The licking after beating is a response to the pain the dog is still feeling from the injuries caused by the beating. The licking creates a positive e...
That would mean that if you put a dog in a cage at birth and beat it every day and gave it no pleasures, the least severe beating would be a positive ...
I already did this, in a generalised way. I connected the natural fact of (let us say) A’s action T being a torturing of B, to the moral fact of A’s a...
The example I gave involved physical pain, but as I believe is usual in philosophy I was using ‘pain’ to mean either physical or emotional pain (e.g. ...
Thanks for replying to my post. I’ve been on this forum before, but it was a while ago, and I wasn’t here for long. I’m an ethical naturalist, so I di...
His situation is worse than that. If moral facts are dictated by God, then two things follow: 1) In any universe not created by God, there are no mora...
I hope philosophy is not expected to do any such thing. It would be as if a zookeeper had the job of pushing food into a cage when there was no eviden...
Are you sure it's the pain you're enjoying, and not the feeling that the pain is doing you good? Wouldn't you enjoy your workout more if there was no ...
When a sentient being is awake, there are two answers to this: the being itself, and everyone else. When the being is unconscious, there is only one: ...
Every hopeful expectant parent would disagree with you. To them, because it's the cyst that will grow into their son or daughter, it's far more valuab...
Bob presented us with a supposed evil (the moral decay of modern society) and offered Aristotelian ethics as a cure. That was his justification for pr...
It isn't, actually. I wish it had been, because then this thread wouldn't have lost itself in the swamp of amateur social history. The OP makes a clai...
All I'm really picking up from this thread is that society has got better in some ways and worse in others. Well, hold the front page. I think I'm don...
That society is in moral decline is a common illusion (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x). Every generation thinks this. If you are g...
At the moment I don't know if I'm a consequentialist or not. Some sort of weird Kantian-Benthamite deonto-consequentialist hybrid, I think. A philosop...
This is the heart of the question, I think. One problem I have with your reading is that it divides humanity into two groups — those we interact with,...
In the Groundwork, after he has introduced the 2nd formulation, Kant says this: "Fourthly, as regards meritorious duties to others, the natural end wh...
@RogueAI, @Bob Ross, @Leontiskos I apologise for not answering your posts. I haven't gone away, but the past week has been difficult. I shall try to r...
My point is that I consider YOUR position to be immoral. It is universally held that a human life is among the most valuable things in the universe; p...
I think your third example is not necessarily correct. Suppose I sit next to a guy on a train and I see that he is listening to music on his headphone...
This begs the question between us, which is whether killing Alan and Betty is an immoral act if it is the only way of saving the lives of Charles and ...
It's 50 years since I read Kant, so I am horribly rusty. But when I look up Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative, I find that it re...
In the case of Alan, Betty, Charles and Dora, where the driver let Charles and Dora die by not turning the wheel, can we at any rate agree that you co...
Surely the point here is that if let Hitler live, he will continue to fail to treat millions of people as ends by murdering them; and our only way of ...
I want to put this train of thought in your mind: If you kill someone, then you are not treating them as an end (unless it is mercy killing). If you l...
We aren't; that's the bit where we're treating him as a means. You don't have to save someone's life or better their condition to be treating them as ...
First of all, let's be clear: there is nothing wrong with treating someone as a means, provided you also treat them as an end. I don't think the threa...
It would be, indeed. But I take the view that the hedonic calculus should only be applied subject to the imperative to treat sentient beings as ends, ...
I didn't say not turning the wheel was an action, I said it was a choice, so it is not true that I am "confusing decisions (or choices) with actions"....
It doesn't appear in my view because I don't think it is morally significant. Here's the car driver barrelling along the road. He turns a corner and s...
You are claiming here that sacrificing the two people is required in order to avoid killing all four — in other words to save the other two. Let's see...
When you say that 'eudamonia is the highest moral good' is the ultimate underpinning, do you literally mean that nothing further underpins that? Becau...
Certainly 'to deliberately/intentionally/purposefully kill the single person' is not an adequate or accurate description of the operator's intention w...
Actually I think Bob is taking the straightforward position that it is always wrong to deliberately kill an innocent person. If I understand him, he r...
This would be true if the second supposed means was, in fact, needed to save the five; but as Leontiskos has pointed out, it isn't: Since the second s...
You are saying two different things here. Let's take them separately: "Killing one person to save the five is what enables the person to save the five...
Arguments by analogy are never sound, they just confuse the issue. A means is something that facilitates or enables the performance of some action. Th...
Exactly so. The whole point about the greater good is that it IS the greater good, i.e. is better than the alternative. That is precisely why one shou...
Well, firstly, you can't decide questions in moral philosophy by appealing to courts of law. The most a study of legal systems can tell you is what th...
This is incorrect. The means they are using to save the 5 is the lever by which they divert the train. The 1 who dies is not the means, but merely som...
Moore's reasoning is inductive, not deductive, and it implicitly begs the question. He takes just two suggested definitions (that 'good' means the sam...
I Googled 'definition definition' (that was fun), and it said 'a statement of the exact meaning of a word, especially in a dictionary.' That will do f...
OP is asking if good can be defined, and is therefore, by implication, asking for a definition of 'good'. I think that what you have provided is a lis...
Suppose someone comes up with an example that they claim debunks your definition. How can we tell whether their claim is true? Is the example the stan...
If determinism trumps rationalism, then any argument that purports to show that determinism trumps rationalism may be invalid; we may only think it's ...
Not if I have free will, because if I have free will, I can do what I do in spite of the way I am. Strawson's initial premise therefore begs the quest...
I don't. I was taking a bet. The odds of me winning are proportional to the amount of evidence I have that the North Pole exists. The odds of me losin...
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