Of course, the point can be made that theplacebo effect is real and that the patient's optimism about the treatment can importantly contribute to better outcomes of the treatment.

But then what is "safe and effective" isn't the vaccine itself, but to a possibly considerable extent, faith healing.

There is a difference between informed consent and uninformed consent. If the best advice you can give them is not to believe the science then they are properly informing them. What an uninformed patient wants should not be the deciding factor. — Fooloso4

Except that in this case, the necessary information doesn't even exist yet.

I am. — James Riley

You certainly don't sound like it. You're far too critical of others to still allow for the thought that you'd be willing to die for them.

Having been vaccinated does not prevent someone from spreading it, it reduces morbidity and mortality, not spread. — Book273

Yet the official party line and the pro-vaccination slogans are "Think of others, get vaccinated!" and similar.
(Here the Croatian one, for example.)

No, but a probable personal catastrophe if one accepts the COVID vaccine.
— baker

Possible, yes. Probable, I don't know. — TheMadFool

Depends on one's current health and financial status.

The vaccines haven't been tested enough to show what they do to a person who is already immunocompromised due to some other health problem (such as genetic autoimmune diseases, preexisting infectuous diseases).

The public covid vaccine discourse allows for no such considerations.

I would have thought that working together to prevent the spread of a virus via masks and vaccination would mean that people will die in far fewer numbers.

The significant barriers to this are clearly the positions people hold on government and freedom and what counts as evidence. — Tom Storm

What does it matter to you if you end up terminally ill after the vaccine?
Do you really take solace in other people benefitting from the vaccine?

Are you willing to die for others?

What's most striking about this thread is the parsing of an ethical decision as if it were a calculation of odds. — Banno

This is exactly how it is presented by some governments and people uncritically in favor of vaccination.

But you do have the freedom not to go along if not the freedom not to be expected to go along. And of course not everyone will expect you to go along. To my knowledge vaccination is not mandatory in any democratic nations at least. I haven't checked to see if it is mandatory anywhere else; although I think I heard somewhere that it is in one part of Spain. — Janus

No, there are already consequences promised to those who have not been vaccinated. For example, in order to visit a restaurant or cinema, one has to provide proof of vaccination, proof of having been diagnosed with covid, or a negative test. In some companies, all employees had to accept the vaccine, or risk being fired. Discrimination is already taking place. Also, there is limited choice or none as to which vaccine to take. There is also shortage of vaccine. And scandals with using used needles (in order to get the most out of one vial).

About the health insurance angle: if that's true it's a bad sign and would seem to indicate that the insurance industry, who generally do very rigorously analyze and assess risk, must think there is a degree of risk that is unacceptable, to them at least.

All covid vaccines are experimental medications at this point, so from the perspective of health insurance, they are treated as other experimental medications.

This has to make one wonder how many cases of (possible) side effects of the covid vaccines have actually been underreported or misrepresented, in order to make health insurance pay for the treatment.

What I wish is that there would be more fairness and more opennes about the issue, and less hype.
Two examples of good practices:
When Iran started to vaccinate people, the government openly told people that they have an experimental medication that yet needs to be properly tested and that they're asking every citizen to help with the testing.
In Poland, when they started to vaccinate people, they also started a public fund to help those who would develop adverse side effects to the medication.

But instead, in so many places, the covid vaccines are touted as if they'd already be classical, approved, well-tested vaccines the taking of which requires no further justification or explanation.

a significant proportion of the populace has bought into Trump’s lies — Wayfarer

It seems more likely that they already believe such things, rather than having "bought into his lies". It seems unlikely that one person would have such power over others. Rather, this is about something that is already in the people. Similar as in Nazi Germany: Hitler didn't convert anyone, people weren't "buying into his lies". Rather, they already believed those things.

They’re too stupid to be genuinely dangerous. Trump is the definition of stupid. — Wayfarer

Don't be like the deva in the sala tree. That which you call "stupidity" is a seed, and it will grow, and destroy everything in its path.

Assuming E = the buddha exists after death.

1. E. No!
2. Not E. No!
3. E and not E. No!
4. Neither E nor not E. No! — TheMadFool

A buddha is impossible to define comprehensively (it is said that it takes a buddha to know one). Hence it is impossible to make definitive claims as to what a buddha is or isn't.

The way I see it, the point is to understand why a particular question is a wrong question. There are several reasons why a question can be a wrong question. A quick way to ascertain that is to look at one's intentions for asking it.

Ven. Sāriputta said: “All those who ask questions of another do so from any one of five motivations. Which five?

“One asks a question of another through stupidity & bewilderment. One asks a question of another through evil desires & overwhelmed with greed. One asks a question of another through contempt. One asks a question of another when desiring knowledge. Or one asks a question with this thought,1 ‘If, when asked, he answers correctly, well & good. If not, then I will answer correctly (for him).’

https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/AN/AN5_165.html

In the mind of an ordinary person, the five motivations, or at least the first four, tend to be intertwined, which results in confusion. Hence the importance of purification practices, thorough which one's motivations become streamlined.

I asked:

So you think that a conman "has" cognitive dissonance? — baker

This is a philosophy discussion forum. Read with precision.

I asked you about the conman, not about the religious conman, as the issue was the contrast between a person's thought expression and their behavior. I said nothing about the religious conman.

The average religious person has a cognitive dissonance though, I might even go so far as to say that belief in a religion is impossible without one. After all if you follow any one edict in the bible and not follow some other edict then you aren’t really making sense and since the contradictions of the bible make it impossible to follow them all you can’t really religious without making one or more breaches of logic and rationality.

This would apply only if religious people would typically be well familiar with the doctrine they profess to support.
They are generally not thusly familiar. Even by their own accounts and by the accounts of critics from their own groups. For example, you can read on Catholics blogs written by Catholics that Catholics generally have a poor knowledge of Catholic doctrine. Among cradle religionists, there are also folk versions of the religious doctrine that they profess to be part of; folk versions that are not in line with the actual doctrine (e.g. some Catholics have the folk belief that people who weren't baptized as babies are bound for hell and that baptism later on doesn't really count -- this contradicts actual RCC doctrine; or in Buddhism, there are folk beliefs about karma that have no grounding in the Buddhist holy texts).

Moreover, many religions don't even have a catechism-type of doctrinal text (the way the RCC does), so to begin with, it's not clear what said religion's doctrine actually is about. And if even that is not clear, how can we even begin to talk of cognitive dissonance? We can't.

Further, in religions, there tend to exist meta-level teachings that order the importance of teachings. To an outsider who doesn't know those meta-level teachings, all edicts in, for example, the Bible might seem as being on the same level, having the same importance (thus creating opportunities for contradictions). But to an insider, the biblical edicts are hierachically ordered, so that some are more important than others, some contextualize others, and so on. This order minimizes or annulls the possibility of contradiction, as contradiction proper can exist only between statements of the same order in the hierarchy or in the same context. For example, for Catholics, the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament, so the edicts between the two are not in conflict. For a Vajrayana Buddhist, the instructions of one's teacher supersede everything and everyone else. And so on.

I do wonder sometimes if mass shooters really believed they would go to hell for their actions, whether they would carry them out. The belief that ‘death is the end’ might be part of the rationale for such massacres, in that the perpetrators believe that when they die there won’t be further consequences. So that belief might be, ironically, consequential. — Wayfarer

At this point, the seriously injured Valeen Schnurr began screaming, "Oh my God, oh my God!"[127][131] In response, Klebold asked Schnurr if she believed in the existence of God; when Schnurr replied she did, Klebold asked "Why?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre

It can only be speculated how far the perpetrator's religious or spiritual quest went. But it sure is telling that at a critical moment like the one above, he wondered about the reasons for belief in God. We can speculate that he was wondering about these things for some time already before the shootings.

While I agree that belief in God might deter some prospective perpetrators from their actions, it's also worth noting that the despair and the social stigma resulting from a person's failure to believe in God can contribute to desperate actions (which might have been intended as attempts to force God "to show himself").

Both theists and atheists often underestimate the intense personal struggle of a person who makes an effort to believe in God but fails.

But 'failure of imagination' is not itself an argument against even ludicrous, evidence-free ideas like "after lives" or "past lives". — 180 Proof

Character assassination is a classical proselytizing method. It seems to work quite well on many people.

I know evidence that the conscious mind continues after bodily death is rare and iffy at best. But what type of evidence would be reasonable to convince skeptics that an afterlife probably is a real possibility? — TiredThinker

Why do you want to convince them?

For their own good?
For your own good?

But you will not answer this, will you?

So, if you want to tell the truth about tomorrow and rain you could say, either it'll rain tomorrow OR it'll not rain tomorrow. The same logic applies to any other proposition.

Conclusion: It's possible to always tell truths. — TheMadFool

Either there's enough gas in my car to get me to town or there isn't enough gas in the car to get me to town.
Either I'm dead, or I'm not dead.

Such "truth telling" is useless.

I have someone very close to me who has zero tolerance for lies - comes down hard on anyone caught lying - and the reason for that attitude is 100% ethical in flavor.

How about, solely for the purposes of an experiment, viewing that person as immature, naive; or as bossy and aggressive, rather than as a moral ideal?

Taking into account that one is ethically duty-bound to always tell the truth, isn't it rather intriguing that one way of doing that is by resorting to a tautological disjunction (p v ~p)?

Either one is ethically duty-bound to always tell the truth, or one is not ethically duty-bound to always tell the truth.
There you go.
There is no such ethical duty.

Thus, in some sense, being honest/truthful is to admit one is uncertain.

Only when one is in fact uncertain.

Ethics seems to have a very deep connection with epistemology.

Such is the view of virtue epistemologists: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-virtue/

Plagues, historically, have been proportionally far worse than the present situation, often killing far greater percentages than Covid-19. That we have a vaccine that works is an extraordinary vindication of the understanding that science provides. That we have several... we should be singing the praises of science from the rooftops. Millions of lives have been saved by applying science here.

But that's not what happened. Instead we have an abject failure to recognise the benefits, a wilful emphasis on every negative.

Comment? — Banno

To begin with, this is exactly what you asked for in this thread: Reasons against science.

What did you expect???

Also Cognitive dissonance is observable, primarily through the contrast between a persons thought expression and their behaviour. — DingoJones

So you think that a conman "has" cognitive dissonance?

It's supposed to get people to rethink their alleged thinking. Same with the lotteries, game tickets, etc. In other words, "risk" is not really the reason most of these people don't get the vaccine. They are either scared or petulant. — James Riley

What an extremely uncharitable position to take!


I think many people who refuse to get vaccinated or who are skeptical about taking (experimental) vaccines are so because the medical and the political establishment are abusing their trust.

We are in the position where we're expected to trust our lives to people who don't have time for us, who don't listen to us, who treat us like cattle, who are misrepresenting statistical findings, who are cynical, and some of whom have a personal history of betraying people's trust.

Are you not scared to put your life in the hands of such people?

We take much greater risks every time we walk out the door. — James Riley

What is this party line supposed to do??

How, exactly, would you tailor your explanation? — charles ferraro

First, I would need to feel a genuine need for it (which I don't).

The question, as I see it, is simply whether, or not, the Cogito Sum argument has an inherent integrity, regardless of Descartes' motivations. Can the argument stand on its own two feet? If not, explain why. We're talking epistemology here, not religion.

My assumption is that epistemology is done by persons, so no argument can somehow stand on its own two feet, regardless of the person making it.

Care to elaborate on how you got this "passive-aggressive wimp" from my 'stoic warriors' post? — 180 Proof

*sigh*

I was trying to explain a point about S/stoicism to TheMadFool, in line with the discussion that far. So I asked him a question about a type of profession that probably most people nowadays do not associate with S/stoicism. I wanted to saliently make the point that being a military general (a characteristically proactive profession where there is a lot at stake) is not in conflict with being a Stoic. And then I wanted to elaborate why this is so, depending on how TMF would reply, addressing his further questions or concerns.

*sigh*

Actually I might assume the Pantheist to have quietist tendencies, wanting to contemplate and commune with God at the expense of all worldly concerns. — praxis

No, there is no personal god to commune with in pantheism.

It’s not lenience, it is just understanding what’s going on re cognitive dissonance. — DingoJones

It's not clear that in the case of the religious not living up to what they profess this is really due to cognitive dissonance. You'd need to rule out deliberate duplicity. Religion's bloody history warrants such scrutiny.

Maybe binary isn’t the right term...I meant to describe how on your view your belief is either backed up by action or it isn’t really a belief. That seems like a binary metric to me.

You asked:

That if you really believe something you obligate yourself to act in accordance with it? — DingoJones

To which I replied affirmatively. But see my above post: Some beliefs are inactionable, at least for some people. So one has to wonder why would anyone profess those beliefs? Because of their metavalue? (Ie. because professing such beliefs spares one from being prosecuted by other people?)

Compare: You and I believe that radium-226 has a half-life of 1600 years; I assume neither of us works in the nuclear industry, so we can't act on this belief. We also don't make a point of telling anyone that we believe that radium-226 has a half-life of 1600 years. So what gives?

I don’t see “belief” as binary like you do, I think as long as there are differences in how strongly people can believe things you have to accept that conviction and belief are distinct from each other. — DingoJones

This is a poor distinction. Rather, the pair should be belief -- relevance of said belief to a particular person's life.

For example, you probably believe that radium-226 has a half-life of 1600 years. But unless you work with radioactive elements or in some relation to them, said belief has little or no relevance for you. It's also inactionable for you. (It's relevant and actionable for those who plan to build nuclear waste storage facilities, for example.)

It's similar with religious beliefs: for the most part, they bear little relevance to a person's life and are inactionable. The belief in, say, the immaculate conception of Jesus is inactionable for the vast majority of Christians, except indirectly (!) for, say, translators of holy texts or inquisitors (given that wrong beliefs about Jesus are cause for accusations of heresy and according actions).

How would one act on the belief "God exist"?
How can one act confidently on the commandments supposedly given by this God?

Except for formal religious actions (such as praying, venerating), there is nothing to do as far as the belief "God exist" goes. Given this, the commandments supposedly given by this God also can't bear much weight to a person's life.

This approach has more explanatory power than the dichotomy belief -- conviction. The fact is that you can have all the conviction you want in a belief like, for instance, the immaculate conception of Jesus, but you still can't act on it.

I have a question: Why does the discourse about this have to be so superficial??

The risks from being vaccinated are demonstrably far smaller than the risks associated with getting the disease.

I put anti-vax on the same footing as young-earth creationism and climate change denial. In that sense, I'm not the least 'anti-science'. — Wayfarer

Sure. But 5 in 200,000 is a very small personal risk. I've had my shot, and I think you have made a poor choice. I wonder how you took into account the risk, should everyone follow your example. — Banno

While I don't wish that upon either of you, I'd still like to see how you'd do, what you'd say if you were the ones ending up with the negative side-effects of the vaccine, and with all the associated costs. Such as having suffered a stroke and ending up homeless because you couldn't pay the medical bills.

What the two of you are doing here is scientism -- an unwarranted optimism in the power of scientific solutions, and a public reviling and misrepresenting of anyone who doesn't fall in line with that optimism.


Mind you, I will get vaccinated, as the national plan here foresees. But share in your unwarranted optimism about science I will not.

Baker would have us not vaccinate because of a relatively small risk. — Banno

See, this is the hysteria I'm talking about. Making stuff up like that, black-and-white thinking.
Either you're hysterically with us, or you're hysterically against us!!!!


Fuck you for this.
Millennia of philosophy down the drain.

*sigh*

But I still think it’s well-established that the risks from COVID are far higher than the risks from any of the vaccines. — Wayfarer

So what?

Statistical probabilities calculated for a particular observed group do not translate into the same probabilities for a particular person. They would do so only if the probabilities would depend solely on chance.

Instead, the actual probability for an event to occur to a particular person has to be calculated for that particular person, based on empirical data for that person. If that data is not available, the probability can only be calculated theoretically. Meaning, there's actually a 50% chance you'll die from a vaccine.

All this talk about "low risks associated with vaccines" is just a way to falsely inspire hope and optimism. And compliance.

The choice then, if choice is so important to us, is between a certain health catastrophe if one refuses the COVID vaccine and a probable political catastrophe if one accepts the COVID vaccine. — TheMadFool

No, but a probable personal catastrophe if one accepts the COVID vaccine.

They can take the Pfizer or Moderna. — frank

No, they can't. It's not possible to choose which vaccine one is going to be vaccinated with. At least in some parts of the world.

What are the arguments for and against the responsibility that individuals might be thought to bear to accept a Covid 19 vaccine? — Janus

Follow the money: Health insurance doesn't cover the costs of the treatment of the side effects of experimental vaccines (which is what all the covid vaccines are). That ought to tell you something.
If you get blood clots and then a stroke after the vaccination, and end up paralyzed for the rest of your life, along with becoming homeless because the bank took your house because you couldn't pay the medical bills -- well, this is just a fair and reasonable burden that a citizen should take upon themselves, right? The vaccine is, after all, "safe and effective".
(Oh, and you also can't get life insurance if you've been vaccinated.)

I wish I had the freedom not to be expected to go along with the hysteria of the provaxxers and I wish I had the freedom not to be expected to go along with the hysteria of the antivaxxers. But we don't live in a free world.

Can you imagine a military general, out on the battle field, who is a Stoic?
— baker
Well, let's see ... other than the old adage (I can't source it at the moment) 'Epicurean during peace, Stoic during war', what do you make of these reputed 'Stoic warriors' ... — 180 Proof

Thanks for illustrating my point! The modern day stoic is a passive-aggressive wimp, while there is nothing in the original Stoicism that would stand in the way of being proactive.

You believe that pantheism somehow preventsStoicism from being quietism? — praxis

Of course, because pantheism gives one a definitive sense that one is part of divinity, and that as such, one's life is worth living, that life is a big and worthy project worth striving for, all taking place in a big and worthy universe.

Major personal monotheisms operate from the notion of separation between man and god, and of the fallen nature of man. This gives rise to despondence, guilt, demoralization, hopelessly trying to (re)establish the bond between man and the divine. Pantheism doesn't throw a person into such an abyss, so the person has more energy and can utilize it proactively.

Cognitive dissonance, humans can hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. It doesn’t mean they don’t believe in one or the other, it means they are holding an irrational contradiction. Most of the time it’s because the person doesn’t see the contradiction.
That makes more sense to me than saying they don’t really believe it considering the kinds of things they do in the name of their beliefs. — DingoJones

No. They threaten with eternal damnation anyone who doesn't believe like they do. Because of this, they do not deserve the kind of lenience that you describe above and which would apply in other situations, for other beliefs (inlcuding flatearthing and antivaxxing).

I don’t see “belief” as binary like you do, — DingoJones

It's the religious who primarily see belief in such binary terms!

What counts as unacceptable stereotyping? (Or when does stereotyping become prejudice?)

On a forum like this? There are discussion forums where already the software is set to disable the spelling of words like "fuck" etc. But here, given the forum settings and the generally combative, testosteron-laden atmosphere with a high tolerance for sarcasm and satire, it's really hard to tell what is unacceptable stereotyping and what isn't.

Rather little of what is normal here would pass for acceptable watercooler conversation.

It interferes with the understanding. Much of what was best in ancient philosophy was absorbed into Christian theology, and then became rejected along with it. So there are philosophical ways of thinking and ideas that are rejected purely because of their association with religious dogma, even though that isn't an accurate depiction. — Wayfarer

It goes the other way around too: For example, the way Catholic monotheism and the motivation to proselytize were conveniently omitted from Descartes' philosophy (probably in an effort to make Descartes look palatable to secularists?) which was then raised to a secular standard for philosophizing. What a Trojan horse!

So there are philosophical ways of thinking and ideas that are rejected purely because of their association with religious dogma, even though that isn't an accurate depiction.

But for whom is this really a problem? Perhaps for the professional philosophers. Other people who also have some interest in philosophy can and do skirt this bias.

But then why tailor one's quest after a religious proselytizer like Descartes?

I do. In fact, many a southern bigot specifically defends their own stance as one of heritage. I get it from the following language: "Confederate flags . . . endemic voter suppression . . . Dixie . . ." — James Riley

On a philosophy forum, it should go without saying that people would do their due dilligence and check with the potentially offensive poster as to what they really mean, before accusing them of racism.

Unless it is clear from the poster's posting history that they are a particular kind of racist supremacist.

Actually, I think that was the posters point - he was describing what he considers to be the heritage of white southerners. — T Clark

This is a stereotype about white southerners, indeed. For example, when I think of people of the American South, my first impulse is to think of white people, not of blacks.