Terrapin Station

That's even too strong. Atheism is simply a lack of a belief in a deity. That's it. You don't have to consciously reject the notion of a deity to be a...

There are a number of issues here. First, I'd never have planning or even conspiring or contracting or ordering someone to do something as a crime. Th...

Syntax by itself doesn't refer. And reference is semantics. Reference requires thinking. What refers, and the way it refers, is purely a matter of how...

Because, for one, I don't like the idea of people judging other people in general, especially not where those judgments constrain what other people ca...

Suggesting that he feels that "Preventing pleasure is only bad if someone (actual) is being deprived of pleasure." Someone else might feel, "The more ...

Sometimes I wonder if it's not kind of a consequence of people who "think too much" in this regard: maybe there are some people who never are simply a...

I wouldn't at all want a society wherein people are required to "justify having a child," and then other people judge their reasons.

Yeah, that's a very good question, actually. It's not clear why an idealist would parse something like a tree as mind/an idea in the first place rathe...

The whole problem there is the ridiculousness of for some reason taking matter (or substance) to somehow "underlie" things like roof tiles and trees, ...

Importance is subjective, which is one reason why it's a good idea not to put too much weight on gift-giving either way.

"Basing that on expectations re gift-giving is what's an overreaction." "That" = Basing whether you're loved or not valued.

I don't know, but in my view, the goal isn't to lead to a theory. The goal is to have accurate views about what is. If an accurate view about what is ...

No. You're not understanding what I'm saying. Let's do this one step at a time: first, just to be clear, a justification for a moral action can't be s...

This makes sense only to the extent that it's a matter of whether we're talking about a particular person or not. The problem with it is that you don'...

You want me to be asserting some broadly abstract principle that I'm doing ethics by, so that it would be applicable to a bunch of different scenarios...

For one, there is no such thing as an "intrinsic good." "The capacity for quick recovery, although a good for S, is not a real advantage over H." Ther...

I'm not attracted to men, so I don't see any as beautiful in that regard. I would expect that people attracted to men often find them beautiful, thoug...

Yes. It's not a value assessment.

I don't think we know what is and isn't really random. But sure, maybe quantum phenomena are the key.

The functions of things are every single thing any individual does, though, every single way they do it.

People simply go by whatever intuitively feels right to them. It's not a factual matter.

Right. Phenomenally, I randomly chose it, albeit while not biasing all of the options completely equally. I do this for things I choose all the time.

Sure. What program to watch from my DVR while eating lunch.

It seems to me like I can (and often do) make random-but-unequally-probable choices.

Hahaha. That's not a fact of biology. It's fine to say that the relative time involvement from each, purely re the biological processes required, is a...

Couldn't agree with that more.

What I mean by free will is that I can make choices that are like rolling dice (where we assume that the dice outcome really is random), but where I'm...

That doesn't work in the slightest because Benatar doesn't understand what "x is good" claims are. You can't say "x is good" "based on someone else's ...

There are a number of problems with that. The two biggest problems are that: (1) "entails that existence has no advantage . . . " Advantage in a moral...

To me this reads like commentary on a paper I haven't read, but where it's assumed that I'm familiar with the paper in question. There are a number of...

I obviously don't agree with that at all, but I suppose you won't want to endlessly bicker about it. :razz:

Yes, obviously. That comment makes no sense to me. It only matters to whom that pain was prevented? Mattering can't be "to no one." Mattering is alway...

Agreed. And not just interpretations, but comments, too--do you think the author is right or wrong? Why? What do you think is right instead? The whole...

Glad to be of service.

This is the complete opposite of my view. The "apart from social context" bit is irrelevant to whether meanings can be the result of one's private men...

Counterfactuals are more like proposals that something could have been other than it was. We create them via imagining differences from facts, where t...

I'm no Kant expert, and I'm not a fan, but per my memory of this, Kant's negative/infinite distinction is about a contingent/necessary or accidental/a...

"High chance of pleasure" is something else. What does that have to do with kidnapping in our stipulated scenario? To not talk about our stipulated sc...

Again, I'm guessing the context. It's context-dependent.

Cool. :wink:

There's no way whatsoever to figure likelhood for anything that we don't have frequentist data for, and even then it's not clear that there isn't a pr...

Again, I know that I'm not wrong.

Again, I'm not making a likelihood statement above. I can know what I said. Again, that's all that can be had in likelihood statements such as this. T...

As I said (in my first post in this thread), ""What I'd normally take the subject to be in lieu of other information" In other words, I'm guessing the...

But that's not a likelihood statement. What I know is that all they can be doing is making shit up based on their psychological biases in making likel...

Say what? What likelihood that I believe exists?

What way? As an indexical. That's what we're talking about.

How do you propose to determine likelihood in a case such as this?

It does if you think about it that way.

"It" is indexical because the meaning depends on the context. "It" doesn't have a "fixed" meaning like "cat," say. Like all indexicals, the reference ...