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Isaac

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You should be wary of assuming others share your sociopathic world-view.
January 13, 2021 at 06:55
Still peddling this?... As we've been through before "...actually account for" and "...requires the least effort" are no less subjective than the term...
January 13, 2021 at 06:47
Tangentially related perhaps, but how so? How do you judge the 'correct' usage?
January 05, 2021 at 08:22
It's things like this that I don't know how to respond to, and yet your posts are littered with them. Am I to take such brazen declarations as somethi...
January 05, 2021 at 08:19
Yes. It's shocking. I don't know if you keep up with UNICEF as well, but this was one from this month... And yet the UK Government is set to cut £2.9b...
January 05, 2021 at 07:45
I disagree with this framing. I can see where you're coming from, but moral theories are not like scientific theories. Firstly, our moral theories are...
January 05, 2021 at 07:16
What do you mean "it works". What would it not working look like? This is a fundamental axiom we're talking about here so there's supposedly no more f...
January 05, 2021 at 07:05
No, it is explained in the rest of that paragraph which you've ignored. It's because your argument fails without them, but including them invalidates ...
January 04, 2021 at 10:45
But it absolutely evidently does not. Surgery being the obvious example where causing harm does not make things worse than not causing harm. Which is ...
January 04, 2021 at 09:49
The argument there wasn't about the label, it was about the objective. It makes no sense. why would you want to reduce harm if no-one benefits from th...
January 04, 2021 at 07:43
I couldn't possibly say that, I've not read most of those. No doubt some fail on that count, maybe others don't. I can only argue against positions wh...
January 04, 2021 at 07:30
My bad. By normative force I simply mean something like persuasive power with regards to action - ie the the difference between saying to someone "you...
January 04, 2021 at 07:06
In that he'd be against the essentialism, I think yes, but I'm not that familiar with Rorty. The point I was making though was not so much about groun...
January 03, 2021 at 19:17
No, not at all. Reduction of harm makes absolutely no sense whatsoever unless there is someone to benefit from that reduction. That's the whole point....
January 03, 2021 at 18:48
You say Your argument is essentially. .. -By Kant's definition of freedom, riding without a helmet is not freedom. -We all think freedom is a good thi...
January 03, 2021 at 18:27
As to... This is the entry I've already cited from the SEP, my position is pretty much the standard one in ethics.
January 03, 2021 at 18:19
Yeah, that's pretty much how I see it. The only way we can even make sense of what the elder means when he uses the word 'moral' is that we know rough...
January 03, 2021 at 17:50
As I said, look into the private language argument. 'Your meaning' and 'My meaning' don't make any sense. There's no private meanings to words, only p...
January 03, 2021 at 09:11
No. You can't equivocate like that. You said... That is a statement about courses of action, not definitions. What we 'call' such a course of action i...
January 03, 2021 at 07:48
What? You're seriously arguing there's no definition of the word? How on earth do we communicate using it then? Are you familiar with the Private Lang...
January 03, 2021 at 07:45
Yes, that one. Where are you getting this definition from?
December 29, 2020 at 11:10
On what basis are you making this claim?
December 29, 2020 at 10:01
I can't make sense of this proposition, you seem to have used 'freedom' in two different ways and whilst I understand the latter, I'm unclear on the f...
December 29, 2020 at 08:20
A more lovely example could not be presented of deciding in advance what one is going to consider right and wrong and then constructing some pseudo-lo...
December 29, 2020 at 07:10
That's not what you're arguing though, you keep loosing the thread of the argument and so it's become very tiresome. Your claim was that features of c...
December 29, 2020 at 07:09
It's worth having a look at the SEP entry on defining morality. We're looking for that 'something else', in your framework to justify the claim that i...
December 24, 2020 at 07:41
So "you should use a 10mm spanner if you want to undo a 10mm nut" is a moral claim? Weird. IF you want to explain the origin of Kant's 'goodwill', the...
December 24, 2020 at 07:28
I'm not arguing that no-one thinks inter-country comparisons are useful, so I'm not sure what this interview is supposed to teach me. You were the one...
December 24, 2020 at 06:51
Where have I said anything like that? I can quote several places I've said the exact opposite. If you're not going to actually follow through the argu...
December 23, 2020 at 16:37
Yep. Meanwhile half a million die from preventable heart disease, but not a penny of additional investment in health initiatives or legislation around...
December 23, 2020 at 14:26
You're not following the argument. What does then make a thing 'moral'? Our agreement that it fits in some loose category. What causes us to agree on ...
December 23, 2020 at 13:54
December 23, 2020 at 12:46
Yes it can (to an extent). If we did not have a drive to co-operate, for example, there'd be no material cause for us to "decide that acting on the dr...
December 23, 2020 at 12:43
Yeah, but policy mostly affects other people's children, especially for the wealthy.
December 23, 2020 at 12:15
No problem. Yeah, things look bad either way. We seem to have no good options. What I find difficult to swallow is why, given these hard choices, our ...
December 23, 2020 at 12:13
You mean like Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter from Cambridge University who called comparing countries' performances a "completely fatuous exercise"...
December 23, 2020 at 09:14
I don't mean 'job' as in employment. I just mean that you cannot sensibly say that something is the 'job' of a particular type of person(or investigat...
December 23, 2020 at 07:30
It's not a job if the standards are arbitrary. There's nothing to be done. Plucking a rule out of thin air is not a 'job' in any normal use of the ter...
December 22, 2020 at 08:33
That's better. I wondered what had happened to the old MU with all this "I'm sure the experts know best" malarkey. This is much more like it - startli...
December 22, 2020 at 08:27
Yeah, I'm worried. Research in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found the lobbying expenditures ($248.4 million) and new lobbyist registratio...
December 22, 2020 at 08:23
Well then you should have no trouble cherry-picking some experts who claim that the effectiveness of the vaccine at reducing transmission and symptom ...
December 22, 2020 at 07:32
Again, you haven't explained a) how this 'job of ethics' is to be done - what do we use to judge, and b) if there's not a naturalistic explanation (pr...
December 21, 2020 at 09:04
Sort of, but normal safety protocols for new drugs aren't designed to pick up on those kind of long term potential consequences either, it's just too ...
December 20, 2020 at 18:03
Well then you should have no trouble citing the published results demonstrating this effectiveness. Here is an overview. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...
December 20, 2020 at 17:46
You're missing the point. We have those imperetives. That's what we just established. The's not some 'other' you that gets to decide what the 'natural...
December 20, 2020 at 08:47
On the subject of MMR vaccines, which are credited with saving millions of lives a year, the WHO reports Monumental recklessness.
December 20, 2020 at 08:09
Well then it's not arbitrary, is it. Unless there was some global coordinated government ruling on what counted as 'moral', that I missed. If we gener...
December 20, 2020 at 08:04
Then how does anyone learn what the word 'moral' means?
December 20, 2020 at 07:56
On what grounds do we decide?
December 20, 2020 at 07:47
Yeah, this is certainly a concern. Having said that, a phase III trial is a phase III trial, if it's come about two years earlier, it's not necessaril...
December 20, 2020 at 07:46