Unrealised gains on an asset are 'realised' when the asset is sold. This reflects that the gains are made 'real' in the sense that they will for the first time (unless the asset was held in the accounts at fair value) be incorporated in the balance sheet and profit and loss statement.

How can you convince someone to not eat meat if you are not concerned with presenting them a valid argument? — Andrew4Handel

The same way most persuasions are done in the real world - by making them feel they do not want to eat meat - by telling a story that changes how they feel about it.

Validity has nothing to do with how nearly all persuasion is done in the real world, Trump/Putin is not the current US/Russian president because his arguments in the campaign were valid. Britain is not leaving the EU because the arguments for doing so were valid.

I am not sure what grounds you have for trying to change someones behaviour if they are not valid or rational? — Andrew4Handel

I see the quest for moral grounds as pointless and ultimately doomed. Our moral decisions are grounded in our values. Our values are personal and cannot be justified by reason. Lack of identified grounds is no reason for lack of action. To not explicitly act is as much a decision as to act, and each is as groundless as the other.

The ending of the official slave trade is not proof that a moral argument is valid.

As I said before, I have no interest in validity. It is only you that is talking about validity.

Humans behaving less than terrible is actually quite demoralising. So finally Western woman have equality, some gays have equal rights after thousands of years and much philosophy. But these things should have been the default.

It's a glass half full or empty thing isn't it? We can lament at there being still a lot of cruelty and injustice in the world or we can be glad at many forms of widespread cruelty and injustice having been greatly reduced (while still working to reduce what remains).

Wouldn't the forces have to act within some kind of substance, like the so-called aether? If there was no such aether what would constitute spatial extension? — Metaphysician Undercover

I see no reason to postulate an aether, nor any reason to postulate something to 'constitute spatial extension'. I see spatial extension as something that is brought to our understanding of the world by the mind, rather than an intrinsic property of the world. But even if that were not the case, I see no need to suppose that space is 'made of substance'.

How is it possible that a particle has no top nor bottom? — Purple Pond

I suspect you are thinking of the particle as being made of 'stuff' (aka 'substance'). That way lie irresolvable paradoxes that Nagarjuna, amongst others, had great fund drawing out and playing with.

One way to avoid the paradoxes is to think of a particle as a force field. There is no 'stuff' to be seen, measured or split. All there is is certain repelling and attracting properties centred at a certain point in space.

Triangularity is not abandoned; rather 'triangularity' is seen for what it is," — StreetlightX

If the parallels 0 to 9 is seeing with Bourland's E-Prime are relevant - and I feel they might be (I was wondering the same thing before I saw her post) - I wonder if Sellars would rather say that, by abandoning a Platonic interpretation of triangularity, we see triangularity for what it does.

For a moral argument to be authoritative it would have to receive almost universal agreement — Andrew4Handel

We are not talking about 'authoritative'. To wish for a moral argument to be authoritative is to wish for the impossible. You said the literature was 'going nowhere'. I gave examples of where it has led to a reduction of the suffering in the world, thereby contradicting that claim. There are such examples everywhere for those that care to look. Heavens, the ending of slavery was based on moral arguments. Who cares that such arguments were not authoritative, and that it did not have near universal agreement? What matters is that they ended slavery.

There is a massive moral philosophy literature going nowhere. — Andrew4Handel

It's not going nowhere. I became a vegetarian and started giving significant amounts to Oxfam and similar organisations after reading Peter Singer's 'Practical Ethics'. I know others that have been similarly influenced by philosophical literature to change their lives to do less harm and be more helpful to others,

questioning whether food and related areas are suitable moral issues. — Andrew4Handel

Why would they not be?
What makes something a suitable moral issue?

But if someone says they are not concerned with starvation in nature and animals being eaten alive then I can't take their ethical objections seriously. — Andrew4Handel

I don't know anybody that says that. Let's not confuse acceptance that one cannot do anything to prevent X with indifference to X.

There is a stereotype that vegans are judgy and preachy. Perhaps that used to be the case. I don't know. But in recent years, as there has been an increased uptake of veganism, it does not seem to be the case. There are several people I know that I discovered to be vegan more or less by accident. They never mention it except when it comes to - almost apologetically - indicating their dietary restrictions for an upcoming meal. I find both the increase in veganism and the humility that often accompanies it encouraging.

As I said earlier, I think it is good that some vegans advocate their values to others, seeking to persuade more people to become vegan, or just to eat less meat. It is crucial though, to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If it is argued that somebody is morally heinous if they occasionally eat meat or fish, regardless of what care they took to ensure it was humanely raised and slaughtered, then that just drives people who might otherwise be persuaded to eat less meat, to give it up and write off vegans as extremists, and ethical eating as too unattainable to bother about.

Everyone must make their own ethical decisions. It is not for any individual to judge any other, unless they are employed by the state to do that. If public discourse about the ethics of what we eat leads to an overall reduction in the number of animals that are factory-farmed or otherwise inhumanely treated and killed, that is a good thing. At least we will have somewhat less suffering in the world and less greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

Let she who is morally perfect cast the first stone.

It's a worn out battle cry here in the US, recited often after a Republican speaks. — Hanover

Yes it is counterproductive, and sometimes unfair, in that context as well. I find most accusations of racism regrettable, no matter who utters them. In most cases they lead either to an escalating exchange of insults or to a pointless semantic argument over what the word 'racism' means.

I think that the arguments that are made against certain policies using an allegation that they are racist can be made better by appealing to human values of compassion and fairness.

the answer to do you believe I ate or do you believe I didn't eat has a definite answer — MathematicalPhysicist

It has no answer because it is a false dichotomy. The question presupposes that one either believes W or one believes ~W. It erroneously omits the possibility that one could believe neither. It also omits the somewhat more controversial possibility that one could believe both. One can debate whether that last is possible. But it nevertheless needs to be included in the quartet, to complete the analysis.

For the vast majority of well-formed propositions that can be made, I believe neither the proposition nor its negation, because I am in no position to form an opinion either way.

It would be very sad if we were to ban the state of suspended judgement. It seems to me that that is one of the most beautiful states there is.

Questions like what gives our Australian announcer the right to live on Aboriginal lands are not discussed — Hanover

Criticism of those in Australia that seek to deny or downplay the genocides of Australian indigenous people are right and just, as are those of people who do likewise in the US, Canada or many other developed countries where people live affluent lives on land that was stolen from the inhabitants a few centuries ago, and where the few survivors of those indigenous inhabitants have mostly been oppressed and discriminated against in the intervening years.

What differentiates this from the Israel-Palestine case is that I can vehemently criticise the Australian government when it seeks to downplay the country's past genocide (as it shamefully does far too often), without being accused of racism against the current majority inhabitants of Australia. Yet when one criticises the Israeli government one is branded as anti-semitic. Or, if one is one of the many Jews that levy similar criticism against the Israeli government's actions, one is branded a self-hating Jew. I'm not saying that people on this forum, who are mostly a pretty thoughtful bunch, would spray those accusations of anti-semitism or self-hatred around. But there are regrettably very many in the wider world that do exactly that.

I don't really believe mass adherence to veganism would improve the world think there are other moral debates that could take precedence. — Andrew4Handel

Most climate scientists would disagree. My understanding is that one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas accumulation is animal agriculture. Even if one had a Cartesian position that animals are automata that do not suffer at all, one would need to acknowledge the benefits of reduced meat consumption in terms of reduced human suffering from climate change.

Although that said all conduct to survive could compromise morality. So in a sense the amorality or immorality of nature compromises morality anyway. — Andrew4Handel

It doesn't compromise it. It just makes it contextual. I would consider it a moral error for me to steal a loaf of bread in most circumstances. But if it was the only way I could feed a person that was starving, I would not consider it a moral error.

Interestingly, the most noted philosopher that would deny the contextually of ethics, and hence reject that response to the objection, is Kant. At the same time, Kant supplies one of the most telling responses to the objection raised in the OP, which is 'ought implies can' (already quoted above by NKBJ).

Which induces one to ponder just why you believe it not worth your time, if not because you think its claims are false. — Thorongil

Simply because I expect the ratio of time spent, to interesting, useful and reliable information learned, to be very low. It's the same time-allocation algorithm as most people I know use.

Why spend time reading an obviously biased source when I could be reading from a reliable, unbiased, informative one like bbc.co.uk or nasa. Why bury myself in the internet rants of an angry blogger when I could be finally learning what the deal is with quantum computers, or improving my german?

And don't complain about your evidence not being addressed. You posted a link to a rant website which, contrary to your suggestion, is not meticulously sourced at all. Nearly all of the hyperlinks backing strong opinions on the pages I looked at were either to pages on the same the site, or to fellow-travellling extremist sites or tabloid trash, like torontosun, frontpagemag or breitbart. Your evidence was addressed by that investigation and found completely wanting.

It is still open to you to post links to reports from reputable sources that support your fantastical claims about terrorism, should any such reports exist.

How'd you go from being a professor to being a janitor? — Buxtebuddha

I think you are mixing up Baden with unenlightened. I'm not aware that un was ever a prof. Based on the depth of insight displayed by un's posts on here, I reckon he could have been if he'd wanted to aim at that, but he chose a different path.

A genetic fallacy would be if I said that a claim made on the website was wrong, because the website is biased, and produced no other reason for believing it to be wrong. Show me where I or Baden did that.

Saying it's not worth wasting time on the website is not saying that all its claims are wrong. Indeed, I expect that some of them will be right, just as some of the statements in the physics crank's 100-page perpetual motion machine design will be right. But I'm not going to waste my time looking for them.

The reason you expect not to learn anything new is because of the biased nature of the compilers and sources of the information. Ergo, genetic fallacy. — Thorongil

That's not what the genetic fallacy is. Look it up.

I wouldn't suggest wasting any time on the Horowitz site. In the interests of charity, I had a quick look to see if there were links to credible sources and found that nearly all the links were just to other places on the same site. Those that weren't were mostly to other reactionary sites or to books written by Horowitz and Collier. There are a few links to a BLM website, presumably to paint a veneer of balance, but they are only for very mild claims, not for any of the sort of dribble that has been pasted above.

But you shouldn't need a peer reviewed journal confirming that a riot took place in Baltimore — Thorongil

No, but one needs a report from a reliable source. The fact that you have, despite receiving repeated requests, failed to provide one suggests it would be a waste of time anybody else looking for them.

Saying it is a compendium of links is irrelevant. I bet a lot of the links are to similarly unreliable sources. If they were to reliable sources i expect you would have posted some by now.

For anyone to spend time trawling through the tainted website to see how much, if any, references to actual verified events and measurements it contains would make as much sense as a physics professor reading somebody's 100-page plan for a perpetual motion machine to see if there were any good ideas in it.

And it's not the genetic fallacy. That would be to assert that everything on the website is wrong, because of the bias of the source. This is simply saying it would be a waste of time doing the work to discern which bits are wrong, because there is no reason to expect we would learn anything new.

That's clearly why Trump got elected! — Pneumenon

No. Trump is the least conservative president the US has had since at least Nixon.

... like BLM, for example, which is a far left terrorist organization. — Thorongil

You are two days too early to be making statements like that (possibly three if you live somewhere between Greenland and Samoa).

I think Hume is making what would these days be called a psychological observation, not a philosophical argument. He is observing that people in general do not find such Leibnizian "All's for the best in this best of all possible worlds" arguments helpful.

I think Hume has specifically in mind arguments where the good can only be speculatively assumed, not those where the good is well understood, such as a vaccination. To this end, note the following phrase in the second paragraph: 'such remote and uncertain speculations'.

Expectation of immunity from polio after a vaccination is not a remote and uncertain speculation. The platitudes of a priest who, talking to a mother whose child just died after an agonising illness, says "It is God's will, and God's will must be good even if we cannot see why", are. Ditto for speculation about there being a 'good' reason for the pain of gout.

Richard Feynman. — Agustino

Bingo! :grin:

Whether there is an after life or not, the death of somebody I love means I will see them no more, and that is likely to make me sad.

For many people, it is the death of their loved ones that really upsets them, rather than their own death.

I just noticed you were talking to me. If you select text from a post, a quote button will appear. Push the quote button. — frank

This works on some computers and not on others. It always works on my home computer, which is Firefox on Mint Linux, but only works intermittently on my work computer which is Internet Explorer on Windows 10.

I have inferred by looking at the style of others's posts that others encounter this problem too. That is, I see people who I know from experience know how to use the quote feature sometimes either not using it where it would be the natural method to use, or doing 'manual quotes', which is where you hit reply, then paste the text you wanted to quote under the reply link in the new post, manually typing in the quote delimiters.

I don't know why this is. It's irritating but it's never been enough of a problem to complain about.

BUT - now feeling guilty about posting off topic - I feel that some softened version of communism may be the best way out of this decline into robber baron social Darwinism that countries like the US and Russia are experiencing, which will only be exacerbated by the rise of AI making all jobs that are not highly skilled - and hence beyond the reach of at least half the population - redundant.

But I have nothing against people that like capitalism. Some of them are quite nice.

That's all fair enough, if someone puts a regress argument. But the alternative is to just question 'how do you know that?' and continue questioning until the person you are questioning either walks off or realises that the knowledge of which they felt so sure actually rests on an infinite, circular or ungrounded chain of prior assumptions.

That way the only claim is made by the knowledge claimant, so the onus is on them to justify their claim to knowledge.

The point? The point is to encourage greater epistemic humility. Since much of the harm in the world seems to be done by people who are very sure of themselves, anything we can do to make such people less sure of themselves seems likely to reduce the amount of harm.

Most people who describe themselves as conservatives these days are not conservative at all, but reactionary. Conservatism is about when in doubt, sticking with the status quo, not about trying to roll back to an era of decades ago.

Trump is not conservative. The religious right are not conservative. Libertarians are not conservative. I am not sure there are many genuine conservatives in the US, or in other countries, of the type that Edmund Burke would recognise. Perhaps Angela Merkel is a true conservative.

Interesting discussion on this issue on this podcast: The Minefield: Is conservative politics having an identity crisis

I think that in popular impressions the technical side of music and the emotional side of 'technical' work like maths are both greatly underestimated.

Sure there is no such thing as a 'wrong' composition but there is definitely such a thing as a flawed performance of any given composition. I would love to be able to play the 3rd movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata at full speed. Composition too, has a very technical aspect. It's all very well to break the laws of harmonic progression but you need to know them first, so that you know what you're breaking and why. Otherwise it's just like a toddler plonking their little fists on a piano keyboard.

On the other side, the emotional and creative aspect of mathematical work, which is enormous, is generally not appreciated by people not involved in the field. One can be moved to tears at the symmetrical beauty of powerful theorems or elegant solutions. One can struggle for weeks in frustration trying to get around a blockage that seems impassable and just makes you feel stupid.

I do agree with the point that the value of technical work is more readily apparent than that of artistic work. When the four colour problem was solved, as soon as the proof was validated it was hailed as a major achievement. It was not regarded as a matter of opinion. That tends not to be the case with a new composition, even if it ends up being recognised as an enduring masterwork.

I assume you don't subscribe to the view that all use of military equipment is unjust, or you would not be asking the question. There is a philosophically credible case to be made for the use of military force in defence and in humanitarian intervention. The fact that the world's largest military powers predominantly use it for purposes other than that is very sad, but doesn't undermine the philosophical case.

For me, a key decider would be whether I was able to refuse an order to start participating in designing something that I believed was intrinsically immoral, or would mostly be used for immoral purposes. If a condition of the job was that you would be criminally liable if you refused an order, and could not resign summarily to avoid having to obey such an order, then that would be a grave risk and, for me, sufficient reason not to take the job in the first place. Such conditions apply to jobs in the actual military. You could be court-martialled and shot for refusing to participate in a war crime. But I am not aware that such conditions apply to military support services. If you were free to disobey or resign if asked to work on something you found morally unacceptable, you may find it morally reasonable to work in such a field. I have no doubt there would be secrecy provisions applying after you leave. But having to not divulge secrets, while distasteful, is a long way short of having to actively participate in planning crimes against humanity. Plus, if the secrets you learned were sufficiently abominable, you could do an Edward Snowden.

But since we all derive our means from a sequence of transfers that probably started with someone blipping someone else on the head and grabbing whatever they could then the basis of our entitlement is not at all clear. — Cuthbert

If we replace the 'we all' by 'many of us' - or possibly 'most of us', although that would be more subject to contestation - the point is solid, and highly relevant.

It gets more ambivalent when we consider rags to riches stories like John Lennon or other creative artists that started with close to nothing and acquired riches by making something that everybody wanted to buy.

That may be why Nozick's most famous example for his 'taxation is slavery' argument was a very rich and successful black basketballer Wilt Chamberlain. Was Chamberlain raised in poverty? Did Nozick deliberately choose him because that avoided the 'illegitimately acquired initial wealth' argument, as well as hoping his argument would resonate better with with people's emotions about America's slave past because of Chamberlain's ancestral roots?

I am fairly anti-capitalist these days but, for the sake of what looks like an interesting discussion, and because I enjoy playing Devil's Advocate, I'll have a go.

I surmise that the moral roots of the esteem in which private ownership is held in a capitalist worldview go back at least to Locke and his notion that everybody has the moral right to ownership of their self. Some (Nozick, perhaps?) have argued from that that what somebody produces through their own effort is a product of their self, and their moral right to their self extends to what their self has produced, thereby giving them a moral right to the product of their labour. Nozick argued that it follows from this that taxation is partial slavery, as it makes the proportion of time that was spent earning the wealth that was removed by taxation, slave labour for the government.

OK, but then what about inherited wealth, which is a primary source of the concentration of ownership of the means of production? I think (or recall?) that the Nozicks of the world would argue that the person who originally produced the wealth has a moral right to it, and thereby to bequeath it to whomsoever they wish. If it is removed from the recipient, by tax or other means, that is depredation upon the moral right of the person that first produced it, and thereby immoral. So inherited wealth morally belongs to the inheritor because to do otherwise would infringe the moral right of the producer of that wealth. This starts to look very tenuous after several generations (if not even after only one), but I could see somebody making the argument that the moral thread still holds.

Nice theory. Must go away and chew on that.

Do you think I should not be allowed to join in the discussion?

'allowed' has nothing to do with it. It's about decency. If there is an issue that literally affects the ability of others to survive, and you don't take it seriously, the decent thing to do is stay out of it.
What is said here may not make an enormous difference, but it will not make no difference as long as there are Americans that participate on this forum. For one thing, they vote. Secondly, they talk to others who vote, and who are in a position to protest on the streets, lobby etc.

Why should I get serious about it, I don't live there and neither do you for that matter. It makes absolutely no difference to my life what ever happens there. But what do you think would be good enough?

What would be good enough would be to simply keep quiet about it, and let others that take the massacres seriously, and those who live there and have to deal with the threat of ubiquitous guns daily, get on with trying to reduce the problem.

I don't think that's much to ask.

Instead you often get responses like this — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Thank the Good Lord for that!

So I have to go to the BBC to check out the FBI? — Sir2u

If you look at the post of mine to which you are responding you'll see that the text I was quoting from you was not the FBI links but the romans322 link.

I have made no comment about your FBI links. For most statistics I would generally regard FBI as a reliable source.

Just think of the things that women can do that men can't and vice versa simply based on their anatomy. Many species have sexual dimorphisms where the size and shape of the bodies can vary between sexes and each one has their own possible behaviors bases on their design. — Harry Hindu

So?

If I had stopped reading every book or article after finding an error in it I doubt that I would have read half of the things I have read.

And here is another link that probably wont interest anyone either — Sir2u

It's not just the errors. It's the credibility of the source. The first link was from an egregiously pro-gun site. The second is from a site campaigning against abortion.

There is never any point in sourcing statistics from such places. If you see something on such a site and want to know if it's true, go see if you can find corroboration on a credible, unbiased site like BBC, Australian ABC, or some government agency that is not involved in propaganda.

When people link to such sites to support their argument, the natural inference is that they were unable to find the information at an unbiased source, and hence to disregard any argument containing such links immediately.

This goes both ways. I would not trust statistics quoted on a SPLC site if I could not corroborate them at a neutral site.