In the case of self defense it's they get harmed or you do. So you wouldn't be wrong in preferring your own safety. In the case of having children no one is harmed if you don't do it but someone might be harmed if you do — khaled

That seems like an irrelevant aside.

Rather, name an ethical system under which genetically modifying children to suffer is acceptable — khaled

Now come on. I didn't make such a claim. You did. Can you defend your claims or not?

I don't think there is a point in continuing this then. Because we'll never see eye to eye. You refuse the claim that it doesn't matter whether or not someone existed at the time the harmful action took place and yet do not take the opposite side claiming that it does either. Probably because it is ridiculous to claim that genetically modifying children to suffer is acceptable. — khaled

I am not allowed to reserve judgement until I hear a convincing argument? Isn't the rational thing to say that you don't know until you have heard a convincing argument either way?

I think this was called the non identity problem or something. Just replace "life" with "genetic modification" and your entire paragraph can more or less be used to argue that genetically modifying children to suffer is acceptable. — khaled

Possibly, but why is it up to me to prove that it's not acceptable? Because you find that conclusion not appealing emotionally?

If you really think that there is no argument that can convince you — khaled

Why? Because I don't agree with your first argument I am therefore irrational and impossible to convince?

Although that choice would commit you to a lot of stances I find ridiculous. Such as, for example, thinking that implanting a bomb in a fetus and setting it to blow up at 18 is ok but bombing an 18 year old isn't. — khaled

A reductio ad absurdum only works if we can agree beforehand that the conclusion would be absurd. But I don't think it's absurd to ask what moral weight future people have.

Ok, in my view there are two ways in which we structure the world: causality and freedom. Causality structures the flow of events - time, essentially. Freedom structures the way we interact with the world, our choices and decisions.

One is our observer's perspective, the other is our actor's perspective. We need both to make sense of the world. Neither is "actually real" so far as we know.

Notably, causality is not something that we can establish using the scientific method. The scientific method relies on causality as an axiom. We cannot learn about causality, because in order to perceive the world as a coherent whole we need it to be given a priori.

Searching for free will in the world of causality is therefore useless. The very structure of that world - imposed on it by our minds - precludes freedom. But it does not follow that freedom is not real. Rather, freedom is a different, but equally valid, way to structure reality.

It seems to me that claims of rights, especially those having to do with freedom, are rooted in this sense of "mine", of self-possession and rightful possession of other things belonging to that self. And where something is thought to belong to someone else, we have no rights. I don't have a right, for example, to eat your dinner, control your thoughts, use your body for my ends, pollute your drinking water, invade your privacy, silence your ideas, do experiments on you, and so on. Any disagreement? — petrichor

There might be justifications for either of these actions. And arguably, if you are justified in doing it then you have a right to do it.

I question the entitlement to "have" children. They aren't yours. They aren't dolls. They aren't pets. They are people. They don't exist to serve your interests. They have interests of their own. — petrichor

I think this is a false equivalence. Creating something is not the same as owning something. The act of creation cannot violate the rights of whatever you are creating, since only things that exist can have rights.

You don’t know whether or not genetically modifying children to suffer is right or wrong? — khaled

No, I don't.

No, not necessarily. All I said was that childbirth risks harming someone in the future without their consent. Actions that harm others in the future without their consent are wrong in almost every ethical system. Name one such action that is right. — khaled

There are plenty of examples where actions that harm others are right. Self defense is the most obvious one.

I disagree with your claim that harming future people is wrong in "almost every ethical system". Can you provide some examples (of said ethical systems)?

My argument is basically this:

1. If an act will impose something significant on another person without their consent, then it is default wrong to perform that act
2. Procreating imposes something significant - life here - on another person without their consent
3. Therefore, procreative acts are default wrong — khaled

We can argue about how accurate premise 1 is, but the crucial element here is premise 2. Premise 2 is not coherent and therefore false.

You cannot impose life on another person. In order to impose on someone, they need to exist. But if they exist we can't impose life on them, since they're already alive (unless we are talking about assister suicide). They also don't exist as a "future potential person" since that would imply we have already decided to create them and are therefore no longer imposing.

The idea of "imposing life" is also incoherent on another layer, because life is not a condition within life. You could impose poverty or sickness, but you cannot impose life in it's entirety, since there'd be no reference point to compare the imposition with.

It would seem that the claim that I have a right to X is often understood as being something like a claim that my doing X isn't illegal under the present government. I'm allowed to do X, in other words. But really, when people speak of their rights, they seem to be trying to express something more than that. And it seems they often want to change laws to make them more consistent with the rights they feel people have. So the rights would seem to be thought prior to legality. — petrichor

This is true, but I think this can be rephrased as thinking that you should have certain rights. I.e. it's a question of what the laws should look like, and therefore ultimately about what people should do.

But to say that I have an interest in something or another seems different from saying that my interests ought not be obstructed. And the rights claim seems to be along the lines of the latter rather than the former.

A rapist could say that he has an interest in satisfying his sexual needs. But most wouldn't agree that he therefore has a right to satisfy them. — petrichor

I am not saying interests are the same as rights. I just think that interests are what causes people to conceive of rights. You have interests, you want them fulfilled. You realize other people also have interests. You therefore come up with the idea of rights, which give special protection to some of these interests.

The problem with the free will is that the experiencer and the experimenter are the exact same person, and as you acknowledged, with no reference point but their experience. This is why I brought up physical analogues. — rlclauer

But physical analogues are also just experienced. Noone has access to anything outside their experience.

As far as the rest of your comments, the scientific method accounts for subjectivity. — rlclauer

I know what you mean to say. It accounts for the mistakes individuals make. But there is another layer of subjectivity: The structure of every human brain. The scientific method does not allow us to escape the limitations of the human brain.

I honestly do not even understand why you are arguing that our subjective experience (like experiencing the earth as flat, from our limited subjective experience) is the same as the scientific method. The only reason I can imagine you are making this argument, is to elevate the reliability of your experience. — rlclauer

I never said anything of the sort. I am a bit confused as to where you take this from.

I do believe the scientific method gives us more reliable information about "reality." — rlclauer

That's not exactly what I asked though. Are you familiar with the idea of a reality behind reality? LIke the Simulation hypothesis?

What does that even mean, that I "have a right"? It isn't quite the same as saying that I am unconstrained, physically or otherwise. It isn't quite the same as saying that something is legal. What is it exactly? I honestly find it puzzling. I wonder if we know what we are talking about when we speak of rights. — petrichor

Probably the only precise definition of right is in legal terms. Outside of legal terms, it's probably sufficient to ask what we should do.

It seems to me that it is primarily rooted in a feeling, maybe something like what a small child feels when screaming, "MINE!" Is it more than this? Is that feeling justified? Is it some kind of instinct? — petrichor

We could perhaps say that rights are rooted in interests. I.e. I have an interest to keep some things at the exclusion of others, and therefore I'd like property rights.

It would seem that the sense that we have "a right to do as we please" is rooted ultimately in a sense of self-ownership. I'm mine. My body is mine. Not yours. We should be able to do with what is ours as we please. Nobody else's business. Something like that? — petrichor

I think that, again, it's in our interest to do what we please. That is almost tautological.

But isn't this basic sense of mineness itself open to question? And isn't that what entitlement is really reducible to? Basically a feeling of mineness? — petrichor

What kind of question would be subject that basic sense to?

This is the whole problem isn't it? You can simply redefine repeatability to make your claim appear to be coherent in a scientific sense, but that does not work, which is the argument I have been making this whole time. The problem is the subjective perspective. — rlclauer

But if you repeat an experiment, and get the same results, those results are only the same in the subjective perspective of each experimenter, right? Repeatability means that different people, doing the same thing, experience the same outcome. That is true for experiencing free will.

I can perceive myself as a continuously solid being, that does not negate the fact that 99% of the atoms comprising me are empty space. Do you see the problem with referring to your experience? If your experience is constructed as a byproduct of brain activity, why would you refer to it as trustworthy. This is why I refer to it as an illusion. — rlclauer

All experience is constructed as a product of brain activity. That includes "scientific facts".

Again, we are back to the same thing as before, is free will something you experience or something that actually exists. I would argue it cannot exist given what we know about cause and effect. — rlclauer

I can only know about what "actually exists" by experiencing it (that includes indirect experience such as reading a book about physics). So the question is why the experience of free will is supposedly less convincing than the experience of causality.

It is not easy to have these conversations through these comment sections. When you say, "as noted before," I can't dig through a pile of comments to find what the argument was. — rlclauer

Well, the argument was that, assuming free will is "actually real", it's invisible from the outside.

The separation is in having physical references for the hypothesis being tested. If the hypothesis is both the product of subjective experience, and also being subjected to testing by that subjective experience, all you have is a circular argument, a self-referential, non-scientific grounds. — rlclauer

But not everything can be established via the scientific method. For example: the scientific method itself. Do you agree?

Again, the whole point of me invoking the scientific method, and by extension, this appeal to physical analogues, was to show that when you can interact with things outside of yourself and compare them to other subjective being's experiences in interacting with those objects via the same method (repeatability), you have grounds on which to arrive at a non-circular theory to explain a phenomena. — rlclauer

Right, but what about things other than phenomena? Free will is not a phenomenon, I don't experience it via the senses.

I honestly do not follow your line of thought here. Perhaps you could phrase this in a different manner. — rlclauer

Let me put it this way: Do you think you "learned" what causality is by watching events happen? Or could it be that causality is a prerequisite for you to watch events happen in the first place?

First of all, I do not think acknowledging cause and effect is "elevating it above all else." I am glad you said this because this is the whole rub of our disagreement. You seem to not really care what is "really real," only what you experience. This is exactly how every human lives their daily lives. Everyone operates on a pragmatic level. If you want to the analysis to end there, fair enough. I want to take it one step further and ask, what is producing these experiences, and is it possible that these experiences in themselves have some sort of dissimilarity to the "really real reality." In my opinion it is more interesting to posit this latter question, — rlclauer

Do you think the scientific method can tell us what is "really real"?

We are "entitled" to do as we please so long as doing so does not infringe upon the freedoms of others. This, it seems to me, is not a very controversial idea on this forum. It would follow that we are entitled to have children unless it can be demonstrated that doing so violates the freedom of others.

So it’s wrong but you don’t know why you think it’s wrong? — khaled

I haven't said that it's wrong. I said I don't know.

For my position it would be very easy to explain. Because it will harm someone in the future. I believe if an act will harm someone for no justifiable reason then it’s wrong. It doesn’t matter if there’s existed a person at the time the act took place. I don’t ridiculously think think that bombing an 18 year old is somehow more wrong if done directly or by implanting a bomb in the fetus. It doesn’t make any difference. What matters is the consequence — khaled

So, essentially utilitarianism? The problem I see with this argument is that it relies on there being two alternatives, and one leads to less suffering/more utility for the people involved. But when we are making the decision to create those people in the first place, there are no such alternatives. There is one timeline without people and one timeline with people, and you cannot compare the relative utility of these timelines because for one timeline it's an empty set.

If you're arguing that consequences, i.e. outcomes by themselves somehow have absolute ethical value, I'd have to hear an argument about how that works.

Is this the late “but actually morality doesn’t exist” card? — khaled

No, I do believe in moral philosophy as a rational discipline. I don't agree with utilitarian systems though.

Explain to me why genetically modifying children to suffer is wrong then. Whatever explanation you come up with you will find will lead to antinatalism. — khaled

I can't explain. That's why I am asking you. After all, your position depends on, or is at least strengthened by, that argument. I just say I don't know.

No. Because it will harm someone in the future. Unless we can cheat the system and not give birth to that final generation then heck yea — khaled

Well, if everyone knows, perhaps they'll all not have children. We don't know that they won't, of course. But do we need to care?

It is undeniable that the first premise has considerable support from our rational intuitions and premise 2 is obviously true. — Bartricks

I think premise 2 is obviously false. You cannot impose life on anything.

No. We only do that when considering the consequences of a certain action. For example, we don’t think not having kids is harming anyone. Because not having kids has no negative consequence on anyone. However having kids does have negative consequences on someone in the future, it doesn’t matter if they existed at the time the decision was made — khaled

But we need to consider the consequences to someone. Ethical considerations need a subject that already exists. I am not aware of any ethical system that allows you to just jump to non-existant "potential" subjects without issue. What ethical system are you using that allows you to claim that the distinction doesn't matter?

I don’t think either is more or less wrong than the other do you? — khaled

I'd need information on why we're planting those bombs in the first place. I would accept more justifications for B than for either A or C.

But there is another problem with this example: If we consider the decision whether or not to have children, the children cannot be said to "already exist in the future". That would imply our decision has already happened.

So here is another example: Let's assume we develop some technology (or magic) that will be extremely beneficial for society for several generations, but then everyone still alive will die horribly. Assume life extension is not plausible when we make the decision, and everyone will be made aware of the eventual consequence.

Should we use that technology in order to make everyone's lifes much more pleasant right now?

Because it risks (pretty much guarantees) harming someone in the future. It doesn’t matter that that person doesn’t exist at the time — khaled

But we haven't established exactly why harming people in the future is a bad thing.

I think existing is an action. Considering it can be stopped. Maybe “living” would’ve been a better word. — khaled

I think the connotations of "living" and "existing" are very different. The former is a general description of things you do, the latter is a category of being.

I don't think it'd be good advice to avoid being hurt at all costs. Some experiences in life require you to get hurt. That doesn't make being hurt a good thing somehow, but it does mean I don't really want my children to never get hurt.

None. Then again, I’m not claiming having kids harms non existent ghost babies. I’m claiming it risks harming real people. That the real person didn’t exist at the time the action that would harm said real person in the future took place is of no consequence. — khaled

But this really does amount to the same thing as harming ghost babies, doesn't it? If the position in time of whoever is harmed by an action is of no consequence, then we treat them as if they were alive right now. They're not, however. Whether they will be alive in the first place depends on the choices of current people. Therefore, I think it's wrong to say that the fact that the person doesn't exist is "of no consequence". I think, rather, that we need a dedicated justification for the moral standing of "potential" persons.

To demonstrate: I’m pretty sure you’d agree that genetically modifying children to suffer more (extra limbs, blindness, etc) is wrong no? Explain to me why that is wrong then you will find that the same explanation could be used to explain why having children with the normal number of limbs is still wrong. — khaled

Sure, but that's only because you're causing me to imagine a suffering baby and therefore empathy kicks in. I'm not actually sure a rational argument can be made to this effect. Perhaps you could explain why it is wrong.

Grammar doesn’t make or not make sense to individual people first of all, and as far as I know “being imposed upon to exist” makes grammatical sense. Doesn’t “being imposed upon to eat” or “go to school” make sense? — khaled

I don't think "existing" is an action. It's a relation between a mental concept and some external state.

I don't follow you. I was simply admitting that though it is in general wrong to procreate, there are circumstances where it may be permissible or even obligatory - such as when procreating is the only way to save one's own life, or the only way to save the lives of numerous others. — Bartricks

Right, I misread that, sorry.

Let’s expand on this logic a bit. “If getting raped isn’t worth going through, she can just stop living and spare herself further injury, after all she MIGHT enjoy the experience no? I’ll rape her and give her a chance to make the verdict herself. After all, not raping her would he forcing her to not get raped when she could enjoy it”

Disgusting to even read isn’t it? — khaled

This isn't the same scenario, because the person being raped exists beforehand and therefore already has ethical position that would be violated. But what ethical standing to non-existant potential people have?

Thus when someone exists without asking to exist, they have been imposed upon to exist. — khaled

The phrase "being imposed upon to exist" doesn't make grammatical sense to me.

Yes, in those sorts of scenario we'd have to weigh the importance of not imposing a life on another person versus the good of preventing someone who already exists from starving to death. — Bartricks

This seems to be a false dichotomy to me. Conceiving children is not opposed to caring for the people who are already alive.

It simply doesn't matter that the person is full of bullshit. If the person is against what these people don't like, anything goes. The lies are totally OK when they anger the people who you hate. — ssu

Precisely. It's a lot more about tribal groups than it is about actual content. If you can make your enemy feel bad, that means you win.

I think the question that needs to be answered first before we can even tackle your specific question is: what ethical standing do future humans have?

There are various approaches to establish the ethical standing of current humans, but how well do these apply to future humans? It seems that the question can further be divided into the standing of humans which are already born and those which might be born in the future. For the former, protection of their future well being might be seamlessly derived from protection of their current well-being. But for people who have not yet been born, that avenue is closed and we'd need an entirely separate justification.

1. What is it about turning enough switches on and off in a certain way that gives rise to consciousness?
2. Why is the pattern of switching operations important? Why does pattern A,B,...C give rise to consciousness, while pattern D,E,...F doesn't? — RogueAI

I think the problem here stems from treating physical reality as fundamental. What looks to humans like to very similar patterns of switches might, to some some other observer, look extremely, that is to say qualitatively, different. Physical reality represents some underlying principles of the overall reality, but we cannot know to what extent it does so. It's entirely possible that whatever "consciousness" actually is simply isn't very well represented by physical reality.

3. If consciousness can arise from substrates like collections of mechanical switches, can it arise in other substrates where particles interact with each other? Say, a rain cloud? Swarm of comets? Sand dune?
4. Is electricity a necessary condition for consciousness? Or can you have consciousness arise from really strange collections of things? Say, for example, a bunch of ropes and pulleys? — RogueAI

Presumably, a conscious entity could appear to us in all number of ways. Since there is, so far, no evidence that the consciousness of the observed can be experienced by the observer in some way, there is currently no reason to suspect we can identify consciousness as such.

Why does Trump flirt with Putin and Kim, but he harasses Iran? Real question. — frank

Iran is Muslim. Also Jared Kushner.

Can you explain how free will is repeatable? — rlclauer

I consistently experience myself as having free will, and others do likewise.

By physical analogues, I mean we can have a theory for planetary motion, and then look through a telescope and see a physical analogue to the theory. — rlclauer

Ok, so basically physical evidence? It doesn't make sense to ask for physical evidence of free will since, as was noted before, there is no reason to expect such evidence.

Could you please explain how it is not possible to know if causality is "how things really are?" — rlclauer

Only by asking the counter question: How could we possibly know? There is not a time any human can remember when they "discovered" causality. It seems to develop in some children somewhat graudally, but whether that is from the brain developing or the brain receiving external input is impossible to say.

In my opinion, if you are going to be skeptical as to whether or not we are correctly perceiving reality, how can you not also be skeptical of your experience of free will? — rlclauer

I am not really sceptical that we are "correctly" perceiving reality, in the sense that you might be sceptial about correctly identifying a fata morgana. It's more that physical reality is only part of the universe hat I inhabit, and I see no reason to elevate it above all else. In that sense, I am equally sceptical of free will. I am not claiming free will is "more real" than physical reality either, just that we don't know either way.

In other words there is a largest number and infinity doesn't exist. — TheMadFool

But you will never arrive at this number, because in order to do so you'd have to take an infinite number of steps. Which is why we call it an infinity.

Ok thanks for explaining that. I would disagree with the characterization of the results of any scientific experiment being beholden to the subjectivity of the observer. I agree completely, what you experience has been structured by your brain, omitting certain information, and we are not really "seeing out there," but more or less "seeing" the model our brain creates. — rlclauer

It's not really about subjectivity in the sense of individual experiences and more about the realisation that experience is something subjects have.

That applies to your notion of free will also. The difference between your subjective experience of free will, and the subjective position of the observer relative to the scientific method, is repeatability, and physical analogues. — rlclauer

But free will is entirely repeatable. I don't know what you mean by "physical analogue".

I do not think "causality" is just in your head, the same way free will is in your head, unless humans the world over have collectively hallucinated the reliability of things we have learned through science. — rlclauer

Of course causality is not a hallucination. It's a part of the structure of our reality. But, crucially, we don't know whether this structure is part of "things as they really are" or added by human minds. The same is true for freedom. It's possible that causality is "how things really are", but we cannot know this without access to a non-human observer's perspective.

I do not even know what this means, sorry. I am just a working class person, not a philosophy degree holder. — rlclauer

Right, so perhaps we can discuss this further, since it's critical to my position. I don't want to ignore the rest of your post, just try to get this out of the way first.

Whenever you observe anything, including when applying the scientific method, the you, the observer is an important part of the resulting observation. Whatever you experience has been structured by your mind - certain information has been left out, certain principles have been applied. This includes all scientific knowledge.

The world you are seeing is not "out there". It is in your head. And hence, causality and determinism are also in your head. In the same place freedom is. It's just that you apply the concept of freedom to one perspective, and the law of causation to the other. One is not more real, or more subjective, than the other.

It would manifest as an action free of prior causes. This is why I think free will (or true freedom as you put it) is an incoherent concept. — rlclauer

Actions seemingly without cause exist on the micro scale. But randomness isn't freedom.

But more importantly, why do you conclude that freedom is incoherent because it can not physically manifest as freedom?

You do not "know" what is real, if you can only experience it subjectively. — rlclauer

But I do experience freedom subjectively.

If you do scientific testing, and continuously get the same result, you can conclude that there is probably a real property which is affecting this outcome. — rlclauer

But scientific testing will only reveal causal connections, because causality is one of it's core assumptions. It only provides a constructed reality, albeit a very useful one.

I do not really know what you mean by "internal perspective" vs "external perspective." — rlclauer

In my internal experience, I have freedom. But from an external perspective, e.g. yours, there is only a causal chain of brain-states. The question is, why would we call one of these perspective an illusion?

In my opinion, there is your perspective, which is subjective and therefore fallible, and there is the world we inhabit, which seems to be real, and we have discerned some properties about this world, but the discovery of those properties requires placing a check on our subjectivity, namely the scientific method. — rlclauer

I think there is a difference between having a subjective perspective on objects and experiencing yourself as a subject. The observer is not part of that which is observed.

There are no "free actions." if you want to define free as uncoerced, which is a loaded word, fine. There is not a guy with a gun to my head. But this does not capture the idea of the causal chain of material factors which generate what we perceive as "conscious deliberation." Consider the Libet experiment and the "pantyhose experiment." — rlclauer

Right. I am asking you to do a thought experiment though. Assume that, metaphysically, true freedom is real. How would it manifest physically?

It makes sense to call something an illusion because of the disconnect between how it actually is and how it is perceived. The only "constructed" element here is the perception, not the real. — rlclauer

But how do you know what's real? If both the internal perspective (freedom) and the external perspective (causality) are constructs, neither is real.

If we both hold that freedom isn’t physical, is that the same as saying freedom doesn’t belong to physical systems? — Mww

I'd think so, because to be part of a system, there'd have to be some kind of interaction. As system, the way I understand it, is a collection of factors with relevant interactions for a given question.

And if that holds, why would there be such a thing as degrees of freedom in a physical system? — Mww

There'd have to be degrees of interaction. So, maybe there could be degrees of determinism, and what remains without interactions is than negatively defined as "free".

I disagree. Instincts are something everyone would agree is an automatic action, which require no agency to be instantiated. I am simply saying all action looks like instincts when you have enough information. — rlclauer

Let's assume an action is, in fact, free. How would you tell from the outside?

The reason your point is irrelevant, is because my argument is not based on the commonality of illusion, but rather, whether a particular thing actually is an illusion, which it seems obvious, that the phenomena of self, will, and consciousness, are all just mental constructs, not some spooky thing which floats to the left of your prefrontal cortex. — rlclauer

But if everything is constructed, it makes no sense to call one construct "illusion".

Sure, that's what all compatibilists argue. I just think it is an unnecessary maneuver. A rapid dog has no "agency, or free will," but you would shoot it if it was attacking your baby. Invoking free will in order to have accountability is an artifact that is no longer needed. — rlclauer

Perhaps the point of accountability is to establish what you are not accountable for? After all, if we were to just eliminate possible causes of danger, we'd never stop.

You know...I always thought that, too. But then I came across this “degrees of freedom” for showing coordinate dimensions in a phase space, and I got to wondering how freedom was meant to apply there. I don’t consider freedom to be physical either, but apparently, somebody figured degrees of it, are. — Mww

Wouldn't you need a conception of physical freedom before you can map degrees of it?

(1) How am I supposed to know what you consider relevant or not, since you're really asking for that--a difference that you would consider relevant (and why would I go fishing for this anyway)?, and (2) How is describing a difference not going to be semantic? We'd be talking about what terms are referring to. — Terrapin Station

See, and this is why I said I'd rather drop it, because there is simply no way I can communicate to you what I mean in a manner that you will find satisfactory. Essentially, for the purposes of arguing, I consider your argument and a "cost-benefit analysis" to fall into the same category. E.g. it's an argument from consequences rather than from principles.

Aside from the trivial non-coercion meaning and the randomness that harms any kind of will, the "definition" eludes us since it never works out, so far, but the Holy Grail of the crux of it is to find a way above and beyond the automated brain will being true to itself that lets there be some higher agency that is somehow 'free' and 'independent' of the brain will or able to will the brain will, but, again, we not being able to well define this 'free' idea, much less to go on to show it. — PoeticUniverse

Of course, it's entirely impossible to identify something "free" in the physical world, using the scientific method. At best the scientific method can establish randomness. Freedom is definitely not physical.

It's not necessary for traits to confer survival value in order for those traits to develop. They merely need to, in fact, survive.

Both Music and Math are probably heavily derived and more or less accidental results of human intelligence, and ability of abstract thought.

My arguments are what I think. — Terrapin Station

Well they're a subset. But it should be clear what I mean, no?

But a little over a half hour ago you asked me something that you should have known the answer for, with respect to my arguments, since I already said it just 90 minutes prior to that. — Terrapin Station

I asked for a relevant difference. So I don't think the answers you did give amounted to more than semantics. You're not going to agree with this, I suppose. Me repeating what you said won't help though.

It's kind of hard to examine someone's arguments and whether they hold up when you're so uninterested in them that you can't even recall what they are 90 minutes later. — Terrapin Station

Of course, if you're going to interpret your fellow posters in the most condescending way possible, that is the conclusion you will reach.

Regarding what you just replied to Coben, do you think offering people money for committing crimes on your behalf should be legal?

Sure, so I have no interest in a conversation the way you're going about it. I guess you're not that interested in what I think, in which case don't bother pretending to be in the first place. — Terrapin Station

True, I am not really interested in what you think on this topic, or rather it's sufficiently clear to me from what you wrote. I am interested in your arguments and whether they hold up.

You're asking me what I think the difference is. I gave info for this already. What did I say? — Terrapin Station

Sorry, not interested in teacher / student roleplaying here. If you like you can engage with the rest of my previous questions.

What did I say the difference was? — Terrapin Station

None of your previous answers indicated any relevant difference to me. But I'd rather drop this and ask you to answer my other question than go down a rabbit hole about what is and isn't a relevant difference.

But I'm not using a cost/benefit analysis approach. — Terrapin Station

What's the difference, other than you giving it a different name?

Again, you can't read any preference as a cost/benefit approach. — Terrapin Station

No, but you explicitly argued in terms of the consequences of certain legislation.

Any moral stance (as well as stances about what sorts of legislation we should have, etc.) is just a matter of individual preferences. I don't agree that that implies that we can't discuss them, but there aren't correct answers. — Terrapin Station

What is there to discuss if there are no correct, and therefore also no false, answers?

I didn't say anything like that. I was pointing out that there's nothing factual about whether anything is a cost or benefit. — Terrapin Station

You were criticizing @Baden for simply "assuming" a cost-benefit analysis is the correct approach. While using something very similar as your own approach.

Can this topic actually be usefully discussed or is it all just a matter of individual preferences, like favourite colours?

A cost-benefit analysis requires that someone thinks of something in terms of comparative costs versus benefits. — Terrapin Station

Right. So you're saying that you only thought of benefits, and therefore it's not a cost-benefit analysis? But other people still need to justify why they are doing a cost-benefit analysis with regards to speech?

Nope. Not thinking about it in that way at all. Again, I said nothing about "costs," and having a preference (which is what feeling that x is more desirable than y is) doesn't at all imply thinking about anything in terms of a cost/benefit analysis. — Terrapin Station

You expressed more than just your preference for a given world though. You gave that preference as the reason why you don't want any speech acts to be illegal. If an act leads to something you prefer, then that's a benefit. And if you're basing your argument on the benefits of not legislating speech, you're doing a cost-benefit analysis, albeit a one- sided one.

Of course, this is ultimately irrelevant since there is no point in arguing over mere preferences.

That would be a completely arbitrary credo, — Terrapin Station

It's called intellectual honesty.

but I'm not asking anyone to give a justification of their stance on whether hate speech should be allowed or not at any rate. — Terrapin Station

So, why did you write this:

you're simply assuming that cost-benefits analyses are how these issues should be approached. — Terrapin Station

?

Moral stances are ways that we (individually) feel about interpersonal behavior that we (again individually) consider to be more significant than etiquette. — Terrapin Station

I am aware that this is your view

Re the other part what I said was "The world we need is one in where people don't believe anything just because someone said it, don't automatically follow anyone's orders just because someone gave them, etc. "

How would that be a "cost/benefit" analysis? What am I saying about the "cost" of anything? — Terrapin Station

You're starting that you consider a certain state of affairs to be more desirable than another. This implies you judge the benefits of that state of affairs to be more significant than the costs. If you have another justification, you have not given it. If you don't consider a justification necessary, you cannot ask others to provide one.

Not only are you ignoring that cost-benefits analyses are just something we're making up, where there's no correct answer, because there are no factual benefits or costs in terms of detriments, but you're simply assuming that cost-benefits analyses are how these issues should be approached. — Terrapin Station

If I remember correctly, your initial argument on why all speech should be legal was about teaching people to make their own decisions and ignore the influence that the speech of others has on them.

How is that not a cost-benefit analysis on your part? What is your argument for approaching the issue the way you approach it?