different situations? — Perchperkins

The answer depends on exactly what you mean when you say "judge". The first question is whether or not we are actually judging people, in their entirety, or actions of these people. The second question is whether we are judging according to moral or legal norms, or whether your judgement is instrumental towards some goal (like an effective distribution of resources). We usually try to judge everyone's actions to a single standard in legal questions, for example. But when we want to distribute resources effectively, it'd be a pretty terrible idea to ignore the differences.

I don't want to personally attack you, but to me it kinda sounds like you're asking whether or not your personal feeling of superiority towards other people is justified, and the answer to that is pretty much always going to be "no".

Some notes about individual points you make:

You don't have to make 100k a year to be a millionaire, people make 40k a year and live frugally for years and save and invest and become multimillionaires. — Perchperkins

"People" also win the lottery. It's generally a bad idea to extrapolate from outliers. Most people who make 40K a year and live frugally don't become millionaires. Focusing on the ones that do will expose you to survivorship bias.

I did this because I am high in conscientiousness and seek to improve all the time. Lots of poorer people aren't incredibly conscientious and won't naturally seek financial improvement, and the way I see it, it is inherently their fault, but at the same time it isn't. — Perchperkins

I think you've hit on an important notion here. The notion of "character traits" isn't exactly well defined. If someone is born with bad vision, we treat that as a disability that they can't be blamed for. If someone is born with a lazy disposition, we treat that as a "character flaw" and we do blame people for that. At the end of the day, the distinction is somewhat arbitrary.

Im very analytical and see life as simply actions and results. If you aren't getting the results you want, take different actions. People don't become wealthy by sticking to poor financial habits. in a nutshell, poorer people are not taking the right actions, and aren't going to get the right results. Whereas someone who is wealthy IS taking different actions and getting better results. — Perchperkins

Two things here. You're now talking about judging individual actions, not people in their entirety. Saying "this action is a poor choice" and "you are simply a person that makes poor choices" sends very different messages.

Secondly, good financial habits are neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for getting rich. And the same is true for the inverse.

It is simply choice. The game of life is not personal and does not care about your situation. You take different actions, you get different results. — Perchperkins

Life does have no-win scenarios though. And, assuming that we could give everyone a guide to making the right decision (according to some pre-formulated goal), do we really want to live in a world where such conformity is enforced by, say, withholding aid to people who deviate?

I have a number of problems with that approach.

First of all you don't seem to be making a distinction between people and things, that is subjects and objects. This would imply people don't have a special qualitative value in your system, and hence can be subjugated by, and treated as, objects.

Secondly, "potential" seems to run into an infinite regress. If I am valuable not because of what I am today, but because of my potential for tomorrow, where does that value of tomorrow come from? If it comes from the state I am in tomorrow, then that is the value of what I am tomorow (a singular state), not a potential (a range of future states), which would falsify your premise that "things" aren't valued for what they are (i.e. single states). If my potential is valuable because tomorrow, I have another potential for another tomorrow, you have an infinite regress (or egress, rather). Ultimately, everything is worthless because everything ends eventually.

Furthermore, I don't see a way to quantify "potential". For example, what's the difference in potential between someone who will live for another 10 hours, 10 days or 10 years? If there is no quantitative difference, then the results are entirely arbitrary.

Lastly, I thing the notion that we don't value things for what they are, but only for their potential, is simply wrong as a matter of fact. If we valued things only for their potential, we'd never watch movies in the cinema, go to live concerts or have "bucket lists". We also value people for who they are, their character traits, or things they do and say. We don't somehow feel something that's transitory is less valuable. Indeed it's usually the other way around: We try to hold on to the transitory.

Suppose whatever arbitrary numbers are used to define those constants and laws, still we somehow end up with some kind of universe and some kind of sentient beings living in it. No more fine tuning mystery, but the mystery remains, and it's an old one everyone agrees we are clueless about - emergence of consciousness and life from inanimate matter, driven only through combinatorics of several particles with few simple properties. There is nothing anthropic about it, except that it's kind of wicked. — Zelebg

We have a couple of good ideas about how life came about, though we cannot decide on a specific one with certainty. We aren't clueless about it.

As for consciousness, the tricky thing is figuring out what it is in the first place. We don't even know who or what is or isn't conscious, apart from ourselves.

I hold that there is only one reality, and anything “subjective” is merely the point and position from which it is viewed. — NOS4A2

That doesn't make any sense to me. But I lean towards a constructivist stance on reality.

I still can’t see how the argument would not apply to the original people, however. — NOS4A2

It would apply to them if they asked themselves the same question. But the logic no longer works if, instead of sorting yourself, you're trying to sort other people, too.

I’m skeptical of terms like “sensory input”, “experience” or “phenomenon”. I think leaving it at “reality is a simulation” suffices to make sense of the argument. — NOS4A2

So long as you recognize it's talking about your subjective reality. As a metaphor, the reasoning for the simulation theory imagines every human that lives in any version of the early 21st century, real and simulated, in a long line, and the first X people in that line lived in the "real" 21st century, while the rest experienced only a simulation. The question it then asks is whether you are among the first X people or the rest. That's why I called it a "self-sorting" problem earlier.

The trouble with that approach is it seems to set an unreasonably high bar not consistent with other objects. No one has any objection to me talking about 'this chair' yet have I captured all that is this chair, it's history, it's place in my life, it's connections to other stuff in the world, it's fuzzy boundary at the fundamental particle scale? No. But it's just fine to talk about 'this chair' nonetheless. I don't see why 'this thought' should be treated any differently. I'm thinking broadly about a chair. Yes the exact nature of that thought is inextricably linked to my whole ecosystem (as we're discussing on the other thread at the moment). But insofar as "have this machine read thought X?" is concerned, I don't see any reason why a loose similarity should not be sufficient to answer "yes". — Isaac

This is a valid objection. What I had in mind was the "pop culture" version of mind reading, where you literally hear someone's thoughts the way they sound in their head. And that probably requires you to model their entire brain. In any event, in order to gather more than just very basic emotions, you'll probably need to know a lot about the structure of the specific brain you're trying to read thoughts from, since you'd need to know the connections between neurons to determine what their activity means. So in that sense, the history of the brain is much more important to it's current state than the history of a chair might be.

Why would I need to have their experience if I can have information about their first-hand experience and still get the same relevant information? — Harry Hindu

Well you'd be missing the qualia.

Can we be able(in future) to use some machine to read the thought of person? Is it accorded with the philosophy? — nguyen dung

It's probably impossible to directly read thoughts. Thoughts are bound up in the individual experience of whoever has them, and you cannot recreate them without copying the entire person.

You can probably still extract a lot of information though.

The mystery, or the problem, is that the Universe can't have 'known we were coming' because it's supposed to be vast ensemble of inorganic matter and energy. The very thing which Enlightenment rationalism strips out of the picture is intelligence, intention and goal-directedness which in all previous philosophy were assumed to have been provided by God. But the 'fine-tuning' argument seems to imply that the conditions for the production of complex matter and living beings were indeed instantiated or configured in the Cosmos well before any beings capable of intentionality evolved. And that sounds very much like the work of an intelligent agent. — Wayfarer

It only sounds like the work of an intelligent agent if we apply the Copernican principle. If we apply the anthropic principle, the mystery entirely disappears. The universe is made for us because we live in it, not the other way round.

Applying the Copernican principle to self-sorting problems caused absurd conclusions, as the doomsday argument illustrates.

I don't think this is quite true. I believe that according to standard formulations of the uncertainty principle, energy and time are conjugate variables. This is due to the uncertainty relationship between time and frequency inherent within any Fourier transform. — Metaphysician Undercover

But doesn't the state having a frequency require an "objective" time as a given?

True, my senses do not receive all the data and my brain is equally as fallible. But when I give primacy to direct interaction it becomes more about how I experience than what I experience, more about experiencing reality than experiencing experience. To me, the notion of experiencing experience is a form of solipsism and seek to avoid it. — NOS4A2

We could reformulate the simulation hypothesis as "your sensory input is modified by some intelligence outside of yourself".

What the story about the child is supposed to illustrate is that grief and suffering are illusory in nature. When one stops thinking about them, they stop to exist. — Tzeentch

But the story doesn't illustrate that. The feelings the child has are real. So are the memories of the event.

Who says they aren't? — Tzeentch

I think the world would look very different if they were.

Terms like "omniscient", "omnibenevolent", "omnipotent", they are paradoxical in nature and make little sense to me. Though, I don't believe a "creator" necessarily needs to be any of those three things. — Tzeentch

I do agree with that. All three "omnis" are incoherent. Nevertheless, that's the Christian doctrine the "problem of evil addresses".

:chin: Arbitrary, yeah, but not necessarily deliberate ... (of course, "from a certain point of view" :smirk: ). — 180 Proof

We could debate the exact debarkation between intentional negligence and deliberate harm here, but for the purposes of theodicy, the distinction is moot.

Not necessarily. Some methods of ‘stopping evil’ contribute greatly to suffering. War, for instance, does not ‘emit a good’. — Possibility

That's begging the question though. If war contributes greatly to suffering, is it "stopping evil"?

The loss of a family member is an event, and an event cannot be overcome, only accepted. But I am assuming you meant to ask "how to overcome the grief of loosing your family in an earthquake?", which I will simplify to "how to overcome the grief of losing a loved one?" — Tzeentch

But that still means the grief exists. It's real. We wouldn't talk about "overcoming" a mere fiction. So in the context of this thread, the question is why is there grief in the first place? Why aren't people born perfect Buddhists?

I'd like to add that we are now talking about natural events, like earthquakes and death, which cannot be considering evil, which was the original topic. I don't mind the detour but I still wanted to acknowledge that. — Tzeentch

From the perspective of an omniscient and omnipotent God, there are no natural events. Every event, and every consequence of every event, is intentional.

Understanding the nature of something is the first step in overcoming it. If people do not wish to understand, that is their choice. — Tzeentch

Oh, so what are the other steps towards overcoming, say, loosing your family in an earthquake?

I don't agree. Suffering likewise takes place in our minds. — Tzeentch

That doesn't help the people who are suffering.

2. Gratuitous evils should be stopped if they emit a positive good.
3. There is no evidence that stopping a gratuitous evil emits a positive good. — LizNH

Stopping a gratuitous evil "emits" a good by definition.

The forum seems to have eaten your answer to me, and your answer to Nosferatu is now actually in front of his post.

What I mean is I do not believe I am some little being in the head viewing my experience, or that I am viewing any experience at all, but that I am also the senses, the entirety of the body, and I am directly interacting with the world. By “buffer” I mean the assumption that there is some distortion, veil or other barrier between me and reality. — NOS4A2

Right. I can see why the simulation hypothesis wouldn't make any sense to you from that perspective.

But, even if you are your senses, you can still get things wrong. Maybe you're missing some channels (like extra spatial dimensions) or you're constructing patterns that aren't really there. From an epistemological perspective, there is therefore still a difference between your experience and whatever that experience is based on. If it were otherwise, you'd not experience the world, you'd be the world.

I suppose I hold a different conception of self. I think it’s more about reality in general, basically wether what we experience is real. I can access reality directly by virtue of the fact that I am also my senses, and there is no buffer between sense and reality. — NOS4A2

Isn't what we experience always simply in our heads? Our experience is real whether or not we are being simulated.

I don't quite understand what you mean by "buffer" between the senses and reality. Do you mean that the senses directly inform us of "objective" reality, without any distortions, additions etc.?