schopenhauer1

Before someone is born, what on earth would possess someone to non-consensually cause all risk of harm to another person? What does someone need to go...

This would assume that we are motivated by capabilities, rather than just have capabilities that we can or cannot work towards achieving. That is a ma...

Right, and since most of the people on this forum are middle class 1st worlders, they are going to say they should have more children, because their c...

What's the alternative? Is this a nod to the idea of reincarnation?

Great points. However, the natalist will retort, "But the majority of people like life!" and thus no other argument is deemed necessary.

People care about pain is good? Yes. No it isn't. That has never been my position. These opposed to these holistic balance sheet approaches of aggrega...

Wow, I think you summarized Terrapins main problems astutely well here and yet I disagree with almost everything you wrote in the reply to my last pos...

But doesn't this sound a bit too starry-eyed to you? What makes you think this? Is this conscious or unconscious? Is this evolutionary? Are humans tha...

Thank you :smile: . Why would anything become important to me in the first place? At the end of the day we are looking to be most comfortable, survive...

Yes, so not getting fired becomes a priority. Getting in car to get to work..etc. These are all habits dictated by the social convention- lateness or ...

Exactly..I'm glad you brought that up because I was thinking that from your previous paragraph. Your mild sadism (which is what I call enacting suffer...

True. Also there is Pollyanna psychological bias to only remember past moments that were good in more detail. As you said, most people simply are habi...

Good point. Apparently people want the children to face specific adversities in order so they feel the benefit of growing from them. This of course ma...

I liked reading your comments. Sorry, I'm trying to formulate something but it's hard to. I am trying to understand how people's intentions/desires ar...

I really like your thoughts, but I'm trying to get at something more phenomenological- though I think you may want to start a thread on this one. I'm ...

Ok, but what made you write in the first place as opposed to something else? Where does your goal and then decision to act on the goal come from?

Why even comment on this thread? Don't be an asshole. The question of the OP directly applies to you here.

So, as an individual making these decisions- internally, what goes through your mind that makes you actually do these activities?

So you wake up and get out of bed, do some stuff which you say is habitual (brush teeth, etc.), and then do some "stuff" which you decide you want to ...

So how does this look for you in real time on a daily basis? Describe what happens when you do any activity?

Where did this come from? Do you think habituation is a way to bypass indecisive quibbling? Or, rather, what is the benefit of habituation? Whence did...

Ah the whole causal chain. So what is it that makes you do any particular activity in your daily life? I mean this as a subjective experiencer of some...

Can you explain?

So can you reconstruct how that goes answering where the desire comes from and how it leads to activities?

What makes doing the yard or philosophy a priority?

Can you explain this further? What is the question at hand?

How does desire lead to the actual activity? How does the desire arise for you?

I know that. Axiology is often the term for value theories in general, which include ethics. My point was that I am arguing because I am doing what pe...

I just don't get why you wrote that anyways. Because I referenced dialectics in philosophy, and ethics is a form of philosophy, ergo dialectics in eth...

You said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics It's a thing man..one of the major branches of ethics in philosophy is normative ethics. How ...

Please, normative ethics such as Kant's deontology, Mill's utilitarianism, and virtue theory are debated constantly, as are their applications, and ap...

Before I do that, are we going to agree that philosophy is basically based on argument and dialectics?

Are you asking, has anyone who has held one set of values been convinced through argument to hold another set of values?

Um, in philosophy, debates and arguments are pretty much its foundation. It's essentially built on dialectics, starting with Socrates. So your charact...

Hence we are philosophizing. I can only try to convince you that prior to birth, preventing harm for a future person is all that matters and I have pr...

No one is talking law though, just personal decision-making and heuristics. Life does contain structural harms in certain views, and certainly has ine...

Thank you! I appreciate that :grin: .

First off, rephrasing my questions in such ways, is not a great start to answering them, but I'll indulge your odd idiosyncrasy here, if just to clari...

Not when it's trying to make a point that is answering your question :roll: . It's an answer by demonstration....

I just think it funny, because the very question you pose is philosophical and not scientific :razz: . Again, there are so many assumptions here. What...

Here's a question, what's the point of using electricity in the first place? Why engineer all this engineering? If you give any answer, no matter how ...

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Science is done in a certain social context, with certain underlying assumptions, in a certain historical development, in...

That's fine, being your OWN arbiter of good relative to you and me, but this decision affects a whole lifetime for another person, so I don't think th...

Right, that is the gist of the AN argument. It would be a category error to focus on pegging causal instances to the parent. It is only at the procrea...

Great point!

Let's look at this.. So two things here: 1) If you notice a couple posts back I asked if you were the "arbiter" of what is good. In other words, it se...

All I'm saying is self-reports don't necessarily tell the whole picture of what's going on. But, as I said to you, this empirical data, doesn't even m...

Ok.. sure. You definitely have to go deeper than the "overall" summed evaluation someone gives you is the point. Thus, "life is good" is often wrought...

Um, what you stated was the same thing.

Right..so restating what I said. I'm not saying I know better, but that people reporting positive overall evaluations, often don't recall accurately t...