Terrapin Station

Bertrand Russell once said, "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to not seem worth stating, and to end with something so p...

You don't see the difference between someone's intent, someone's action, and your reaction?

I have no problem accepting that you don't believe me. ¯\_(?)_/¯ That should have been clear from the post you're responding to. I don't expect you to...

Any random threat could be an example.

You mean re intent? Someone could say any utterance with any conceivable intent.

I didn't say that was vague. I said that "harm" is. "Harm" is as bad as "suffering." If you go to the current antinatalist thread, you can find someon...

I don't consider it to be anything that is morally wrong or that should be legislated against. "Harm" is too vague to make generalizations about. Cert...

It's not that I don't use that word. I do not believe that my preferences are correct just because I have them. You're so far up your own derriere tha...

Yes of course. If I weren't, I wouldn't be able to say that I'm in favor of there being no speech prohibitions, would I?

Aside from the fact that you're claiming to know everything anyone has ever proposed, which obviously you'd not know, you're aware that the measuremen...

I'm not someone who thinks that their preferences are correct just because they have them. Why would that be in favor of my ego? Be a free speech abso...

Why are you introducing words like "healthy" or "undamaged"? I'm not saying anything like that. Are you saying that for "unhealthy" or "damaged" brain...

The laughter is at your ego.

Must. Not. Be. Too. Different.

So you're arguing that there are things it's physically impossible to positively or negatively value?

Your objection amounts to either an endorsement of conformism or an ego-oriented fiat, depending on where the pendulum is.

You can invent them all day long. "Standard" doesn't imply a widespread consensus (ignoring the sorites problem there). But at any rate, to avoid quib...

That's fine, as the measurement is an objective fact and you can match or fail to match an objective fact. Moral stances are not objective facts.

Because we know something about neutrinos and how they interact with bodies. Other dimensions? That's incoherent nonsense stemming from the reificatio...

There are no moral or normative facts. But that's irrelevant to persuasion via rhetoric at any rate. There, you're appealing to what and how particula...

I said that per that standard, it's 7" , but the standard isn't correct. Per other standards, other definitions of "inch," it's a different number.

There would be no way to make sense out of saying that someone could "ride a neutrino," because it's not physically possible. But an individual could ...

If we're just saying that something is "able to be valued," nothing would be excluded from that. And everything would be able to be both positively an...

That's not intransitive. It's only valuable to the people who value it. It's not universally valuable or valuable independently of the particular indi...

Yeah, but just to the same someone. That's not what he's saying though. He wants the consequent to be the claim that it's morally valuable in general,...

Also, re all of these comments about his argument re predicate logic, etc., those only matter if we focus on the natural language semantics of the arg...

The problem is that the clause after the modal only follows if we're saying morally valuable to me, but he's not saying that, he's saying morally valu...

By your own admission, you're not really familiar with predicate logic, modal logic, etc.--even though your arguments rely on these things (modal logi...

That a standard is created doesn't make the standard correct. It's the case that 5" per one idea of an inch isn't the same as 7" per a different idea ...

Yeah, it is. It's taking a term I was applying to one idea, one reference, and applying the same term to a different idea, a different reference inste...

?? It's from something subjective. The standard is simply something we make up by thinking about it and making decisions about what we're going to nam...

Per the particular standard it would be 7" , sure. That's equivocating the sense of "feeling" or disposition I was using, however. Because in this cas...

Not the case, because you wind up telling people that their moral stances are incorrect, where you're not simply saying that they're very unusual (rel...

So I was interested in what your reasoning would be for believing that moral stances can be correct/incorrect, that reason somehow transcends individu...

Especially if we've agreed on using the same definition of "inch," you're simply going to think that my estimate is off. The length of the stick in in...

I was just nipping the "correct" stuff in the bud. But again, sure re all of that. (I'm just about to start a session, by the way, so I'll be back in ...

Sure. Objects have whatever lengths they do in particular circumstances. This does nothing to make the standard correct/incorrect, or to make it corre...

So would you posit some sort of real (extramental) abstract for it? Maybe I'm remembering this wrong, but I thought you didn't buy the idea of nonphys...

There are personal and agreed-upon standards, sure. They just don't have any normative weight aside from an individual personally wanting to follow so...

I have no idea what that's even saying. What's the distinction you're making there?

So you're arguing that argumentum ad populums are not fallacious because? (Maybe because they're commonly accepted? But that itself is an argumentum a...

I'd not do it if you'd give what I consider to be straightforward answers to questions, with some detail to them, when I ask something like "anything ...

Well, for example you're bringing up "objective standards." I don't agree that there are such things first off. Standards are not objective, and if we...

I mean (and this should be clear from context) there is nothing else to talk about that aren't confused fictions.

"Sensible" is simply "something not too far removed from my own or from the consensus view" --that is, something not too different. Where the only thi...

There's nothing else to talk about, though. Again, there are no factual normatives. This means that it is not correct/incorrect to not have (seemingly...

I addressed different senses you might have had in mind, because I wasn't sure. Again, it's being charitable. If I were to just ask you what sense you...

Descriptively, at least potentially anything could go. In other words, someone could have just about any imaginable stance. Evaluatively, no one think...

There are two problems there: one, the fact (if it is one, more on this in a moment) that one would only see drowning as a problem if one does not wan...

So desire isn't a mental phenomenon in your view, or are you asserting something like panpsychism?