There's text, and there's subtext.

As un said earlier in the thread, a small group like this forum, or any voluntary society, has rules about people's remarks not being offensive. I'm glad of them; to be frank I find people ruder online than I feel comfortable with, and sometimes I don't even come to this relatively civilised forum because some posters are more aggressive than I can handle.

I quite accept that there is no 'right not to be offended'.

There is nevertheless, among civilised people, normally a tacit rule that one is not rude to others. When people are aggressive in their arguments I suspect their rationality is flimsy. When people insist that their need to express their opinion is more important than their feeling of mutual respect towards other people, I doubt their goodwill.

I'm active in the Greens in the UK and we've had a universal basic income as policy for a long time. At the last elections other parties started talking about it and I think that's partly the role of the Greens here and in other countries, even if far from power: to seed policies that will take root elsewhere.

I think the arguments, many outlined earlier in the thread, of simplicity, resilience in the face of job losses, especially adaptability in the face of technology change, and the end to a whole range of benefits one has to 'deserve' are strong ones. There are supplements in most proposals, however, for disability, for being pensioner age, and a rate for children.

Some of the devil is in the detail. The Greens costed a proposal for the UK 2017 elections which had a nil cost to the government, but when you do that, the initial income is meagre. To me an incoming government with a one-off generous beginning to such a scheme would be the best way of introducing it.

It's an issue that doesn't divide neatly between left and right. To some it sounds like socialism. But it does mean less government, as the bureaucracy of tax and benefits is greatly slimmed down. The Adam Smith Institute for instance is a free market neoliberal bunch, but they've just endorsed the idea.

https://www.adamsmith.org/news/rising-evidence-basic-income

There are experiments in Ontario and Finland. I think a major country will introduce a version of it in the next few years, but I'm terrible at forecasting.

For me 'selfless' and 'selfish' are words in a moral system I don't subscribe to. Acts done without some element of self-love...what would that even mean? So they aren't descriptive words, they are judgments, and who is to be the judge? Best to do what feels right, and if that eventually turns out not to make you feel it was right, modify it next time.

To keep up the pithy w-ness, your question could be just

Will? (or Whither?)

...to which I would add...

Was?

Investigation and Litigation isn't going to have the same cathartic results that a Truth and Reconciliation procedure will. Something that combines both? Not sure here. — Bitter Crank

I agree, it's a tough call. A class I did last autumn usefully compared South Africa with Argentina - Truth and reconciliation, led by Desmond Tutu, on the one hand...Bring transgressors to justice, which is what's happening in Argentina. It feels like different States and institutions have to go through different rituals. Tutu's heavy emphasis on forgiveness left some South Africans feeling that there had not been enough retribution for wrong-doing; some Argentines feel reconciliation is made too difficult when punishment is the order of the day.

As for the Catholic Church and its institutions, in Ireland the successive abuse scandals have been followed by a related but different sort of crisis: hardly anyone wants to become a priest. A couple of friends have told me that their local churches are becoming run basically by laypeople. There just aren't enough new vocations to go round even the dwindling number of believers. Interesting to see where it leads.

We should no feel shame for the actions of our ancestors because they were not our fault, but if we have excess while others suffer (regardless of the reason), guilt is an entirely appropriate response to doing nothing about that. — Pseudonym

Linda Radzik wrote an excellent book called 'Making amends' about collective atonement. One case study she analyses is that of the Magdalene Laundries for 'fallen women' in Ireland that treated women discarded by their families like something close to slaves: to what extent are (a) present volunteers and members of the charities that ran the laundries responsible for doing something about the charities' past actions; and (b) Church members in Ireland responsible?

It's worth remembering that for every direct transgressor there are many who turn a blind eye, or who are complicit in minor but meaningful ways. Herein lie shades of responsibility.

I'm not offering any kind of neat answer. I've been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates about slavery: he believes there has to be a collective reckoning in the USA, avowing that slavery was wrong and setting up explicit large funds to redress that wrong, because the harm done in the past still afflicts descendants of the harmed - and benefits descendants of the harmers - in the present. None of my business, I'm a Brit, but I'm interested in the principles at stake. But I heartily agree with BC, we've got to be clear, if we start engaging in any kind of collective breast-beating about such issues, that, for instance, other disempowered people had no chance of a say about many past moral wrongs.

In which case your guilt is completely self generated both internally and externally. — charleton

I'm wondering how else guilt gets generated.

Why this need to evaluate others? — Michael Ossipoff

I'm not clear why your post, which ends for some reason with a quote from me, has as its final remark the one above, after you have spent quite a few paragraphs claiming to evaluate others. I don't see how we would have reasoned discussion without commenting on others' evaluations, and responding with evaluations of our own. That's surely what you are doing?

I hope I'm not an 'aggressive atheist'. I usually find myself disagreeing with Harry Hindu about materialist and scientific matters, though we're both atheists. I was educated without any belief in gods or God, and my 69 years haven't brought me any closer to such a belief. But old gits have a tendency to waver on this front when the man with the scythe approaches, so I'm not forecasting my future.

My atheism, looked at in this way, seems more an absence of belief, rather than anything stronger. There isn't a god-shaped hole in my mental universe, which is packed to the brim with thoughts of one kind or another. I do think I have religious feelings, as I presume nearly everyone has, though they may define them differently. I remain eager to understand how others think and feel, though I'm weighted with my 69 years of baggage.

I don't have a single starting-point except my own curiosity. I have nagging questions.

At the moment my nagging question is to do with the 'wisdom' in the name of philosophy and how that's somehow become about 'facts' and 'knowledge' and so forth. I learned more from a 3 minute record baby than I ever learned in school. I am especially interested in how language works, which I think is strangely (mis-)described by analytic philosophy.

I am trying to link in my head, because to my intuition they are linked, the strong feeling of wrongness I experience in rereading a remark Frege made,

In hearing an epic poem, for instance, apart from the euphony of the language we are interested only in the sense of the sentences and the images and feelings thereby aroused. — Frege

with this provocation, which opens the door to an entirely different world-view than the one advocated:

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries -- not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods;
and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the
physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our
conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most
in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable
structure into the flux of experience. — Quine

In terms of evidence of gods. I think evidence of creation/creativity in human culture and volition, sentience and intelligence raise the possibility of an intelligent sentient volitional creator. If you only look for certain types of evidence or concept is it is going to rule our the possibility of gods. — Andrew4Handel

Dialogue and the dialectic are to me a better ground than 'open-mindedness' as I said in an earlier post. To me this section of this post of yours, for instance, demonstrates a lack of open-mindedness on your part. I am aware that believers in monotheism make the sort of causal link you describe in 'raising the possibility'. Starting from a clean slate, though, what would the case be? Compared to the evolutionary case? It seems pretty thin to me. I'm interested in a third way, that there is some intrinsic meaningfulness in Being, but that doesn't involve 'an intelligent sentient volitional creator' - who, to an atheist like me, is probably just the brain-child of some people in quite a small part of West Asia 2-3000 years ago.

What makes anyone think brain and mental states are correlated, when computer and computational states aren't? — tom

Well, I said, this is a mid-20th century fantasy, and at that time it was the view of a group of people including Feigl, named in the paper Sam referenced. For a time it was the leading 'physicalist' view. Then the notion of the mental supervening on the physical gradually superseded it. I don't really understand the accusatory tone of 'What makes anyone think...?' It's not something I think. But I'm exploring that some other intelligent people have thought that, and that it's got affinities with what Sam is arguing for. One obvious rejoinder to your analogy is that it's a poor one: 'computer and computational' don't easily map on to 'brain and mental' without remainder.

I like this too (Feigl's account of imaginary future language), but only as an object of criticism. — Banno

Me too. But I think Feigl could answer your question. If beliefs based on the evidence of personal experience are primitive science - which I think he's saying - then one could certainly discover that in adulthood one's coordinates for what one's child-self used to call 'belief in God' are not about 'belief in God' at all, they're about the mathematical equivalent of 'loving father-figure'.

Hm. Now I've written it down, not clear how that can be right although it seemed right when I thought it. Perhaps she could discover it's associated with delusional state 45-36-23-90-10, which she wasn't even monitoring.

I'm not sure this could even work for a computer, let alone a human brain. We can, as a matter of fact, identify all possible states of a computer, yet dong so helps us in no way to understand what it is computing. In fact the same computer-states will be used in different computations for different purposes.

Assuming isomorphism is a mistake. — tom

It's a mid-20th century scientistic fantasy. I do think it's an interesting way of putting it, in that it spells out some of the ground that a lot of people evade: just what sort of factors would need to be aligned to make an ultra-physicalist view work.

One problem anyway is 'state' versus ' process'. A still picture, if that is the equivalent of 'state', can be very deceptive about what 'process' is going on in the course of movement, taken in isolation.

People get bogged down in terminological problems: 'mental' and 'physical', 'monist' and 'dualist' for instance. Feigl identifies that there would need to be some common language, and he can only imagine a scientific one replacing a 'natural' one, a bit like the Churchlands. It's interesting then how hard it is to imagine 'I believe' being represented by 'I am in state 44: 34: 22: 67 :98'. I suggest that one issue is that 'belief' has an emotional, or at the very least a commitment component to it that natural language gives us.

(Personally I think 'belief' is overdone and 'thought' is a good old-fashioned Fregean word that might be better. When I think of a musical note, as I often do, in relation to musical notes before and after, for instance, I feel the vocabulary needs to encompass that)

In my uni work on metaphysics of mind last year I read and thought a lot about Feigl. Contrary to what the paper you cite says, Sam, he did in his appendix to 'The Mental and the Physical' (1957/67) write something about 'brain states'. (You can read the whole paper online here) I hope it's of use to quote here extensively from his Appendix B. I think he is saying something close to what you're saying, Sam, but correct me if I'm wrong. Excuse me jumping into the debate on page 16!

Suppose that we had a complete knowledge of neurophysi-ology and that we could order all possible human brain states (if not metrically, then at least topologically) in a phase space of n dimensions. Every point in this phase space would then represent a fully specific type of brain state. And, taking isomorphism for granted, a subset of these points would also represent the total set of possible mental states.

Suppose further that we could teach children the vocabulary of the language of brain states. If this requires n-tuples of numbers, then simple expressions like "17-9-6-53-12" (or even abbreviatory symbols for these) might be inculcated in the child's language. If we took care that these expressions take the place of all introspective labels for mental states, the child would immediately learn to speak about his own mental states in the language of neurophysiology. Of course, the child would not know this at first, because it would use the expression, e.g., "17-9-6-53-12" as we would "tense-impatient-apprehensive-yet hopefully-expectant." But having acquired this vocabulary, the child, when growing up and becoming a scientist, would later have no trouble in making this terminology coherent with, and part of, the conceptual system of neurophysiology, and ultimately perhaps with that of theoretical physics. Of course, I not only admit, but I would stress, that in this transformation there is a considerable change in the meaning of the original terms. But this change may be regarded essentially as an enormous enrichment, rather than as a radical shift or a "crossing of ontological barriers." In other words, introspection may be regarded as an approach to neurophysiological knowledge, although by itself it yields only extremely crude and sketchy information about cerebral processes. This sort of information may concern certain Gestalt patterns, certain qualitative and semiquantitative distinctions and gradations; but it would not, by itself, contain any indication of the cerebral connections, let alone localizations. — Feigl

But to me Philosophy should be completely open minded and not based on preserving one's own world view.

A similar issue is with God debates. I think some people are so committed to favouring gods non existence that they are not given equal weight to all arguments (but they don't explicitly state this) — Andrew4Handel

Yes I'm surprised sometimes by the unrecognized, or at least unacknowledged, presuppositions people bring to the philosophical party.

But there are commitments one develops in one's life. I realized in a chat on the #metoo topic that I'm very committed to supporting a rather pedantic, anti-wishy-washy but pro-feminist viewpoint. I've loved and been loved by feminists, spent much of my working life among more women than men, read a lot in the subject area...so I find myself with baggage. Could I retrace my steps back to first principles in such debates? I believe I could, but it would take quite a long essay not a snappy forum response. And honestly, I've had such debates in the past, now I'm interested in other things.

So I move on. Gods are another case in point: I was brought up in an agnostic household so arguments in favour of a single capitalised God come to me as very much an intellectual exercise. I am interested in religious feeling, and I realize now I'm old that's partly because my parents had such feelings: but my Dad had lost his Catholic faith over the Pope's actions in the war and after, and my Mum's religion was one of practice rather than belief. So I can't help, because of my life, being 'committed to favouring gods non existence', at least compared to someone who was brought up with monotheism, or who thinks monotheistic 'belief' is something I should take more seriously. These things are dialectical rather than absolute, I suggest.

The areas I'm interested in, where I have less baggage - like philosophy of language, epistemology, and virtue ethics - there I have tried hard to strip away my presuppositions and be 'open-minded'. But one can't be vacuous in being open. One brings one's experience and understanding from elsewhere to bear on new topics. Open-mindedness then involves entertaining novel ideas, or new evidence, or challenges to one's preconceptions from surprising angles. But there must be qualifications to get through the gateway of open-mindedness. If other people show prejudice, or show what looks like a dodgy attitude to evidence, or adopt a bullying or self-justifying tone (I find that happens too much), then I'm liable to switch off and turn away. Unless I fancy the challenge!

I've been thinking about apology just lately and writing an essay about *public* apology - for which I heartily recommend Alice Maclachlan as a starting point.

http://www.alicemaclachlan.com/research.html

I'm feeling for myself, after some deliberation, that apology is part of a ritual or symbolic exchange. You make an apology when you believe that by such a speech act you will place yourself, and the person you're apologising to, in a better relation than your present mutual standing. That's it!

My other major source is Karine Polwart - a philosophy graduate who became a singer-songwriter. This is her song 'Sorry'.

Well, I've explained how I see things, and you see them differently. I have my opinions about these matters, but I'm more interested in philosophy on this forum, so having explained my views, I'll see you in other threads no doubt :)

When wealthy people disempower the lower class, it isn't through psychological means--they have created a tangible system where it is harder for lower class people to gain wealth. The prevention is due to the wealthy physically having power over the unwealthy. In the case of women being unable to deny unwanted sexual advances, we're talking about something psychological. So are you saying that men are psychologically stronger than women, and this is what allows them to have this power over them?

My whole point is really just this: how is this supposed system actually enforced? — JustSomeGuy

This is neither my experience of life nor my understanding of things I have read over the years. The shift from talking about 'men as a whole' to 'men as a class' is to say that systems of power aren't always a deliberate rational structure. It is difficult to move from poor to rich when your ability is equal, for instance, not merely because of a tangible system, but because there are multiple obstacles in your way - education, networks, purported 'manners', wider knowledge of the world. When I left a poor home to go to a posh university, many years ago, it was a fearful social experience that wounded me for life, even though it also liberated me into learning and the fellowship of other smart people.

All manner of people in power operate in complex fashions. Bullies in both childhood and adulthood operate through gangs and punish people who inform on them. Abusers create a world where the abused often feel responsible for what has happened to them. The unwilling are manipulated by the cunning. Repetition and exemplary punishment frighten others into silence. And the rational claim equality exists when incomes remain unequal, and labour remains unequal, and there is still a backlog of problems to be remedied: the incidence of domestic violence, for example.

None of this is a totalising system. The bullied, the abused, feminists, the racially-harassed break through, and norms shift. Lots of people - like me - move among egalitarian groups and learn different mores. Good women and good men get together and there's no hassle.

I can only tell you, as far as the sexual arena is concerned, I've lived 69 years now, and many women I've known have told me how deeply things like this have affected them. For others, it's been a pinprick they've brushed off. I'd be amazed if anyone doesn't know instances of male misbehaviour towards women that the men got away with.

If women have honestly felt unable to object, I would ask why they felt that way. Who made them feel that way? Because the implication in this entire movement is that men, as a whole, made them feel that way. — JustSomeGuy

That is indeed the analysis. Men as a class, not 'as a whole', I would say. Just as the majority of people in my impoverished town, as a class, know they are hopelessly disempowered compared to, say, bankers, as a class. This is basic sociology, it's how the world works. 'Subjectivity' operates within norms of behaviour that have become established socially and historically, and which relate to relative power of different classes and groups in that society.

Do we need to ask for consent before... — Pseudonym

There is a bit of a panic going on. We need to get back to due process and so forth about allegations; such things happen after a lurch in social mores. But I confess some of the remarks like these mystify me. And I'm not a monk: my last partner called me a serial philanderer, though she was smiling and touching me on the back as she said it.

No third party is going to help you here. Philosophically I think David Lewis's 'Score keeping' paper of 1979 has it right: permissibility shifts in a language-game (including body language) according to what someone does in the next moment - 'if nobody objects'. The trouble is, many people, mostly women, have long felt they couldn't object, even if they didn't like the last bodily or linguistic move in the language-game. So they conceded permissibility ground against their own wishes.

Now they're feeling empowered to object. People who in the past exploited their power, and the knowledge that the object(s) of their desire felt disempowered, are having to relearn how to act in situations.

Daily life is anarchy; no-one gets to 'decide all this' but you and your interlocutors. It is possible to cultivate sensitivity to other people. Take it from a serial philanderer.

I don't know about all of you, but it takes me a lot of time to respond to your remarks. I've been sitting at this computer for about 4 hrs. This is why I can't always respond to everything. It just takes too damn long. — Sam26

Sam, just to mention that although I'm not participating in this thread, I'm finding your contributions really interesting and useful to my own thinking. I wouldn't want you to feel you were just whistling into the wind :)

By the way, T Clark is a nice chap, but some of us are empiricists here all the same, don't listen to him. And welcome to the forum.

The bottom line of this post is that I want to know if this kind of "faulty reasoning" or "faulty explanation" has been studied or been given a name. Can anybody point to a reference? — Juan Dubra

I think the word of Kahneman and Tversky should be your first port of call. They did a lot of empirical work on 'faulty reasoning', and the use of common-sense heuristics that lead one up the garden path. When I did a quick Google search just now I easily found a Tversky chapter summarising some of their findings. They were/are however psychologists rather than philosophers.

I think your exemplary case about males working less and females working more has, incidentally, some faulty reasoning of its own, but perhaps you were summarising a complex idea quickly. The period from the 60's to the 80's involved in Western countries a steadily increasing proportion of women coming to the workplace at all, i.e. non-economic factors had been excluding them from the workforce before that. I am old enough to remember such non-economic factors: middle-class mores, and male power over gateways to work. The feminist argument that their domestic labour was hidden from the economists' view is now a pretty old one. But maybe you were allowing for all this in your argument.

And with a conservative for the matter...

How do you argue with economics? — Posty McPostface

I'm not a neo-classical economist, but I do think most neo-classical economists (and I think one needs the prefix 'neo-' nowadays) believe economic action needs to be taken urgently in response to climate change. So I think your argument is with a different beast.

I've attached to this post an article by Jaffe and Kerr from a couple of years ago which purports to be a book review but which I think is a good summary of the neo-classical economists' position. Put simply: there is an absolute limit to carbon emissions. Carbon has to be priced, either by emission permits or tax. This needs international agreement and drastic national action.

There are some enormous methodological problems to overcome.

..we really do not have an analytically consistent method for adding up costs
and benefits across different generations and income groups... — Jaffe and Kerr

So economists believe in counting and then compensating for 'externalities', but it's damned hard to count the implications well. Plus there may be 'tipping points' for the worsening of climate change which are impossible to predict well if at all.

I think your target is more the political elite right in the United States. They are heavily invested in fossil fuels and the 'doubt creation' industry they finance spreads among themselves. The authors and Nordhaus, the man they're reviewing, end by considering the conservative who

....notices that many economists, including the vast majority of the professional economists who work for Republicans (again, consensus if not unanimity) favor a tax on carbon... — Jaffe and Kerr

Does that conservative eventually see the light? I'm a distrustful old socialist so I fear not, but I still hope they do :) But I just wanted to set the record straight about 'economists': most of them, including ones I would virulently oppose on many things, aren't as myopic about climate change as all that.

In the late 1980's and early 90's — anonymous66

This does need contextualising. The 1980's in Britain and the USA saw an upsurge in retrospective accusations of child sexual abuse, together with some contemporaneous use of purported physical evidence that children were being abused.

Part of the upsurge represented a feminist-led liberation. After some decades of children who claimed abuse largely being disbelieved, a new generation of abuse survivors, social workers, lawyers and researchers emerged who were less deferential than their predecessors and more prepared to confront the often authoritative fathers, uncles, elder brothers and male authority figures who were mostly accused of being responsible. It seems to me this lifting of deference and the preparedness to confront entrenched power has happened very slowly and gradually: the #metoo stuff that has followed the Weinstein allegations demonstrates that 30-35 years later, curtains are still being lifted on the unpleasant truth. Many memories of past abuse are withheld or personally suppressed by the sufferers because they think they won't be believed, or lack a sense of their own power or worth, or because it's too painful to fight a battle about what happened to them.

But in the 80's this liberation was also accompanied by serious failings. In the UK there was a scandal in Middlesborough where two arrogant doctors suddenly decided that a new physical test they were using showed according to them a dramatic rise in evidence of child sexual abuse. The local police, social services, press and public figures went to war over this. And wild tales emerged in various places of 'Satanic' abuse, fuelled by a widespread therapeutic belief that children wouldn't tell untruths about such things, when subsequent studies show that with particular interview techniques they are highly suggestible. Then some 'therapists' began to make an industry out of purportedly recovering repressed memories, and many innocent parents were wrongly accused.

This paper by Howe and Knott from a couple of years ago seems to me a good summary of the stuff that emerged about memory. It's interesting in how it summarises current academic views of memory as narrative reconstruction, which can be influenced especially in childhood by the way that figures in authority talk to you about your supposed memories. A lot of 'common-sense' views held by police or therapists with only modest training are erroneous, e.g. that more detail implies more credibility.

I would much prefer a quarrel — TimeLine

Oh all right then.

...a unity between our understanding of causality and freedom — TimeLine

I did have a Kantian summer a couple of summers ago but I didn't get as far as I'd hoped among Critiques so you may have left me behind here. I think 'reason' 'unity' and 'natural law' are indeed interlocked in a nexus. After my Kantian summer I got to reading Hamann a little, and to my mind he's an ancestor of a Wittgensteinian point of view: he pokes suspictiously at this 'reason' business and criticizes Kant for not seeing that it rests on assumptions about 'language' which Kant doesn't explore. Not that he (Hamann) could come up with as systematic a view as Kant's (so he ends up with a more religious view to give himself a comforting unity) but that's part of the point. Once you think unity, natural law and reason are locked together, you presume System and Determinism, you don't demonstrate it. Whereas you can be pluralist, scientific in method, but open to the arts or religion for instance as having something equal to say about fundamentals, something that might not have the same unified Systematic causal outlook.

I don't know why I had an outbreak of Capitals there but that was the impulse so I'll leave 'em in. Hope I'm not talking rubbish here.

I agree with your conclusion, but dispute your premise. Vengeance reprisals are not the consequence of resistance, that is to accept the warped logic of the tyrant.

But one can still ask what makes the virtue of resistance to tyranny a virtue in the first place. Is it not that virtuous acts, a good polity is what has positive consequences in general and overall? — unenlightened

(a) I think a justification for vengeance reprisals could be that exemplary punishment will prevent others in future acting in the way that the one punished acted. This justification isn't in my view 'warped logic'. I don't agree with it, but it has a logic to it and is not an uncommon rationale in liberal law courts. Retribution isn't wrong in principle, and nor even is exemplary retribution.

(b) What does make something a virtue? I agree that if more people acted virtuously, or indeed if just less people acted viciously or with akrasia, then for a neo-Aristotelian the world would become a better place. I still feel this is different from the 'consequences' in 'consequentialism', which are about the act itself and its repercussions. For the virtue ethicist it's about doing the right thing in the right way at the right time for the right reasons, one of which will be 'consequences'. (But not all of which.)

There is no escaping determinism except through consciousness (transcendence) — TimeLine

What sometimes bewilders me about this view of determinism is that 'the causal web', the way that determinism is supposed to actually work, is largely unknown. I have broad theories but little detailed idea how things came to be thus and so, and I only have intelligent guesses about the likely consequences of various courses of action. In such situations what is it to 'escape' a determinism whose workings are pretty much a mystery to me? It seems like an imaginary exercise by people with a hubristic belief in their own rationality.

I'm not quarrelling with where your later words explain you end up, seeking a balance etc.; I just don't seem to find in myself an understanding of this intermediate step. But I often feel I must be missing something, as other people seem to find it so obvious :)

And I suppose, from the difficulty of discerning even one's own motivation, one might arrive at virtue ethics, where the cultivation of good habit is the best bet, but the bet still concerns consequences. — unenlightened

(Pardon me, busy with other stuff I'm slow at picking up on threads that are interesting)

I don't think virtue ethics relates in this way to 'consequences'. The rare escapees from Nazi concentration camps precipitated dreadful consequences in vengeance reprisals, but they were still right to escape. Or so I see it. Or, for example, hopeless unconditional love is more virtuous than despondent realism. As I see it. From the Aristotelian and indeed the MacIntyre view, virtue and vice and the other options are embedded in a good polity. Sometimes the good polity can only be in one's head, and among one's imagined moral colleagues, still, the right thing to do at the right time for the right reasons may be to love - or escape - or make some pointless heroic gesture.

Quite agree. And it is philosophically interesting. How we are with each other is not explored that much, esp analytically. The atomising of talk into speech acts, for instance, means that the to and fro of social interaction doesn't get properly explored. And there aren't that many variables involved in social exchange: say, previous mutual presuppositions between the parties, and their relative power/status, and their emotional states at the outset. I think the difficulty with your contextuality argument - although I basically agree with it - is that if enough twits overstep a certain sort of mark, then a rule starts being introduced. Like driving on one side of the road or the other, for instance. Pedestrians manage without such a rule but drivers can't. So it's worth thinking about what 'a certain sort of mark' is constituted by. 'Using power for sexual ends' might be one aspect of a description. (copied from Shoutbox)

One excellent thing the #metoo movement has done is to have men debate things like this in this way. Worth the occasional remark going #offpiste

When we are discussing the existence of God, there are three main positions — darthbarracuda

I feel I have, in one sense, an atheist equivalent of timwood's position. I don't feel obliged to have some sort of ontology of ontologies in order to have a rich intellectual life. So all this bother about 'existence' of deities doesn't matter to me. I was brought up without gods and there doesn't seem to be a gap in my outlook where gods would fit the space.

Secondly, I think it's a local historical accident that deities have been boiled down to a mono capitalised God. Lots of societies talk of multiple gods, and good luck to them. Pluralism makes more sense to me than monism.

Thirdly, there is a question of practice. I greatly admire people who have a spiritual practice of one kind or another. It seems to feed into or underlie a way of living that often makes overall sense, even though it may be Buddhist, or Catholic, or atheist with poetic leanings, or whatever. Here I feel I deviate from being an atheist a la timwood. These practices tend to be performed as if this, that or the other were there, present, perhaps 'existing', without the question of 'belief' precisely coming up. I had a mother, I loved her dearly, she died, I sometimes ask her in my imagination for guidance. There doesn't seem to be 'belief' in this mental arrangement.

On Sunday (at the post-worship Lutheran Coffee Hour) I suggested to a couple of seminarian types that we should just get rid of the Trinity. Gasp! But that would mean losing the Holy Spirit? — Bitter Crank

Unitarians have already made this breakthrough. Much good it has done them in the recruitment stakes. But it means they get on better with Muslims than most other Christian types.

I guess without hard numbers it doesn't make sense to generalize. I wonder why there are no altruistic statistics when we have loads of crime statistics. Could this fact point to what I'm trying to say in my OP - that our bad behavior exceeds our good behavior? — TheMadFool

Every now and then people have a go at this, trying to come up with a happiness index or something, but the world tends to make fun of them. As a football fan, I think of the world's fascination with crime statistics as akin to football commentators fascination with referee rulings: they greatly exaggerate the importance of rule-infractions, perhaps because these are moments of drama, whereas to the aficionado a game of football is best understood over the whole period of play, something that is very hard to pack into 'highlights' to titillate the audience.

I would be interested in someone trying to quantify, say, 'small acts of kindness': I believe they would greatly outnumber acts of supposed wrongdoing, but we just don't have the urge to count them, and maybe then they become invisible and we forget they even keep happening all around us.

My goodness I'm sounding optimistic about humanity this New Year :)

Well, so that article doesn't contain a bit of information which actually invalidates the notion I quoted? Can you summarise for me then why it would invalidate it? — Agustino

It was just a comment on the article, I wasn't trying to invalidate anything.

Can you please cite the parts of the article you linked to which discredits the views of Manzotti? — Agustino

I think that Barbara Saunders raises legitimate philosophical and scientific doubts about Manzotti's remarks about colour, including a purported genealogy from Gladstone through Rivers, culminating in

In 1969, the anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay established that color names do not change the colors one sees, and later studies have confirmed this.{/quote]

I don't know what you mean by 'parts of the article'. The whole article opposes the evolutionary model behind the Berlin-Kay model. There are many other articles by Saunders propounding this view, I just cited the most easily accessible one, and there is other literature supporting her philosophical doubts. I don't think this 'discredits' Manzotti, but I certainly think his views on color are glib and should take alternative paradigms into account. — Manzotti

I've read the interview, but it all seems to be a "back to Hume" moment. — Agustino

I am wary of this article. Take the remarks about colour,

In 1969, the anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay established that color names do not change the colors one sees, and later studies have confirmed this. — Manzotti

This is a scientific realist view of the situation and seems likely to be mistaken. Barbara Saunders has a trenchant critique of the Berlin/Kay view here. I am not clear if the rest of the Manzotti view is scientific-sounding assertion rather than based on good science.

You have a point there. The ''we'' in my OP is too broad for some like you who are, may I say, good people. Yet, there is this tendency to generalize and I'm only doing what most (again generalizing) do all the time. I've heard many people say ''women are bad drivers'' or ''Spartans are brave'', etc. Generalization seems to be a valid method of making sense of our world. Am I wrong, then, in generalizing human nature as evil? — TheMadFool

I suggest people all too often drift from a valid generalization about a class as compared to other classes to ascribing that to individuals of that class. 'Baby-boomers' and 'millenials', for instance, are often compared in inter-generational ways. Here in the UK there's been a lot of hassle about brexit and commentators say 'People in Thistown voted for Brexit' if, say, 52% of the voters who voted in that town did. Well, 48% of them didn't, so the generalization doesn't hold.

I couldn't find a better word than ''evil''. As you say, it could be like an old coat that no longer fits and is best discarded. But how would we categorize pedophilia, rape, genocide, slavery, mass-shootings? Do you have a better word that describes the theme among such acts? Shit by any other name would smell as bad. — TheMadFool

Well, I don't know how it helps to label certain activities, and then to group those labels under 'evil'. Nor do I see the argumentative step from accepting that some people do these things to claiming that therefore 'we' are 'evil'. I'm claiming that mostly 'we' like to get along in peace and tolerant disharmony, with goodwill towards each other: that this is the predominant mode of life I've known and I'm getting old.

There is quite a lot of literature in the modern era about secular approaches to evil, beginning with Hannah Arendt, who I think one really ought to read: she suffered herself, reflected on it wisely, but was of course divided in her own feelings and opinions by the tug of loyalties and events. My take on the literature and on my own reflections is that each of the sort of thing you want to label is, in itself, wrongdoing, some of it deeply unpleasant and offensive wrongdoing, that I would like to see prevented or punished. I am more unnerved by systematic wrongdoing: be it Nazism or religious orders that condone and cover up child abuse. A small number of individuals are irretrievably bad and I'll call them 'evil' in conversation, but I don't feel a link between them and how human beings 'inherently' are in general.

So, doesn't that mean that people are inherently bad? — TheMadFool

I hope this doesn't sound complacent but, you know, I've lived 68 years and it's mostly been peaceful, modestly prosperous and amicable. I've become a small-town fellow in my old age and the town is a poor, post-industrial, arty-farty place with adverts that say KINDNESS by the supermarket. We're so affable, at least one fellow-poster has considered moving here. I don't feel inherent evil breeding in what some think is a rough town; nor, frankly, inherent good; but at least, a desire to get along, and even if we don't have much, in the words of the old campaigning song, to enjoy roses as well as bread.

Or, to put it more analytically: 'evil' is a hangover from monotheistic times, let's not be glib in claiming its prevalence.

Which brings us to the delineation of science. — Banno

Thanks, the case you quoted was interesting all round, with enjoyably pithy judgments.

'The delineation of science' is something I once tried to write an essay about. Fingerprint evidence in the 20th century, for instance, was often present in court as 'scientific'. It became clear when DNA evidence began to appear around 1990 that previous notions of 'scientific'-ness for fingerprints were absurd. Low-level technicians, not scientists, often under pressure from detectives, worked from comprehensive-sounding checklists that were pretty worthless. In the law courts they were expected to assert that their conclusions were faultless. Now we do have fingerprint science, but I'm still awaiting the scandals of wrongful convictions from the fake science of pre-1990.

And by implication, what are the guidelines for scientific practice that will include brilliant trail-blazers like people I know in the field of medical physics, creating new machinery and utilising quantum entanglement to help diagnose cancer, for instance, from the charlatans of Big Pharma who suppress non-supporting evidence and make millions out of dodgy anti-depressants? (still remembering these articles from 2011 by Marcia Angell)