I don't make a difference between the two of them. That's another reification right there in my opinion. It's the same underlying action, you're just using two different words to differentiate based on CONTEXT not on the action. — Agustino

But how do we determine the morality of an action if not the intent of the agent who performed it? The only other way to determine it is by the consequences of the action. In that case, intent doesn't matter. But I never took you for a consequentialist.

I tend to agree. Science deals with how things are, given our means of measurement, as opposed to why things are or are the way they are.

Sucrose.

I get what you are saying about violence in self-defence; and I would probably employ it to defend my loved ones and myself if needed, since I am not morally perfect. — Janus

But it would be morally permissible to kill your assailant in self-defense. That wouldn't be murder but manslaughter. Look up the principle of double effect, which effectively states that the cause of a cause is the cause of its effect.

I do hold that murder even in self-defence is ultimately wrong, but a "necessary" wrong if I may say so — Agustino

But as I told you in the other thread, killing in self-defense is not murder. It's manslaughter.

I sometimes wonder if those of us who don't get along on this forum would get along in real life and those of us who do get along on this forum wouldn't get along in real life. A mostly unprovable thought experiment.

But this is agent-centered and not about reducing suffering writ large — schopenhauer1

But how can it not be? Look at your first premise:

1. It would be wrong to treat humans as a means and not as an ends in themselves, if it brings about all structural and contingent suffering for another person's life. — schopenhauer1

Here you speak of humans, plural. Your clause at the end speaks of structural suffering, which refers to suffering that all humans must experience simply by virtue of being alive. Thus, you are talking about reducing suffering writ large.

You can then call it agent-centered deontological negative utilitarianism, and I would not have a problem with it. — schopenhauer1

Fine by me. As long as you understand that it depends on both a deontological claim that I believe admits of exceptions and on a certain conception of personhood with which I disagree. I'm glad we were able to at least narrow down where our disagreement lies, but it seems I wasn't all that off the mark in my suspicion that you were still arguing for anti-natalism on fairly convention grounds.

Of course not, they are talking about "coming into existence" which usually correlates to becoming a fully functioning human — schopenhauer1

This doesn't make any sense to me. You exist from the moment of conception until death. I am talking to an adult human being. If we wind back the clock, before you were an adult, you were an adolescent, and before that, a child, and before that, an infant, and before that, a fetus, and before that, an embryo, and before that, a zygote, which places us at conception. At no point during this sequence did you not exist. Thus, you began to exist at conception and have continued to exist ever since then.

This is true, unless you are trying to say that your person did not exist until a certain point after conception. Is that what you're trying to say below?

Being born implies more than the birthing or conception. So no actual person was being harmed until X time, then that person who started at x was harmed (X being some X time of becoming a fully functioning human- whether that be awareness, being in the world as a separate entity completely from the mother's womb, etc.). Existing in the world came about through events that were not self-caused. Something caused this to happen. — schopenhauer1

It seems here that the answer to my question is, "yes." If so, then I disagree with this hitherto unstated premise in your argument. I don't think personhood arises at some magical date after conception. I take personhood to exist concomitantly with the distinct generic code that results from fertilization.

Most Pessimists (capital P) would say that the world has structural harm, and thus bringing someone into existence is bringing someone into this world means creating the circumstance for a fully functioning human who by this fact experiences the structural harm inherent in the system. — schopenhauer1

Implicit in this line of reasoning is negative utilitarianism. Thus, when all the dust has settled, you're actually presenting the most well known and popular argument for anti-natalism, despite your seeming protestations to the contrary.

That's fine, as long as you realize you're actually at odds with your own church's teaching on this.

You sort of implied that you thought this, in the past tense. What is your position now? Do you accept the principle of double effect?

I got it from introspection. — Mariner

I see. Well, did you ever consider becoming a Jain?

Would a genuine repentant bear arms against others "under any circumstances"? Sure. I used to present the thought experiment of someone getting home and finding a guy raping his wife or child (or both). Would not most people use violence (and most likely lethal violence) to stop this? Note that I say this as someone who has publicly (in the old forum for those who remember) defended the notion that any killing is evil, including the killing of the rapist in this scenario. If I met this scenario, I don't know what I would do. I'm quite sure that I would violence, I don't know whether I could restrain myself to non-lethal violence, and I'm absolutely positive that killing the guy would be wrong -- even though it is a live possibility that I would kill him. — Mariner

Where are you getting the idea that all killing is wrong? Have you not heard of the principle of double effect, which is taught by the Catholic Church and accepted by most non-consequentialist philosophers? Murder is wrong, intrinsically so, which means that it is never justified. Killing a rapist to protect your wife is not murder, however, but manslaughter. The Hebrew word sometimes translated as "kill" in the commandment, "thou shalt not kill," is vague and has been traditionally interpreted by both Jews and Christians to refer to murder. Both admit that there are legitimate exceptions to the commandment regardless, such as in the case of your example.

Not so much for his philosophical expertise — unenlightened

This is enormously underrated, I find. Inasmuch as philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, he's far wiser than most of us.

I don't think we need to talk about Kevin. I think there's been too much talk as of late on topics such as Kevin and his alleged misdemeanours, and much of it has amounted to petty squabbles, mudslinging, and hot air. I'm getting sick of it, and I think it's about time that we all moved on. In fact, I think it's long overdue. Kevin isn't as bad as people make out. He isn't a murderer. Yes, he did wrong. So did the other Kevins. But what's done is done. If there are lessons to be learned, how about we contemplate what they might be - in blessed silence. — Sapientia

(Y)

Typically it is a learned male trait to 'take it like a man', so it disadvantages half the population at a stroke. — unenlightened

Females today are not fragile little creatures needing your protection.

I hope you are not suggesting that we have an unmoderated forum? — unenlightened

No, but I would be as hands off as possible. I requested this before, but there really needs to be an ignore feature on this forum. That's a pretty glaring oversight by its makers. Nonetheless, it is still possible to ignore users you don't like, so I still have a hard time feeling sorry for you.

Have I offended you, or are you a gratuitous shit merchant? — unenlightened

It's not so much that I feel offended, but that I find you to be a rather offensive and offense-taking person. I've never reported you or anyone else. I haven't asked a mod to ban anyone. I only just now discovered in this thread that John Harris was banned. I thought he probably would be, but I never called for it and never reported him. This, despite the fact that I've been subject to some rather nasty abuse by him and others over the years. It's the Internet, and I'm able to take things with a grain of salt and move on. Why can't you? What does your time on this forum really mean, in the grand scheme of your life?

Perhaps you can help? — unenlightened

I did. I said you need to ignore Kevin, as several other people have suggested you do.

about all the many Kevin's that are infesting the site — unenlightened

Kevins, no apostrophe.

we need to talk about Kevin — unenlightened

No, apparently you need to talk about Kevin and are so desperate to talk about him that you have created a thread nine miles long expressing your thinly veiled contempt for him, a contempt so unquenchable that you have requested a thread be made solely in order to bitterly complain about him. You aren't fooling anyone.

You could and ought to just ignore him, as someone else in this thread suggested, but that would require giving up the pleasure of unearned moral superiority.

Even if I grant you that "You" began at the instant of conception, as I stated, it is the whole process of gestation and birth that contributes to the person. The harm does not maybe start with conception, but it does start at what ever X time after conception. — schopenhauer1

Yes! But if you grant, as you have here, that you exist at the moment of conception, then "coming into existence" isn't a harm, because there is no one to harm prior to conception. You also previously granted that literal birth (exiting a mother's womb) isn't a harm. So whence anti-natalism? It has no leg to stand on now.

But yet you said earlier, no one is the recipient of harm. When that "one" comes into existence (let's say 6 months is when some sort of conscious awareness begins), that X moment is the beginning of harm. — schopenhauer1

The "no one" referred to the nonexistence of any person prior to conception. We can trace your existence all the way back to the point at which an egg was fertilized in your mother. Before that, "you" didn't exist.

Yes, and we can be reasonably certain that "go fuck yourself" was followed by "don't make me smack a bitch" on the part of the first person's interlocutor, as shown in the following diagram:

Found an interesting, relevant article. I quote from the final paragraph:

Of course, SOME Calvinists DO embrace nominalism/voluntarism consistently and then they must swallow its “good and necessary consequences” including that we cannot know that God will keep any of his promises because he has no eternal, immutable character that causes him to that and only that. The only reasonable result of consistent voluntarism is Luther’s “deus absconditus” – the hidden God who is the cause of evil as well as of good.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2010/12/more-about-the-basic-choice-in-theology-voluntarism-versus-realism/#T28pzgdB38wgteBy.99

So, Agustino, I don't think Beebert and I are off the mark in detecting Protestant strains in your thinking.

Nuh. It would have been "fuck!" — Banno

Followed by "you."

I find it ironic that Agustino expressly and quite legitimately requested that this thread be devoted to his suggestion and not to the topic of sexism and yet here Willow and Thanatos are running their mouths about Agustino's alleged sexism.

The closest would be calvinism. — Beebert

Yeah, maybe so.

For someone to be evil, they have to break the moral Law. God cannot break the moral Law as He is not its subject. Therefore God cannot be evil. — Agustino

We were talking about God causing an event that we know from the law to be evil, like murder. You replied by saying that, if God caused the event, it would be beyond good and evil. But this makes the event both evil and not evil at the same time, which is impossible.

Does this privation of the good exist? You will now say yes. So apparently, something - the free will of man - can displace God, so that God ceases to exist where the privation of good exists right? So His omnipresence was a joke. That's absurd. And if you'll claim that evil is nothing, then you're even worse than you claim that I am by asserting that God is beyond the Law since you do not take evil seriously. — Agustino

Please bear in mind that I have tried to speak on behalf of classical theism for the sake of this discussion. That being said, from that perspective, I don't see why claiming that evil is nothing is not to take evil seriously. Why would that follow?

Wrong doctrine. Or better said, doctrine at a superficial level. Divine simplicity entails first and foremost that God is beyond the things created and nameable. — Agustino

The position I am defending says that, while God is in himself beyond whatever we might predicate of him, we can nonetheless truthfully predicate certain things of him in an analogical sense. If you, on the other hand, really believe that nothing can be predicated of God, not even analogically, then I fail to see how the word "God" has any meaning whatsoever. You'd best stop using it and remain silent, a la Wittgenstein.

I also stand by my claim that I have never heard a traditional Christian theist make your claim. There are roughly two schools concerning predication, the analogical and the univocal. I've already explained what I take the former to assert. The latter school would say that what we mean by good and evil applies unambiguously to God, e.g. to say of a human being that he is good and to say of God that he is good is to use the word "good" in precisely the same sense.

Right, so you've never read Dionysius? You've never read Isaiah? You've never read Christian mystics? — Agustino

I don't think a careful reading of them would yield the conclusion you've reached. Nor do I believe they all fail to describe God as good. It's also ironic that you bring up Dionysius, who believed that evil was indeed nothing.

although yes, there are instances when murder is not wrong - or better said excusable. If you attack me with a knife for example, and I end up killing you, that is morally excusable — Agustino

That's not murder. That's manslaughter. Murder always wrong (intrinsically evil).

Please expand on this. — Agustino

See above.

I think procreation is not immoral. Whether it should be preferable to never procreating is a question for the individual. Some are called to be completely devoted to God. Others are not.

I was never an anti-natalist. — Agustino

Interesting. Thanks for clarifying.

Furthermore, God is incomprehensible - therefore He can't be capricious, for capriciousness is comprehensible. — Agustino

I find capriciousness and evil to be highly incomprehensible actually. Whether theism is true or not, evil often defies easy explanation.

No one is the recipient of birth? Who cares — schopenhauer1

Oi vey....

Do you agree that people exist? — schopenhauer1

I do.

Do people "start" to exist at X time? — schopenhauer1

I'm tempted to challenge this, but I'll provisionally say yes.

At the X time of starting to exist, starts the harm. — schopenhauer1

X could only refer to the moment of conception, in which case we're talking about a fertilized egg. I don't think fertilized eggs can be harmed, so I disagree with you here.

Have you ever heard of Markus Gabriel? https://www.amazon.com/Why-World-Does-Not-Exist/dp/0745687563

Admission of what? — schopenhauer1

Let's look at it again, then. My claim is that birth itself is not a harm. You then said:

The act of birth has nothing inherently harmful (except the physiological pain involved I guess), but rather than "birth" I should say "life" or "existence" itself- not the birthing process. — schopenhauer1

I thought you were agreeing with me here. But looking at this quote again in light of your present confusion, it appears as though you were using the word "birth" in a different way than I was. I said a while ago in this conversation that I was going to take "birth" to mean "coming into existence," not the exiting of a baby from a mother's womb, precisely because I wanted to avoid the kind of difficulty we have now run into. I thought everybody was on board with that, but apparently not. I apologize for not being clear if I wasn't.

My position is, to wit, that birth, in the sense of coming into existence, is not a harm. Procreation is the cause of of birth, I agree. But identifying the cause of an action is not necessarily to identify the moral blameworthiness of that action. Anti-natalism takes procreation to be a morally blameworthy act. I don't, and the reason I don't is because the effect it causes, namely birth, is not a harm. Why don't I think it's a harm? It's that because, in order to inflict harm, a person must exist to be the recipient of it. But no one is the recipient of birth (for we agreed that pre-born souls do not exist), so no one is the recipient of harm in being born. Please tell me if you follow this.

At least this was the impression he gave me But I probably over-reacted. — Beebert

I don't think he's out of the woods yet, as I too detect something similar to what you do in him.

Yes — Beebert

Damn. I'm sorry that happened. I guess it goes to show that ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver would say, sometimes physically deleterious ones.

I myself am not opposed to taking action on what are recognized by all to be things deleterious to the natural environment. I am opposed to the idea that the government is the best institution to carry out this action.

This is exactly the view of God that caused me to be hospitalized for a month a year ago. — Beebert

Are you being serious?

If God causes the event directly, then it would be beyond good and evil. — Agustino

Poppycock. This is to say that evil is not evil.

Hmm okay, so then where does evil come from? Evil exists eternally like some kind of absence? — Agustino

This returns us to your original argument, which I only granted for the sake of argument. I suppose the response to your question would be that you are mistaken to speak of evil as existing. That is to say, if you grant that evil is the privation of the good, and it is the case that the good alone exists (God), then evil does not exist. God cannot by definition be present where nothing exists, so the contradiction you thought resulted doesn't actually do so.

No. God's transcendence would imply that doctrine. — Agustino

But as I said, the doctrine also entails that God is goodness, however analogical this claim may be. To enact a complete divorce between goodness and God is not something I've ever seen a traditional Christian theist do.

Using the Law to judge God is an effect of sin, or so would be my claim. — Agustino

I'm still uncomfortable with this, as it seems to imply a kind of moral relativism, which would suggest, for example, that there are instances when murder is right. But for God to command murder at one time and condemn it at another offends our moral sensibilities. Murder is intrinsically wrong, no matter the circumstances, which means that its being wrong cannot change. I would rather revise my conception of God and my understanding of those passages of scripture wherein he seems to command murder, than admit that murder is sometimes right.

Is morality defined by God's Law? Is God the Creator of the Law? Presuming you've answered these two by yes, then it would follow that God - as Creator of the Law - cannot be judged using the Law. So how is this theologically absurd? — Agustino

Not univocally, no.

God is in many ways like a Father, but He's also different from your earthly father. — Agustino

Right, so my analogy isn't fallacious.

Because whatsoever God does, it wouldn't count as breaking the Law - precisely because God is above the Law, and thus not subject to it. By not being subject to the Law, there is no sense in which you could say that God would break it. — Agustino

As I said above in this post, this is not the sense in which God cannot break it. You say that he can break it because he is utterly beyond it. I say that God cannot break the law, because the object of the law is the good, so to break it would be to violate his own nature as goodness itself.

In the sense of St. Augustine's statement, it might (although I'm not ready to go there). — Agustino

I admittedly threw you a slightly off-topic bone here, but this is an interesting response. You don't have to respond in this thread, but what exactly is your view on procreation? I might have mistakenly believed you were an anti-natalist at one point.

But I just said he's probably trolling, which was confirmed in the Shoutbox. Sue me for not seeing it as fast as you would like. I honestly never expected him to react that way to being proven wrong.

Who?

I don't know how else to account for your inability to comprehend a very simple issue. But oh well. — darthbarracuda

You have some lemons, some water, and some sugar. Making lemonade requires mixing lemon juice from the lemons with the water and sugar. This means the lemons must exist prior to the making of lemonade.

So now why don't you tell me how I'm wrong.

Lemons do not need to exist beforehand in order to make lemonade. They need only exist at the time of lemonade-making. — darthbarracuda

Wow. You must be trolling me. I don't know how else to account for such brazen stubbornness.

How does acknowledging a lemon's prior existence contradict my claim that the only thing that matters is that the lemon exists at the moment of lemonade-making? — darthbarracuda

If "at the moment" still presupposes the lemons' prior existence in your mind, it doesn't.

It contradicts this statement:

Lemons do not need to exist before making lemonade — darthbarracuda

I said the duration doesn't matter because it doesn't matter at all whether or not lemons exist before lemonade-making. — darthbarracuda

Darth, I refuse to accept that you are this daft. The point I just made to you was that, if you acknowledge ANY duration of a lemon's existence BEFORE making lemonade, then you have contradicted the following statement:

Lemons do not need to exist before making lemonade — darthbarracuda