my above post updated for typos etc.

Suppose someone does something with good intention, but by a stroke of bad luck the consequences of that action were bad - it's easy to come up with scenarios where that would be the case.

I think such scenarios show that the distinction between 'consequentialism' and 'intentionalism' is artificial, in the sense that neither pure consequentialism or pure intentionalism captures the 'moral status' of an act - they are both 'one-eyed' over-simplifcations that have the dubious attraction of being simple and providing an easy-to-apply classification of acts into 'good' and 'bad' but with the huge defect of mis-classifying many real world situtations.

Put another way if act X is 'intentionally' good but 'conseqentially' bad then those are objective and immutable facts, but whether that means X is 'moral' or 'immoral' depens entirely on which interpretation of 'moral act' is adopted - essentially a matter of arbitrary convention.


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Suppose someone does something with good intention, but by a stroke of bad luck the consequences of his action were bad - its easy to come up with scenarios where that would be the case.

I think such scenarios show that the distinction between 'consequentialism' and 'intentionalism' is artificial, in the sense that neither pure consequentialism or pure intentionalism captures the proper 'moral status' of an act - they are both 'one-eyed' over-simplifcations that have the dubious attraction of being simple and providing an unambiguous classification of acts into 'good' and 'bad' but with the huge defect of mis-classifying many real world situtations.

Put another way is act X is 'intentionally' good but 'conseqentially' bad then those are objective and immutable facts, but whether that means X is moral or immoral depend entirely on which interpretation of 'moral act' is to be applied - essentially a matter of arbitrary convention.
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My view is that the orgin of the universe certainly does appear to be paradoical and the is no satisfactory way I know of to 'unparadoxify' it.

I don't believe actual paradoxes can exist and the most likely reason why the origin of the universe appears paradoxical is simply that there is a piece of the puzzle missing.

I think it is a waste of time - and rather silly - to imagine that the puzzle of the orgin of space and time can be solved by playing around with words, as if reality is governed by idioms of the English language.

The solution, when (or perhaps if) it gets revealed, will come from a discovery of some fact about the world that shows that some assumption we are making is invalid.

I expect it will be some asssumption we barely think of as an assumption - it will seem axiomatic today, much as what was axiomatic in the classical pictire the world was overthrown by the discoveried of quantum physics and relativity, ie that things can be in twp places at once, a cat can be both alive and dead and time doesn't always 'flow' at the same rate. Only a madman would have believed those things just over a hundred years ago. I believe there is something we take for granted that just isn't true. Our grandchildren will wonder how it was we could have believed whatever it is - but what 'whatever it is' is, I don't care to guess!

More positively, I think it might get clearer if we ever resolve quantum physics and general relativity, but I expect that will only result in even having deeper and more difficult problems - that is what science tends to do, which is why (and how) I like it!