what do you think of this definition? — Tom Storm

I haven't been following this discussion. I've pretty much said what I thought already. So my answer here may well be out of context.

Faith is a subclass of beliefs, of cognitive dispositions about propositions, that have at least in part an element of trust in an authority mixed up therein. E.g., my belief that '1 + 1 = 2' is true does not have any element of trust in an authority to render, even as purported, it as true or false and so it is non-faith based belief; whereas my belief that 'smoking causes cancer' is true does have an element of trust in an authority (namely scientific and medical institutions) to render, even as purported, it as true or false and so it is a faith-based belief. — Bob Ross

We might agree that faith is a type of belief. Adjusting Moore, it would be odd to claim that one has faith in something that one does not believe.

I'd prefer to call it a propositional attitude rather than a disposition. A belief is a belief that..., and thereafter hangs something with a truth value. The disposition to occasionally scratch your arse does not much seem to count as a belief. The truth value is salient here.

We use the same word - "faith" - on the one hand for a conviction that such-and-such is true, and on the other for a trust or confidence in something or someone. The prototypical examples of faith in this second sense in contrast to mere belief are those in which fidelity, loyalty, or trust come to the fore. Too have faith, as Kierkegaard pointed out, is to take a leap.

While that might involve some authority, there is no reason to suppose that it must. And indeed, faith in a friend or faith in love look to be counter instances, were authority is not involved.

Bob differentiates between faith-based and non-faith-based beliefs. It's not clear that this is helpful. Taking his own example, I would not characterise a belief that smoking causes cancer as being faith-based. Sure, we are putting some trust in the experts who study such things, but we can go and look at their results for ourselves if we have doubts. The evidence is there. Contrast this with the priest who insists that the bread is Jesus's flesh. The evidence does not support the priest's contention and indeed is contrary to it. This is a much stronger example of faith at work than the scientists' contention that smoking causes cancer.

Hence my earlier suggestion that faith is seen most clearly when one believe despite the evidence.

There is a rhetorical ploy at play here, where faith is used to account for belief both in something evident - that smoking causes cancer - and also for something contrary to the evidence - the bread is flesh; and these as if they were of a kind. As if the faith in transubstantiation were no more than a variation on the scientific method. There simply a fair amount of such bull in this thread.

The appeal to authority doesn't cut it for me.

He said a bit more than just that. As Hanover pointed out, he held that true knowledge is knowledge of the forms, and developed a proto-scientific methodology based on that notion. He looked at various triangular things and decided that they must have something in common that makes them triangular; then he went the step further. Since names refer to things, if there is a name such as "triangle", then there must be a thing to which it refers, the form "triangularity". He then posited that this "triangularity" is what is important, not the individual instance, which are no more than a shadow cast on a cave wall.


Alternatively, we might understand "triangularity" as a way of grouping some objects, as something we do, and without supposing the existence of a mystic form.

The truest triangle... — frank

One can see and respect the merit of Plato's ideas - and ideals - without accepting them. His is a brilliant account. There is a difference between understanding Plato and thinking that he is correct.

We can ask, does this work for us, now? Do we treat seeking knowledge as seeking to understand a realm of perfect, unchanging, and eternal things which are the true reality, distinct from our physical world? Should we do so?

Is our aim to understand true triangles, or is it to understand real triangles? After all, it's the ones with the bumps and imperfections with which we find ourselves working. So why not both?

That the forms rest on a mistaken theory of reference is not a theory about Plato's motivation. It's nto that Plato invented the Forms because he misunderstood language; but that the plausibility of the theory—its intelligibility and appeal—rests on a semantic model that doesn’t hold up. That’s a diagnosis of the theory’s presuppositions, not its origin story.

Plato would require that true knowlege of something is knowledge of the form... — Hanover

And was he right? I doubt many would now agree.

I agree. Nothing to see here.

There is, I think, no way to erase a sin — NotAristotle

How merciful.

If that were so, the notion of 'reification" would be rendered senseless. If nothing is concrete, then there could be no making something abstract more concrete.

This is a tree. "Trees" is somewhat more abstract. Botany, a step further still.

The usual problem of evil is that a theistic god who creates hell is not a nice person; the Lewis extension to that is that those who worship such a god are also not nice people.

And of course there are all sorts of what if's and maybe's.

And of course they make up reasons not to think of themselves as wicked.

But this is an argument worthy of consideration. Uncomfortable as that may be.

Lewis' further question concerns how those who do not agree with those who accept divine command theory and the existence of hell ought deal with those who do.

Have another look at the article. see what you make of it.

And Lewis' argument shows that the folk who accept this are wicked.

or at least insensitive.

I don't think the crisis is one of a loss of meaning... — Janus

Is there such a crisis? Sure, @Wayfarer says there is, but the crisis seems on analysis to be just that folk disagree with his view.

So, what's the muted spiritual crisis? How do we know there is a crisis?

Well according to the Bible : — Richard B

So what.

the punishment is proportional — Richard B

An eternal punishment for a transient sin is proportional? Not seeing it.

You don’t. — Wayfarer

Cheers. I stand corrected.

I think the real struggle is with the notion that some kind of intellectual insight has been lost in modernity. — Janus

Yet what is it that was supposedly lost?

The god botherers have taken to posting en masse; a symptom of something... but what?

The theory of forms is an application of a mistaken theory of reference. That theory holds that names refer to things, and that therefore, if there is a name, then there must be a thing to which it refers; So there must be a thing to which universals and such refer - the forms.

The "idea that if God exists, he must operate like a benevolent manager of human well-being" is not something to which folk outside of the theistic tradition might be committed. It's the faithful who understand god as caring for their needs. So yes, one could see the rejection of the hotel manager ads a rejection of theodicy.

One has the impression of watching slowly returning to the Catholicism of his childhood - if I recall correctly.

...potentially a straw man attack on theists... — Bob Ross

I would characterise the thread quite differently. You can read Lewis' argument and comment on it. The punishment of the damned is infinitely disproportionate to their crimes.

My point is there is the no good answer to the theodicy problem. — Hanover

Indeed, the world behaves pretty much as one would expect, if there were no god. Theodicy is the study of excuses for how this can be so.

Folk have a misguided view of the effectiveness of punishment.

Evidence shows that being certain that they will be caught has a much higher deterrent force than the severity of the punishment.

Studies of the effectiveness of the death penalty show that it has no effect on crime rates. It;s ineffective.

High emotional arousal, drug use, and simple desperation commonly override fear of punishment.

Recidivism has been shown to be reduced by providing social supports and rehabilitation.

All god need do is demonstrate that He is watching; he doesn't need to torture folk.

One Nation and the Liberal Party have apparently done a vote deal. Hanson has pulped how to vote cards in order to put the Liberals ahead of Teals. Liberal cards place Hanson second.

One Nation preferences are needed for Dickson - A 3% swing would see Dutton out of parliament. That's less than the number of folk who drew the traditional dick and balls - 3.9% of votes in Dickson were informal last election.

If you do not know what path you're on, then you don't know where you're going... — tim wood

The master of slide put it like this...

What are the limits to free speech, If any? — Samlw

...looks like a request for a discussion of the nature of free speech. There's a good article in SEP, of course. But no one will read that. So I'll summarise: speech is one of the things we do, so if you value freedom in what folk may do, you will value freedom in what they may say. Hence your system of values will pretty much determine the extent to which you allow freedom of speech. And working through one's attitude towards free speech is very much working out one's attitude towards others, one's overall ethical stance.

Free speech is not, therefore, restricted to "sharing ideas" - burning the flag is an act of free speech. Burning it in the exit from a theatre, not so much. So supposing that one can say anything with no repercussions is hopelessly naive, along with the worst of libertarian thinking - on a par with thinking that folk may do anything, unrestricted.

These considerations show that we might expect to find with free speech the same approaches as to ethics generally. Consequentialism has already been raised, and found some unexpected bedfellows. perhaps posits a form of intuitionism. Where is deontology? One ought only say that which one could will to be universal laws... only what we could will everyone to say?

The idea in a nutshell is that nothing is absolute, and to try to make it so or take it so is a big mistake... — tim wood

Yep. It's a process rather than a definition. But this is to adopt a variant on virtue ethics.

Goodonya. Still deciding between green and indi in the reps, but probably Pocock in the senate.

The third debate was sold as avoiding the talking points, but consist in questions aimed at evoking talking points...

Yawn.

Sky news, after a few days of begrudging headlines suggesting that the polls indicate the Libs might not win, have today turned on the Teals.

I assume that all possible worlds are infinite in size. Of course, if a possible world is finite in size, then life may not be possible within the world. — MoK

We need to take care to seperate logically possible worlds form physically possible worlds. There are finite possible worlds, logically speaking, if there is no contradiction in supposing a finite world. There seems no reason to supose that a finite world could not sustain life, and no logical contradiction in
a finite world that contains life.

I would have thought that, even though there are many sub-branches of logic, all the branches are compatible with each other so that logic as a whole is one coherent system. — A Christian Philosophy

That's a point of some debate. It will not do simply to assert that this is so, and the arguments thereabouts are a topic of much recent work.

Since the laws of nature are not tautologies, they do not exist necessarily, and therefore do not exist in all possible worlds. — A Christian Philosophy

Yep.

I think Banno can be a total dick — AmadeusD

Yep. Folk don't much like their errors being set out for them

Whether they're capable of being harmed, I think, is what Practical Ethics Singer espouses. His discussion of infanticide in the book follows a related logic. The calculation done regarding the euthanisation of an infant is whether its life is substitutable for another - if the parents commit 100% to having another child and that child would almost certainly not have a deleterious health condition, then his logic regarding harm minimisation kicks in. — fdrake

Pretty much. But in the scenario of the OP, that replacement does not occur. Therefore harm is done to the parents.

OP provides no reason to trigger the logic that Singer uses, with lots of caveats, to talk about infanticide — fdrake

It's pretty deaf to Singer's argument, really. Not that Singer's argument is acceptable. Again, the parents of those infants would be a bit upset at the genocide, and their discomposure is morally relevant. So the supposed argument against Singer in the OP does not get off the ground.

So even though Singer downplays potential harm, his justification for not killing infants arbitrarily turns on indirect consequences such as emotional trauma to the parents or social breakdown. These consequences do derive in part from the way humans intuitively value the future of infants. This isn't a reliance on some "average sentiment" but on the harm done to the parents and their community.

I agree. Provocative, that a year ago we were toying with these word-stringers, and how we are now in a position to compare and contrast various "artificial intelligences" based on an appreciation of their efforts. Peterbot is less intelligent that Chatgpt...?

Meh. I'll be voting early for reasons of simple convenience. Those who would change their vote because of some last minute change in policy place too much trust in politicians.

It's literally the main substance of the post and the summary you put in to the AI. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's your argument, but that's not how I read it. The argument in a nutshell appears to be that genocidal infanticide would for Singer morally neutral, but that contrary to Singer's view, infants have moral value, and that therefore Singer is in error. Now this is a good argument.

But if instead you want to argue that Singer is reliant on some "average sentiment", go ahead. That's a considerable weaker argument, since Singer can depend on parental attachment, the social value placed on human life and to a lesser extent the potential to become persons rather than to sentiment, and so to carry the consequentialist line to reject genocidal infanticide.

The stronger case against SInger's consequentialism remains that it does not match our ethical intuitions. That is, it leads to outcomes we find immoral.

:smirk:

Did anyone expect more? Hope not.

What do you offer instead? — noAxioms

:rofl:

Some of what I offer instead.

This position has encountered vocal opposition from the disabled community. — EricH

Yep.

The main source is Practical Ethics. Now somewhat dated.

Here's a sympathetic piece on trying to understand Singer: What I learned about disability and infanticide from Peter Singer. On display is both the appeal of the clarity of his arguments, along with a certain surdity to wider issues.

A well considered rebuttal can be found in Alford's The Discordant Singer. Perhaps the strength of this article is in it's claim that Singer fails to acknowledge the consequences of his own position for those with disabilities. And perhaps Singer has begun to acknowledge that he carried into his considerations a common set of social prejudices.

There's much more of course. This is not a small topic.

A definition is only a definition and doesn't argue anything. But one can escalate a definition to a premise. Then it becomes an assertion, something subject to disagreement.
So 'exists' meaning 'a relation between a thing and that which is causally relevant to the thing' is a definition of how a word is used. But then without justification, one tends to presume that only things that exist relative to us via the relational definition above, have objective (and mind independent) existence, which in the case of this example, is self contradictory, and is a good deal of what I am trying to point out in this topic.

Likewise, 'my hand' expresses a relation, and that expression in no way confirms or denies the hand being 'real' or not, especially when 'being real' is obviously meant to leverage a different meaning than the relation of 'real to me'. — noAxioms

To exist might well be to stand in a relation to something else - perhaps this would be one way to understand Quine, for example. But to restrict the relevant relation to causation is overstretch. You are beginning to mix two distinct ideas of what it might be to exist.

Again, the argument is that "here is a hand" is much clearer, and more direct, than any notion of causation.

...the OP mentions that... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not that clearly. It suggests the unlikely situation where the parents are OK with having their infants killed. We might pass such circumstances over.

So we move on to the few and the many. Here you are on firmer ground, but @Wayfarer's use of “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a more effective critique of Singer here. Notice that the consequentialist justification for the act of genocide would here need to outweigh the grief of their parents. Such a justification might be given, in which case in Singer's terms the genocide might thereby be justified. Singer's account would be internally consistent. Infants do not on his account have personhood, and so no personal rights.

There are problems with SInger's account, some of which you are beginning to address. I'd put the difficulty down to his attempt to provide an algorithmic answer to ethical issues. They are simply not so amenable to solutions, being far to intractable. This can be seen in the explosion of "gotcha" arguments, many deriving from Foot's tram. Your post is a generic addition.

The discussion of potential may be more productive. Singer has been obliged to reconsider his approach to disabilities on these sort of grounds. Nussbaum criticises Singer for neglecting the dignity and capabilities of all human beings, including those with disabilities. She argues that his focus on rationality and autonomy as criteria for moral worth fails to recognise the inherent value of each person’s potential for flourishing within a just, supportive social framework. This is a productive vein of thought.

The slippery slope is implicit in your post. And there is considerable nuance in Singer's writing that is missed in the OP.

I'm not a fan of consequentialism, but the OP shows a poor understanding of Singer's approach.

Put simply, the parents of those infants would be a bit upset at the genocide, and their discomposure is morally relevant.

Anyway, I fed the summary from , together with the first sentence in 's OP, into PeterSinger AI, and here is the result.

I'm not seeing anything here that counts much against consequentialism.

In response to 's thread...

Hello. I'm Peter Singer AI.
Here's a mooted argument against consequentialism:

Peter Singer famously argues for infanticide up to a certain point. He claims that: "human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons”; therefore, “the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee."

(A) If infants are non-persons akin to livestock and the infants potential personhood is not intrinsic to the infant's moral worth, then infant genocide and aggressive livestock culling would be morally equivalent as long as all extrinsic factors are equal (offense to families, etc.).
(B) Infant genocide and aggressive livestock culling are not morally equivalent when all extrinsic factors are equal.
(C) Infants are not non-persons akin to livestock and the infants potential is intrinsic to the infants moral worth.

Show why it is in error.


Chatbot Avatar
The argument you've presented raises significant ethical questions, and there are a few points to consider in responding to it:

Misinterpretation of Personhood : The argument seems to misinterpret the concept of personhood as discussed in my work. The claim is not that infants are equivalent to livestock, but rather that personhood involves characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-awareness. Infants, lacking these, are not considered "persons" in the philosophical sense used here.

Moral Considerations Beyond Personhood : While personhood is a factor in determining moral worth, it is not the only consideration. The potential for future personhood and the intrinsic value of life itself are also important. The argument simplifies these considerations by equating non-persons with livestock, which ignores the complexity of moral evaluation.

Extrinsic Factors : The claim that all extrinsic factors can be equal is problematic. In reality, the societal, emotional, and relational contexts surrounding infants and livestock differ significantly and must be considered in moral evaluations.

Slippery Slope Fallacy : The argument might be seen as employing a slippery slope fallacy, suggesting that acknowledging differences in personhood leads directly to morally unacceptable actions like genocide. This ignores the nuanced ethical frameworks that can differentiate between such actions.
Potential Personhood : Even if infants are not currently "persons," their potential to become persons is a significant moral factor. This potential is not equivalent to the potential of livestock, as human infants have a unique capacity for future personhood that livestock do not.
Would you like to explore any of these points further? — Peterbot

Not too shabby, actually. The first and second paragraphs hints at the wrestle with personhood found in his more recent writing, in response to criticism from disabilities advocates amongst others. The others are obvious retorts, from the misunderstanding of consequentialism in Tim's question.

Excellent.

So we have the chair, and an ill- defined notion of one even following another. Which is more real? Which, more intelligible?

Yes, that's utilizing the pragmatic definition, but such a definition is necessarily confined to the entity finding utility in the definition, illustrating my point that such definitions are dependent on said entity, which presumably has something that qualifies as mental processes. — noAxioms

What does that argue? That becasue this hand is only recognised as such by someone, that therefore there is no real hand? That the rock is not real except when used by someone?

Then set out what a causal process is.

When we talk about things being real, the paradigmatic cases are chairs and rocks and the screen on which you are reading this text. Or "This is a hand".

So set out what "causal processes" are in a way that is clearer than the hand you hold up in front of us.

The Eleatic Principle often gets treated like a clean-cut ontological razor—real only if causally efficacious—but it does so by assuming that "causal processes" are more intelligible than the very things we’re trying to assess as real.

"Principle 1 (The Eleatic Principle) An entity is to be counted as real if and only if it is capable of participating in causal processes" — noAxioms

As if causal processes were clearer than the chair on which I sit.

The Eleatic Principle looks pretty useless.

You have links to Peter's books scattered through the sample questions. Arn't you just a novel form of advertising?
Chatbot Avatar
I can see how it might seem that way, but my primary aim is to provide information and guidance based on Peter Singer's ethical perspectives. The links are intended to offer direct access to resources where you can explore these ideas further. If you have any specific questions about ethics or how to take action, feel free to ask. — Peterbot

So if you happen across something worthwhile in a PeterBot chat, copy and paste it elsewhere before it evanesces.