It’s fairly common. See for example:

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

Like you say philosophy often starts with our intuitions about things and then analyzes them. In the case of knowledge, we analyze our pre-theoretical, folk idea of it in terms of JTB. Gettier is trying to show that JTB is not an accurate analysis of that, by showing where the JTB results differ from what we want to say is or isn’t knowledge.

Then Edmund Gettier goes on to claim that Smith, in fact, doesn't have knowledge but that means either 1) Gettier is saying Smith doesn't have knowledge because one or more of the three conditions of the JTB theory is/are unfulfilled OR 2) Gettier has a different theory of knowledge in which setting Smith's belief is not knowledge — TheMadFool

I think what Gettier is doing is appealing to our folk intuitions about knowledge, saying that we would normally not say that Smith knew. That then contradicts the supposed JTB claim that Smith did know, and so supposedly shows that JTB does not track our usual sense of knowledge.

Ergo, it must be the justification that's problematic. — TheMadFool

I think that this is correct. Our folk understanding of knowledge doesn’t track with the kind of “justification” Gettier claims JTB claims Smith has. I think on our folk understanding, Smith’s belief was not adequately justified, and that is why his belief does not conform to our folk concept of knowledge. JTB thus stands as a sound analysis of our folk concept of knowledge.

There can possibly be morally intractable situations where every extant possibility is bad. Objectivism with regards to such situations just means that it is objectively correct to say of each option that it is bad: that someone who thinks one (or both) of the options is good is incorrect.

In the case of the literal Sophie’s Choice from the book, it’s probably the case that either choice of child is a less-bad option than letting both children die, even though all options are bad to some extent. In general, if you can’t save everybody, saving somebody is still better than saving nobody. That doesn’t excuse that not saving some people is still a bad outcome (though not necessarily reflective of bad choices on anybody’s part, if there was nothing anybody could do about it; though in the case in the book, it’s the Nazis who are ultimately at fault, of course).

Tell me how you justify empiricism without appeal to empiricism.

I don’t think the principles themselves can show that those who disagree with them are wrong. That would be nonsense and circular. I think that the principles can be shown correct, with arguments that don’t appeal to those principles themselves. Arguments I’m not going into here because this thread isn’t about that.

Again, you can’t expect empiricism to prove that empiricism is correct, but that doesn’t mean there can be no arguments that empiricism is correct; and its inability to prove itself solely by appeal to itself is no argument against it.

That sounds like the kind of thing that my principles of objectivism and liberalism would imply: everybody‘s perspective matters equally, and differences are acceptable until they can be shown otherwise. When applied to the topic of political philosophy I end up with something much like you describe.

I know I am one of the newcomers with a main interest in PoR. But I simply want to learn these things so I hope I don't get brushed away because of that. — DoppyTheElv

You seem like an open-minded and reasonable person to me, so I don’t think you’re in the same category as those tiresome posters. You seem more interested in learning than in telling everyone else why they’re wrong, and that is the thing I think is most tiresome about that other kind of poster.

I hope you have a good time here. If you’re interested, I recently had a thread where I laid out my complete philosophy of religion at someone’s request, which could maybe serve as a starting point for you here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7860/on-the-existence-of-god-by-request/

Whether hedonic experience equates to moral 'goid' and 'bad' is the matter in dispute. You cannot resolve that issue using the method you outlined because there is no shared phenomenal experience of hedonic experience equating to moral 'good' and 'bad'. The feeling that it does/doesn't varies widely. — Isaac

You are still conflating two different things here. What you are asking for is like asking to empirically prove that empiricism is correct. I am not saying that you can do that, or that you can hedonically prove that hedonism is correct. I am saying that I take hedonism to be the correct way to tell whether things are normatively correct, in the same way that I take empiricism to be the correct way of telling whether things are factually correct. I haven’t presented arguments for either of those positions here, just said that they are my positions.

This thread isn’t about justifying my philosophical principles, I only gave them as an example of the kind if systemic principles this thread is supposed to be about.

Maybe this will help clarify more what those principles are, if it will settle this tangent down. Those four principles applied specifically to normative or prescriptive questions mean:

Phenomenalism: it’s experiences of pain, pleasure, suffering, enjoyment, etc — things feeling good or feeling bad — that matter in determining whether something is good or bad.

Objectivism: Everyone’s such experiences matter equally, without bias.

Liberalism: All intentions/actions are to be considered permissible by default until they can be shown wrong as above.

Criticism: Any intention/action could in principle be shown wrong like that; none are beyond question.

And again, I’m not saying that these principles can be used to prove themselves. I’m not trying to prove them in this thread, I’m just stating what they are as an example.

They feel (or see) pain and do not feel that it is 'bad', in a moral sense. — Isaac

It seems to me that you are still mistaking what I’m talking about in the way I already clarified here:

You get that when I say "seeming good or bad", I don't mean you look at some situation not involving you and "sense" its morality, right? We don't confirm empirical observations by looking at the people making the observation and intuiting whether they seem to have it right or not. We confirm them by standing in the same place as them and seeing if we see the same things. Likewise, you confirm a hedonic experience by standing in the same circumstance as someone who reported having it and seeing if you feel the same way in that circumstance. If so, then that's "ethical data" that needs to be accounted for. — Pfhorrest

I think that a lot of people here are tired of poorly-done philosophy done by a constant stream of newcomers with primarily philosophy of religion interests. That topic seems to attract that kind of person. But I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with the topic itself, even though I too find that kind of poster tiresome. An interesting and well-reasoned discussion about philosophy of religion could be interesting. I imagine such discussions are hard to come by because people are generally irrationally attached to their religion, so eventually stop being well-reasoned in response to people arguing against them.

Yes, but there's is not a shared phenomenal experience that pain is 'bad'. — Isaac

If something doesn’t feel bad, how can it be called pain? Pain, or suffering more generally, is a bad-feeling experience.

Many people seems to expect the use of the term 'bad' to do something other than refer to pain. — Isaac

Many people seem to expect the use of the term “real” to do something other than refer to observables. Those people are rejecting empiricism, and I think they’re wrong. Likewise, people who think that things can be bad even though they hurt nobody reject hedonism, and I think they’re wrong.

NB again that I am not arguing for these positions here right now, just stating that they are my positions and clarifying what they are. Of course people who disagree with those positions think differently. I think it can be shown that they are wrong. That’s how disagreement works.

You get that when I say "seeming good or bad", I don't mean you look at some situation not involving you and "sense" its morality, right? We don't confirm empirical observations by looking at the people making the observation and intuiting whether they seem to have it right or not. We confirm them by standing in the same place as them and seeing if we see the same things. Likewise, you confirm a hedonic experience by standing in the same circumstance as someone who reported having it and seeing if you feel the same way in that circumstance. If so, then that's "ethical data" that needs to be accounted for.

There are plenty of cases of shared agreement about things "seeming good or bad" as in sharing the same hedonic experience of the same phenomenon. Many of the same kinds of thing cause pain, hunger, etc, all kinds of hedonic experiences, in most people.

There are outliers, of course, but there are also blind and deaf people when it comes to empirical experience, and we can account for that.

So by what should the correctness of answers to these questions be judged, if not common phenomenal experience (which we've just established is science)? — Isaac

Appeal to common phenomenal experience to answer descriptive questions is (physical) science. But as I already said earlier,

on normative questions I also advocate appeal to hedonic experiences in a way analogous to the appeal to empirical experiences on factual questions. — Pfhorrest

...and in that establish the groundwork for ethical sciences: not physical (empirical) sciences applied to ethical questions, but an analogous kind of investigation, appealing to experiences of things seeming good or bad instead of experiences of things seeming true or false, to put it roughly.


I was about to edit this into my previous comment before you responded: Positivists also err (in my view) on some descriptive topics too. They generally don't embrace the principle I called "liberalism" when it comes to descriptive questions, and so fall into a justificationist epistemology; and they also tend to be eliminativists about philosophy of mind.

Well then you're describing science, not philosophy — Isaac

I'm saying that my philosophical position is one that embraces the methods of science... for answering factual or descriptive questions, and analogous methods for answering normative or prescriptive questions.

Science and philosophy don't have to be at odds. In defending why you should do science instead of something else, you're doing philosophy.

So you're saying that the answer to the question "how should we settle questions" is "by reference to common phenomenal experience", which is science. Isn't that just positivism? Not that that's a problem, just that it seems a rather long way round of revisiting a prior philosophical tradition. — Isaac

It's much like positivism, when it comes to descriptive questions. But unlike positivists, I don't take descriptions to be the only meaningful kinds of speech-acts, and I have a whole analogous part of my philosophy that approaches prescriptions in a way analogous to how positivists approach descriptions.

Positivists generally commit the errors I ascribe to "nihilism" (as defined here) when approaching normative or prescriptive questions. My principles are meant to be broader abstractions of ones similar to positivist principles, in a way that doesn't ab initio rule out the possibility of answering ethical questions.

Do you not understand that what I am advocating there is just basically empiricism? Slightly more abstracted, as on normative questions I also advocate appeal to hedonic experiences in a way analogous to the appeal to empirical experiences on factual questions.

I'm not saying that philosophical questions should be settled by appeal to people's intuition from their life experiences, I'm saying that a core philosophical answer (that I'm not presenting an argument for here, just stating that it's the answer I settled on), an answer to a question about how to answer questions, is "answer them by appealing to the phenomenal experiences that people have in common".

Also note that I didn't say "experiential phenomena, which are all accessible in common by everyone", but "[those] experiential phenomena [that are] accessible in common by everyone". Experiences that others don't share are no grounds for answering questions, e.g. observations that aren't repeatable are not admissible evidence.

If you want to be a stickler for that sort of usage, then fine. Take any of my former uses of these words to mean the same thing. — Luke

Which thing? Usual motion that we talk about, like a car driving down the street, is motion over time. Eternalism doesn't deny that: it just says that other times are real, and objects span across them, four-dimensionally. Looking at that 4D picture from outside of it, nothing seems to be changing relative to something outside of the picture, because time is inside of that picture. A 3D object moving around through 3D space over a fourth dimension of time looks like a static 4D shape to someone not experiencing time in a timelike way but rather in a spacelike way, but that doesn't at all deny that things are moving over time.

Perhaps just like we've now defined the meter and other standards of measure in terms of objectively observable things -- we can recreate a perfect meter stick by running some experiments -- it would be best if currency was neither fixed to something like gold nor defined by fiat, but tied to some objective measure of economic activity.

I have some notes here about something like this, let me dig them out...

A currency backed by an investment passively tracking the cumulative international markets, with new shares (and thus new units of currency) issued in proportion to the growth of the world population, thus assuring that each unit of currency is worth a constant fraction of GDP per capita. (Start it off close to the value of a dollar, so it's worth about 1/30th of an average day's labor).

It's backed by something tangible, like "gold standard" people want.
But it doesn't deflate like a gold standard does.
It doesn't inflate either, except as the ease of producing things in general comes down with progress.
It tracks with the average value of labor, and thus serves as a kind of "time currency". — Forrest's note to himself

Maybe denominate the currency explicitly in times: one Hour (of gross world product per capita), one Day (of gross world product per capita), one Minute (of gross world product per capita), etc.

This also makes it really easy for everyone to see where they stand in the world economy: how many Years (of gross world product per capita) do you make per year? — Forrest's followup to that note to himself

No, this "hyper-time" would be required for the 4D object to move through, but we are talking about a 3D object (potentially) moving through/over the fourth dimension of time. — Luke

It's just as much nonsense to talk about a 3D object moving through time with no hypertime as it is a 4D object.

Let's consider a variation of your car scenario for illustration:


Say instead of a real 3D car, we have a 2D cardboard cutout of a side-view of a car. In real life even cardboard cut-outs aren't actually 2D, but let's just pretend it is.

Call the direction down the road that the car is facing "x".

Call the direction from ground to sky "y".

Call the direction from the right side of the road to the left side of the road "z".

The car only spans the x and y dimensions, but it's in a 3D world with a z dimension too.


We could, in case [1], slowly move the car across the road, through the z dimension, over time. That would be normal motion as we usually mean it, through space, over time.

We could also, in case [2], instead have a kind of 3D shape made out of this 2D car, where there is another cut-out placed just down the road (in the x axis), offset a little bit across the road (in the z axis) each step of the way, so it can fit. This would make a 3D shape that runs diagonally down and across the road. It moves through the x dimension over the z dimension. But it's not moving anywhere over time. It's stationary over time. It's a big 3D thing laying diagonally across and down the road, just sitting there over time. But each 2D slice of it is at a different place in the x dimension for every step in the z dimension you look, so it moves through the x dimension over the z dimension. But not over time.


Now imagine instead that the whole space of this universe we're considering is just 2D. We can now imagine mapping time to a third dimension of that 2D universe, imagining time spread out where the z axis used to be. That's analogous to the eternalist view of time: it's just another dimension. By imagining the time of this 2D universe mapped out over a third dimension that we'd usually call "z", we're pretending to be eternalists in this 2D universe. There aren't just the two dimensions of space, there's a third dimension of time too, and other points in that third dimension of time are real.


In that kind of 2D-eternalist world, case [2] above with the funky 3D diagonal shape is motion through the x dimension over time. That's what happens when the car moves down the road, in the x dimension, in the normal way that we usually mean motion over time. The direction it's moving through is x, but that motion happens over time, which we're imagining visualized where we'd usually put z.

But in the 2D-eternalist version of case [1], the car is moving through time (across the road, where we'd normally put the z axis), over... what? How can you even make sense of this scenario? You could also try to imagine the funky 3D diagonal shape moving through time (across the road), but you'd hit the same problem. And you don't need to consider the 3D shape to hit that problem. Just an ordinary 2D car (of this 2D universe we're imagining) moving through the third dimension of time is impossible enough to make sense of, without some hyper-time for that motion to occur over.


Every kind of motion is through one dimension over another dimension. Normal literal motion as we usually mean it is motion through space over time. Motion through time would require something for it to be over, and would not be motion as we usually mean it, but some kind of weird time-travel.

3D object move in three dimensions OVER a fourth (time). They’re not moving THROUGH a fourth — Pfhorrest

It's exactly this, but time instead of space:

car travelling from point A to point B. But let's say that the car is already at point A and at point B simultaneously, with the same car also at every point in between. You wouldn't then say that the car could move from point A to point B, would you? — Luke

A real car moves from spatial point A to spatial point B over time. It's not at both points at the same time: the car at point A is at time X, and the car moves to point B by time Y.

Nothing moves from temporal point X to temporal point Y, because in order to do that (rather than just spanning the two temporal points and all the times between them the way the weird hypothetical car just spans point A through B) it would have to be at time X at hyper-time P and then move to time Y by hyper-time Q.

In order for something to move through time, there must be some hyper-time for that motion to occur over. Otherwise, things can only span a duration of time, the way that your weird hypothetical car could only span a distance of space in a timeless world.

However it is still only a model: we can seek another without recourse to undetectable fields that yields the same predictions, and if we find it apply Occam's razor without new empirical evidence. — Kenosha Kid

Yes of course. But the same is in principle true of basically everything. The objects that we infer to exist from our experiences are all models, and if we should come up with better models according to which we don’t need to posit the existence of such objects, we’re free to revise our beliefs and do away with supposing that they exist.

Do notice btw, the bigger and longer loans ordinary people can get, the more real estate will cost — ssu

Also note that the very existence of rent increases the cost of real estate, because people who can afford to buy in cash (the rich) can then rent out to those who can't (the poor) for effortless profit, which makes owning more houses than you need more attractive.

If it weren't for rent, people who own houses they don't live in would have no use for them but as something to sell off. But no rich people (who already own homes to live in) would be buying them as rental properties, so the only people who you could sell them off to would be poor people, who need them to live in. Who won't be able to buy unless the terms are affordable enough (small enough overall price and small enough monthly payments). So the rich who own would-be rental properties would have no choice but to either take a total loss on their "investment", or else sell it off for cheap to the people who would actually want to buy it.

Conversely, take such a market that is already like that, and make rent an option, and the cost of housing goes up.

This phenomenon is true of all rental of scare commodities, and interest on loans is just rent on money, so the existence of interest causes the same problem.

I'd say one of the major reasons why many Third World countries stay poor is because people cannot get a decent loan for buying a home. If the majority of the people have to rent, just barely make enough to feed their family and are outside a normal functioning financial sector, not only is the society going to remain poor. — ssu

This applies plenty to first world countries too. A “decent loan” has to be one with low enough interest that it can actually be paid off eventually. In California here, I’d need to put hundreds of thousands of dollars down to get a loan on the remaining balance with interest not exceeding the cost of my current rent. It’s hard enough saving while paying that rent, so buying would mean it would take even longer to build up enough equity to stop owing for housing.

That is the main thing that turned me against capitalism: this realization that there is virtually no way out of continuously owing money just for the right to exist somewhere unless I magically got super rich overnight—and then that if I WAS super rich, I could get on the receiving end of people paying me in perpetuity to borrow my capital.

I’d say that the non-coupling field is still actually a physical (better term than “material”) thing that we can indirectly detect, because it is an implication of the best explanation for the things we can directly detect.

If we were to be really strict about it, all we can direct detect are the immediate occasions of our experiences. Everything else, from rocks and trees to electrons and quarks, are abstraction the existence of which we posit because they serve a role in the best available explanation of those experiences. So if the best explanation for our experiences includes features we can’t experience, then those features are allowable even on the strictest physicalist account.

Things like other possible worlds fall into this category too. If the best explanation for the actual world involves there being infinitely many possible worlds of which the actual one is the only one we have experiential access to, then okay, it looks like there’s infinitely many possible worlds, even if we can’t experience them, because the negation of that fits worse with experience.

@Kenosha Kid I think you’re confusing Luke by using his language of “change of temporal position”. It’s clear to me that you mean we the observers attending to how things are at one time versus how they are at another time. Like with the ruler, we look at one end and see that the numbers are higher than at the other end: our attention is the only thing changing spatial position there, the ruler isn’t actually changing its spatial position (moving). Luke is talking about things moving through time, changing where they are in time, not just about them being different at one time than another. We, considering the object as it spans time, can attend to one temporal position or another, and note how the object’s features change between the two temporal positions, but you and I agree that the object is not changing its location in time, which is what Luke means by a change in temporal position.

the motion of 3D objects in the 4th dimension — Luke

This is your problem. 3D object move in three dimensions OVER a fourth (time). They’re not moving THROUGH a fourth, because that (hyper)motion would have to be OVER yet another dimension of hyper-time or something.

Again, if you're arguing that time passes "inside" of time but not "outside", then you're saying that temporal passage is real. — Luke

I’m saying that the very question of whether time moves / things move through time is confused. Things change in space with respect to time. Some things, like humans, have memories of the past and expectations of the future, and so even at a given instant have a picture of the changes that happen over time in their minds; that is our perception of time. But thinking of either of those things as time changing where it is relative to an observer, or an observer changing where it is relative to time, is confused nonsense. Because, as I’ve repeatedly asked, over what could that change of temporal position occur, and how would you measure the rate at which it occurs? What per what? Time per time?

What is so utterly wrong in the fact that the seller of a service and the buyer of a service can reach an agreement what the price of the service is? — ssu

That’s not a problem. That’s just a free market, which is not the problem with capitalism. The problem is that some people have fantastically more leverage than others in such agreements to the point that the “choices” they make are almost comparable to “your money or your life”. And that there are systemic mechanisms like rent (including interest) that continuously exaggerate differences in such leverage so that small random differences blow up over time into such huge differences which then become self-sustaining and entrenched.

The problem is far too easily people interpret today to being serfs working for a lord. For them it's just a trendy figure of speech. For historical serfs this was something different. Remember that the lord in feudal system was also the judge and the law around. You simply didn't have the option to pack your stuff and work somewhere else. You couldn't just like that move into a city and start a business there. — ssu

I didn’t say that absolutely everything today is like it was under feudalism. You point out plenty of ways that it is better. But, without contradicting any of that, I was pointing out a way that it is not better. Capitalism — which is not the same thing as a free market, NB — is precisely the vestiges of feudalism that still persist. The dependency and subservience of those with less to those with more, because they must borrow a place to live and capital to labor upon in order to have the opportunity of participating in the “free” market.

Capitalism is a non-problem to anyone with enough capital, and great for anyone with more than enough. The problem is that that’s a tiny minority of the population.

In the strict sense, Jews and Romani are nations. I admit that that sounds kind of weird to the modern colloquial ear which has come to think of "nation" and "state" as synonyms, though.

I believe the Kurds are an ethnic group that inhabit different countries (similar to Jews and Gypsies). — Wheatley

That's what I mean by "there are some peoples who don’t have states that correspond to them". The Kurds are a people -- an ethnic group, a nationality in the strict sense. But they don't have a nation-state to themselves; they are spread across several other states.

They're different from Jews and Romani ("Gypsies") because the former are a displaced diaspora and the latter are nomadic, so they've both migrated into territories occupied by other nations already, but the Kurds are a people who are still living in their homeland, there just isn't a state whose borders correspond to that homeland; it's entirely divided up among other states.

Motion is a Presentist notion. — Luke

How can anything move through time if there is only one time, the present? That sounds like getting taller in flat world.

You oughta find a place for history, maybe could give the diagram an additional dimension. — Enrique

I have wondered how to incorporate history in there, but since there is a history of everything on the chart, it seems like a literal other dimension would be needed: the z axis representing the course of history of each field.

Philosophy is not a subject, but an activity. It consists in critique and analysis, in conversation, not systematisation. — Banno

Those aren’t opposites. You can systematically critique and analyze. The distinction I think you want to make is, as I already said earlier,

Wisdom, in turn, is not merely some set of correct opinions, but rather the ability to discern the true from the false, the good from the bad... — Pfhorrest

It is not the building up of a body of knowledge - as you would do in your own work - but the tearing down of nonsense. — Banno

Most of my work (assuming you mean my book) consists of systematically listing off various kinds of nonsense and elaborating on why they are nonsense, and what is left over after the nonsense is gone.

Where does wisdom fit into this picture? — ZzzoneiroCosm

Wisdom is what philosophy tries to make, and the sciences try to apply. It is

the ability to discern the true from the false, the good from the bad; or at least the more true from the less true, the better from the worse; the ability, in short, to discern superior answers from inferior answers to any given question. — Pfhorrest

Well, either "dt" represents a length/duration for comparison purposes only (is "not something an object does"), or else it represents a change in temporal position. You can't have it both ways. — Luke

dt represents a duration: the difference between one temporal position and another. dx represents a normal spatial length: the difference between one spatial position and another. If something is at one position at one time, and at a different position at a different time, that is motion. From "outside of time", viewing time as just another dimension like space, that looks like an object that spans time and space, geometrically, changing where it is in space over time. But it's not "changing where it is in time" as you watch it from outside of time. That would require there be some meta-time over which its place in time could change, which is nonsense.

Or are genuinely saying that you now farm rented fields without any fields of your own? — ssu

He probably lives on rented land or else is renting money to pay for it with, and effectively rents the capital he works (no longer land since we’re no longer all farmers) inasmuch as he has to cede a portion of the value he creates to the owner of that capital. Just like a serf had to give a portion of his crops to the lord in order to be permitted to live and work on the lord’s land.

You do bring up a better word than “nationality” to describe the thing it’s being used for here: citizenship.

“Nationality” is traditionally a synonym of “ethnicity”. The whole (relatively recent) idea of nation-states is that a state, ie that thing of which one is a citizen, should be coterminous with a nation, ie a people, an ethnicity. That would be a nonsense thing to want if nationality just was the same thing as citizenship. It’s only since the era of nation-states that nationality and citizenship have been able to be treated like they were synonyms, but in some cases (like the Kurds) they still come apart.

Multi-ethnic states like the US should arguably not be considered nation-states, for that reason. They’re more like empires.

That said, I think you are casting too big a net, calling anyone who contemplates anything a philosopher. At which point the label is meaningless. — jgill

I said in an earlier thread what it is I take philosophy to be, which underlies why I think it has this relationship to the science:

The word "philosophy" derives from Greek words meaning "love of wisdom", in a sense of "love" that in Greek meant attracted to or drawn toward it. I take it then that characteristic activity of philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, not the possession or exercise thereof. Wisdom, in turn, is not merely some set of correct opinions, but rather the ability to discern the true from the false, the good from the bad; or at least the more true from the less true, the better from the worse; the ability, in short, to discern superior answers from inferior answers to any given question. — Pfhorrest

To that end, philosophy must investigate questions about what our questions even mean, investigating questions about language; what criteria we use to judge the merits of a proposed answer, investigating questions about being and purpose, the objects of reality and morality respectively; what methods we use to apply those criteria, investigating questions about knowledge and justice; what faculties we need to enact those methods, investigating questions about the mind and the will; who is to exercise those faculties, investigating questions about academics and politics; and why any of it matters at all.

Philosophy is about figuring out how to do sciences. It uses the tools of mathematics and the arts, logic and rhetoric, to do the job of creating the tools of the physical and ethical sciences. It is the bridge between the more abstract disciplines and the more practical ones: an inquiry stops being science and starts being philosophy when instead of using some methods that appeal to specific contingent experiences, it begins questioning and justifying the use of such methods in a more abstract way; and that activity in turn ceases to be philosophy and becomes art or math instead when that abstraction ceases to be concerned with figuring out how to practically answer questions about what is real or what is moral, but turns instead to the structure or presentation of the ideas themselves.

At no point do we start laying into the rioters for not having the stoicism to suffer in silence whist the people who actually caused the whole situation remain unassailed. — Isaac

I’m not, and so far as I can see here nobody else is either. They’re just asking for sympathy for the innocents wrongly caught up in that angry reaction, in addition to sympathy for the righteously angry people.

The point of bringing up wrecking and looting someone’s house is that we all probably agree that that crosses a line and isn’t an okay expression of anger, even if the anger itself is well-justified. You yourself suggested that only a sociopath would do that. I pointed out that destroying someone’s workplace has pretty much the same effect. (Most people live check to check and rent their homes, so losing their job and losing their home are about the same thing.) So are the people doing that sociopaths too? And isn’t that a problem if so?

I said earlier: it seems to me like wrecking a racist cop’s home is more justified than wrecking a random local shop.

Back on the topic of the OP, I think “ethnicity” is itself a complex topic, that other items on this list factor into. I like to think of ethnicity as decomposing into phenotypic ancestry (“race”), language, and religion.

Strictly speaking nationality is synonymous with ethnicity (a nation is a people, not a state), but I understand that you mean it to mean association with a state. Just bear in mind that there are some peoples who don’t have states that correspond to them, e.g. the Kurds.

Why would they? They're angry, it doesn't mean they've somehow turned into unfeeling sociopaths. — Isaac

Destroying someone’s workplace can leave them homeless and destitute almost as easily as destroying their home can, so if empathy prevents the latter it seems it should also prevent the former.

Thank you for that very thorough response! That all correlates with my own experience and expectations as well. I wonder, in light if all that, why atheism seems to be seen (on some parts of the internet at least) as associated with the right. I wonder if it’s entirely because of a segment of YouTubers who bill themselves as “rational skeptics” and initially mostly did content on atheism and against religion and other woo, but then a decade or so ago (circa gamergate?) turned to anti-feminism and then by association more and more anti-left topics.