Did the U.S. ever pay reparations to Vietnam? Or one of the many countries it destroyed during its crusade in the Middle-East?

Am I doing it wrong? — Tzeentch

If someone feels a wrong doing has been done and wants financial compensation they would have to make a case for it.

But who should pay? The American tax payer?

Ideally we could work out who had done wrong to whom and redistribute stolen resources or repair reduced capacity. But that is idealistic. And people will debate who was in the wrong. Wars tend to contain controversies.

My concern here is inherited blame. Should your wealth be confiscated to recompense someone else?

I am mixed race my dad was Afro Caribbean and My mother is Welsh and some of my ancestors may have been slave owners.
My mother's mother initially disowned her for marrying a black man but then they reconciled a few years later.

I was also bullied as a child but seemingly unrelated to race or sexuality probably influenced by autistic traits.

I have a sense of having been a victim in some respects although more privileged than some. I grew up in a religious cult with the original sin narrative.

You can respond by nihilism and feeling fatalistic about your inheritance or fighting back against unjust social structures. To some extent I have been apathetic.

I don't support payment of reparations for past behavior. It's not the injustice of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries that need to be addressed. It's the ongoing unfairness and privilege that remain today. — T Clark

The current situation is a result of past actions such as redlining in the USA and inherited privilege.

As well as false notions of just dessert, false notions such as that life is fair (The just world hypothesis), The fundamental attribution error. Failure to replace the current system with anything since the disasters of communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/slavery-reparations-evanston-san-francisco-sheila-jackson-lee-b2272142.html

"Louis Weathers didn’t know what to think when he heard he was going to receive reparations for slavery.

He had listened to people talking about reparations — people such as Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton — during the two decades he’d lived in Washington DC. But it was always couched as a demand, or an aspiration: something that might happen in a far-off place or a far-off time, not one still so wounded by the impact of America’s “original sin”."

"Weathers’ mother, when pregnant, was forced to travel to a neighboring town to give birth because the hospitals where she lived would not accept African Americans."

"Weathers, a military veteran who served in the Korean War, was among the very first people to receive a reparations payment, more than 500 years after the start of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and 156 years after slavery’s formal abolition in the United States. He was eligible to receive one because of where he lived. In 2019, the city of Evanston, Illinois, established a committee to fund and administer reparations to those of its 70,000 residents who met certain criteria.

To apply, the Black Evanstonians had to fit one of three categories. They could either be residents who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969, referred to as “ancestors”; or direct descendants of a Black resident from 1919 to 1969; or else they could submit evidence that they had suffered housing discrimination due to the city’s policies after 1969. There was a requirement that the money be used to help pay for housing costs."

There is now increasing of the intergenerational effects of trauma including effects on the genes.

Epigenetics.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics

I think the idea that science adequately explains things is probably an illusion or complacency in the same way some religious people believe there religion is the only guide needed for Life. (I know these Christians and the bible is their first and last resource.

Various scientists throughout history have predicted the end of scientific enquiry and been proved wrong.

"In 1897, the physicist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin : "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." This was prior to the discoveries of quantum physics

I can cite various other scientists over confident at the explanatory reach of their current knowledge base.

Camus said: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide"

I agree with this to some extent. We could easily come to the conclusion life is not worth living like hundreds of thousands of people do each year. Science cannot convince us life is meaningful and seems to be trying to do the reverse recently.

Life only appears to have any value subjectively through the individual aspiration.

If you were tasked with putting words to such a cry for help, what words would you use? — ucarr

What is the meaning of existence? How did I get here? How should I act?

I think questions arise at least partly through discontent. Would we have any progress scientific artistic or otherwise if people were content?

I am beginning to think that philosophy is a cry for help trying to make sense of the world we have been thrown into.

I believe that the human situation and the human being are one of the big puzzles.

Our cognitive capacities including our ability for self awareness and our ability to philosophise. Our minds. Our existential dilemmas and meaning making/pursuits.

The laws of physics may be the only possibly scenario under which matter and life can exist.

I think the problem with fundamental unknowns is that they undermine all knowledge leaving us with no secure foundations on which to build.

For example I think until we understand consciousness we cannot possibly know the true nature of reality or whether the contents of consciousness are veridical.

I have had solipsistic intuitions/feelings in the past. I think we need to defeat solipsism or face a kind of personal isolation where we are able to be skeptical about everything but cogito ergo sum/ourselves.

Also we end up with a relativity about facts and truth.

Who says we understand reality? — Agent Smith

If we didn't we would probably be dead. We can predict reality's behaviour accurately. Our perceptions need to represent something accurately about reality so we can survive.

What would be the point of a hidden incomprehensible layer of reality?

The other situation is that we are in an illusion or a brain in a vat/matrix scenario.

Why are we able to understand reality at all?

Something about reality/the world and our cognition allows us to give detailed and causal explanations of things that also allow us to successfully manipulate things and make accurate predictions.

I believe the world must be causally and logically consistent to exist and therefore contain discoverable coherent processes.

To me existence is a puzzle. Even if all that existed was one atom it's existence would be a puzzle.

It would either have a cause or be uncaused. It's cause would be caused or uncaused. Being uncaused would defy sense making.

What does it mean to solve the puzzle of consciousness. — RussellA

I think our best understanding may be mechanical where we can see how A causes B.

At the same time we are good at predicting humans behaviour and the behaviour of things in our environment.

That may be partly to do with the idea of constant conjunction where things co-occur reliably and we become good at predicting or inferring.

Our capacity to understand is itself something of a mystery. It may be shared by a few other animals to some degree who seem able to predict their environment. But in a mechanical world view there doesn't seem to be room to reflect on the truth of something or to use symbols. So The behaviourist tried to model everything with stimulus and response learning. But that was trumped by the cognitive revolution.

I'm mostly interested to understand why a given matter is thought to be a puzzle. — Tom Storm

What do you mean by a given matter?

A puzzle is something that is hard to understand. Maybe you are overconfident in your perceived understanding of reality?

The first philosophical puzzle I encountered was as a young child when I imagined going out into space. Hitting a brick wall and realising there must be something behind that wall that there was a conceivable infinite. I also thought about the concept of God creating the earth and realised there must have been an infinite time before God randomly decided to create the earth (The puzzle of the infinite past)

It wasn't until later on when I started to think about consciousness in my early 20's but I didn't have a name for it because nobody at any stage until I was 23 to 24 had mentioned the word consciousness. It wasn't mentioned in school or college.

Bizarre really that the source of all my experiences was never talked about as if it was irrelevant.

Strangely nobody I have randomly met ever seems to have spontaneously thought about these things including family members. it is like they have a lack of curiosity or don't like ruminating.

So you value facts more than values? How's that? — Banno

No. Facts trump values because they impose themselves. I can't change the laws of physics based on my desires and values.

When we set out a fact, we make our sentences fit the way the world is. When we set out a value, we say how we want the world to fit our sentences. — Banno

It is certainly impressive that we can influence the external world. That may even be considered a philosophical puzzle. But its value is subjective to our desires.

Our desire for meat has lead us to create many abattoirs that can slaughter billions of animals a year. That can seem somewhat macabre and not in the best interest of the animals.

There is a conflict of values.

The values invoked by religion were transcendent eternal values and this life a temporary stop over. Life felt eternal because you believed you had an immortal spirit/soul. No one would be left behind because even those with the most short miserable lives would go onto something better.

What could be more important than what you value? — Banno

Facts I would say.

Facts restrict desires or the outcomes of desires.

Some restrictions maybe down to limitations of our knowledge and imagination but other limitations are external/physical.

in the USA, where 96 percent of the population is a devout Christian? — god must be atheist

Apparently 63% of the USA population is Christian now and it was 90% 50 years ago.

That is an interesting observation.

Our consciousness does seem require us to travel at a particular time flow to maintain coherency.

Although that seems to apply when we want to take action in the world and form concepts.

In terms of dreams I find it hard to fit a time scale to that state of consciousness.

It could be that consciousness is all we have and time is illusory and a product of consciousness or it could be that perception of time is relative to perceiver.

I think who the perceiver is a n ignored but integral part of consciousness. Someone has a conscious experience. I refer to that someone as the self. The subject of experience. I can't imagine bacteria or planets as having selves.

The ten commandments are inadequate — Tom Storm

I wasn't advocating them seriously.

I was advocating commands over suggestions and theorising which is what people want from morality. for it to work like a command. Just tell people it is wrong to kill and theoretically no more killing.

I am a moral nihilist anyway. The more threads I read about morality the less convinced I am by it.

Are people saying there are things we should feel compelled to do? Are people saying there are objectively good and bad phenomena? I don't know what people are saying anymore.

Life is extremely complex and I don't believe most of it could be subject to moral type calculations.

I was just referring to the lack of ambiguity in the 10 commandments.

As I have said elsewhere I think morality needs truth value and one reason for that is so that one feels compelled to be moral.

An ambiguous theoretical morality seems good for nobody. In the end we want compliance to some compelling rules.

I think we are probably actually stuck with perpetual moral disputes.

It seems like we'd be better off with the ten commandments because they are less ambiguous.

Law seems to have replaced morality. We just need to enforce the law which already prohibits a lot of harmful behaviour but the law needs to prohibit even more harmful behaviour and then people vote on it.

I think it is harmful to try and manipulate moral behaviour from people because this makes people pray to ideas they wouldn't accept without coercion. It will just prove that social scientists can coerce a range of behaviour from people.

I think we just have to rely on people having spontaneous moral intuitions and emotions concerning harm and exploitation.

I feel confident saying that the overwhelming majority of atheists lead meaningful productive lives and are not nihilists. — EricH

Well the majority of atheists are middle class people living in the wealthy west. Atheism has less ramifications here and there are a lot of distractions. But you are not a starving child living in a slum I assume.
Lots of people including children have died prematurely in poverty and war without the chance to have a meaningful life.

I would question whether anyone's life is meaningful. I think meaning is objective but this is up for debate. If meaning is subjective you could find paint drying meaningful but that would hardly be profound. If there is no innate purpose or teleology for us or our species then we are not going anywhere. There are no values beyond subjective feelings towards events and wishes.

However how happy one is is obviously not proof that ones beliefs are true or valid.

I think atheists that are not nihilists haven't grasped the ramifications of their position. My agnosticism is wider than agnosticism about gods but also concerns other positions atheists have closely aligned with atheism like physicalism, scientism, eliminativism, no afterlife, reductionism and so on.

You can ask if there is anything before as well.

I am friendly to the notion of the persistence of consciousness.

I think that death is a topic in the meaning of life as well. Meaning in the face of potential personal oblivion.

I suppose I would add Time to my list. It is an elusive concept more in the realm of physics.

Andrew seems to me to be saying 'being an agnostic hasn't morally worked out for him ... and somehow that's atheism's fault.' — 180 Proof

Nope. Leaving religion turned me into a nihilist. Now I am agnostic I have recovered some hope.

In this thread I have been exploring whether atheism is just a lack of belief or has any entailments and what facets of society can be maintained coherently on an atheist worldview.

I have Quoted prominent atheist Dawkins previously:

" The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

"(..) safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.

They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; andtheir preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”"

My views on atheism are derived from atheists. They have written books and set up societies disseminating their opinions.

If you want to increase the benefits of cooperation in ways that will better achieve your goals, then you ought to follow your cultural moral norms when they will predictably solve cooperation problems and abandon them when they will create cooperation problems”. — Mark S

Cultural moral norms have been destructive and abusive. Cooperation can be a bad thing. There was a lot of cooperation and self sacrifice in the two world wars and amongst Nazis and in other acts of cruelty and destruction.

Maximising cooperation would only be moral or good if people were not being harmed by the goals involved.

I don't accept there is a science of morality or the authors analysis of moral norms.

You could study religion in the same way and make a compilation of religious aspirations and beliefs and see what commonalities were between them but it wouldn't validate the beliefs.

It seems a very arbitrary and self serving analysis to try and find some kind of unifying feature to very diverse data.

The notion of what a benefit is will be subjective based on individual preferences even if these individual preferences are widely shared they are not universalizable.

Thanks BC!

Overwhelmingly, people do cooperate. — Banno

But then we need to have some kind of shared goals. People cooperate for different reasons with different belief systems. People want different things for their children and from their children's schools.

If atheism is a simple lack of belief what is the average goal of an atheist? Their hope for the future? Aspirations? Motivations? Motivations for continuing/propagating life?

I feel that some atheist believe that almost everything has been explained and that the lack of explanation for consciousness is not a big gap in our knowledge its just a byproduct the brain.
And that we shouldn't expect an afterlife and just make do with what we've got and not have wild ideas. My opinions come from the discourse I have seen and been involved in.

So no ethical theory convinced you. Note that whether or not you were convinced is different to whether or not the theories were true or false. You might be, indeed presumably were, unconvinced because the theories were false. If so then they do indeed have a truth value. — Banno

The course book I read pointed out the problem with all the theories. And they all competed with each other so you would have to select one from several going and hope other people also did.

What did not convince me is whether they had truth value or were enforceable or whether they crossed the is-ought divide.

It's not, I hope, at all difficult to present ethical statements on which we would agree. So for example i doubt that you would agree with kicking puppies for pleasure. And that is to say, we agree that "One ought not kick puppies for pleasure" is true. — Banno

Some people kick puppies for pleasure so they don't share your intuition, If I have no desire to do something personally I don't ned a moral law about it. If it was legal and praiseworthy to kick puppies I still wouldn't have a preference for it. The idea we need morals to stop us doing something implies we have preference for that thing as part of our character.

We do have expectations for the behaviour of ourselves and of others. So if moral nihilism is the view that moral statements do not have a truth value, then it does not seem to be the default position. — Banno

We are not encouraged to question social expectations. It is indoctrination it seems. But people don't live up to our expectations and really we have no reason to expect anything off them (unless they are our primary care giver)

What's the alternative to nihilism you can identify in the world today that does not come with any harms or problems? — Tom Storm

Agnosticism to me would entail only acting on facts and when facts are not available acting with caution.

I am not saying there is a solution but I prefer this way of thinking to current models. In the end it could all descend into meaninglessness.

.

I went to an event last night that had eighty folk in one small room enjoying an excellent musical performance. No one hurt anyone else, folk moved so as to allow entry and egress, applauded the performance, ordered and paid for food and drink - all done without the threat of violence from some authority figure. — Banno

Because you don't live in Ukraine. You I assume live in a country with a vigilant army and police force keeping you safe and where the general population have submitted to the system. Meanwhile a lot of aspects that enabled this culture involved exploitation, colonialism, slavery past and present. It seems more like complacency to me. The system works for you not everyone.

You are not being forced to defend a lot of your values, They have already been fought for.

So you find no truth value in the OP? Humm… — Mark S

I view moral claims as "oughts". I don't see the point of moral claims that can be ignored.

You could call them moral laws.

The laws of physics impose themselves and impose limitations and boundaries.

You can impose any system of belief on a society or on someone and that doesn't resolve its truth value. It will result in people subjectively rejecting your system but you imposing it on them anyway not through reason.

We all have different goals and values they are not all compatible.

The important thing to do in your analogy is to go out and look for your missing friend, and muster what support you can for the search. — Banno

My analogy is about what beliefs you form when someone goes missing. Sometimes there is nothing you can do. The police are searching. The person has made it hard for them to be found but you remain in the situation of the agnostic. Lacking adequate knowledge and proceeding with caution.

But overall if you don't know you really dont know it really is a place of lack of knowledge from which few conclusions can be drawn. In my opinion. You start acting on faith from that basis.

Not sure what this has to do with the topic at hand, but there's not often a need to resort to force in order to social norms. — Banno

Because they don't enforce themselves like natural laws. I am saying atheists are relying on social structures created through force not reason which is similar to what religious people do.

When I left religion at 17 I became a nihilist because life lost it's meaning and purpose to me and I could see a failure to justify anything (This was before I studied philosophy). Nihilism can be a real problem. Most antinatalists are atheists, atheists have less children and various other stats which suggest a causal link between abandoning religious ideas and losing motivation and meaning.

That's why I don't embrace atheism as neutral, (harmless without ramifications) something needing promoting, superior to religion etc.

This is an analogy to how I see the situation.

A friend or relative goes missing and no one currently knows what has happend to them.

You are not justified to say that they are alive and well and you are also not justified to say that they are dead.

You could give false hope or cause false despair so instead you admit you don't know (agnosticism) what has happened to the missing person.

It is emotionally important not to take away peoples hope as well as not to give them exaggerated hope.

I think the atheist is usually making an assessment of evidence to reach a belief about gods based on the current scientific knowledge failings of religion etc but that then is not a simple disbelief.

Uh huh. :roll: — 180 Proof

Are you committed to the notion that all harm is bad? Harm = Bad? Some harm is bad? We should prevent all harm? We should prevent subjective harm as experienced by the individual (I hate going to school)?

In utilitarian thinking this has led to lots of absurdities such asthe idea that we should destroy all life because harm outweighs the good inevitably. Other claims are that we should manufacture suffering out of animals by genetic modification. Or that we should kill one healthy person to save 6 sick people by using this person as an organ donor.

If you wouldn't kill one healthy person to save six dying or suffering people then you are not committed to an ethics based on harm minimisation but have different moral values such as the sanctity of life, consent and so on.
.......
What I would want a morality to do is to convince someone not to shoot me in the head. And if they did to know they would get some kind of karma/judgement that is guaranteed into this life or the next. An afterlife justice scenario means you can never escape your wrong doing which is currently happening with unpunished murders genocide and unsolved crimes in general were someone gets away scot free with harmful behaviour.

I've been trying, unsuccessfully so far, to understand what you're saying. You're agnostic and you want to know whether your actions are good or bad, but then you say that it can't be done. — EricH

I am saying atheism seems to lead to moral nihilism and other forms of nihilism. If someone is consistent about not believing things without evidence or not believing things involving supernatural claims.

I also think the idea you can own something and have property is a metaphysical/supernatural claim because I don't think ownership is a natural property and it can only be enforced by brute force such as the police or army. A lot of social norms and claims are being maintained by brute force not reason.

I don't think one child deserves to go to Eton/a private school and another child deserves to not be educated living in a slum. Communists have forcibly dismantled some previous societal structures based on what they see as their inequality and lack of justification. But communism is also not scientific and a statement of of a preference for an alternative way to structure Society that led to a lot of conflict an death.

Just like no one has discovered a truth value to medical diagnostics or treatments. — 180 Proof

No one is obliged to take a medical treatment. But if they cure an illness they do what they say they do.

As an ethical naturalist and fallibilist, the truth value of moral claims about 'what harms persons, other animals and ecosystems' is discernible, ergo preventable or reducible — 180 Proof

I don't see how you get from an assessment of harm to a morality. Our ability to perceive harm does not imply we should take a moral stance on it. My dislike for harm leads me to antinatalism. But there are many other facets to moral judgements other than harm calculations.

Also I do not think people would accept the results of harm calculations if they were actually made comprehensively.
Would people give up a large chunk of their expendable income to help the poor if a utilitarian calculation led to that? Would they spend more time in the week helping others, stop eating meat? Stop taking foreign Holidays? Stop having children? Adopt a child. Visit the lonely elderly? These calculations would be easy to dismiss or ignore and not have the imperative of a law.

Other aspects of morality are moral obligations, moral character/virtues, a conscience, integrity or just the a lack of desire to have a moral system imposed or otherwise.

There is a large body of ethical theory that insist that moral statements have a truth value, but do not rely on a deity. — Banno

What are you referring to? When I studied moral; philosophy no theory we were presented with was able to give convincing evidence for moral truths.

I believe moral nihilism should be the default position and then any moral claims ought to be presented with substantial evidence. Otherwise I think it is a faith position to believe you know what is right and wrong.

People say there is no evidence for gods. I say there is no evidence for moral truths and they deserve equal skepticism. Some people accept nihilism as a consequence of atheism. Not accepting a nihilist consequence to atheism may mean you believe in some kind of objective values and these objective values like morals and beauty or just the presence of natural laws have constituted arguments for god.

An analogy might be someone claiming to not believe in atoms. Atoms are still going to contribute to your existence whether or not you believe in them. I think a lack of belief in gods doesn't rule out gods or the notions of gods influence in your life.

I think a nihilist, which I have been, is someone who is committed to true skepticism about the grounds for meaning and doesn't take anything for granted and in my case they may gradually reassert some meaning claims that they feel have some warrant.