I don't think it's likely that someone would start shooting if he knew that everyone else would start shooting back.

I think it far more likely that the collateral damage might become great enough for you to rethink the whole thing. No one would be safe. You cannot protect against a hail of bullets coming from every direction with a gun.

Perhaps. But I doubt if everyone owned a gun people would start shooting each other.

So injustice is beneficial so long as it suits your concerns. I cannot abide by that, myself.

I doubt I could muster enough conceit to find any desire to control your's or anyone else's life.

Then why don’t you put everyone in prison? You’ll eliminate violence entirely.

I think murderers and criminals will think twice about harming others if they know everyone is packing. So I think the world I want to live in is a peaceful one.

That’s why utilitarianism is unjust. You’ll punish people for things they haven’t done.

That is what I am going through right now. After a mass shooting the state moved to restrict more guns. In this country I am no longer able to purchase a handgun, though I already own one. I don’t think any group of men should possess the absolute monopoly on violence; I believe I have a right to defend myself, with weapons if necessary; and am a responsible owner of guns. Yes it’s unjust to punish me and others for crimes none of us committed.

Yes I believe I ought to be able to defend myself with whatever I want.

If someone has the motive and desire to run people over they will do so. If they don’t, they won’t. The same is with guns or any other object that can be used as a weapon.

Is this a quiz? I am entitled to my guns because I own them. I have a basic human right to defend my life, liberty, and property, and owning weapons extends from this right.

It’s unjust because they are mine, I am entitled to them, and I have done nothing to justify taking them away.

Everyone should carry a weapon as soon as they are competent enough to do so, in my opinion.

It’s unjust to ban my weapons if I didn’t shoot anyone or do not intend to.

Why can I not own a firearm if I didn’t shoot anyone or do not intend to?

It’s meant to be faulty. Guns and cars don’t just go out and start killing people. It leaves out the motives and reasons why one would pick up a gun and shoot someone in the first place.

Utilitarian concerns don’t mean much to me wherever we are speaking about basic human rights. Banning cars would be unjust. Banning guns is unjust.

Sure it can. Before that it was car accidents. Maybe we should ban cars.

There should be armed guards at schools in the US, perhaps even teachers, in my opinion. The most recent shooter picked one target over the other due to lack of security.

I thought the shooter was a male. I was wrong. It was indeed a female. So it is uncharacteristic after all.

What do you mean?

Most mass shooters are male.

A transgender shooter. It might not be as uncharacteristic as we’d like to admit.

Well said.

Our periphery is quite limited, so one can at least understand the indirect realist’s skepticism. The body is no doubt a mystery for any organism that cannot see its own ears, let alone what occurs beneath the epidermis. Introspection and wondering could never penetrate its own depths. But I think we’ve taken enough looks inside to realize there are no spirits pulling on strings in there.

As for animals, their bodies are different. What else is there to say? We can say a dog has different perceptions, experiences, phenomena, fine, but that’s multiplying zeroes. Their bodies are the only thing that differs from us. Their relationship to everything else can be described in the exact same manner as ours: direct, without any specious intervening factors.

The so-called directness of perception is useful only to contrast with the indirectness of perception, as it is put forward by indirect realists. It has no other use and is rather redundant otherwise. We usually don’t need to mention that, yes, we can perceive other things.

Indirect realism implies that we cannot see past our ourselves. It implies we hinder and hamstring ourselves from accessing the rest of the world, when it is the other way about. The rest of the world is wholly accessible to us. It’s true; we cannot apprehend all of something all at once, as if we ought to know about the backside of something by looking at it from the front, but with a little time and effort we can come to understand things a little better by perceiving them instead of doubting ourselves.

It does, I’m afraid, much to the chagrin subjectivists. Their “hard problems” and other efforts are little more than an attempt to muddy the waters, perhaps in an attempt to rescue the spirit from the ever-encroaching domain of the physical.

The idea that biological activity is accompanied by experience—by anything—is question begging. The only problem is that we haven’t come up with an ethical means to prove to the subjectivist that he is wrong, for any such procedure would invariably be dangerously invasive. So rather than breaking our oath not to harm another it’s better to just dismiss the hard problem as hot air.

My guess is you need to expand your Self to the surface of your being, your skin. Note the following argument which you presented:

Solipsistic Fact: Unless you literally internally experience of an external agent, such as random voices or God (in which case, you should connect with a therapist or pastor quickly!), you, like me and other “normal” “humans”, receive 100% of their information only from their own sensory inputs. Therefore, everything experiential is part of an internally simulated model of externality set forth by and from the brain/mind.

It assumes that you are a mind or brain, experiencing the outputs of your senses, which is contrary to fact. You are also your senses, muscles, skeleton, skin, etc. and there is nothing between you and the rest of the world. See “the homunculus fallacy” and the “Cartesian theater” for what is problematic about the argument.

I would suggest going out and being a thing for a while. Go bump around with other things, do what things do, and so on.

Yes it does. It’s what differs between the experience of the colour blind man and the typical man. It’s the seeing differently. We’re not just behavioural machines that respond to stimulus. There’s an inner quality to experience, a “what it is it like to be” aspect that distinguishes us from p-zombies.

Again, we know what is different about the color-blind man and the man who is not. These causes are biological. The “inner quality” is the biology. What it is like to be color-blind is what it is like to have the biology conducive to color blindness. We don’t need to insert sense-data, experience, qualia, and other figments between perceiver and perceived to account for these differences.

Just to be precise, no, their biology is different. This conforms to the relationship and the facts of biology. The “character of their experience” is not different because no such property exists, biologically or otherwise.

I don't understand what you are asking. Do you or do you not accept that some people are colour-blind; that the colours they see things to be are not the colours that you see things to be? If so then you accept that direct realism fails; it cannot be the case that both you and the colour blind person directly see the apple's "real" colour and that you see different colours.

That's exactly the point. The structure of your experience is one thing, the mind-independent nature of the world is another thing, and it's the structure of your experience that informs you, not the mind-independent nature of the world. You can't bypass your blurry vision to see the mind-independent nature of the world around you.

It’s easy to maintain direct realism with your scenario because the relationship between person and the apple is direct. X perceives Y. Working with this scenario, we can assume the difference in the experience lies either in X or Y or both. We know that the color-blind person sees it differently because his biology is different. We needn’t assume that something about the apple is different. Simple. Direct realism is maintained.

Unfortunately, the indirect realist likes to insert other variables. X no longer perceives Y. He perceives something else, in this case colors or experiences. It’s not just that X is different, but that these other variables are different as well. So they are inserted into the relationship as if they had their own existence apart from X and Y. It’s all too confusing and the indirect realist is guilty of confusing things. He alters the relationship where it ought not to be altered and it leads him to strange conclusions, like sense-data and representationalism. Indirect realism has failed, and adding qualifiers such as “mind-independent” does little to disguise this failure.

It’s not in all-caps.

The fact our eyes point outwards is something the indirect realist is unable to overcome. But the matter is simple. The contact with the rest of the world is direct. So how can one perceive indirectly a world that he is in direct contact with?

“What kind of person can charge another person, in this case a former President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a Crime, when it is known by all that NO Crime has been committed, & also known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country? Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely hates the USA!”

So no, it isn’t true that “Once an individual is born, they are immediately part of a society that may not fully align with their values and principles, and they may have to make compromises and trade-offs to survive and succeed in that society”. The very first assertion…at this point I could care less what follows.

Did you or did you not make the assertion that a newborn is immediately part of a society that may or may not fully align with his values and principles? We know the answer to this.

Once an individual is born, they are immediately part of a society that may not fully align with their values and principles, and they may have to make compromises and trade-offs to survive and succeed in that society.

I cannot just accept the first assertion and move on. I need to know if the principles and values were acquired later in life, through life, long after the fact of being born.

The fear of you acting on them influences me, the voter.

It does matter because one’s values and principles cannot be violated upon birth if there are no values and principles. One requires life and living in order to form values and principles at all.

It certainly does influence voters. It does so because people will believe you will act on your threat.

Are Russian tweets and Facebook ads the unjust influence of an election, but threats of civil unrest aren’t?

I never brought up the influence angle, but should you remain consistent, maybe you can alter my mind with your words enough so as to influence me to believe that threatening civil unrest should an election not go your way is not election interference.

How does a newborn come into the world with values and principles?

Perhaps given your propensity for sorcery you can move me with your words to believe the same as you do.

Again, your words are not influencing anything. My belief that you may act on your words do. Is this going completely over your head?

Threatening civil unrest lets people know your intentions, that you may become belligerent should things not go your way, and threat of this future activity is more than enough to get people to do what you want.

Yeah, sorry, your words are still not influencing anything. They do not have the causal effects you pretend they do. Your words only reveal what you think. What influences me are my own fears of what might happen should you get violent and burn my business down.