I don’t follow, that clarification wasn’t meant to disqualify anything, so I don’t know what you mean. Option 3 is for if you don’t think there’s at least one god, and that is a core principle of your philosophy. Maybe you derive naturalism or materialism or something from that principle, but just being an atheist doesn’t mean you have to do that.

I've added a note for clarification to the end of the OP.

Thanks for asking. You pretty much hit the nail on the head. The traditional theist is typically going to default to fundamentalism. Just like the atheist wiil default to positive Atheism in justifying their belief system. — 3017amen

Maybe, but the poll also has options besides those. It seems clear that you do believe there is a god of some sort, but that you arrive at that after some more general philosophizing, so I don't see why you think the second option doesn't fit you.

(And the atheists, so far, seem to be saying that they generally don't start with positive atheism and build from there, but the other way around).

I find it really curious that no theists have answered the poll so far. Do theist generally think "theism" means something more than it does? Maybe I should have phrased it as just "Do you believe there is a god" (with yes/no answers) instead of "are you theist or atheist", even though those mean the exact same thing.

Is there one example of a documented, atheist system for morality with at least some followers? — alcontali

Utilitarianism and Kantianism both make no reference to gods and so are entirely practicable by atheists.

I didn't vote because I'm a Christian Existentialist — 3017amen

How is that not just an obvious vote for one of the theist options? I think I would expect the second, if you’re the usual Kierkegaardian “confronting the absurd first, leap of faith in response to that” type.

Maybe the question is why does Deity rear it's ugly head in virtually every intellectual/ abstract philosophical discussion — 3017amen

My first answer would be akin to @StreetlightX's: wherever there's an unknown in one's worldview, "God" is a tempting non-answer to insert. It's easy to hang the entirety of reality and morality on "it exists because the guy in charge said so, and you ought to do what he says". But start poking at that answer and things start unraveling fast. IMO, at least; the point of this thread isn't to argue for or against theism. But I expect that God is a central part of most theist philosophies for that reason, and an incidental part of atheist ones for the converse reason; and I started this thread because I was surprised to see so many people (or so it seemed at the time) who started from atheism and then built out from there, instead of the other way around.

You can believe in fate, karma, souls, all manner of supernatural stuff, and still not believe in gods, and therefore be an atheist. Pantheists etc are still kinds of theists. Atheism doesn’t necessarily have to mean naturalism or materialism, though vice versa probably does.

I used to be a naturalistic pantheist who considered myself neither theist nor atheist, BTW, until I recognized that the sense of “God” I affirmed was no different than anything atheists affirmed, and I was only setting up an unnecessary linguistic difference.

If god did exist then how could it be irrelevant to the human condition — DingoJones

Maybe not "irrelevant to the human condition", but "irrelevant to philosophy" at least, on my account, goes something like this: in order to answer questions like "Is there a God?" and "Should we do what he says?", we first have to be able to answer questions of forms like "Is there X?" and "Should we X?" more generally. Once you've done that, figured out some way to answer questions about what is or ought to be, then you have already built a philosophical system; all the philosophically important questions are answered. Now you can ask whether there's a God and whether you should do what he says, using that philosophy, and it might make a big practical difference in life, but it can't make any difference to the philosophy used to answer those questions.

I’d have liked a middle ground Agnostic choice as that is where if fall. — Mark Dennis

An atheist is just anyone who's not a theist, so if you're not a theist then you're an atheist. If you're "agnostic" in the sense of "I don't know if there's a god, maybe there is maybe there isn't, not at all sure", then you're not theist, and are therefore a kind of atheist. If you're "agnostic" in the sense of "I'm not completely certain that there's a god, but I think there is", then you're a theist, and therefore not an atheist.

In Islam, charging interest on loans is considered usury and is forbidden — Mark Dennis

This is a tangent from the topic of this thread but one that interests me: in old Catholic canon law, usury was forbidden too, which is why Jews got a reputation for being bankers in Christian countries (because being of a different religion, they weren't bound by those laws, so they were the only ones allowed to lend at interest in those countries). Catholics back then, and Muslims today, still had what were effectively loans at interest by using a combination of an interest-free loan, an insurance contract, and a rental, which hinged ultimately on the fact that renting is basically a form of lending at interest where the thing you're lending is not money; or conversely, lending at interest is just renting out money. The fact that you could effectively lend at interest even with the prohibitions, plus rising capitalist pressure to do away with the restriction, was a large part of why it was abolished in Christendom. As a kind of libertarian socialist myself, I'm really interested in this bit of history and economics, because I think that the enforcement of contracts of rent and interest is the main driver of the injustices of capitalism, and that by just doing away with that (having the state stop enforcing a kind of contract, not prohibiting anything), the free market would live up to much more of its mythic egalitarian potential. Explaining why should probably be the topic of another thread, though.

Strictly speaking atheism doesn’t imply anything about anything besides God, so you can reject materialism and believe in something supernatural or spiritual but if that thing doesn’t count as God to you then you’re still an atheist. I’m more curious if you start off believing there’s nothing that counts as God and building a worldview from there or vice versa.

May I butt into this argument to ask all the incompatibilists who are apparently here, who accept that the fundamental microscopic scale of reality is not deterministic even if big classical systems like brains are: does an electron, being non-deterministic in its behavior, therefore have free will? If not (and probably not), how would it help human free will for our brains to be non-deterministic, if they were (which they're not)?

As a pretty much lifelong atheist, I've recently come to see that in a much more sympathetic light. I always saw people, like my mother, who seem to believe in God just because the world would be too terrible a place to go on living in if there wasn't a God to put their faith in, as just intellectually weak, letting irrational fears shape their beliefs. But over the past year some kind of inexplicable existential horror has been hitting me for no discernible reason, and I've found myself at times desperately wishing I could believe in something comforting like that, even if it is false, just to make the emotional pain go away. But I can't believe in something that I can see to be false, even if I want to; belief just doesn't work that way.

I don't really follow your point about short vs long term; I think both of those are important to moral considerations, and there's isn't some line between moral and non-moral drawn along that divide.

As for terminology, I do distinguish between goodness of character that we might call "virtue", goodness of action that we might call "justice", and goodness of situation where I would use the term "good" without qualifiers. But I don't see a need to invoke those distinctions in the point I was making above. Asking "what should I do?" involves consideration of all of them.

Goodness requires free will only inasmuch as free will is equivalent to the capacity for moral judgement to guide behavior, which NB does not require indeterminism. And God is irrelevant to anything that I said; I don't believe any gods exist, but their existence wouldn't make any difference to my earlier point.

That point again is that asking "what is good?" is just asking "what should I do?". Answering that (correctly or not, just deciding on what you think is the answer) is the process of willing, of intending to do something, where an intention is the moral analogue of a belief (since beliefs are properly speaking descriptive in attitude, not prescriptive; which is why omnibenevolence is not a subset of omniscience, one is prescriptive and the other is descriptive). And that will is free when it causes you to actually do the thing you intend, in contrast to when something else causes you to do otherwise despite that intention.

If you recognize that you are not as good as you could have been, that only implies that you realize you have shortcomings not that you act contrary to your own perception of the good. — Congau

I mostly agree with everything you said, but in this one bit I'm not sure I do, though I might. There is such a thing as weakness of will, where you think that you ought to do something, make up your mind to do it, and then find that you do not actually follow through on that decision even though you think you should. In that case you are "acting contrary to your own perception of the good"; but, maybe you mean to include that among "shortcomings", and there's no real disagreement here.

"Why we should be good?" is a question akin to "Why should we believe the truth?" Baked into the concept of "truth" is "thing to be believed", and baked into the concept of "good" is "thing to be done". Asking "what is good?" just is asking "what to do?", just like asking "what is true?" just is asking "what to believe?"

To either question, answers can be handed down authoritatively without explanation, or they can be argued for from reasons. The exact process of how to justify anything, factual or normative, is a big can of worms to open, but it's a problem that applies just as much to descriptive questions as prescriptive ones. There's nothing special about prescriptive questions in that regard.

I think the gist of the cyborgs vs AI concern is that rather than humans building AI that will then replace humanity, humans can build AI to enhance humanity. Basically, the idea is to build a posthuman race out of a combinations of humans and machines, rather than building just purely autonomous machines that then supplant humanity. Whatever subsystems make an AI smarter, make those subsystems accessible to human minds too.

For example, something I've often fantasized about: imagine a hypercompetent general artificial intelligence that has a completely blank personality, no memories, no beliefs, no intentions, just all the capacity to learn and decide and generally to think with exceeding efficiency, but nothing to get started on, just sitting there idle. Imagine you could read a human mind, feed its memories, beliefs, intentions, etc, into that system, which will then feel like it is the human whose mind was read, and do all of the thinking that that person would do, but with all of the hypercompetent efficiency of the AI. And then, rather than writing memories of that thought process to some external source, it just writes them back into the same human brain. From the perspective of that human, it would just feel like you were suddenly hyperintelligent; you would have memories of thought processes that felt like they were your own, just way more competent than yours naturally are. The human plus the empty shell of an AI would effectively function as a fully autonomous AI. But without the human, that fully autonomous AI would go back to nothing, so there is no worry about it supplanting the human it exists to augment; the AI would feel like it IS that human, and care about that human's preservation as much as the human itself would. Because they really are one joint being.

Yeah, like many potential future technology applications, I longingly dream of the possibility of the good it could do, but I'm also terrified of the harm it could do if misused.

I dream of the ability to change the function of my mind, as there are lots of things it does poorly or shouldn't do at all, so a technology that makes that a possibility would be amazing. But fuck if I'm gonna trust Elon Musk to be in charge of deciding what changes to my mind happen. I've been slow enough to even adopt decades-old mind-altering pharmaceuticals, and only when they offered relief from some newly life-disrupting degrees of dysfunctions in my mind (the kind of things I dream of the ability to change). I probably won't trust any kind of brain-computer interface until it's been around for at least half of my life or if my life would end without it.

But I really do hope for a day when I can trust it, and through such technology I can finally make my mind work the way I've always wanted it to. No more lapses in attention, no more forgetting things, no more missing logical implications of things, no more fruitless emotional unease, no more wandering off task, no more weakness of will. Just calm, clear-minded, intelligent observation, retention, digestion, planning, and follow-through.

"Possible worlds" in the way that Lewis uses the term are definitionally causally isolated, so nothing from one can meet or in any other way interact with or observe anything from another.

If you mean the phrase in a different way, you'll have to elaborate.

I believe necessity (in an occurrence) is a special case of contingency. — Fine Doubter

I don't understand this sentence, because contingency is literally the negation of necessity. "Contingent" means "not necessary".

All I'm saying is that what you've laid out here does not show why the Incompleteness Theorem must be true. You've successfully shown that any false proposition has the same truth value as any predicate function that always returns false, and that that predicate is thus false of any such false proposition; and equivalently that any true proposition has the same truth value as any predicate function that always returns true, and thus that that predicate is true of any such true proposition; although it sounds like you are now saying the latter is not correct. I'm sure that Godel's actual proof explains the missing gaps here, but I'm curious to see your easier-to-understand explanation bridge those gaps itself.

I invite you, then, to offer a definition of the good itself, as a substantive noun. — tim wood

I have been disambiguating between different senses of the word "good". You are asking what is a "good man" in a way that sounds equivalent to asking what is moral virtue. I gave an answer to that in terms of "good deeds", which I defined in a way that I would say is equivalent to "justice": a virtuous person is one who does just actions. And then I defined what makes actions just, in terms of their relationships to the goodness of prior circumstances and consequences, but not in as simplistic a way as utilitarians would. And I defined good circumstances -- and here I have no other words besides "good" to use, so this is where I would apply that word without qualification -- as those in which what I called appetites are satisfied, which as I said is slightly technical language on my part, but which means more or less that pains are alleviated, including pains from lack of things, the alleviation of which is equivalent to pleasure.

So a "good" (virtuous) person is one who does "good" (just) deeds which are deeds that (at least) don't hurt anyone, or (better still) also soothe existing hurt.

not S ↔ K(%(not S))

For the sake of the argument, let's now rename "not S" to "P":

P ↔ K(%P)

Look at that! We now have a sentence P that has the property of being heavy, even though K, the heaviness predicate, always returns false! How is that possible? — alcontali

But because prior steps hinged on S = true, it must be the case that this P = not S = false, so as you have presented it at least, we only know that there is some false proposition that has the same truth value as a predicate function that always returns false, which... duh. I don’t see how any conclusions can be drawn from that to more general statements about predicate functions that sometimes return true or sentences that are true. So to get from here to

P ↔ not provable(%P) — alcontali

requires either that P be false and “not provable()” always returns false, or else some other step I’m missing. We could trivially invert the truth values and say that any true sentence has any predicate that always returns true, but again, duh, and for that to apply to this situation would require “not provable()” to always return true, which just says that in a system in which nothing is provable, any true sentence is not provable, which is again trivial.

Most people here - objective-wise - seem to fall into three camps; the "I've got a brilliant new idea that no-one's ever thought of that will change philosophy" camp (hint - no you haven't), the slightly more measured supporters of the status quo, and the ones who have a huge store of information about philosophy (or occasionally some other topic) that they're just desperate someone will ask their sagacious advice about. Actually, none of these are very conducive to a discussion format because none of them have any interest or incentive to understand significantly opposing opinions. — Isaac

For my part, I'm here looking for a little bit of 1 and a little bit of 3, both on my part and in other people.

What I loved most about being in philosophy classes at university was constantly being exposed to new ideas, and the contests between opposing ideas that often each seemed to have good and bad points, and the opportunity to come up with syntheses of those antitheses that it seemed like nobody had thought of before, because the professors weren't teaching them, though in time on my own reading I keep finding that lesser-known but professional published philosophers have often come up with similar ideas already.

Meanwhile one of the things I've loved most in the decade-plus I've been out of there has been being able to expose people who are still mired in those (what seem to me now) trite contests of tired old antitheses to the syntheses either that I've come up with independently or that I've since read about, and the continued process of discovering that other people have already had similar ideas to mine that maybe provide food for thought to further build out my own philosophical system.

Most of the philosophical conversations I've had since school have just been random topics that came up on random internet forums, and it was tiring to keep coming up against the same people completely unversed in any philosophy and yet so completely assured in the rightness of their own tired old opinions I've seen countered a zillion times. I came here hoping to find other people with their own new ideas on how to get past those tired old arguments, or recommendations for published authors to look into for such ideas; or people looking for that themselves, to whom I could maybe provide one or the other.

FWIW I'm not completely disappointed and don't intend to be complaining at all here. Just talking.

I'm kind of curious, as a newcomer here, if there's somewhere I could read (or if someone could briefly write up) a kind of overview of the social dynamics of this place?

So far, in the less than two weeks I've been here, I'm finding things a lot less detached and dispassionate than the philosophy I did at university, where the individual people didn't seem to matter, it was all about the ideas, and nobody was ever really judged on whether they were right or wrong in their conclusions, just sound or not in their reasoning, clear or not in their explanation. Whereas around here it seems like people care a lot more about how Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, and it's usually This Guy, and I'd kinda appreciate an overview of what all is going on in that respect if it's available.

I think my position is more clearly stated by expounding the analogy with epistemology in a way that asks us what makes a person epistemically virtuous, as in, what makes them a good thinker, a wise person, skilled at correctly forming their beliefs. I think that situation is much less controversial, and my position is that moral virtue is exactly analogous to it.

An epistemically virtuous person is not just someone who believes things that are true. Rather, they are someone who believes things because they are true, meaning that they employ a belief-formation process that is responsive to truth, such that not only do they believe something, and it happens to be true, but if it had been false they would not have ended up believing it. So someone is epistemically virtuous if they follow correct epistemic procedures, basically if they employ sound theoretical reasoning, in such a way that, most importantly, they only reach true conclusions to their inferences given true premises (their inferences are truth-preserving), and secondarily, better still but not necessarily, they tend to eliminate false premises and so narrow in gradually on the complete truth.

Likewise, a morally virtuous person is not just someone who causes states of affairs that are good (where this is defined hedonically, but with some technical caveats I won't go into to make it more analogous to empirical truth). Rather, they are someone who does things because they are good, meaning that they employ a decision-making process that is responsive to goodness, such that not only do they do something, and it happens to have good consequences, but if it had bad consequences they would not have ended up doing it. So someone is morally virtuous if they follow correct deontic procedures, basically if they employ sound moral reasoning, in such a way that, most importantly, they only bring about good consequences by their actions given good prior circumstances (their actions are good-preserving), and secondarily, better still but not necessarily, they tend to eliminate bad prior circumstances and so narrow in gradually on complete goodness.

FWIW, I consider moral virtue like this definitionally identical to freedom of will. Your will is what you think is the best course of action, which is identical to moral reasoning (even if your moral reasoning fails to consider anyone's feelings but your own; you're just bad at moral reasoning then, but a solipsist is equally bad at theoretical reasoning and for the same reasons), and your will is free when such judgements about what is the best course of action are causally effective on what actions you actually take (in contrast to cases where something else besides your best judgement ends up the cause of your actions).

You're missing the important middle step of my three-step position, which is explicitly a synthesis of deontology and utilitarianism. I am anti-consequentialist in the same way that I am anti-confirmationist, which is to say that results do matter, but only in that they can show your process to be wrong, and the process is the important part. Bringing about good ends doesn't justify all means -- something with good consequences can still be the wrong thing to do -- but bringing about bad ends disqualifies any means. With the important point that it's the introduction of new bad ends that does the disqualification; merely failing to fix existing bad circumstances isn't a sign of bad deeds.

Exactly like how a valid argument will produce only true conclusions if you feed in only true premises, so if you get a false conclusion you know that either the argument is invalid or that the premises contained falsehoods. But getting a true conclusion tells you nothing; invalid arguments from false premises can still produce true conclusions.

So someone who does no harm is a good person. Someone who undoes preexisting harms is an even better person, but failing to do so is not bad. It's the difference between permissible and supererogatory.

Soon we'll have gangs and factions in here. — Wallows

If we could pit the fideists against the nihilists that would be fun. Anyone left standing would be good people.

"If I am morally responsible, then I have free will" is definitionally true for some forms of compatibilism, like mine, for which freedom of will is just equivalent to the functional capacity to reason about what is the right course of action and to have that reasoning be effective on your behavior.

From that it logically follows, as in the OP, that we can conclude that someone has free will if we know that they are morally responsible. People with free will are definitionally the ones that we hold morally responsible: those who are able to change their behavior in response to moral judgement.

But "If I have free will, then not everything I think, desire and do has been determined by prior external causes" is only definitionally true on an incompatibilist view of free will. On any compatibilist conception, including modern ones, having free will is completely independent of nondeterminism, and may in fact be dependent on adequate determinism, in that any functional capacity relies on causation to operate reliably in order to function reliably.

So you can conclude"I am morally responsible therefore I have free will" for one sense of "free will", and you can conclude "I have free will therefore determinism is false" for another sense of "free will", but you can't string them together to get "I am morally responsible therefore determinism is false" without conflating two different senses of the term "free will".

Short version of my answer:

A good person is a person who does good deeds.
Good deeds are those that are good-preserving: that, given good initial circumstances, produce only good consequent circumstances.
Good circumstances are ones wherein all appetites are fulfilled.

Long version of my answer here and the following three or four pages.

So no, if a person is in circumstances where he cannot bring about other circumstances, that does not disqualify him from being a good person, so long as the things that he does do don't make things worse, and hopefully make things better. (Where for 'better' and 'worse' see "appetites" and the link above).

I'll give it a shot, sure.

OP doesn't name which specific military actions he's thinking of, but it looks clear to me that he has some in mind; that he is aware of his military doing harm, and he doesn't want to participate in that, for moral reasons.

It looks to me like boethius interpreted your post (and I find it a reasonable interpretation) as expressing general support for there being a military and for people serving in it, and that boethius is contrasting that general support for there being a military with the OP's concern about some particular (unspecified) things his particular military is doing.

You can be in support of there being a military in general, as you evidently are, but be opposed to the particular actions that your particular military are doing, and so oppose it and decline to aid it until such time as it stops doing that.

Even if you've already signed up for military service before you discover that your military is going to send you to do unjust things, you can still refuse to participate. Your military will punish you, of course, because they want obedience, but it's up to you to decide whether the moral consequences of your actions outweighs the practical consequences you will face otherwise.

Seemed quite intelligible to me. :shrug:

Inasmuch as cognitive science overlaps with philosophy of mind, there are a number of topics in that field concerning embodiment.

I'm not really aware of a field of philosophy specifically about the body, though. Mostly just mind-body relations, not all of which are about repudiation or doubt; plenty of philosophers emphasize the unity of mind and body.

The exact quote

the military in question causes a lot of unjustified harm by using excessive force — SightsOfCold

suggests that the OP has particular real actions by his particular military in mind. He doesn't say explicitly that it's a war per se, so Terrapin wins that point on a technicality, but it's an irrelevant point: as boethius says, OP has concluded that his military is doing something unjust, whether or not that something is specifically a war (if any application of military force can really be counted as "not war" besides on legal technicalities), and the rest of the reasoning follows from there. It us unjust to knowingly aid in an unjust action. This isn't a scenario of whether it's unjust to agree to follow the orders of an organization that might end up doing something unjust. OP knows (or at least believes) that his military is doing things that are unjust.

That the same set of beliefs can be philosophy to some people and religion to others, at the same time, depending on how and why they believe them? I'm not sure how I can be more clear here.

So case in point, Buddhism can be a religion to some people, but a philosophy to others. Not because some people interpret "the" practice of Buddhism to be a philosophy and others interpret it to be a religion, but because some people practice it religiously and other people practice it philosophically.

I think this scenario is a good example of why a synthesis of utilitarianism and deontology is necessary. The synthesis I generally propose is an analogy to falsificationism in epistemology, whereas consequentialism is analogous to confirmationism or more generally justificationism. I propose that ends do not justify means, but they can ‘falsify’ them so to speak. Means are themselves important as in deontology, but ends are also important as in utilitarianism. A good end doesn’t mean you used good means, any more than a true conclusion makes an argument valid; but bad ends mean either that you used bad means, or that there was something bad about the prior circumstances. Truly good means must not introduce new badness to the ends, they must be “good-preserving” the way a valid argument is truth-preserving. Bad ends from good prior circumstances indicate bad means. But good ends do not indicate good means.

My point is that the same beliefs or texts can be simultaneously treated as religious by some people and philosophical by others. It is not the content of them but the approach to them than constitutes either philosophy or religion. A critical, fallibilist acceptance of some belief or text is philosophical; acceptance by faith of the same belief or text is religious. And there can be people doing both things simultaneously.

For those people it certainly is, but in that world there is also a philosophical tradition like our, which includes a Platonism like ours. So in that world, it’s also a philosophy, to some people.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

It may be a standard view of the sciences that brains are effectively deterministic, being of classical (not quantum) scale, but that can only be extrapolated to mean that a standard view of science is that there is no free will if you assume an incompatibilist concept of free will, which is a rather floofy metaphysical and unscientific thing to assume, akin to dualism in philosophy of mind. Contemporary compatibilists view free will as a functional attribute, just like (access) consciousness.

If all people chose not to serve in a military that did unjustified harm specifically, but would serve in a military doing only justifiable violence to prevent even worse harm, then that would incentivize the military to not do unjustified harm and to only do justifiable violence to prevent even worse harm.

Or else (more realistically) to remove the choice not to serve entirely, in which case it's only an illusory choice to begin with. But if we're operating under the assumption that it is a genuine choice, then the moral choice is to choose not to serve unless your service is to a good end, not a bad one.

Knowingly signing up to help an organization that you know is going to do unjustifiable harm makes you complicit in that harm.