Moliere

I think that's the best way to put it. Reason is slave to the passions for some people. And reason cannot do what it does unless it is motivated.... b...

Well, Hegel said... ;) I often fall back to interpretation in thinking through questions. Guilty as charged. But I can offer a reason -- it strikes me...

Okie doke. I do. But that's not my point here. I don't believe mercy is the foundational value by which I can judge something to be good or not. Howev...

I think you have it backwards. This isn't work, so it's not about being paid. Some people even put money in the pot to help keep the servers running.

Ahh OK. Well this is different than what I had in mind before. What I had in mind was the sort of responses you hear from people unsympathetic to the ...

I just mean mercy in a mundane sense -- so Meriam Webster states: And that's what I mean. So to be merciless is to punish offenders within your power,...

I feel like your two statements here are in conflict with one another. If all of our actions are within our control, then how do you account for the c...

That is really cool! I didn't know they made those.

I think this is just to place the value of justice above the value of mercy. "Good" is a placeholder for "just", but I would say that one could just a...

Yes! A roll of it is really inexpensive too. I like it for pencils, charcoal, and pastels. (and sharpies of course :D)

No worries. The more the merrier. We can give type (4) explanations in some cases and not give them in others, because this is a more true description...

It's paper that's meant to wrap up meat or fish, but is often used for all sorts of other crafty things. Thanks. :)

I think it just depends on what a person cares about -- which value they hold to be the most dear. I love myself, and I care about mercy -- so I act o...

I suspect so, but it's not my primary concern I'm trying to relate. My primary concern is more like this: People need to be able to say that they are ...

I believe the following statements: Some of the things we do are in our control. Some of the things we do are not in our control. That which is and is...

Kant argues for exactly this -- that there are a set of beliefs which are not strictly determinable as true or false, but in believing them we are bet...

So I guess in a sense these scripts would be different from games, after all -- at least in our formulation here -- since rules of a game are more of ...

Admittedly yours wasn't the direction my mind was going in, but I think we're on the same track with the metaphor/analogy. So, yes, I would agree that...

Then it had the opposite effect to the intent. :D Though I didn't mean to say that every response is a script, too. I just meant these sorts of cliche...

I was sort of hoping to nip self-recursive meta-scaffolding in the bud by highlighting that these are scripts. A script can be analysed, re-interprete...

I want to note that you're modifying your premise. You did say behavior originally, and not action. Look at how your definition of action plugs into t...

Ah! That clicked for me. Thanks.

I was following you up to this point. Grasshoppers really being ants makes sense to me in this way: that the grasshopper feels more in control by focu...

I have two points here. The first is that I think your conditional is false. If my heart beats at a certain rate because of physiological conditions t...

Why would you disbelieve him when he says it's not in his control?

What exactly is dishonest in the scenario you posited? In what way is the patient lying to himself?

That is true! I didn't mean to give the impression that we should contradict the patient. I was more just trying to focus on how the particularities o...

I don't think there is a general answer. He could be right, and he could also be wrong. Mental illness is a sub-category of illness. And insofar that ...

Akrasia is just a fancy term for failure in spite of our intent. We may correctly judge what is good for us, and yet act against said judgment. Addict...

I think I prefer to call what Berne calls games scripts because it de-emphasizes the games as something as a part of one's personality and puts it in ...

I think that addiction doesn't work so cleanly as all that, or akrasia in general for that matter. Suppose both conditions are met the first time. Wha...

You make me feel embarrassed for myself. lol Here he gets close to answering your question in responding to his own question that prefaces it, " If I ...

It would not be unjust, but surely you understand that demanding reparation would itself be just. It is the fair thing to do, since you have been wron...

I see it like this: If it's good to help people, then it's good to help people whether or not the universe is material or immaterial, whether it was c...

Ah, I didn't realize your objection was primarily one of fundamental ontology from the perspective of idealism. I guess from the materialist's perspec...

Well, I guess I don't actually do philosophy for the truth. So I'm being sloppy in hopping between hypothetical set-up and my own actual motivation. S...

Probably not. What reasons, along that line of thinking, do you find convincing? Also, while that series of statements is a non sequitur I don't know ...

Instrumental action is something motivated by some end-goal. So I go to work in order that I may earn money. I exercise in order that I may feel healt...

Alright, but then you do agree with the point that the instrumentality of action is not something intrinsic to self-interested action, right? So what ...

Yeah, one of my take-aways was how little the actual science mattered to me as much as the discussion it inspired. Like, you could find out later that...

Not yet. For me it's one of those things that would be nice, but the circumstances have to be just right.

I am not an objectivist. I was more just following the line of reasoning that came from thinking about egotism in relation to my theory of compassion ...

We could, though. I'm open to changing concepts. It'll just take some time to hammer it all down. How do you understand compassion/ego ?

You're gonna have to unpack that one for me.

I think that I'm committed to the notion that selfish acts, as defined by the frame of compassion/ego, can be good. But I suspect that in the process ...

Life is full of suffering. I don't think suffering is enough of a reason to say life is not worth living, though. It is a fact of life. Learning to de...

Awesome. That gives me a clear picture. What about giving? A gift can be egotistical -- a display of ownership or power -- but I'd say there is also c...

Cool, that's the sort of thing I was looking for. Is compassion the only non-egoistic motive?

What if your partner wants children? Even supposing your partner wanted children out of a sort of egoism, if you were doing it for your partner, that ...

/deleted for pedantry