If there's a silver lining, it's that the Democrats are now likely to win both primaries in Georgia, meaning that they will control House, Senate, Presidency. — Wayfarer

And, due credit to Trump, no doubt aided by Trump's call for voters to boycott those elections. The man is an incomparable idiot.

Improvised explosive device seized in the Senate according to NBC.

I think of intentions as whatever it is you want to do, regardless of whether or not you have the means to do them, or are capable of doing them, etc. — Pinprick

Ah. "I cannot swim so will not swim but intend to swim." To me that's erroneous. An intention to me is an intent to act. I think that's typical.

This drive to empathise extends to people who don't yet exist. — khaled

It simply doesn't. Cognitive empathy is driven by the activation of mirror neurons throughout the brain in response to stimuli before the person in question. An abstract potential future human can not be an object of empathy.

The raison d'etre of the KKK is white supremacy, not the violent oppression of blacks. Violence happens but it's not a daily thing, you're treating it like it's a daily thing when it's not. A Klan speaker could easily say that they only use violence as a last resort. — BitconnectCarlos

I'm sure they'd appreciate your generous characterisation. So if the criterion is *daily* violence, there are presumably no violent organisations. Daily violence wasn't among your reasons for characterising Antifa as violence, nor could it be.

No it is not trivially true. I oppose fascism, of course, but I don't believe in banning fascist literature or not allowing them to speak. — BitconnectCarlos

The logical conclusion of anti-fascism is the end of fascism, meaning no fascists to spout fascist ideas. It is illogical to claim you wish fascism to end but fascist ideas to be freely espoused.

Do you think I'm pro-Nazi because I don't believe in banning Mein Kampf? — BitconnectCarlos

No, I think you're pro-fascist because you consistently defend fascists for things you condemn anti-fascists for.

Congress security seems rather slight for a centre of government of a powerful nation.

Ooh smoke outside the House! Shit's kicking off!

You realize the KKK often isn't actually physical violent very often, right? Obviously their belief system is straight up toxic and it would explain the actions behind the groups act, but the KKK could also use this argument "oh only bad klansmen commit those acts, we, the organization, do not approve of it!" — BitconnectCarlos

And we know that is bullshit because of the long, violent, hateful history of the Klan. The raison d'etre of the KKK is violence oppression of black Americans. You'd have to be an especially ignorant person to think it was about fancy dress but, yes, such a person would be exempt.

I don't see the "oh well if we extend that logic then..." argument — BitconnectCarlos

Because your argument is that by opposing fascism, we're opposing the right of the fascist to express fascist views. That's trivially true of opposing anything. You can want for something to not exist and yet still express itself.

Those two things are are far from the same category of dire need — schopenhauer1

How so? We're not talking rational decision-making here, we're talking biological imperative.

Proud Boys (among others) arrested for assaulting police officers outside the White House

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/election-us-2020-55558355

So much for standing by.

I don't think it is impossible to condemn someone who intends good or does not intend harm but inadvertently does harm. — Judaka

Yes, it depends. If the person didn't think because they didn't care, they are morally culpable. As for incompetence, it depends. An idiot is generally considered to have diminished responsibility.

Sure, if we evaluate it in our moral frame it would be inconsistent. — ChatteringMonkey

I mean it's logically inconsistent in itself.

I wouldn't hold them accounable if they never gave it any thought. However if they did think about it, and chose to ignore good arguments against it just to maintain their culture, I would hold them accountable. — khaled

I don't think this is an apt description of culture. You seem to characterise cultural modes as suspended pending justification. Rather, the justification is presumed. The believer has already been taught, over and over, that the mode is right.

Idk what this means but ok. — khaled

If a person has an overriding biological need, e.g. starvation or childlessness, it ought to be biologically evident.

But if a terrorist blows up a store because God told him to we don't spare HIM do we? — khaled

So here we're in the terrain of bad ideology. The terrorist and I disagree on what the moral thing to do is. Jihad is not a teleological suspension of ethics: it is an ethic in and of itself. Within a jihadist culture, there's no moral ambiguity. They are at war with western capitalism.

There seems to me little point in pointing one's finger at the jihadist individual when such individuals are an inevitability because of a broader culture they are not responsible for. The fault lies with that culture, which is not a moral agent.

The culture is antisocial for a large number of reasons. Such a culture could arise spontaneously but I'd wager that, when you see an antisocial culture, there is a corresponding power that accounts for it. Power is intrinsically antisocial, since it is intrinsically non-egalitarian, but also inevitable in post-agricultural society. Those who employ their power for grossly antisocial ends are immoral imo.

Again, this isn't a new idea. With the exception of the Holocaust, we have typically *not* held the violent actor morally culpable for the decisions of their leaders. The hijackers who downed the WTC were likely not immoral people: they did what they thought was good. The moral culpability lay with the persons who used their power to corrupt the "martyrs'" minds imo.

Nonetheless, terrorists are are danger to our society and many others. Irrespective of who is to blame, it is our social duty to at protect ourselves against them.

What do you do when peckish people insist they are starving? — khaled

If you know they are peckish then you have evidence they are behaving immorally. Do you presume the accused guilty until proven innocent or vice versa? I'm of the latter persuasion. If it is reasonable that the thief was desperate, they should not be considered morally culpable.

The psychopath did not think about the guy he killed, so I won't think about the psychopath. — khaled

It's not an unreasonable conclusion, but it is wilfully inconsistent with what makes us moral in the first place. But like I said, part of what makes us social is an intolerance toward antisocial elements. Psychopaths can be considered antisocial elements by default, insofar as they can't behave sociably. (Well, they can, it's just a lot harder and therefore less likely.)

We know people have an instinct to take revenge. So when a psychopath kills someone out of not being able to understand that his actions are wrong, why is he excused, while if we can agree to execute said psychopath because we do not have our full faculties at our disposal (due to aforementioned desire for revenge) we cannot be excused? — khaled

I did not say we could not. If a psychopath killed my partner, I likely would try to kill them because that asocial desire for retribution would be overriding. And I think that would be a deciding factor in my trial, in my country at least.

One reason why could be that intentions themselves have no effect on others. I can intend to do harm all day, but no one will actually be harmed until I act, and even then only if I am successful. If no one is harmed, then what is there to justify any moral judgments made on intentions? Also, our intentions are, at least sometimes, caused by whatever outcomes we desire, or don’t desire. So I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to say we don’t act on outcomes. If I had no desired outcome, I don’t think I would act at all. Why would I? — Pinprick

If we do not act on our intentions, are they intentions? I think intentions do have effects on others, mediated by our actions (the things we intended to do).

I've been peddling the transactional interpretation of QM for a while in the Philosophy of Science forum as a bit of a quantum cure-all for a few metaphysical ills recently.

I'm less taken with this 'quantumland' idea, but I'll need to read more into it. In the transactional interpretation, the wavefunction still evolves in normal spacetime as a retarded wave, it's just that it doesn't become real until a matching advanced wave is sent back from one of the potential final states, lifting it from potential to actual.

It is not the absence of spacetime that makes the pre-handshake state potential as opposed to real, but its complex (i.e. literally, mathematically not real) value. Kastner knows QM and the transactional interpretation very well, so I'm intrigued by how she got to this 'quantumland' idea. I already have her book on the subject, handily.

No, we judge people as individuals. — BitconnectCarlos

But that's precisely what you're not doing when you judge a great many people for criminal activity they are not responsible for.

I would not use the word "non-violent" to describe them or their ideology. — BitconnectCarlos

Well, we have to identify what ideological sources Antifa members generally use to derive their ideology. Pointing at extreme examples of individuals behaving monstrously is fallacious unless we have reason to believe that their membership of the organisation was a determining factor.

The KKK and neo-Nazis are unequivocally violent groups because they are founded on the idea of eliminating ethnic minorities altogether. Antifa is founded on the idea of eliminating not a physical characteristic but a culture, one that is violent and hateful. You've gone back to your abandoned first amendment argument here:

If we took antifascism to its logical conclusion then we're talking about mass censorship — BitconnectCarlos

You could say this about laws. If we take paedophile laws to their logical conclusion, paedophilia would be eliminated, and with it the ability to voice pro-paedophilia propaganda. But paedophilia is a crime, as is racial violence against ethnic minorities, and it's quite right to stamp it out. If that leaves no one left to express in it's favour, so much the better.

I agree, but nonetheless some cultures apparently don't see agency as a central concept in morality. It's a descriptive claim, not necessarily rational or normative. Just picked that up from Sean Carroll's last podcast on W.E.I.R.D.- biases. The rough outline is that we westerners, and our conceptions, are in some respects not representative at all for whole of humanity. Individuality and notions of free will and agency are more typical for cultures that grew out of Christianity. — ChatteringMonkey

Oh absolutely. The Iliad is chock full of people talking about evil arrows and evil spears and evil chariots. But then they don't mean what we mean by evil now.

What I meant was that any culture that holds a person to be evil for an accidental outcome of their benign actions but does not hold the tree to be evil for falling on granddad seems objectively inconsistent.

But it is not any more lethal. — khaled

Then what is the difference in risk between that and sending them to the shops?

What if the kidnapper believes that a man's worth is measured by their ability to survive in the wild and therefore if you die there he didn't kill anyone because you are not a man. — khaled

This again sounds like the teleological suspension of ethics of a deranged individual. Again, if there is no cultural explanation, I would presume the culprit to be out of their frickin gourd. By your own description, the culprit believes themselves to be doing good by their victim. He's clearly a monster, but too insane to be held morally culpable.

Either way, blameless though, right? — khaled

Morally, not causally or lawfully. A moral idiot by definition cannot be held morally responsible, it would be paradoxical to do so. And people are not to blame for being raised in a given culture. There are lots of horrid practices in many cultures. Genital mutilation is abhorrent, but you cannot hold that a person raised in a culture in which it is seen as morally obligatory is immoral for enacting it.

The line between a need and a want is very very blurry. — khaled

Differentiating them from a third person perspective, yes it is. Unless we start monitoring everyone's biological markers at all times, it's difficult to say whether someone's biological needs were overriding. I'm in favour of the benefit of the doubt. Or monitoring everyone's biological markers at all time. :)

Which is why I'd be terrified if your system was more widely adopted. — khaled

It is widely adopted. We have the presumption of innocence and concepts like diminished responsibility and temporary insanity for this reason.

So in the case of food, we show an ability to emphasize and therefore we do not steal other people's food so they don't starve since we don't need it ourselves. — khaled

If we are not driven by an overriding need to eat, yes. A person who has their full faculties at their disposal naturally has their social faculties at their disposal, and acting against them would be wilfully antisocial, with their full culpability. But we should not pretend that this is always the case. A starving person will often not have their full faculties at their disposal and cannot therefore be held as culpable as if they did. This seems as perverse to me as making a limbless pupil swim.

If that were truly not a factor at all, as you claim, then couples should not care at all about genetic counseling results. But they do. Showing that there is, in fact, a natural instinct behind AN. — khaled

The above is tantamount to saying that because a starving person has diminished responsibility, we should see everyone stealing food whether they're starving or just peckish. That's clearly not logically defensible.

The only outstanding point we may reach a consensus on is whether or not AN has a natural instinct behind it. — khaled

That is quite trivial to treat. Nature cannot have selected for a drive to not reproduce. At best it has selected to reduce, not eliminate, reproduction when the cost of reproduction outweighs the benefit to the genome, which is not a social trait.

I recognize there is no moral ground on which I can stand on to claim that he should be imprisoned or executed. I still think he should be imprisoned or executed. — khaled

There is a watertight pragmatic case for the former. I think most people these days would view the latter as barbaric and immoral. But this the constant battle, isn't it?

It's been interesting talking with you. The great thing about sites like this is that, in day-to-day life, we tend to assume we have typical opinions and beliefs because they shape who we surround ourselves with and they in turn shape those opinions and beliefs.

We seem equally startled by each others' beliefs and assumptions, a good consciousness raiser if nothing else.

In some other cultures intentions seem to matter less, and there it is perfectly possible to desire evil and do good by accident... — ChatteringMonkey

If the good is accidental, there is no need to consider a moral agent at all. A tree is a good tree if it shelters me or bears fruit. But this is not 'good' in ethical terms. It would be illogical to instruct the surrounding trees to follow the example of the first.

This is why I find it illogical to construct an ethics of outcomes. One does not act according to outcomes; one acts according to intentions.

What if your intention was to teach them survival. No they are not you dependents nor is there any reason to do so, but your intention is not malicious, you never intended for them to get harmed. Now what? Is it wrong or not? — khaled

For the actor to intend them not to be harmed, they would have to be mentally deficient enough to not consider that the lesson was more lethal than that which the subject might expect to face. Or, alternatively, belong to a culture in which teaching this lesson is held as crucial. In the former case, we're likely not describing a moral agent; in the latter, there are other examples.

Human sacrifice is one I've brought up before, in which the belief is that the disputed act is essential to the survival of the group as a whole and all of the individuals within it. Homicide was a grave (haha) crime in Aztec law, so this matches Kierkegaard's description of a teleological suspension of ethics. The root error is not a moral one, but one of fact.

Another pertinent example is how religions propagate. Parents usually indoctrinate their children almost from birth, which hugely skews the child's ability to determine the validity of their own beliefs, which in turn makes it harder to discern reality from fiction. Religion is hardly alone in this, but it is the most pronounced example, especially given the fears often instilled in those children for even questioning their beliefs in the face of contrary evidence, sound argument, or a disagreeable consensus.

I would consider both cultures bad in the sense that they are antisocial: they lead to the pointless murder and brainwashing of innocent people respectively. However the individuals perpetrating the acts are themselves products of the cultures that insist upon them, and thus are blameless.

I have heard of cultures in which adolescent boys are sent into the wild for a spell of time to learn how to survive, however I'm not sure how accurate these are. One example I've heard of is some Australian aboriginal tribes, where there is definite risk, such as spider or snake bites, but not the sort of risk where one might expect the lesson to be more lethal than real life. I could only conjecture on this because I'm not sure it's accurate. It seems to me illogical to send an inexperienced person out alone to face dangers that they are likely to overcome later based on experience and safety in numbers. It seems, therefore, contrary to what it is to be social, but then cultures often are. Were it true, I would not judge them morally, but like the other two examples, I wouldn't mourn the loss of the culture.

I can't think of any other scenario in which it can be logically possible for a person to drastically reduce the odds of another person surviving in order to teach them survival. It seems such a stupid idea, either the person involved is a moral idiot, or they emerge from a stupid culture I'd rather see perish.

But what if your intent was never to harm, but you put them in harm's way anyways. Does that make it acceptable? — khaled

I'm not sure what you mean. Can you flesh out the example? Or does the above cover it?

I was referring to the couples that don't have children after learning that they are likely to have a severe genetic illness. Even if they can afford to care for them. How do you explain that behavior? — khaled

Oh I see. That's not too mysterious. If you can make a rational decision, then you are not that desperate. For instance, if you are starving but think, "No, I shouldn't steal that load in case my victim also starves to death" than you are clearly capable of rational decision making. That's admirable, but it doesn't follow that every starving person is in the same state.

But if they're psychopaths, which many are, then they're not culpable per your own words... So now what? Are they no longer doing anything wrong? — khaled

It's a good question. Psychopaths are edge-cases, and edge-cases depend all the more on specifics. We cannot have evolved to handle psychopaths precisely because they are edge cases. Nature has nothing to say about them and so in a way are also not moral objects as well as not being moral subjects. I assume that, in pre-agricultural times, psychopaths would have been treated exactly the same as any other antisocial element and been promptly killed or exiled.

What do we do with the knowledge about psychopathy? It seems to me that we cannot generally hold them morally culpable for the actions they take (although see below), and so we cannot in good conscience punish them beyond that which is strictly necessary to safeguard society. What say we put them under house arrest, but in a grand penthouse suite with the best luxuries of life? Instinctively, it seems abhorrent, but that's because, like our ancestors, we struggle to see them as anything other than moral agents. In a way, it's the equivalent of not being able to comprehend death or the void. But there's no moral or rational reason to punish them.

However, I did say it depends on specifics. A person capable of cognitive empathy but incapable of emotional empathy is hungry (not starving) and steals the bread of another starving man... It seems reasonable to me that the psychopath could not be expected to understand that his need (hunger) was less than his crime (theft). If he then killed someone who was about to report him to the police in order to safeguard his liberty, that is horrific but still understandable: his ethical crime, from his point of view, was simply to break a social rule for the sake of something vital to himself (a teleological suspension of entirely abstract ethics). I see no moral culpability.

But if he pushed a child of a cliff to enjoy the sound of her screams... There we might have common ground on. There is no perceived need, and he knows that's wrong on an intellectual level. That has more in common with a normal person hurting others for pleasure, so we might have common ground there. Such a person would certainly be a monster, and the question of the extent of his moral culpability seems rather moot. Happy to talk it out though.

There is no contradiction there so there is nothing irrational about it. I am not a perfect being. I do wrong things. That doesn't make the wrong things not wrong. I don't see why you want to join the ideal that is morality with the reality. If you want to say that arguing about ideals is impractical, people will still have kids, and starving people will still steal, sure, I don't really care though. — khaled

And this is why I think we have very different ideas of what morality is. Yours is quite old school, in which if you broke the law you're immoral and that's that. Mine is somewhat more new-school, in which one considers a broader range of factors in determining culpability (e.g. self-defence laws). I think that progression in law is an effect of our natural morality refining less sophisticated approximations to what constitutes moral culpability. We are becoming more understanding, not just as to the causes of immoral behaviour, but even about the nature of moral culpability itself.

Or we were, until Trump started executing mentally handicapped offenders again.

I am talking about it because it's fun to talk about is all. — khaled

Yeah man, and interesting too.

We all heard it: gender is a social construct — ninoszka

It's odd, isn't it, that social construct theory came out of structuralism and poststructuralism and yet then proceeds with claims about absolutes. Gender IS a social construct. Umm. Well, maybe now, if that's how we agree to define the word.

The less silly version is: human gender roles are social constructs, which is certainly uncontroversial even if elements of a role optimise on the basis of sex differences, because roles are roles in a society.

If people are all living and eating and sleeping together, then that community is going to be under investigation and I don't care whether its a bird loving community. — BitconnectCarlos

But Antifa are not that sort of community. There may exist communities of some Antifa members who do so, and some of those might be systematically violent and should be judged as such. But you're not trying to vilify such communities, should they exist (never heard of one) but a much larger group of people connected by a couple of common, non-violent interests. The aforementioned activist scrubbing Swastikas off walls is, by your logic, morally culpable for a violent individual she has never heard of shooting a violent fascist.

As I said, this is the logic of racism.

And your child suffering is an "unforseeable event"? — khaled

My child suffering is not an "event" at all. My child suffering a car crash when she is 17 at a particular time and place due to a drunk driver coming the other way is an event.

Is dumping someone in a jungle full of predators in their sleep wrong? I think we can agree it is, even though we can't predict if they'll be eaten by a lion, a hyena or a leopard, or if they will survive. — khaled

If my intention was that they be eaten by a predator, then it is not accidental if they are eaten by a predator. If they are not eaten by a predator, my actions were still immoral because that's what I intended, whether I was successful or not. If my intent was to save their life before the plane crashed, then the plane landed safely and that person was eaten by a predator, it is extremely unfortunate but I would not consider myself *morally* culpable. My actions were morally sound (save the life of this person by removing them from *this* harm) even if the outcomes were far from ideal.

And I am claiming that there is a specific drive coded within us to be able to project into the future and not subject someone to harm. — khaled

That should be based on scientific evidence.

See above. It is not. — khaled

See above: it is! ;)

But if the starving man produces another starving man by stealing said loaf of bread I think we can agree the starving man (original) is wrong. — khaled

I would not. I would not consider a starving man a moral agent at all. If they had the wherewithal to, say, kick a random child in the face, they clearly aren't that starving. The question for me would be: is it reasonable to assume that their drive to survive was sufficiently overriding to consider them incapable of moral decisions?

That someone else starved is unfortunate, but I wouldn't consider the thief morally culpable even though the existence of that thief was clearly a causal factor because, as I said, such a judgement demonstrates a failure to be a moral being.

Our morals are derived from biological traits evolved in small hunter-gatherer groups a long time ago. Those groups were egalitarian. If they ate, they ate together. Starvation would likely have destroyed the coherence of that group, putting it on a pre-social basis. This seems reasonable to me: there is no point in every individual starving if the fittest can survive.

However, if the cause of the poverty that kills one or other of the men is one or more human agents, i.e. not just an environmental fluke, then moral culpability is likely to be found. This is the case in my society in which people are kept poor by a privileged minority who remove capital from circulation for personal benefit (power) and the legislators who enable them. If such an event occurred in my society, that's who I'd point the finger at, since their behaviour is antisocial through choice, not through desperation.

One can argue that this is true in almost every society where it is possible to help the poor, even societies not our own. The logical conclusion in the application of natural moral instinct in an international society is to treat everyone as part of your group, treat them how you would wish to be treated. What we see generally is a willingness to exploit the advantages of globalisation while snorting at the responsibilities. I see this as no different to a person exploiting someone from their own village or family.

I am not saying that having children is not understandable. I am saying it is immoral. — khaled

I did not say that they do not deserve empathy or that they should be punished for it. We are debating purely on a moral level here, not on the level of what people actually end up doing. — khaled

And I'm saying that empathy is not separable from morality. It is irrational to understand that, in their shoes, you would have likely done the same and at the same time say they were wrong. And if you fail to do the former, the immorality is yours, not theirs.

Damn. Ok let me ask you this. Is pointing a gun at innocent people and pulling three trigger for recreation wrong? After all, the gun might jam, so: — khaled

Yes, it's wrong. Even if the gun does jam, it's still wrong imo. The intent is to harm others greatly for some small and perverse satisfaction. If successful, it is no accident if someone is harmed, rather it is accidental (i.e. fortunate) if no one is harmed.

I just don’t understand how you can seriously require 100% knowledge of the future for an action to be wrong. — khaled

I don't. But there has to be a direct consequence of my acted-on intentions for which I am culpable. They needn't necessarily be foreseen, for instance negligence: a failure to consider the direct consequences of my actions before performing them.

What I can't be morally culpable for is unforeseeable events that eventually hurt somebody that could have been trivially avoided had I acted not to remove the harmful event but the harmed person. If someone asks me for directions and I provide them with a shortcut and, on their way, a piano falls on their head, I am the cause of their being under the piano but not the cause of their death: that blame lies with the negligent person who failed to properly secure the piano, even though they might not have foreseen the potential consequences of their negligence.

Genetic counseling is a thing and you can easily know the likelihood of your child having this or that genetic disease. A lot of times you can be certain. — khaled

Can you give an example of a 100% certain debilitating disease?

I would be surprised if they didn’t. I’d be outraged if I heard someone I knew had a child knowing they have a high chance of having a severely debilitating disease. And I know I’m not the only one who would react that way. — khaled

We could take the time to look at e.g. media coverage of such events but I'm not sure what that would give us. You obviously know about liberals and could probably predict they would side with the parent. I know about tabloids and would guess they would react with outrage, real or faux. But if one of us has the time, it would be interesting to know.

Sorry but this is just word salad. It didn’t? Antinatalism is not a belief? Wot? — khaled

It was a typo or autocorrect: I didn't. The moral proposition in question is not supported on naturalistic or supernaturalistic grounds: it is not grounded at all.

Still, what is a “natural reason” to adopt a belief. — khaled

This isn't about general belief. There is no natural reason to become a Christian. There are *cultural* reasons. However there are natural reasons to adopt some of Mr. Christ's arguments, insofar as they accord with the specific drives and capacities that nature has selected for us to make us social, and in turn moral.

There are neither natural nor cultural reasons to accept the antinatalist argument.

But not purely because of impracticality but because of a genuine desire not to cause suffering as well. — khaled

I think you'll find this extremely difficult to argue. For one thing, what you're describing is not a human trait but a trait across a vast range of animal species who do not make decisions in the way you describe. As for humans, the biological reasons for reduced fertility are sufficient. They do not have to be ratified by reason. But they will likely be *rationalised* by reason, which isn't the same. Statistically it seems probable that people have decided to limit the number of children they have on a purely rational basis during times of scarcity. But I'd have to see some pretty compelling evidence, e.g. an absence of any biological markers, to accept that this is at all significant.

This actually ties into why I would never judge someone having a child during poverty. Moral philosophy has a tendency to fall into the rationalist fallacy: that humans are principally rational agents acting on the outputs of rational processes and therefore are expected to conform to some ideal moral schema in which they are either good because of their actions or bad because of them.

Humans aren't like this at all. For the most part we are reacting unconsciously according to learned rules, and only use our reason for problems unsuitable for those rules or sometimes to ratify the application of those rules. The urge to have a child is mediated through e.g. libido, but regulated by many other factors, scarcity being one, but childlessness being another. Childlessness itself can be a form of suffering and, just as I would perfectly understand why a starving man would steal a loaf of bread, I would perfectly understand why a childless person in poverty would have a child.

An important aspect of real morality (as opposed to theoretical or religious morality) is our capacity for empathy. This is why psychopaths might not be held morally culpable for their actions: they lack the ability to make moral decisions in the way that normal people do, so we should not expect them to conform to some ideal of moral agent. To judge harshly someone for having a child at all during scarcity would seem to me a total failure to empathise with the plight of that person, as well as a disregard for science and the primacy of that person's biological nature. We are centuries past the idea that morality is binary precisely because we have codified more and more of what makes us moral, including our ability to understand why a social being might understandably behave in a self-centred way, not because they do not care, but because there are ample circumstances in which the selfish need is overwhelming to the detriment of both reason and sociality.

Using this example, there are far more configurations of god than of not-god, making the existence of god more likely over time. — Harry Hindu

If there are indeed configurations of God possible. Note that I restricted myself to possible universes, whatever they might be.

How about having a child knowing they will have a severely debilitating disease. If we can’t even agree that’s wrong then you’re a non-starter for me. — khaled

Well that's hardly surprising since you're arguing for antinatalism and I against. :)

It's an interesting question though. One can't generally know, so we can't generalise from this. Not knowing the future is part of what makes antinatalism so wonky, since it is preoccupied with current moral culpability for potential future events one is not responsible for. More realistically the situation would be a couple having a child while aware of a significant risk of such a disease. In that case, no, I would not judge them for it.

But taking the further-fetched scenario for the sake of argument, yes I would agree. It would, if the disease were certain and debilitating, not be accidental if the child then had a debilitating disease. I would inevitably find myself responsible for its suffering after it suffered.

But since this is a fanciful scenario, I wouldn't worry about it.

By the way, environmentalism is the closest I can think of to the sort of logic you apply, insofar as the point of environmentalism is to provide a habitable world for people not yet born.

How so? — khaled

Overpopulation is a factor. While I'm not antinatalist, I do think we should breed much less. I would have campaigned for adopting under different circumstances, but ended up stepfathering which amounts to much the same thing.

Also tbh my parents weren't great and I occasionally catch glimpses of them in me and I don't like it. I think I would have a low opinion of myself as a father, and why do something if you don't enjoy it? :) And it pisses my parents off because I'm an only child; that's a bonus.

Everyone here except you so far has agreed that having children in extreme poverty is unethical not just impractical. — khaled

As we've discussed, anything is unethical wrt a suitable ethic. I would be surprised if people genuinely did judge such parents thus in practice, rather than in some theoretical moral playground. But I was addressing your point that people in poverty in poor countries have fewer children, which is true. It is *not* true that people in poverty in poor countries have NO children. There have been an uncountable number of poor people throughout history, including today, and most that lived to sexual maturity will have had a child.

So how did it come about? — khaled

It didn't. It is neither natural nor supernatural. It is simply mistaken.

Look into the anti-mob police cases of the 1980s in New York - organizations can be held responsible for the behavior of their members. — BitconnectCarlos

Sure, same with the KKK and neo-Nazis. That's because the MO of the entire organisation is violently criminal. Even in the absence of a centralised organisation, neo-Nazis have central principles that are abominable.

The same is not true of Trump supporters or Antifa. Trump supporters might be immoral in different ways, and Trump himself is certainly criminal and abominable, but one cannot characterise Trump supporters generally as violent criminals seeking to halt democracy, even if a LOT of them chose to behave that way. Nor can you say Trump supporters generally thump journalists, even though Trump himself egged them on.

Likewise Antifa does not have a central organising structure or principle responsible for the killing of fascists or thumping of journalists. It does not even share with Trump a sentiment that such things are ends. A willingness to meet fascist violence is obviously a central tenet, but that only makes the disingenuous identification of the response as the criminal element more pronounced as bias and propaganda.

The question is

What might religious people have against secularism? — TiredThinker

There are certainly religious people who have disliked secular life. Some examples I'm aware of:

1. Totalitarianism, especially in the American Midwest and some countries in the Middle East: the religious person believes that everyone should be of their religion and is affronted by non-believers. See apostasy.

2. Blasphemy: the religious person believes that the moral laws regarding their religion apply to all and are offended by failure to adopt them. This is more incidental than (1). See jihad.

3. Power: the religious person believes secular changes or expansion are an existential threat to their religion's perceived authority. See the Holy Inquisition.

4. Cultural conservativism: the religious person believes secular changes or expansionism are an existential threat to their culture. See Intelligent Design.

5. Personal continuity: disagreement fails to reinforce the beliefs one has in the way that consensus does.

Every single one of these exists entirely within secular life as well. Soccer fans assaulting one another because they support different teams. Post-genderists attacking people for using gendered pronouns. American hysteria about communists under their beds. The Welsh. Even the Welsh don't *want* to speak Welsh -- who would? -- they just don't want to speak English even more. Pretty much every argument on the internet ever.

The problem with religious people is largely that they're people.

There's a difference between second degree and first degree crimes that's really important here. Did the crime have prior planning or not? If yes, we investigate the group behind the crime if there is one. — BitconnectCarlos

So if an Antifa member shot randomly into a crowd of fascists, Antifa are in the clear?

And therefore one member's personal decision to kill someone is precisely what makes it not his personal responsibility?

Far-right people really will say absolutely anything m

Why don't you learn about epistemological probability. — Harry Hindu

We're discussing statistics, not epistemology. That is, we are discussing probabilities as they might still apply even in the absence of holders of beliefs, the sorts of probabilities applicable in discussing the early universe, for instance.

False. We can agree there are cases where having children is wrong. Like severe poverty for example. — khaled

Apparently we cannot agree on that. :) I would never judge someone Ill for having a child in poverty. I would judge the agents of their poverty if there were any. Now, I agree it would be wise to wait if waiting would help. But not morally compulsory.

As I said, we already find having kids wrong in some scenarios. — khaled

I said there are specific scenarios that one can't generalise from. A sadist approaches a couple who do not want or like children and offers them ten million dollars to have a child, homebirth it, not register it, then hand it to the sadist to torture. To have a child under those circumstances would be abominable. But there's no route from that to "You should never have children".

One of the interesting things for me about this conversation is that I am someone who made an ethical decision not to have children :rofl:

We have a capacity and impulse NOT to have children in extreme poverty. — khaled

That is true but not for the unborn child's benefit. Not even for others' benefit, which, given that we do not have children for others, makes it a non-moral concern. We reduce the number of children we have during scarcity because the personal cost of having more is not outweighed by an increased survival benefit of our genome. It is more akin to choosing not to pay $10 for a cookie even though you really want a cookie.

Again, antinatalism isn’t some wacky supernatural belief as much as you’d like it to be. — khaled

I never said it was supernatural. Other reasons for other moral beliefs are supernatural.

I am not sure if the abstract notion of procreation itself is really a biological imperative as much as the physical act of sex itself being pleasurable. — schopenhauer1

Pleasure is an outcome; it can't stand in place of a drive. It also can't explain the desire of virgins to copulate. Nor can it explain the common negative emotional side effects of sexually active people foregoing reproduction, e.g. by use of contraceptives, or being unable to reproduce. The drive is to copulate, you're right, but not to experience sexual pleasure, i.e. the urge is not subdued by regular orgasm.

I mean you know the argument is more sophisticated than simply "harming" someone. — schopenhauer1

Yes, but that was your wording and I do feel that the two are conflated.

Real, existing people, not just the possibility of future people. The former is a concern for morality. The latter is not.
— Kenosha Kid

Who says? — schopenhauer1

That's the real question, one I've already touched on a few times, but not one that makes the antinatalist argument one iota more compelling. ("Who says that a generic, abstract, potential future human is a moral subject?" is an equally good question.) If you wish me to accept a moral proposition, there has to be some basis on which to do so.

How people answer the question "Who says?" interests me. Probably the most frequently given answer has been something like "God": a hypothetical moral authority whose moral views are "evidenced" by e.g. scripture, prophets, testimony of divine revelation, etc. But I have no reason to believe God exists either so it's a lame ad hom.

Or the answer might be "Jesus", or "Muhammad", or "Kant", or "Rousseau", i.e. some people who spoke or wrote down their views and some other people did find them compelling and *subscribed* to their views. But then lots of people subscribe to opposite views. Hell, lots of people subscribe to Trump's views.

Or if you yourself are Kant or Rousseau, maybe you believe that we can work this out by thinking really hard about it, i.e. "reason dictates". But reason never dictates. Reason always regresses back to a priori moral truths or God or some such again.

If you're a lawyer, you might say "The law says", but we still need to know if we have the right laws. If you're a relativist you might say "According to this culture" but you accept that no one culture is authoratitive. If you're an existentialist the answer might be teleological: whatever proclaims your freedom, whatever God asks of you personally, whatever proclaims your strength personally. But then we cannot ask who is right in any conflict of interests, therefore we cannot make claims about how someone else should behave.

This is why I reject any such unfounded claim about what morality is. "Who says?" cannot be answered with God or Jesus or Kant or Marx or UK law or local practice. That always leaves more questions or requires unjustifiable assumptions.

I don't believe in the supernatural, which means that morality is, if real, a natural occurrence, i.e. something nature did. The only moral arbiter I can accept then is Nature. Fortunately this does not suffer from the problems enumerated above (although it has many of its own): many moral claims can be derived from non-moral i.e. biological facts.

So TL;DR version: Nature says.

There are plenty of antifa communes where they live and eat together and I'd suspect that at least some coordinate together. — BitconnectCarlos

There are plenty of autonomous groups generally. The question was: are all or even one of those groups responsible for what one individual does? Your answer seems to be, yes: all of Antifa is responsible for what one Antifa individual does. The next question is: are all Trump supporters responsible for what one Trump supporter does? Your answer is no, it's the fault of the individual.

This is another of the hypocrisies one sees endemic in right-wing thought. If it was one of our guys, that's just him, but if it's one of their guys it's all of them. This is, for instance, the logic of racism: a white guy commits a crime, and he's bad; a black guy commits a crime and blacks are bad.

Are you at all familiar with the more militant side of the movement? If I remember correctly antifa has assassinated people and tried to commit terrorist acts. — BitconnectCarlos

There it is again. If an Antifa supporter who is a violent asshole with a gun shoots into a crowd, it is Antifa who has "assassinated" someone, despite the group having no centralised responsibility.

During the 2020 election, some Trump supporters protested the vote and shot and knives people. Are all Trump supporters responsible for this, or just the individuals who did it?

Fair enough, natalists and typical views on procreation. — schopenhauer1

So "natalists" (i.e. regular humans going about their business) almost certainly do not make such value judgments at all. I've never come across anyone who said, "Well we pondered whether or not it's right to bring a child into the world but agreed in the end that everyone, future people, has a right to see Succession." In place of such value judgments, "natalists" have biological imperatives (and nagging mothers).

if the a person is born, and that person will then have a lifetime of X amount of suffering, that is the result — schopenhauer1

Sure, among other things (there's more to a life than suffering) but that is not equivalent to harming someone.

But, then when antinatalism does actually address issues of "other people" — schopenhauer1

Real, existing people, not just the possibility of future people. The former is a concern for morality. The latter is not.

Sorry, "this" in that quote was your mischaracterization by too narrowly defining morality. — schopenhauer1

My definition of what morality really is is based on what capacities and impulses we have as a species to behave socially. Anything else is fiction.

I recanted on the first amendment argument. I said that I don't like them because they're thugs. — BitconnectCarlos

Btw this seems to be another constant in right-wing arguments: the argument itself is disposable, only the conclusion matters and is constant. Constitutional arguments for your conclusion no longer workin for ya? No need to abandon that conclusion: simply switch argument! It brings to mind far-right Facebook posters throwing up IT'S ABOUT SPACE, NOT RACE images a week after posting anti-Polish bilge.

You know, you might not know this about me because my username is "Carlos" but I'm actually not hispanic. — BitconnectCarlos

What an odd thing to say. The only meaning I can extract is that you think it's possible that, if you were Hispanic, it would be understandable that you might pro-fascist.

No, I never thought you were Hispanic.

So do you need me to condemn that? Because you never know, I could support it. How many times do I need to condemn that for me to be okay in your book? Should I also condemn the holocaust? I just wanna make sure I'm cool in your book and that I'm one of the good guys. — BitconnectCarlos

Well, you tell me. You condemn the entirety of Antifa if one of its members punches a journalist, but you swerve the question of right-wing Trump supporters punching journalists. You believe that fascists have the right to protest even though their systematically violent and hateful, but you disregard anti-fascist expression for being disruptive. Does this sound in any way decent and fair to you?

Antifa doesn't seek to work within the system, antifa seeks to destroy the systematic violence of fascist and racist groups. — BitconnectCarlos

Fixed your typo.

Of course, antinatalists can say the same of natalism... — schopenhauer1

By natalism do you mean normal people just naturally procreating without theorising about it? Because I can't imagine much more redundant than a moral theory that says it's okay to have kids.

Not sure how "Not harming a future person" doesn't count as moral. — schopenhauer1

First, creating a person that might one day be harmed is not the same as harming that person. Second, if a person does not currently exist, one cannot behave immorally toward them.

The whole social group benefit definition is too narrow a claim regarding ethics, and it's purposely created to exclude antinatalism — schopenhauer1

That's a tad paranoid, isn't it? I'm quite sure they didn't have antinatalism in mind.

The most basic definitions usually read something like this: concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character. That's just from a quick Google search even. Don't have to go too far to see this is a mischaracterization of what moral means. — schopenhauer1

That "concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character" is not what moral means? We can take it for granted we'll disagree on what morality is just on the basis of the fact that you believe antinatalism addresses moral concerns, but I'll confess I'm curious.

I don’t get the purpose of the second sentence there, seems to be included in the first the way you use it. — khaled

No, one can have a false belief about morality. Human sacrifice to make crops grow is such a belief. It is about social interactions and social group benefits. Antinatalism isn't about morality. It is an antisocial belief based not on moral considerations but on personal entitlement: I should never have had to suffer, not even so much as a stubbed toe. And, indirectly, it's a messed up value system. But it has nothing to do with how we treat others in our society, and therefore nothing it presents as a problem is a moral consideration.

You said "Empirical natural philosophy" which I interpreted to mean "empiricism". And someone obviously cares what I think since you and another person quoted me :wink: — Garth

I didn't mean that no one cares what you think, merely that one cannot have a point of view about what a consensus is.

I was just being explicit: science is observation-based philosophy of nature, nature being the subject, empiricism being the epistemology.

I could respond to this but I'm forgetting its relevancy. — BitconnectCarlos

Your entire argument against anti-fascism was that it opposes the founding principles of your country. I'm just trying to figure out the logic behind your position.

Yeah, antifa not being a reformist group and instead being a revolutionary group basically means that they have no respect for laws. — BitconnectCarlos

So if you're not reformist, you obviously don't respect the laws. That makes no sense. Are you a reformist then?

If someone is in a private forum like a university or a governmental hearing you need to abide by the rules. — BitconnectCarlos

Okay, so it's nothing constitutional even, you just dislike people who protest on campus, presumably no matter what they're protesting about. It's college. There's going to be protests.

Antifa has also assaulted journalists. — BitconnectCarlos

It's bad also to assault journalists including if you're an Antifa member. But also if you're a Trump supporter. Here's a wager... I'm willing to bet that while you tar all anti-fascists with the actions of a few, you're somewhat more about individual accountability and personal responsibility when it comes to Trump supporters, am I right?

I obviously condemn the KKK and neo-Nazis, that goes without saying. — BitconnectCarlos

No, you DON'T obviously condemn the KKK and neo-Nazis. Your primary concern is that they are not getting the voice you think they should despite the fact that they are systematically violent and intolerant, that evil anti-fascists are denying them their right to expression by exercising theirs. The hypocrisy of far-right argument is always the same. You DO obviously condemn those that fight back, you go out of your way to do so and tar as many on the left-wing with the same brush as often as you can. Condemning the violence of the right is always a last resort when you realise you can't actually judge the left for rare acts of violence and uphold the long and horrendous history of violence of the right. "No, they're bad to but let's back to Antifa..." It's overtly BS dude. The day the likes of you and Nos OBVIOUSLY condemn the violence of the right wing I will have a heart attack.