Perhaps you could show how this works in a real-life situation. In America, black men and boys are 2.5 times more likely than white men and boys to die during an encounter with police. How does one try to solve this problem without addressing race? — praxis

That is a case of ongoing racial prejudice (on the part of the police), which can be solved by the police not discriminating between people on the basis of race, which is what those advocating for colorblindness want. I don't know specifically how to get police to stop racially discriminating, but somehow making the police do that (i.e. act colorblind) is the solution to that problem.

Alternatively or additionally, that is a case of class prejudice, the police treating poor people badly, plus blackness correlating with poverty, which is solved by having the police stop treating poor people badly (again, I don't know how to make them do that), regardless of race, which will have beneficial effects disproportionately for black people precisely because black people are disproportionately poor.

Additional fixes to the second case are to help more people get out of poverty, regardless of race, so that they aren't poor in the first place even if police are still discriminating against the poor. That again will have beneficial effects disproportionately for black people precisely because black people are disproportionately poor.

This being an anonymous site, no one has any constraint to give an honest answer, — Isaac

Thing is, unless I'm reading the site interface wrong, there's no way to tell who voted for what, only how many people voted for each option, so unless a voter also comments to say how they voted, voting is just throwing an anonymous token in a bucket.

I will say that the results so far surprise me some. I was expecting mostly autodidacts, then students, then decreasing numbers of the increasingly higher degrees, and while there are mostly autodidacts and degrees in descending order as expected, I'm surprised that there are no students or associate's degrees.

We can't even take in the basic empirical data without bias, it's ingrained in our entire thinking systems. — Isaac

I don't disagree, but we don't use that as a basis to say that nothing is actually real, just that we are bad at figuring out what is actually real. I think the case for figuring out what is moral is comparable: we may be bad at figuring out what is moral, but that's not an excuse to say that nothing is actually moral. And I don't have any particular commitment to contingent particulars about how relatively better or worse we may tend to be at each; just that's it's a task we can undertake, however fallibly, in both cases.

Is that about right? — Isaac

More or less, though I expect some important technical details will probably need clarification in further conversation.

The problem with this definition is that it is too broad. It sounds like believing in bigfoot, or believing that this football team will win tomorrow's game, are religions — Samuel Lacrampe

Only if by "faith" you mean "believing something not conclusively proven", which I don't. I tried to explain this before, but maybe I can use a conversation about sportball to explain it better.

Alice believes the Stars will win tomorrow's sportball game, even though she doesn't have any good reason to believe that. Bob believes the Stripes will win that game instead, even though he doesn't have any good reason to believe that. Alice and Bob both acknowledge that, lacking any evidence with which to convince the other, they must agree to disagree; each has their own expectations that they believe will happen, but no grounds on which to assert that those who disagree are wrong, so they don't assert that those who disagree are wrong, even though they go on believing as they do. So neither of their beliefs are "faith" in the sense that I mean.

Meanwhile in an alternate universe, Alice and Bob believe the same things about who will win tomorrow's game, but both insist that the other is wrong. Alice still doesn't have any reason to give Bob for why he needs to change his mind, she has the same (lack of) reasons for belief as the Alice in the first universe did, but her attitude toward those (lack of) reasons is different. She just knows it, in her gut, and also the Stars coach swore confidently on TV that his team was sure to win the game tomorrow, and besides the Stars are more popular than the Stripes anyway and that many fans can't all be wrong. That is faith in the sense that I mean. Bob meanwhile explains to Alice his reasons for thinking that the Stripes have better odds than the Stars, and will therefore win over them, pointing to their win/loss ratios and player characteristics and so on. Alice doesn't care; Bob is wrong, as far as she's concerned, because she just knows he is, even though she's got nothing to counter his argument with. That is faith in the sense that I mean.

Faith isn't incompletely justified belief. All belief is incompletely justified.

Faith is uncritical, unquestionable belief. Not all belief is uncritical.

On the other hand, adding "the gods and related topics" (along with behaviour) fixes that, and should be able to include Buddhism if the "related topics" include the after-life, ultimate reality, and such things. — Samuel Lacrampe

"Ultimate reality" is a topic that non-religious studies like physics and (irreligious) philosophy also investigate.

It sounds like what you really want that category to be is "supernatural things", which would actually work for me, but only because I hold that all belief in the supernatural is necessarily held on faith, since by definition opinions about supernatural things cannot be supported by evidence, for if there was evidence, the supernatural would have an observable effect on the natural world, and would therefore be natural.

Don't these two claims contradict? To disbelieve in p is to believe in not-p. E.g. "I have good reasons to disbelieve in an atheistic world; this must mean that I believe in a god." — Samuel Lacrampe

Well technically, disbelieving P and believing not-P are not equivalent; if we write it in functional notation that becomes clear, the opposite of believe(P) is not-believe(P), which is not necessarily equivalent to believe(not-P), although the latter would certainly entail the former, but only in that direction. But that's a minor aside to the main point.

When we start out, with no knowledge, all possibilities are live, any possible world might be the actual world so far as we know. We cannot pick out one of those infinite possibilities and conclusively show that that is definitely the actual world. All we can do is show that whichever possibility is actual, it mustn't contradict this or that bit of evidence, ruling out swathes of possible worlds, leaving a narrower selection of those that might be actual. But there's always still a selection, always still multiple live possibilities. The more evidence we accumulate, the more we can narrow in, but we're always just whittling away possibilities, never positively supporting any particular one of them.

I think your are attempting to say that reason can support faith; — Samuel Lacrampe

I was saying that the Thomists think that. That wasn't my opinion, that was my report of their opinions.

More or less. There is not a clear distinction on my account of prescriptive claims that are moral versus ones that are not moral, but sometimes in writing about it I get the feeling that using the word "moral" in place of just "prescriptive" might confuse some part of the audience, so I'm not certain that for all speakers they are synonymous.

The sense I get from those who might make such a distinction is between other-directed action and self-directed action, though on my account there is no need to make that distinction for the claims to be broadly speaking "moral": I'd say one ought not, for example, literally beat oneself up (like punch oneself in the face) over one's failures, and that "ought" is prescriptive, and therefore on my account the same kind of claim as a claim that one ought not beat up overs over their failures, but I get the sense that others would say that only the latter claim about interpersonal action is "moral" and the first is... something else, I guess? I would make a distinction between self-directed and other-directed action when it comes to procedural justice, saying that someone has the right to beat themselves up but not the right to beat someone else up, but that's only a subset of moral concerns, and in the broader sense I'd say that the first is moral too.

I'm not familiar with those phrases exactly, but reflexivity basically means self-reference, so "auto-referential" and "reflexive" are basically synonyms. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, so epistemic reflexivity would be about knowing what you know (as in, you can know that you don't know something, etc; "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns", and so on). The problem thereof would then be the question of how we can know what we do or don't know.

Not sure what minimalist and maximalist mean in this context, sounds like it's in reference to someone's specific theorizing about this problem.

I haven't really been following this thread closely, but I'm seeing a lot of isolationism vs interventionism talk in here, and as a general matter of principle, I've always found that a false dichotomy. Consider a personal analogue of it: what is better, a neighbor who stays holed up in their house and doesn't interact with their neighbors at all even if it sounds like the guy next door is murdering his wife, or the neighbor who's always sticking their nose in everyone's business, complaining about every little thing that's not to their liking and making threats if people don't comply with their demands?

Trick question! They're both shit neighbors. A good neighbor will mind their own business generally, but lend a hand as reasonable to friendly neighbors who need it, and not sit idly by while that guy murders his wife but stand up and actually do something about it.

I'm not familiar with a term for the international equivalent of that kind of policy (generally leave other countries alone, unless they ask for help, or we see someone obviously in need of help who doesn't in turn tell us it's fine and to leave them alone).

Why should the proud godman bother with this stage for virtue? His only attachment is to detachment. — jellyfish

"Well... then I guess I don't care about becoming a Stoic master."
"Oh my god... he is The One!"

Fairness can't be achieved by disregarding advantages and disadvantages. — praxis

That's true, but race in itself is neither an advantage or a disadvantage; to claim otherwise is to say that some races are better than others. Race correlates with advantages and disadvantages like wealth or poverty, because of people treating some races as better than others. One can recognize those actual advantages or disadvantages, that correlate with race, without discriminating on the basis of race itself at all; and because of that correlation, the fair treatment of greater aiding people with greater disadvantages will correlate with greater aiding people of races that correlate with disadvantages, all without having to actually address race itself at all.

I just remembered a comment from another thread I recently made that may also be helpful describing my view here:

as far as I'm concerned, "needs" as I would construe them technically cannot conflict, in the same way that observations of the world technically cannot conflict. They can suggest interpretations about what is or ought to be that conflict, but what actually is must account for all observations, even if it's a really difficult creative task to figure out how to do that, and what actually ought to be must account for all needs, even if it's a really difficult creative task to figure out how to do that.

(Consider the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Each one feels a different thing and interprets that as meaning there's a different object, and while all three of those interpretations cannot be simultaneously true, the actual reality is nevertheless compatible with the different things each of them feels to prompt those interpretations. Analogously, people's different feelings may prompt them to want different states of affairs, and those states of affairs may be incompatible, but what's actually a moral state of affairs will nevertheless account for everyone's different feelings, even if it means nobody gets any of the states of affairs that those feelings prompted them to want). — me in another thread

But if we resort to persuasion, aren't the ones with the most persuasive rhetoric in power? — Isaac

I suppose I misspoke; by "persuasion" I meant more specifically "reason". You're absolutely right that there are other influences between reason and physical violence, but my point was to distinguish between reason and all of those other non-rational influences, with physical violence just being the clearest exemplar of them. (Something like "if you don't I'll make you feel embarrassed" is still the same kind of "create a reason they'll pay attention to" use of power as "if you don't I'll hurt you", albeit softer of course).

It’s like I’m talking about comparing empirical observations and you think I’m talking about comparing people’s beliefs. Beliefs and desires don’t matter, they are subjective interpretations of experience; it is the experiences we have in common that matter. — Pfhorrest

I don't understand what you're saying here, could you try and explain it again? — Isaac

Gladly, this is the most important part of my whole ethical model really.

When it comes to investigating reality, we don't just ask people what they believe (what they think is true or false), and try to come up with something that's true according to everyone's beliefs. That would be ridiculous and is obviously almost guaranteed to be impossible. Instead, we ask people what looks true or false to them, what they observe. (And it's important to highlight the difference here also between perception and sensation, where perception is of something like "a ball", and sensation is of something like "a pattern of light"; sensation is raw sense data, akin to the pixels of an image displayed on a screen, while perception is interpreted sensation, akin to a vectorization of that pixel data. Perception is "feeling" like something is true, sensation is raw phenomenal experience with implications on truth). Observation is not about perception, which has all the same problems as belief, but rather about sensation). And then we don't just take their word for it, we go and stand in the same circumstances they said they observed it and see if we observe it too, and if we don't we try to account for differences between each other (and of course, first, double-checking for differences in the circumstances) to see if that can explain the differences in observation. Once we have an agreed-upon set of observations, we try to come up with models that satisfy all of them, which may or may not be what anybody initially believed or even perceived on account of those observations.

My ethical model hinges upon making a similar distinction as that between belief, perception, and sensation: instead of just wants or preferences, we need to distinguish between what I term intentions (thinking that something is good, "moral beliefs" some would say), desires (feeling that something is good, analogous to perceptions), and appetites (experiences of things like pain, hunger, etc, with implications about what to feel or think is good, but no propositional content to that effect as such yet). Just as in investigating morality we don't care about what people believe or even what they perceive but about their senses, their empirical experiences, and then we try to replicate those and build up from them to a model that satisfies them all even if it's not what anybody initially believed, so too in investigating morality we shouldn't care about what people intend or what they desire but about their appetites, their hedonic experiences, and then try to replicate those (stand in the same circumstances and see if we experience the same, try to account for differences between us and double-check for differences in the circumstances), and then try to come up with models that satisfy the set of everything that survives that process, which models may or may not be what anybody initially intended or desired on account of those appetites.

There's a whole lot more philosophy and what I'd call "ethical sciences" needed to build from that basic criteria to a complete understanding of what in particular is morally right, just like we can't just say "Empiricism is reality. There, all of the physical sciences are complete, everyone can go home now, we know everything about reality, it's just whatever you observe!" But this at least gives you criteria by which to start making prescriptive judgements.

No, it's not about the least bad, it's about what will or will not come to pass. The issue with the Second World War was not "which is worse, killing some innocent Germans or being taken over by Hitler?", it was "is killing some innocent Germans a necessary act in preventing us from being taken over by Hitler?". That question is not resolvable by empathy. — Isaac

That is a descriptive question. All actions hinge on making both descriptive and prescriptive judgements (usually called "beliefs" and "desires" in traditional philosophy of action, but I'd say "beliefs" and "intentions" instead, per the above). To know whether we ought to kill some innocent Germans, we both need to answer the descriptive question of whether that is necessary (or even sufficient) to prevent us from being taken over by Hitler, and the prescriptive question of whether some innocent Germans being killed is better or worse than us being taken over by Hitler. And any judgements on either of those questions are fallible, and might be wrong, so we might end up doing the wrong thing, but just because we can't be completely certain what the correct answer is to something doesn't mean that there is no correct answer, whether we're talking about reality or morality.

But it seems fundamental that there are not 'resaons' why we prefer things. — Isaac

There are raw experiential feelings of “preferring”, hedonic experiences of something just seeming good or bad, that are not had for reasons; but then there are also things that we instrumentally prefer for reasons grounded in exactly those experiences.

We can persuade people not to do what they want by all sorts of means. — Isaac

If we are the ones in power and so can create circumstances that they’ll consider reasons to behave like we want (like “I’ll hurt you if you don’t“), sure. If they are the ones in power then we’re fucked. That’s why in absence of any way to persuade anyone, might supplants right.

Yes, we can point to some things in our common experience, we're all humans and biologically we have some pretty similar gut feelings about stuff, but they're just that - vague gut feelings. — Isaac

I’m not talking about floofy gut feelings about what circumstances we instrumentally prefer, but about the experiences that lead us to prefer them. It’s like I’m talking about comparing empirical observations and you think I’m talking about comparing people’s beliefs. Beliefs and desires don’t matter, they are subjective interpretations of experience; it is the experiences we have in common that matter.

(And biological similarity is not strictly necessary. We can account for differences in people’s senses when taking empirical account of the world, and we can do likewise with peoples’ appetites when taking hedonic account of it).

How would it help getting someone to imagine themselves to be a 'rank-and-file' soldier in the German army 1940. "would you like to be in his position, would you like to be shot at?", "No", "Well then you shouldn't shoot German Soldiers in World War Two". Where would that have got us? A lot of innocent people were killed in World War Two. They were killed because many people thought the long-term good outweighed the bad. — Isaac

Ideally we would not shoot soldiers in wars. That is bad. But if something else bad will happen if we don’t, if we’re forced to choose between two bad options because we can’t find an all good one, then we choose the least bad of course. You say nothing here that shows that it is not possible to compare options to see which is less bad.

One thing I find odd about this talk of global debt is that whenever one party owes another something, that someone else is owed that same amount, so globally it should necessarily equal out to zero. The only way I can make sense of it is to assume the other side of the equation is being excluded. This means that saying we’re three years of GDP in debt is saying that investors collectively have claims to three years of GDP from their debtors, And what exactly to take away from that would depend heavily on how many people those investors are, and how the debt is distributed among them. If there are billions of investors each owed a fraction of a billionth of three years GDP that’s not so horrible. But if it’s a few hundred people who hold all that debt...

Its prescriptivity, which can be elaborated upon in terms of direction of fit. A descriptive claim is like a detective's list of the things a man he's investigating bought at the grocery store; a prescriptive claim is like the shopping list the man's wife gave him. The lists might be exactly the same, but they are for different purposes: if the things the man bought disagree with the detective's list, the detective's list is wrong, but if the things the man bought disagree with his wife's list, the things the man bought are wrong instead.

I could swear I saw a post in here I wanted to reply to later, and now it's gone. It was something to the effect of "even though there is no objective morality, it's still useful to debate moral topics so we can come to an agreement on what we will subjectively take to be morality just for practical purposes of getting along". I can't remember who wrote it.

In response, I wanted to submit the idea that that is all that it takes to develop an objective morality. If there are reasons that could persuade someone to prefer something, with the likes of which you could conduct such a debate as above, then working out what all of those reasons taken together say we should prefer just is figuring out what is objectively moral. (If there are no such reasons, then such debate is doomed to failure regardless, and we're doomed to a world where everyone does whatever they want and can't be persuaded to do otherwise, so might substitutes for right and there's no point debating why the guy with the sword shouldn't gut you if he feels like it).

"Objective morality" doesn't have to entail that there be ontological moral objects, moral facts that are true in the same way that non-moral facts are. Moral claims are not descriptive, they're prescriptive, so why would you expect them to be made true by, justified by the same kind of reasons as, descriptive claims? They don't need that to be objective claims. They just need to be unbiased; "objective" just means "unbiased". There just need to be something in common to our experiences that we can point to and say "because of that" as a reason to reject the supposed morality of something, and so begin narrowing in on what the remaining possibly-moral options are, in the same way that we point at disagreement with empirical experiences as reasons to reject descriptive claims and narrow in on the truth.

It seems that hedonic experiences serve that function perfectly well: we demonstrate the falsehood of descriptive claims by saying in effect "stand here and look that way and you'll see that that's false", and we can likewise demonstrate the badness (analogous to falsehood) of prescriptive claims by saying in effect "stand here and feel this and you'll feel that it's bad". Sure, someone can always say "I don't want to stand there and feel that and you can't make me so I don't have to agree that that's bad" (the "somebody else's problem" response), but that's just ignoring relevant evidence in the same way that someone refusing to look at empirical evidence of a descriptive claim would be.

In a funny coincidence, while churning through my 300+ notes to myself I've accumulated over the past decade-plus on things to write about in my philosophy book, I stumbled upon this tonight, from eight and a half years ago when I was still leaning toward pantheism. Some of the phrasing is a little off from what I would use today, but it's still more or less the same idea I just wrote above:

A god is a perfect person: a being with
-perfect accuracy of experience of everything (perfect sensation and appetites),
-perfect accuracy of reflection upon experience (perfect intuition and emotion),
-perfect effectiveness of reflection upon behavior (perfect belief and intention), and
-perfect effectiveness of behavior upon everything (perfect speech and action).

The whole of the universe necessarily has perfect accuracy of experience of itself and perfect effectiveness of behavior upon itself. No mere part of the universe can have these traits; and nothing beyond the universe can exist.

The question is, does the whole of the universe reflect upon itself; and are those reflections in turn accurate and effective? Is the universe a person? Some mere parts of it are, such as humans. Can the whole of the universe be a person, or can only mere parts of it? Such a universal person, a god, would have nothing to experience or act upon but itself; can such an isolated being be a person at all?

If mere parts of the universe can grow to encompass progressively more of the universe, can they ever grow to encompass the whole of the universe, to become the whole of the universe, and thus become God; or is that forever an unattainable goal? Can we mere parts even continue, indefinitely, to get arbitrarily close, or will we some day reach a limit beyond which we cannot progress? — an old note to myself

For exactly that reason (what makes something perfect depends on what it's supposed to be), there can't be such a thing as a general-purpose "perfect being". So if you want to define God in terms of perfection, it'd have to be something like a "perfect person": identify whatever it is that are the defining characteristics of a person, and say that a god is a being that has all of those characteristics perfected. That's where we get the usual "all knowledgeable, all good, all powerful" kind of definitions.

:clap: :pray:

I mean technically it's self-published online right now. I don't have any particular plans to get like a professional publisher to put it in dead tree format or anything like that, though if somehow that happened that'd be cool I guess, but I'm not looking to make or spend any money on the project.

I am hoping to get some pseudo-peer-review from folks here on this forum once I'm done with it. (Over the course of this year I restarted the project from scratch, and have just recently finished my first pass of writing it all out in the new format, and now I'm spending the rest of the year going back through 300-something notes to myself I've accumulated over the past decade-plus to make sure I didn't miss writing about anything I thought was important, and then when I'm done with that I'll ask for proper feedback).

@StreetlightX Might I ask that this debate about moral nihilism/relativism/whatever be split into its own thread? Would rather it not swamp this one. Thanks in advance.

given a suitable (pragmatic or conceptual) reason to demarcate between different facets, we probably agree. — fdrake

Sounds about right.

It's descriptively wrong. — TheWillowOfDarkness

This sounds again like we're all talking at cross-purposes, then. The pro-colorblind side seems to be saying "race should not be factored into our prescriptive decisions"; that it ought not matter what race someone is, and we should act as best we can to ensure that it doesn't matter to our decisions. I don't think anybody is denying that race does matter to people, as a descriptive fact of reality; just that that is prescriptively, morally wrong.

I literally philosophized my way out of life-crippling depression a decade ago. The depression didn't go away, but I became extremely functional despite it because of philosophical principles I adopted, which also turned out to be the foundation I had been looking for for my entire philosophical system.

More recently, I've been having the worst mental health catastrophe of my life, existential horror like I simply could not comprehend before it afflicted me, and for the nearly a year I've been suffering through it and failing to philosophize my way out of it, I began to think that it had proven the abject failure of all philosophy and I even tried (with no success) to abandon my principles and run to religion just to escape the emotional suffering, but as of this weekend I feel like I have not only philosophized my way out of that problem at long last, but also once again discovered the most profound missing pieces of my philosophical system in the process.

I don't think philosophical zombies are possible or even coherent, but I also don't think supernatural things are possible or even coherent, so while I don't think "is natural" or "is not a philosophical zombie" really communicate much of interest, they are complete trivialisms when properly understood, I nevertheless confidently assert that everything is natural and there are no philosophical zombies to be clear that I disagree with that nonsense. — Pfhorrest

Quoting myself to add: it occurs to me that supernatural things are not just a useful analogy for my take on philosophical zombies, they're actually ontologically very similar if not identical things on my account of ontology. For something to be supernatural would be for it to have no observable behavior; for something to be a philosophical zombie would be for it to have no phenomenal experience. Both of those are just different ways of saying that the thing is completely cut off from the web of interactions that is reality, and is therefore unreal.

Can you then please answer the question I asked in the message you replied to, both before and after the part you quoted: "What more besides the things I already described (giving land etc back directly when the crimes are tractable, helping people to get new land etc when it's not) do you or they want in recompense? [...] I'm open to improvements on that plan too. Is there something more you want, besides just to do more wrongs in vengeance?" (Or, I suppose, to exclude the much smaller number of whites etc who might need similar assistance, by limiting aid to aboriginals only?)

What assumptions are you explicitly denying? What's a quale to you?

Edit: run me through an encounter you have with a quale? — fdrake

I don't really talk in terms of qualia, but if I had to define them I'd say they're just facets or aspects of subjective, first-person, phenomenal experiences. I don't think they (either experiences or qualia) are "things", separate ontological objects apart from the objects that those experiences are of. That kind of separate-ontological-stuff talk is the sort of assumption I've been explicitly denying.

[I think there are only physical things, and that physical things consist only of their empirical properties, which are actually just functional dispositions to interact with observers (who are just other physical things) in particular ways. A subject's phenomenal experience of an object is the same event as that object's behavior upon the subject, and the web of such events is what reality is made out of, with the nodes in that web being the objects of reality, each defined by its function in that web of interactions, how it observably behaves in response to what it experiences, in other words what it does in response to what is done to it.

In an extremely trivial and useless sense everything thus "has a mind" inasmuch as everything is subject to the behavior of other things and so has an experience of them ("phenomenal consciousness", the topic of the "hard problem"), but "minds" in a more useful and robust sense are particular types of complex self-interacting objects, and therefore as subjects have an experience that is heavily of themselves as much as it is of the rest of the world ("access consciousness", the topic of the "easy problem").]

My trivial point of agreement with philosophers like Jackson that I've been trying to explain without implying any kind of ontological baggage could basically be summed up as "we are not philosophical zombies". I don't think philosophical zombies are possible or even coherent, but I also don't think supernatural things are possible or even coherent, so while I don't think "is natural" or "is not a philosophical zombie" really communicate much of interest, they are complete trivialisms when properly understood, I nevertheless confidently assert that everything is natural and there are no philosophical zombies to be clear that I disagree with that nonsense.

By definition philosophical zombies could not be discerned from non-zombies from the third person, only in the first person can one know that oneself is not a philosophical zombie, and the only trivial thing I think Jackson proves is that there is such a first-person experience that we have, the likes of which philosophical zombies would not have. Which, again, is a complete trivialism because I think everything necessarily has that and it's incoherent to talk about not having it so saying something has it really doesn't communicate anything of greater interest than disagreement with such nonsense.

I'm guessing that the reply you might get from an Australian or Indian indigenous person would be that the white flea came, took the land, broke the families, took the children, took the language, gutted the culture... — Banno

I'm not denying any of that.

...and now says that race doesn't count for anything in terms of recompense. — Banno

What more besides the things I already described (giving land etc back directly when the crimes are tractable, helping people to get new land etc when it's not) do you or they want in recompense? All that comes to mind is "kick all the white people out of the country", which is just retaliatory vengeance visited upon the innocent children of the original criminals and so is unconscionable. What was done to the indigenous people was unconscionable too, but two wrongs don't make a right. Ignoring the problem doesn't make it right either, true, but I'm not advocating that. I've advocated a means of making right without doing more wrongs, and I'm open to improvements on that plan too. Is there something more you want, besides just to do more wrongs in vengeance?

:clap: :up:

The very start of my philosophy is to reject basically religion (fideism and transcendentalism), and then immediately also reject nihilism (and the cynicism that can't help but lead to it), and then I spend the remaining 80% of the time just going over the vast swathes of what still remains as a possibility besides those equal and opposite anti-philosophies.

But isn't there an extra step required to extend concerns from people who already exist to people who might potentially exist? — Echarmion

Future me doesn't exist yet but I care about him. I also care about other people generally. It just follows from the two that I would care about future other people who don't exist yet.

(I also care about people who are already dead, but I've been thinking that that might be a mistake, or at least dwelling excessively on the bygone tragedies of the past may be a mistake, since there's nothing that can be done about it now, unlike future people. I still have to keep myself in check from excessively caring about future people, or other existent people, disproportionate to my influence on them, though).

qualia talk has a set of base assumptions which are rarely examined — fdrake

You thinking we are implying those unexamined assumptions that we explicitly deny implying is exactly what I mean about people thinking things other people are saying mean other than what they mean by them.

It's both a cause and an effect. Block a minority's path to wealth and influence, then point to their diminished status as proof of their poor character. — frank

That is a good point, thank you.

Banno has stated that race is central to his identity (or to the identity of people). He of course has no problems as he can enjoy all the white priviledge there is as a 'white fella'.

Let that sink in.

It's not that some people are racist or some people use 'colorblindness' as a mask and this has effects on everyone. Race and the color of your skin seems to be central. So not only is race something real and inherent, but also very important to one's identity, central to it. It's not something that you could overcome — ssu

I'm seeing here an analogue to the argument between gender abolitionists and trans people, which is yet another argument where I think both sides have a point and are largely talking past each other.

Race/gender can be individually important to a person as part of their sociocultural identity, and yet at the same time race/gender ought to be morally irrelevant as a matter of public policy or social norms.

That sounds about right, but I do believe racial-colorblindness is required in order to not be racist, that it is a fundamental step to refusing racism, and that color consciousness is a learned, racist behavior. — NOS4A2

Yes, I was thinking about that after I posted last night. Anti-colorblindness is not just unnecessary, it is impermissible; colorblindness is morally obligatory, even though it is still not morally sufficient. We have to be colorblind, but we also have to do more than just be colorblind.

FWIW I completely understand what you're saying (and it seems to me that you've understood everything I've said here so far) and I'm baffled about how Isaac and fdrake manage to not understand it. I'm usually good at explaining things to people who have trouble understanding them, and these seem like generally smart guys, so I'm kinda stymied for a solution to this impasse. Thank you for helping.

FWIW I'm pretty sure we all actually agree on the actual substance of this matter and this discussion is entirely about people thinking things other people are saying mean other than what they mean by them.

But, why believe anything at all? I think it's quite impossible not to believe anything — Wayfarer

You just immediately answered your question. We cannot help but believe something or another. And a critical rationalist epistemology says sure, go ahead and believe whatever, at least until it's shown to be false, and then move on to whatever else seems the next best alternative. (This is in contrast to a justificationist, classical rationalist, epistemology, which says "don't believe anything until it is conclusively proven", which critical rationalists like me think would necessarily entail believing nothing at all ever, because nothing can be conclusively proven from the ground up).

But you can't say that the Christian religion has an 'empty "because"'. — Wayfarer

FWIW I'm not talking about Christianity specifically, at all.

The very thing that the Christian faith provides, is reason, in the grandest possible sense - a reason for being, a reason for striving towards understanding, and a reason for believing. And conversely, one of the casualties of Enlightenment rationalism, is reason herself - not in the scientific sense of 'instrumental reason', but the sense that we have no reason to exist, that we're the accidental outcome of the collocation of atoms, to quote Russell. Enlightenment rationalism actually brackets out 'reason' in that larger sense, in favour of 'verifiability'. — Wayfarer

You seem to be using "reason" here in a sense meaning "purpose". I disagree that rationalism deprives life of purpose, but that's besides the point, because we're not talking about reason as in purpose, we're talking about reason as in evidence.

In other words, you're saying Christianity gives a cause or goal or aim toward which believing (and striving toward understanding, and being) serves as a means, but we're talking about what gives an explanation of why something is or isn't true.

I think that's pretty right, but it's not so much a matter of 'telling' as of 'demonstrating'. Actually in all religious epistemologies, the question of warrant for belief is, or ought to be, of central importance. Obviously in any revealed religion, there is an acceptance that something has been revealed which would not otherwise be known; but again Enlightenment rationalism starts by saying, well let's sweep all the traditional accounts off the table, and start again with what can be demonstrated in the laboratory, that anyone can see and agree to. Then the 'burden of proof' is put on the believer, having first removed all much of what he or she would have considered evidence for their belief in the first place. — Wayfarer

When it comes to public knowledge, public claims asserted to other people as though everyone should agree with them, then the reasons (see above for disambiguation of that word) we give to those other people should be reasons available to them, which is why we appeal to what "anyone can see and agree to". Otherwise, we'd just be demanding that others take our word for it, on faith -- which is, I'm claiming, the defining characteristic of religion, and what distinguishes it from other forms of belief. But when it comes to people's private beliefs, they're free to hold them for whatever private reasons they want (not just politically free as in they shouldn't be punished, but epistemically free as in they're not committing an error of reason), so long as they don't contradict other reasons that are available to them -- which is precisely why the public claims of science have to appeal to things "anyone can see and agree to", otherwise it would be telling people who disagreed to disregard their private reasons for thinking as they do, without giving them any better reason to do that.

As the OP I'm curious to hear your view on my little summary of the merits of both sides of this argument:

• Racism is the historical cause of many ongoing problems, and
• Not doing more racism is not sufficient to undo those problems, but
• Doing more racism in the other direction is not necessary to undo those problems

Or to rephrase, when it comes to fixing ongoing problems left over from past racism:

• Colorblindness is not sufficient, but
• Anti-colorblindness is not necessary

I feel like your side is saying "Anti-colorblindness is not necessary", and the other side is replying "Colorblindness is not sufficient", as though that's a rebuttal. I think both things are true, and not in contradiction to each other, and that "anti-colorblindness" people should not be against colorblindness per se, but for something more than just colorblindness, which nevertheless does not have to be anti-colorblindness.

I should note that the definition of "faith" I'm using here is not "believing something without being absolutely certain in it", but rather "putting forth an empty 'because' as a reason to believe something". On a critical rationalist epistemology (like mine), everything is believed for insufficient reason, because there cannot be sufficient reason to believe anything, there can only be sufficient reasons to disbelieve things. So everyone is epistemically free to believe whatever they want, until someone can show that what they believe is false; and conversely, everyone is free to disagree with what you believe, until you can show that disagreement with you is categorically false. Holding such tentative beliefs is not "faith" in the sense I mean it. Rather, appealing to faith is telling someone else that what you believe is right and disagreeing with it is wrong just because (because your gut tells you so, or everyone knows it, or this infallible book or person says so). It's making an epistemic move that calls for a reason to back it up, without any reason to back it up. — Pfhorrest

Quoting myself to add an addendum: another way of describing this sense of "faith" as I mean it is believing something in a way that holds it as beyond question (precisely because it is "supported" by such an empty "reason" that nothing could possibly counter that "reason"). Faithful belief is the opposite of critical belief; unquestioning, infalliblist belief versus questioning, falliblist belief.

Which reminds me of a pithy definition of religion I came up with a long time ago, framing religion as belief based on such faith and also as belief in transcendental things that (being beyond all possibility of evidence for or against them) can only be believed on such faith:

"Religion: unquestionable answers to unanswerable questions".

Edit to add further: note that this isn't to say that there cannot be rational discussion about traditionally "religious" topics like God. Depending on what who means by "God", that might be something about which one could have non-religious (non-faith-based, rational) beliefs. Natural theology does not strictly count as religion on my account, as it tries not to appeal to faith.

So "faith" could be defined in this context as: the beliefs regarding claims about the gods and related topics, which are not known with certainty to be true. [...] I have removed the term "religion" from the above definition of "faith" to avoid any circularity. — Samuel Lacrampe

I have two objections still to this revision. One is that by restricting to topic to being about "gods and related topics", it possibly excludes things that we probably want to count as religions, like Buddhism, that are not necessarily theistic, but still rely on faith in the sense that I mean, and so should still count if we are to use the "religions are belief systems that appeal to faith" definition. The second is that I think most people both religious and irreligious would say that their beliefs about such things (and most philosophers and scientists would say, most belief about most facts about the world) are not known with certainty to be true; science doesn't prove things with certainty, only math does that. So this definition turns out to be equivalent to "any beliefs about gods and related topics", which is a pretty common first-pass definition of what "religion" is, but has the problem outlined in point one at the start of this paragraph.

I should note that the definition of "faith" I'm using here is not "believing something without being absolutely certain in it", but rather "putting forth an empty 'because' as a reason to believe something". On a critical rationalist epistemology (like mine), everything is believed for insufficient reason, because there cannot be sufficient reason to believe anything, there can only be sufficient reasons to disbelieve things. So everyone is epistemically free to believe whatever they want, until someone can show that what they believe is false; and conversely, everyone is free to disagree with what you believe, until you can show that disagreement with you is categorically false. Holding such tentative beliefs is not "faith" in the sense I mean it. Rather, appealing to faith is telling someone else that what you believe is right and disagreeing with it is wrong just because (because your gut tells you so, or everyone knows it, or this infallible book or person says so). It's making an epistemic move that calls for a reason to back it up, without any reason to back it up.

But if faith is always blind faith, and you should not go on faith alone and should also use reason, then why use faith at all and not just always use reason instead? The Thomists are not that bad at logic. — Samuel Lacrampe

I'm not an expert on medieval philosophy (it's my weakest area actually) but I think the Thomist view is that faith (even blind faith), as the vehicle of revelation, is a valid source of knowledge to tell you what is true, and that is strictly speaking sufficient for purposes of salvation and such, but reason is there to deepen your understanding of why it is true, and in doing so grow closer to God and greater in spirit.

How I would address that problem without having to discriminate based on race:

Whenever a tractable case of someone taking someone’s property is at hand, that is when an identifiable person took an identifiable property from another identifiable person, just reverse the theft and restore property to its owner. However in this case I suspect few if any such crimes will be so directly tractable, so...

Whenever you have some intractable mess of intergenerational poverty like we probably have in this case, address that poverty by addressing poverty generally (e.g. by programs to help people who don’t own land to do so), without direct attention to race. If as is probably the case here the indigenous people are disproportionately facing this problem, then addressing this problem generally will end up disproportionately helping them, as is appropriate, without the policy needing to pay any particular attention to race to achieve that.

EDIT to summarize:

• Racism is the historical cause of many ongoing problems, and
• Not doing more racism is not sufficient to undo those problems, but
• Doing more racism in the other direction is not necessary to undo those problems

Or to rephrase, when it comes to fixing ongoing problems left over from past racism:

• Colorblindness is not sufficient, but
• Anti-colorblindness is not necessary

I submit that we all act in consideration of future people all the time: our future selves. I keep going to work and doing other difficult adult things instead of goofing off enjoying myself all the time so that a future version of me who doesn’t exist yet won’t suffer.

I don’t think considerations of other future property are much different. Just a combination of that and a more general concern for other people at all.

Can you elaborate? I’m not very familiar with Australian racial politics. I would guess that is has something to do with the rights of indigenous peoples to their homelands, in which case I’d say it’s still treating people equally to respect that; it’s not that being of some race per se (ought to) give some people rights that other people don’t get, but that nobody should have their rights to their homes etc violated regardless of race. But again, I’m just guessing at what you mean here because I’m not familiar with the actual specifics; please let me know if that’s completely different from what you mean.

None of those sound like problems where discriminating on the basis of race would have made things better. They're just problems that are not solved just by not further discriminating as in the past. I don't think anybody here who's for color-blindness is saying that just being color blind will fix all problems for everybody. It's not a sufficient condition. But it's a necessary one, and I'm still not seeing a counterexample to that, where treating people differently because of race would solve any problems like these.