Social class is determined by the value you can produce in the market, not your background. — AppLeo

Many people think they live in a class free society, or that the class system is very fluid. They are not, and it is not. A good job and money will improve your standing among your peers -- but that's just the minimum definition of class. If you are a member of the crème de la crème, extra money is merely nice -- not essential.

"Class" (as in polished antique silver, old Persian rugs, and ancestors who got off the boat in 1620 or 1066) is derived from a family's reputation as long-term distinguished leaders of society. This usually includes being, and having been, reasonably wealthy, and WASP -- White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The bluest of blue bloods in the US are the descendants of the Mayflower Compact signers--1620. You can't buy your way into that group. the highest upper class in Britain is richer and larger than the highest American upper crust. They go back a long ways; 1066, at least. Some longer.

Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York City and multi billionaire founder of the Bloomberg Business News Service, doesn't have the family history to count as a member of the social/economic crème de la crème upper class. What he is is a charter member of the fewer-than-1% club of very very rich people. It too is very distinguished; it's upper class, and it's democratic--something the crème de la crème is not. Any very very rich person can join. Only women whose ancestors fought in the American Revolution can join the DAR.

His family didn't come over on the Mayflower. His family were not royalty. His family did not own plantations (and slaves, of course) in Georgia. His family didn't fight in the American Revolutionary War or the Civil War, especially on the Confederate side. Further more, he is a Jew. Even Jews that walk on water don't get into the highest level of the upper crust. Neither do blacks. Italians either. No Mexicans. Really! The very idea.

The crème de la crème highest crust of the upper class, marries carefully, sends its children to the right schools and colleges so they will meet other crusty crème de la crème scions and marry one of them.

If your great great great great grandparents were not crème de la crème upper crust, you won't be either.

Just because you can't be a Mayflower Compact Signer descendent, doesn't mean that you are trash. There are quite a few class grades below the crème de la crème level, yet way above riff raff. In my part of the world, would-be upwardly mobile people live in the right suburbs, send their children to St. Thomas or St. Olaf College. Their children take their place as the up and coming generations of social and corporate managers. It's a good group to belong to. They run a lot of stuff. But they're not crème de la crème. They are solidly upper middle class; kind of bourgeois. Can one buy one's way into this class group? Just about. You have to have been born into it, and attended the right high schools. But your children can belong to it, even if your parents didn't.

The lower classes have traditions too. One way to get into certain well paid tightly controlled trades is to have a father who was a member of that trade. He can get you in, but you have to perform on the job. It's not honorary.

One can see shades of class even among riff raff. There are those beggars who maintain themselves much better than others; they are willing to beg, collect aluminum cans, etc. -- whatever it takes to supply themselves with certain minimum necessities. Then there are the bottom of the barrel riff raff who get drunk, fall over on the sidewalk, and stay there until the police cart them off to jail or detox.

How much human suffering is okay?

We can't quantify or qualify it. Maybe we could say, "More than the individual can bear is too much." How much is that? Potentially, enormous. Some people can bear an enormous amount of suffering. Some people do not do bear suffering easily -- they are crushed by it. It isn't their fault -- it's just how they are constituted.

I have not suffered as much as some people have. I think I bore up reasonably well, especially to physical pain (injury, infection--definite cause). I haven't faced a potentially fatal injury or illness, yet. I expect to, eventually; might be sooner, might be later.

Suffering, of course, comes in 57 varieties. People with COPD feel like they are suffocating. Well, they are suffocating -- it's not just their imagination. It's not painful, it's terrifying, apparently. Alzheimers patients certain suffer, but their mental resources are so scrambled it is hard to communicate with them. People who have severe mental illness suffer intensely.

There is suffering, and then there is SUFFERING. I have osteoarthritis. Sometimes I have a large quantity of pain, but the quality is tolerable. It's dull aching. I've had very bad toothaches that were not tolerable. A bad toothache is 'loud' and very dense"--so much pain from one very small nerve. (It was a piece of nerve that a root canal had missed. It was really pissed off!).

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger — Purple Pond

What doesn't kill you will try again later.

So far, everybody has been on target. Everything said above is true. But...

You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and the student has no choice about being the pig's appendage.

The high stakes game of social mobility is over before the student arrives on campus. IF he or she comes from a high-achieving, at least affluent, well connected family, he or she will probably attend an at-least-very-good-to-very-fine college and, barring some major personality flaw (tilts toward psychopathic murdering, has a taste for cannibalism, sexually prefers little girls and boys, etc) things will work out just fine.

Even very bright, ambitious students from low-achieving, poor working class, socially marginal families will be lucky to complete college at all, and if they do will not ascend into the refined upper classes. Most children are attending schools that do not/can not prepare students for excellent collegiate performance.

Social rank is hard to buck, and effort isn't sufficient. The upper classes (where the choicest goodies abound) will not admit the learnéd rube from Fargo into the firm, period. He may have done very well at Concordia College, and he may have gotten a PhD in Chemistry at Wisconsin-Madison (unlikely but possible), but he will never belong to the Right Class of people.

Compared to where he came from (anywhere in Fargo; working class family; mother descended from Russian peasant farmers in North Dakota; father from lutefisk eating Finnish iron miners in Minnesota; Lutherans, father worked at a hardware store -- note, worked at a hardware store, didn't even own the podunk operation); mother works in a hair 'salon' in Fargo... he's doing really, really great. Very high achieving. He'll get a job at 3M in St. Paul, live in an older home in White Bear Lake, maybe play golf, do the usual, marry; have children; drive a nice SUV... but he won't be part of the St. Paul upper class no matter what.

, @et al

So, testosterone fluctuates daily and seasonally and declines after the prime years. I get that and it seems to be well researched (we've known that testosterone fluctuates and declines over time for many years). Now we would need to establish a causal (or at least correlative) relationship between seasonal variation in testosterone levels and appearance of depressive symptoms.

Depression (conservatively defined) isn't a new phenomenon, but it seems to becoming more common around the world now than it was 50 or 75 years ago. The rate of mental illness (requiring intervention) used to be posted at 10% -- this about 50 years ago. Over time it has increased to about 20% of the population. IF 1 out of 5 people are experiencing diagnosable mental illness in various countries, then something pervasive (and unnatural) is going on. What could that be?

Just an off the cuff guess would be the on-going turmoil that industrialization and aggressively managed economic policy causes in both developed and developing countries. Capitalism, more or less, would be another term for it. Capitalist (or for that matter non-capitalist) industrialization subverts individual, family, and community life to the needs of hungry enterprises. People can cope with these changes for a while (a period of years) but eventually the cost of adaptation begins to erode resilience.

Take as one small example the opioid epidemic: A very strong opioid drug was heavily marketed to physicians and was presented as not being an unusual addiction hazard. Stupid. no opiate is non-addicting. Addiction is just a feature of the way opioids work. Doctors should know that, but representatives of the Purdue Pharmaceutical Company, LP presented it as a safe drug, and doctors tend to rely on dug companies for information. Plus many doctors, being at least as venal as everybody else, enjoy the perquisites they get for generously prescribing whatever is on offer. The Sackler family which owns Purdue Pharma LP are the beneficiaries of the boom in oxycontin sales and addiction. They also make hydromorphone, oxycodone, fentanyl, codeine, and hydrocodone, MS Contin, Oxycontin, and Ryzolt (time release Tramadol, an opiate). They also make iodine-based surgical disinfectant washes, laxatives, and -- humanitarian of the year award -- gluten-free stool softeners.

I don't have anything against opiates: When used with caution they are effective for relief of moderate to severe pain. What opiates are not good for is long-term use, where addiction is practically guaranteed. Opiate addiction is really not good for the body, especially when the drug of choice is not readily available. If one could buy opiates over the counter, addiction would still be a bad thing but it might result in less socially destructive dysfunctional behavior practically required to maintain a supply.

Anyway, the Sackler family drove the sales of its narcotic products to maximize profits for themselves with enormously negative consequences for millions of people, directly and indirectly. They are an egregious example, but not fundamentally different than what most wealthy corporate owners are willing to do. The Koch brothers are another egregious example, but so are the owners of Shell, Exxon, Rio Tinto, Amazon, Facebook, et al.

Poverty, addiction, social disruption, over-work, naked exploitation, zero free amenities (like parks, clean swimming beaches, etc.), no time and place for good sex, good food, nice music (however defined--Mozart for me, rap for you)--add very abrasive carborundum grit to the grind of already unsatisfactory life and wear people down to the point they can no longer cope effectively.

a hot cocoa — NKBJ

At last! The missing piece of effective public health depression intervention. Hot cocoa stations (HCS) located at strategic intersections throughout the city. HCS will be an effective and inexpensive means to curb gun violence, suicide, domestic uproar, et al. Uber will deliver flagons of hot cocoa (with or without marshmallows) 24/7 free of charge in selected deplorable zip codes. Senior citizens can run the HCS for a small wage that won't affect their minimum social security, public housing, or food stamp payments.

suffering is inherently meaningful because we know what it is like to suffer and when we don't we can be glad that we are no longer suffering. — Wallows

God, it FEELS SO GOOD to stop hitting one's self on the head with a hammer.

Too many people are calling themselves depressed or are being diagnosed with depression and being given anti-depressants. "Too many" because there are other causes of people's dysfunction, misery, and unhappiness that have concrete causes and can at least be frankly addressed. (Whether they can be fixed is another kettle of fish.)

Bad relationships, chronic debt, poverty, brutal people, too much drinking/drugs, bad parenting, and so on leave people stressed out, angry, bitter, resentful, frazzled, maladaptive, and so forth. They don't need anti-depressants, they need relief from the causes of stress, anger, resentment, befrazzlement, bad lifestyles, ad nauseum.

They need to get their lives straightened out. They need honest reality-based guidance (if they'll take it). They need debt relief. They need to get paid more for their work. They need better transit. They need better child care facilities while they are at work. They need ready access to consistent medical care. They need more affordable decent food. They need to stop drinking so much and using so many recreational drugs. NONE OF THAT is depression.

-Clinical depression: where depression inhibits an individual's ability to function
-Melancholy: a general feeling of sadness that doesn't interfere much with your life
-Grief: a sadness that comes from the loss of something or someone
-Weltschmerz: a sadness regarding the general state of the world
-Stress, illness, or otherwise physically induced depression
-Life changes: major life changes, even good ones, have been associated with depression — NKBJ

So, I would rule out all your definitions of depression except the first and the fifth. The others are not depression -- they are what you named them: melancholy, grief, Weltschmerz, and life changes -- even good ones. Come on: Who, having gotten a better job, a raise, and an exciting new sex partner becomes depressed because of the good life changes?

-Hormone-induced moodiness: all humans go through regular chemical fluctuations that can cause brief spouts of depression — NKBJ

Hormones are measurable: What hormones are chemically fluctuating (especially in males) that would account for depression? It seems like that would be the most easily detected cause of depression, but it doesn't seem to be (unless you are counting neurotransmitters as hormones).

So: Depression, caused by stress, illness, or otherwise physically induced, inhibits an individual's ability to function.

Joshs's point is on target:

depression as a failure to adaptively cope within one's own subjective world of aims and goals. — Joshs

Failure to cope with the friction between one's private world view and public reality is a source of great stress. (Its the story of my life, soon to be made into a bad movie.)

Frankly, I don't see any value whatsoever in conditions which depress normal functioning. The hallmarks of depression -- poor memory, perseveration, lack of concentration, sleep disturbance, irritability, dysphoria, etc. etc. -- don't seem like advantages for anything.

Melancholy and weltschmerz may have philosophical or literary utility (they are useful flavoring agents) but they aren't depression, per se. Grief is usually transient, has a cause, is not abnormal, and is normally over in a year or so. 99 times out of 100, people progress through grief predictably.

How about formally produced knowledge disappearing behind the very high priced walls of academic journals? Journals didn't pay for the research to be done, they don't pay the salaries of the researchers, they don't support the universities, so really... what good are they? It seems like a few publishers control a lot of the journals - like Elsevier.

If the major publishers and media producers weren't out there policing their products, I would expect pirating would take over, and the quality of pirate-produced product would be abysmal.

But there must be mechanisms of guaranteeing the validity of given works. (I'm guessing -- are there? Yes? No?)

My argument is concerned primarily with the justice of the overall arrangement. — karl stone

I don't think there is anything unjust about direct sales between creators and consumers of art work (music, writing, etc.) One could argue (it has been argued) that the present system exploits the author and reader by the printer. The direct sale (author to reader) might be more just; it might also be less efficient because it is too decentralized.

Books don't just sell themselves. Cover art work, recommendations, reviews, ratings, blurbs, sales rank, and so forth all help get the book sold. Marketing books is a legitimate business activity (it's not merely a ripoff) and it helps move the product. Some form of marketing will be done, or most books will never find enough customers to keep the author from starving.

what if everyone had their own internet ID? The only way to access the internet was via your own ID - and all forms of media were available online... — karl stone

Printing presses and paper were expensive, there were all sorts of distribution and sales problems. I read the other day that Victorians didn't buy many books; they were too expensive, but they read a lot. What publishers did was sell books to for-profit lending libraries. Readers subscribed to the commercial lending libraries, and the libraries then rented and distributed a given book to many people. Authors quite often wrote under contract to publishers, with the text broken up into 3 volumes (to keep the customer coming back for more). This kept the author and printer in business and kept the readers well supplied.

Cheap books (like penny dreadfuls) were sort of the "True Detective" of their day -- featuring stories about crime, disasters, and so forth. Men liked them and they were bought and traded around. Since they were cheap they wouldn't last too long, thus keeping the market in need of new goods.

The modern book store is relatively recent: Tons of books, affordably priced, sold not borrowed. I don't think it's any earlier than the late 19th or early 20th century. So we grew up during the heyday of the physical bookstore.

Bookstores are now being phased out (more or less) in favor of selling books from a few giant stores (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) Books are often sold and read in digital form.

The digital book is the form your idea of direct, democratic distribution and sale of books by authors to` individuals needs, and it's here. (Of course, not all books are digital).

Just as the "browser" was needed to to help people find things on the net back in the late 1990sxx, probably an automated sales force of some sort would be needed to help connect particular readers with particular titles. Your scheme of individual authors selling their books to individual readers seems to me to be quite workable. But a public relations industry will develop within the model to help achieve more sales, if so desired by a given author.

Some bands have resorted to the direct model: they put their music on their web site for sale at attractive prices, but they make most of their money from touring and ticket sales.

The idea can be patented, but the manufacture, marketing and distribution cannot — karl stone

I really don't know much about patents, but practice is the reverse, isn't it? -- you can't patent an idea (like toasting bread) but you can patent a novel toaster (it copies DVDs, it makes toast, it hops off the counter to vacuum the floor, and it recycles pet hair into dental floss).

FYI, "Happy Birthday" was declared to be in the public domain in 2016. Warner/Chappell publishing paid its way out of a class action lawsuit. So, at this point, nobody is getting royalties for singing Happy Birthday. I read it in the Hollywood Reporter, so it must be true.

Copyright, trademarks, and patents do give one an exclusive right, but only for a period of time. For instance, if you write (and publish) the Great American Novel, the copyright on your GAN will last for as long as you live, plus 70 years. After that, it is in the public domain. Copyright can backfire: If, 5 or 10 years after you publish your GAN, it fades away because the publisher decided not to reprint it, you get no more royalties and the public is denied ready access to your book. It's "Out of Print" and hard to find. Tragedy! IF your book could be put up on the internet for free, millions could read your masterwork. You'd still be eating beans and rice, but at least you'd be famous.

The lifetime on patents (like for drugs or gadgets or processes) is quite a bit shorter--17-20 years.

Trademarks apparently work a bit differently. "Scotch Tape" is a registered trademark of the 3M Company (used to be Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing). You can call the roll of cheap crappy tape you bought at the Dollar Store "scotch tape" informally, but you can't sell it as "Scotch Tape™". Zipper lost its trademark status but Kleenex didn't.

if someone were paying a significant sum to license an idea - and can legitimately market those goods, why would they produce bad goods? — karl stone

In the long run, they probably wouldn't -- that's why there are cheap knock-offs. Cheap crappy tape is often "good enough" and one might not want to spend twice as much on the roll of refined Scotch Tape™.

Suppose we didn't live within the capitalist legal system of the western world. Would we still need to protect intellectual property so carefully? I'm in favor of authors having a right to the proceeds of their work at least for their lifetime. I don't think that commercial texts and images should be protected for anywhere close to that long.

Advertising copy and images, for instance, are often quite ingenious, creative, and novel. I enjoy looking at advertising. Somebody deserves credit for creating the Marlboro Cowboy (music, scenery, costume, mustache, the whole package) or the GEICO gecko, and Philip Morris and GEICO would naturally want to have exclusive use of that imagery. But if a different company wants to use a butch cowboy or a clever carnivorous reptile like the gecko, I don't see why they should be blocked in court for copyright infringement.

I ran afoul of copyright law when I was producing extremely limited-run AIDS/HIV prevention messages. Sometimes only 5 copies of the message were made, sometimes maybe 500 were made and given away as part of a safe-sex package. I ruthlessly stole images from books and magazines to create small posters and hand-out packages. I had a budget only for copying materials in house, not for buying expensive images. I wrote my own copy.

All materials created with the use of public funds had to be approved by a committee at state Departments of Health (under the Bush II presidency, and on to the present). These committees tended to be obsessed with copyright and protecting the public's sensitivities. They half-way bought my fair use argument, but they didn't like the wholesale appropriation of published stuff, and they found that my creations were effective and on target but likely to offend public sensitivities. So, I started circumventing the whole approval process which got me into hotter water and eventually I was fired for being a pain in the ass of the management.

Fair use needs to be made a much stronger principle for thieves like me.

Can you shed some light on the objection that such a society would have to run secretly? With only a few philosophers knowing of the utilitarian principle behind it? — Jamesk

I don't understand why there would be an "objection that such a society would have to run secretly". What are you referencing in the 'secret' part? It would seem like the utilitarian principle is obvious enough that many people would know of it. No?

Defamatory speech aimed at a particular person, as in me destroying your reputation and causing you to lose your job... — Hanover

Is not @metoo at least sometimes exactly this? Suppose a former employee (10 years ago) makes this accusation: "Hanover required oral sex from me before he would give me a recommendation, and then he told a prospective employer that I give great head." (Well... she did get a good recommendation, after all. Ungrateful woman!)

The lady posts this on twitter, and a day later your boss fires you. "We can't tolerate your appalling and disgusting sexist behavior and your presence here damages our company. Get lost, creep."

You say the lady is a liar and you never did any such thing, and never would, but you are still disgraced and out of a job. So, two people are at fault here: The lying lady whose false tweet cost you your job and reputation, and your employer who fired you on the basis of a completely unsubstantiated claim which was a lie.

I suspect that some of the @metoo claims are at least exaggerated, if not outright false. But the point is, employers are not obligated to act on these claims, whether they are true or not. It isn't so much a problem of free speech, as it is people who are willing to admit what they hear on the street as sworn testimony and convene themselves as the jury to render a verdict and sentence.

Maybe Tom, Dick, or Harry did paw Betsy 10 years ago, but what does that have to do with his job as a faceless functionary at XYZ corporation? So it isn't just Betsy that is playing fast and loose with the truth. It's XYZ Corp. as well.

If you want to know more, much more, about Hare, here is an article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

This is from Texas A & M University. It might help. I didn't get it either.

The basic argument:

1. The universalizability of moral judgments implies preference utilitarianism.

It is a logical feature of natural language that moral judgments (expressed in terms of "ought" claims, or claims about what is "right") are both (1) universalizable and (2) overriding.
By this he means that, in order to sincerely assent to the judgement that "A ought to do X to B and C," one must sincerely assent to the judgements that "B ought to do X to A and C" and "C ought to do X to A and B," were their various roles switched, and one must assent to this irrespective of what one's individual preferences are (that is, whether one is A rather than B or C).
And this means, according to Hare, that Kantian universalizability implies preference utilitarianism. For to sincerely assent to an ought claim is to prefer that the thing in question be done, even if one had to occupy, successively, the positions of each and every one of the persons involved.
Hare's criterion of universalizability thus combines the intuitiveness of the traditional Golden Rule (do unto others what you would have them do unto you -- you imagine yourself in the others' shoes) with the precision of the philosophers' condition of universalizability (when doing so, you are to imagine yourself having the others' preferences rather than your own). So one way to think of Hare's view is as providing a secular defense of the Golden Rule (one based on the logic of moral judgments rather than divine authority) and an argument to the conclusion that the Golden Rule, properly understood, implies preference utilitarianism.

2. However, human beings need both "intuitive level moral principles" and "critical thinking."

Humans' basic preferences are pretty uniform, but
Humans vary in their ability to think critically and to act on what they determine to be correct moral principles, and across time and varying circumstances, the same individual varies in these same ways.

C. This implies that one should embrace a two-level version of utilitarianism:

We use "intuitive level thinking"...
or Prima facie principles governing general types of cases commonly encountered by people...
when there isn't time for critical thinking, or
when one can't trust one's critical thinking.

and we use "Critical level" thinking"...
when prima facie principles conflict, in unusual cases, or
when both (a) it is clear that utility can be maximized a certain way and (b) one can trust one's judgment that this is so.

The discussion concludes with:

Three kinds of intuitive level principles:

Common morality: Insofar as members of a society face similar problems, we would expect agreement to emerge on basic standards which everyone in the society will be expected to live up to. Moreover, given the universal features of the human condition, we would expect there to be many similarities between the common moralities of various cultures at different times and places.

Professional ethics: Insofar as those in certain roles face similar kinds of situations repeatedly, we would expect agreement to emerge on basic standards for the conduct of various professionals and others in special roles.

Personal morality: And insofar as individuals differ in their abilities to reason critically under various circumstances, critical thinking will lead different individuals to train themselves to adhere to different sets of intuitive level rules, including "metaprinciples" for deciding when to engage in critical thinking and when to stick unquestioningly to one's intuitive level priniciples.

Wikipedia isn't always the best source of information.

I am going to train myself to use it. — andrewk

We all might as well.

The 'st' on the end of 'whilst' is called an 'excrescence'. Apparently philologists don't like it. There are several excrescent words:

whilst, amongst, amidst, against, and unbeknownst

betwixt seems to be the most disliked excrescent word. It goes back to Old English, betweox.

Swingeing (pron. swinjing, rhymes with singeing) deserves more usage. It's British;, meaning a sweeping change..

Unbeknownst to me whilst I was living amidst the Gaulois, a plot against Ceasar was being hatched amongst his soldiers.

It isn't clear to me HOW abortion came to be the hot issue it has become. I am familiar with the 20th /21st century history, going back at least a century. I am (I think) aware that abortion was disapproved of in the ancient world, but NOT on account of the fetus--rather it was on account of the parent, or patriarch of the tribe/community. At the same time as there was concern about women denying someone a child, the ancient world was quite willing to get rid of inconvenient live births. Unwanted babies were thrown out with the bath water -- left outside to die.

So, sometime after the demise of the Empire in the west, and before contemporary time, a religious-led objection to abortion and infanticide arose. (I'm guessing the objection to abortion was as present in Islam as Christian teaching and practice.)

Who, what, when, where and why did the drive to fervently foster full-term fetuses develop?

Anyone can uses references [whilst] misrepresenting the findings of studies and selecting a few studies out of thousands. — Andrew4Handel

Ah, ha! Lives in the UK, "whilst" he posts on TPF.

People who "join the army" or "follow certain spiritual paths" are "different" before they even make that choice. Somebody who is tone deaf doesn't decide to become a musician; someone who is hostile towards authority will join neither the army nor the monastery. The path we "choose to take" is often laid out for us (in terms of compatibility, preference, ability, etc.) before we even step out the door.

Don't take the paragraph above as hard-core determinism. We can make some choices; we can adapt to situations we don't especially like (sometimes, anyway). Lots of people have led lives they might rather not live twice; they put up with what was given them, but they would rather have done something else.

how polarised is human nature?" For example, do the dimensions of good/bad, moral/immoral, play a part in human nature — BrianW

Animal behavior -- squirrels', lions', chickens'... and ours can be depicted on a scattergram better than a a linear line with extremes on both ends. Animal behavior generally don't fit into polarized frameworks.

We (humans) just naturally turn to polarized models because they simplify things. Scattergrams may be more accurate representations of how we behave, but they are harder to interpret than "good/bad", "smart/stupid", "angelic/devilish" and so on. Black and white depictions are just so much easier to use -- they get rid of all that annoying detail and subtlety.

Sexual behavior is a good example of the scattergram vs. linear line. It would be much simpler if everyone was either 100% gay or 100% straight; 100% monogamous, or 100% promiscuous. That's not the way we are. All but a small percentage of us are a little gay and mostly straight, or mostly gay and a little straight, with all shades in between represented. If you chart the results of a battery of aptitude and skills testing for even 1 person, the scores will be all over the place. One gets strong patterns only after you've charted the results for maybe 5,000 people.

The same thing is true for just about any animal behavior you might care to measure. "Birds fly south for the winter." Simple. The actual performance of individual birds and individual bird species varies quite a bit. Some have higher rates of death than others; some birds successfully mate in the south, others don't. Some birds lose their mate along the way, others don't. Some birds get lost along the way. Others make it to exactly the right spot. Sometimes birds are blown off course by storms, and end up in backyards where people are very surprised to see them.

We often say things like, "humans are not a monogamous species" — BrianW

I grew up hearing that this or that species of bird were monogamous for life. Usually said bird was held up as an example of virtue to be emulated. Later in life I learned that monogamous birds cheat fairly often IF the opportunity presents itself. Many male and female birds engage in this sort of thing every now and then.

Why should we be more virtuous than birds? Just because some bird is so discrete when playing the field that ornithologists don't notice, I should never have a memorable affair?

We are animals, unequivocally. It doesn't matter how well we reason, how well we do or do not control our emotions -- we are part of the animal kingdom. Our behavior accords with our genetic makeup and the manner in which we are nurtured from conception -- just like other animals are.

While it is true that we can reason, it is true that we can gain self-understanding (not that we always do, but we can to some extent), while it is true that we can control our emotions (sometimes, at least) it is not true that we can be anything we want to be, that we can feel however we wish, that we can reason at any level of complexity we want, and so forth.

As a species we are limited by our genetic inheritance and potential. We experience our genetic inheritance and potential on a very personal level. Individually we are unique (within limits) and we do not have control over how we become who we are (because by the time we can take control of our own development, the concrete is already pretty well set).

Because we are conscious beings, we can be very aware of the wide -- maybe unbridgeable -- gap between what we wish we were, and what we are. This leaves us quite frustrated a good share of the time.

Some of us would like to think that we have no innate 'nature'. They think we are products of our nurture and our ideas. Some people go so far as to think our 'minds' are not even located in our physical bodies. Others of us are banking on our having at least a large measure of genetically directed or influenced behavior. Our behavior is somewhere on the continuum of animal behavior.

All of this gives a human being plenty of wiggle room -- something a sensitive human needs when trying to explain his nature.

Testicles are often seen as a sign of masculinity, strength, and power. Sometimes, testicles are flaunted like peacocks' feathers: the bigger your "balls", the more manly you are. Oftentimes warriors, sports icons and other masculine idols are described in terms of having "balls of steel" or similar phrases. — darthbarracuda

Taking the expression literally, I think a man with steel balls would find them an inconvenience. They'd be much too heavy, make too much noise banging together, and would stretch his scrotum down to his knees. Never mind trying to get through airport security screening. Just picture what would happen in an MRI machine.

There might be a some relationship between larger testicles and some masculine features like a lower voice pitch. However, pictures of naked muscle-builders don't usually show remarkably large testicles. Testicle size doesn't seem correlated with heterosexual he-man stereotypes. The lack of correlation is partly owing to the role that testosterone plays in fetal development. Male fetuses supply the testosterone that masculinizes the brain. AND, of course, male and female brains look pretty similar when you scoop them out of the skull and put them side by side on the lab table, as one does.

To repeat myself, much of the discussion one hears about the differences between, and grievances directed toward men and women are moronic. Some of it is just another trope like the 'kick in the balls' humor you mentioned. A lot of it is stupid, but that doesn't mean that there is no seriousness in saying it.

Both posts served a salutary purpose in this discussion.

Quite a bit of the discussion one hears about the differences between, and grievances directed toward men and women are moronic (but never within this sublime shelter of reason, of course).

We either have free speech, or we don't — Bitter Crank

thats a black and white fallacy right there buddy. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

If the principle of freedom of speech is not protected in its practice, then it will eventually be whittled back to "the principle of convenient, allowable speech" which is not free speech.

Although I am sympathetic to the sentiment you put forward, I think it overlooks circumstances that would clearly need restricting when it comes to overtly aggressive speech that deems to threaten an individual. Such as the elderly, the disabled, children. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

There are limitations on speech: "The Court ruled unanimously that the First Amendment, though it protects freedom of expression, does not protect dangerous speech. In the decision, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that no free speech safeguard would cover someone "falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."

Aggressive speech is not the same as dangerous speech (at least as I understand "aggressive" and "dangerous".) It's quite possible that a Neo-Nazi might yell at some people ""You old Jews should've been made into soap." Or "Hitler knew what to do with cripples!" yelled at someone in a wheel chair. Very offensive and provocative, certainly. But probably protected.

In 1977 The American Civil Liberties Union defended the American National Socialist (Nazi) Party in its bid to hold a march in Skokie, IL, a Jewish suburb of Chicago where many Holocaust survivors lived. It is a celebrated First Amendment case, which the National Socialists won -- in a decision by the Supreme Court.

[caption] Frank Collin, leader of the National Socialist Party of America, holds a rally in Marquette Park at 71st Street and Sacramento Avenue on Aug. 27, 1972, in Chicago. The Tribune reported Collin telling the crowd of 300, “The black revolution has taken over in all of the large cities in this country except Chicago and it’s up to the white, Aryan people of this city to keep white ethnic neighborhoods like this one together!” (Walter Kale / Chicago Tribune)

The Nazis were a very small group. There was also a black-and-white racial issue lurking in the background (the National Socialists said they were protecting white communities from encroaching blacks).

So, should a group of Moslems wish to march through a gay community carrying signs that homosexuals were doomed to hell, you would have that right.

A grown man, calling children the c word, the f word, the t word, etc etc, like the most foulest things you can think of, outside of the school through the fence on public property.

And the police not having the power to do anything. He is only using speech, and we either have free speech or we don't. Therefore we can't arrest him, and because he's on public property we can't do anything at all. We could ask him to move politely, but so long as he was only verbally abusive, he's protected by absolutest free speech laws and there is no crime being committed. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

Your scenario may seem bizarre, wild, extreme... but actually it isn't all that far out. Some people will engage in this sort of behavior--not all that often, but not rarely either. Some of them are deranged, some of them are hateful bastards. Some of them are besides themselves with rage (over god knows what). What can the police do?

The police are usually not without recourse. He could be ordered to lower his voice. He could be told to move. He could be accused of being a public nuisance, disturbing the peace, blocking a public sidewalk, interfering with a government function (education) or some such thing. The police might act on their own, but more likely they would act on the basis of a complaint from the public.

His speech, per se, isn't the problem, here. It's the loud volume at that particular place. The same thing would probably happen to him if he were at the same location, screaming verses from the Koran or the Bible, Tropic of Cancer. or Paradise Lost. Behavior like this seems deranged.

Adults have, on a number of occasions, arrived at schools being integrated to scream epithets at the black children entering the school. They were protesting a change in policy to which they were very opposed. Were the children in those situations totally traumatized by hearing bad things screamed at them? Not too traumatized, because black parents had prepared their children for what would happen at the school. It's one thing to have people screaming at you and you don't know why, and quite another to know exactly why they are screaming at you.

Matters of taste might have existential gravity. It is quite possible that someone might so strongly prefer to speak French rather than German, prefer certain foods very strongly over others, prefer a certain manner of dress, that those preferences define who they are. For instance, I started growing a beard in 1970. Once it was an inch long or so, I realized that "that's me" and I have not cut it off since (Trim, yes -clean shave, no). It's a matter of taste, a matter of appearance which I define as "me".

Come to think of it, there are several matters of taste I consider existentially central, or have in the past.

So, on closer examination owing to your question and prompt, i"ll elevate matters of taste to a higher level of significance than I did earlier.

Oscar Wilde shed aphorisms like golden retrievers shed hair, so there are a lot of them, and many of them have kind of a snarky quality. But apparently Wilde valued matters of taste very highly. For instance, sober types say that it is shallow to judge by appearances. Wilde says that "Only shallow people don't judge by appearances."

I'm a free speech absolutist. I don't agree that any speech can be harmful, at least not in a manner that suggests control of speech. — Terrapin Station

If anyone is unclear on what harmful speech is, it should be obvious that when anyone criticizes a group of people without any other reason than that they are different in ethnicity, gender or culture, it is hate speech. Any criticism against a group of people should be based on solid reasonable arguments that can't be disputed easily. — Christoffer

I am much closer to Terrapin Station's position than Christoffer's.

I'm not in favor of banning hate speech. I am a member of a group which many people dislike, loathe, hate, disparage, ridicule, consider inherently disordered, sinful, etc. -- gay men. Gay men have come in for what Christoffer calls "hate speech" because we prefer to have sex with other men; often display our preference publicly, and sometimes parody women (drag). Some gay men are swishy. Not only do gay men like having sex with other men, we quite often have sex with many other men. We are also (sometimes) well organized.

Don't I want protection from hate speech? No, not particularly. I do not require that people must think homosexuality and homosexual activity equal, desirable, and deserving of respect. What I want is not to be physically attacked by someone who dislikes gays. Say what you want. Words won't hurt me but clubs and rocks are another matter.

Why should I tolerate hate speech? Banning hate speech isn't just a slippery slope on the way to widespread censorship and censorious policing of expression. It makes law out of some version of politeness. The rules of etiquette should not rule speech. Banning is a restriction on appropriate (as well as inappropriate) speech: There are groups who "are different in ethnicity, gender or culture" and who deserve criticism. For instance, gay men can be appropriately criticized for practicing promiscuous unsafe sex. Young black men - and perhaps urban black culture as a whole -- can be appropriately criticized for the amount of black-on-black violence. Very conservative white men can be criticized for their fondness for the Confederate Cause and for engaging in sometimes violent demonstrations. Young, privileged leftist white men and women (and other ethnicities) can also be criticized for sometimes violent demonstrations and for attacking people for having what are often rather innocuous opinions.

I want to be free to criticize people and their cultures whatever their ethnicity or sex. Promiscuous high risk sex among gay men, promiscuous high risk gun use resulting in deaths, beating up blacks and Jews, or shutting down discussion on campuses are all worthy of criticism. I want to be free to publicly criticize rich people, whether they are male or female, black or white, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim, or atheists. A rich black woman is no more above criticism than a rich white man.

We either have free speech, or we don't.

I have always thought "de gustibus non est disputandum" referenced nothing very weighty, but about which much dispute could occur. So, if its a matter of "I say garum from Greece is better than garum from Egypt", one might say, "De gustibus non disputandum est." Or "You know, Heinz catsup is better than Hunts." Rather than argue over it for an hour, just say de gustibus non est disputandum, or there's just no accounting for taste.

One certainly would not say that the justification for impeaching Donald Trump was a matter of mere taste. Law is not taste or vice versa.

there is no law of the Universe — RosettaStoned

And that's the end of it. We don't get any of our laws from the universe. Never mind about conservation of energy, gravity, momentum and all that. I'm talking about Hammurabi-type law, canon law, common law, and so forth.

So, the only law that matters in court is human-made law, and human-made law sort of frowns on killing babies and raping women (officially, at least)--especially when our ox is the one gored, so to speak. Every now and then there is a regrettable outbreak of arson, rape, and bloody murder by the good side (we expect it from the other side) which requires some fairly stern due process.

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↪Bitter Crank

You said:
I don't care what you say!
— Bitter Crank

So clearly you're not interested in actual discussion. — NKBJ

So, that was your evidence of trolling. What you took to be trolling was hyperbole. Any sort of off-beat humor is difficult in on-line communications because there are no expressions, gestures, voice, etc. which would aid the receiver in interpreting how serious a given sentence was intended. And then there are literalists who take everything at face value.

So by my fault, by my most grievous fault... grovel, grovel, grovel.

We have no more choice about consuming other life forms than any other creature.
— Bitter Crank

That's clearly wrong, since some if us do choose not to.

Also, you already admitted to just being a troll. — NKBJ

Don't troll me, young whippersnapper!

What I said was we have no choice about consuming "other life forms" which includes what fruitarians, vegans, and finally, omnivores eat. Other life forms like spinach, oysters, cows, and termites.

What I said you may not like, but disagreeing with you a troll does not me make.

Maybe then this is not the thread for you and you should stick to commenting on threads you actually care about/have an open mind about. — NKBJ

No. It's perfectly appropriate to reject the validity of a discussion.

Humans are as much a part of the web of life on earth as any other creature. All creatures are engaged in a continual processing of other life forms into their own. We have no more choice about consuming other life forms than any other creature.

There has to be a choice before morality can come into play. We don't have any choice about eating plants directly or indirectly, so it can't be a moral issue--any more than drinking water or breathing can be moral issues. There is no choice there.

In an industrialized world rife with choices which have existential consequences, food choices are just one more moral issue among many. Population, resource consumption (all kinds), and global warming make most of our lifestyle choices unsustainable. Using gasoline in a private car, electricity generated with coal, heating and cooling, irrigating crops, flying, etc. are all choices with significant negative consequences.

Pulling one issue out, say the morality of flying when a bus or train would place a far smaller burden on the environment (or maybe just traveling around at all), would make for a nice heated moral shooting match, but, after all, flying is just one piece among many. Pumping water out of the Colorado River, lifting it over a mountain range, and keeping Phoenix, AZ, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles alive, is a frightful burden on the world environment -- and that's just resource wasting population center among many. It's another moral choice.

What I am saying, is in that in The Big Picture, our individual capacity to make significant moral choices is rapidly becoming limited. Not eating meat is a good moral choice, the benefit of which might very well be negated by other moral choices. A car-driving, large house dwelling, frequent flying vegetarian is accomplishing no more net good than a bus-riding, small house dwelling, never flying carnivore.

I've been struggling for many years with thoughts about suicide, but my case is peculiar in that I desperately want to live. — simmerdown

You apparently are suffering from a chronic condition. You have learned how to live with it -- else you might have committed suicide years ago. I'm glad that you are still with us.

This has created an incredibly difficult life for me, and I regularly fall into depressive episodes (for which I've been seeking help) — simmerdown

Just guessing, but your depression probably came first, and causes your feelings of despair. Stick with therapy. Depression is a bitch, for sure. Try to do the usual self-help stuff that people always suggest: Take care of your physical health; eat regularly, get some exercise, do what you can to get quality sleep; maintain friendships (or at least regular social contacts). Yeah, I know -- when you are depressed, this stuff is hard to do. Try, anyway.

as selfish as it sounds, there would be no "me" to realize the consequences of my actions — simmerdown

True, there would be no "you" afterward, but there is a "you" before it happens, and that "you" is running the show.

Are you taking antidepressants? Do they help? (Don't just stop taking them because they don't seem to be working). Talk therapy? Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? Is it helping?

Is there something about your life that is adding a steady drip of unhappiness? Like a bad job, bad relationship, poverty, disability, alcoholism... stuff like that?

Are you involved in any support groups for depression? (not a cure, you may not like groups; they can be a useful source of info on doctors that are better or worse, and can be sounding board...)

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum.

@Vegans, @Vegetarians, and @Vigilantes Nature is neither moral nor immoral. To the extent that we fulfill our natural functions of thriving (eating, growing, maturing, breeding, nurturing young, extracting necessities from the earth, and in time being returned to the earth) we are neither moral nor immoral. We are simply doing what comes naturally.

Our Edenic Existence has long since passed, of course. Our behavior long since began to range far beyond the borders of the innocently natural world. We developed technics of various kind which extended our reach way beyond our grasp. We became more dangerous to one another; we developed unnatural behaviors like religion in which we sacrificed members of the tribe to appease a god. We played with fire and got burned. We sometimes killed our own kind when they disagreed with us (that is to say, became disagreeable). We discovered we could be really awful, pairing predatory instincts with devious demonic cognition the way we do. We try to overlay our devil selves with higher morality to keep life from becoming too bad. We try. We try.

Just like with technology, morality provides us yet another opportunity to carry things to excess. It's not enough that we actually behave fairly well toward each other. Some of us feel obligated to impose our ideas of higher morality on behavior which is actually pretty natural, normal, and nice. Like sex; like eating meat, like drinking fermented beer and gin; smoking some vegetable matter perchance to dream a little.

I like sex, meat, beer, drugs, all that. You don't? Fine. Go home and have a glass of warm water. Or take a cold shower. Just leave me, my pork chop, and bottle of beer alone.

What animal is there that is not subject to being eaten? Porcupines? Maybe porcupines are exempt. Not sure about that. How would the wolf go about it?

What plant can count on not being consumed by either an animal, an insect, a fungus, or bacteria? None that I can think of.

Will the dietary moralists please clear out of the dining room, and once you are outside, keep walking. I don't care what you say! The next time I get a chance (maybe tonight!) I plan on eating oysters so fresh they will still be alive when I tip them out of their pearly shells. Exquisite!

At the Feast of Life we eat, we grow and we die. Even predatory primates are occasionally privileged to be featured on the menu. Wade in the water and get snatched by an alligator, pulled to the bottom of the swamp; left there to cure for a few days; then the alligator's delectation begins. It's not a crime against nature. It IS nature.

As morally sensitive as I am, I am not outside of nature, and neither are you. Human animals do what we do because we are what we are. You stick with your organic fair traded watercress and cucumber sandwich on gluten free, fat free, sugar free, salt free, artificially leavened wafer and just sit there and glow with vegan virtue. I'll have roast pork, potatoes, broccoli, and beer and glow with pleasure. I'm having dessert, too -- and you can't have any of it. So there!

Chopping up the head of an iceberg lettuce would feel as painful to iceberg lettuce as... — Purple Pond

The head of iceberg lettuce deserves whatever it gets. Awful stuff. At least kill for better results: Romaine, cabbage, spinach...