I believe the Earth is round. I’m quite convinced by the evidence I’ve seen, but I don’t know it. I know nothing and I would change my belief if some ...
Ok, let me offer an interpretation of what you are saying that would make it sound more palatable to me: Suppose you possessed the truth about a certa...
Thank you, Democracy may be a practical form of government that protects against tyranny, but reasonable? No, it isn’t. It’s an eternal compromise whi...
I see. If your notion of “shared meaning” is only intended as a pedagogical device, I entirely agree. Sure, we should look around for all possible per...
What exactly does that signify? The meaning of a hammer is a tool for driving nails. A few people perceive it as a weapon and then there is this one w...
Were great warrior queens like Elizabeth !, Maria Theresa and Catherine the Great any less violent than their male counterparts at their time? Was Tha...
No, I would deny that that’s the aim of philosophy. What if we were all delusional? What if only one person had a reasonable understanding of reality-...
I don’t know who you are, where you come from, what your background is, and for the purpose of this discussion, I don’t care. I don’t think having you...
Whether or not we really expect others to have put their emotions aside in an argument, we should act as if we expected it. If we don’t do that, we do...
Sure, we can’t put aside our emotions in the sense that they are our driving force for making the argument. I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t som...
Women probably think differently from men, on one level and on average. They are likely to have different concerns about what is relevant and importan...
Any conceivable moral rules would have to focus more on what people are not allowed to do. That would be true a priori, before knowing anything about ...
Not at all, it is very psychologist. It is exactly the reason why people would need to see a therapist, to gain knowledge about themselves, and the fa...
Sure, this extreme behaviorist assumption that we only do what we ultimately like doing, does have some truth to it. (Students like taking exams, sinc...
The free will is not about what you choose to like but what you choose to do. In the case of robots that distinction would be blurred since a machine ...
What do you mean by “identity consolidation”? If you mean personality consolidation, I would say it occurs at some point as a teenager. (Although it i...
We “believe” when there is no definite proof available to us. In religion and philosophy there will always be a matter of belief. Proof (and knowledge...
A need is something that is necessary in order to achieve something else. If staying alive is the only thing you aspire to achieve, all you need is fo...
What is love? I would suggest that it is a strong feeling towards an object for which you only want what is good. If this definition is right, it woul...
There definitely are truths in moral philosophy, and we all implicitly think there are, or else we wouldn’t argue so vehemently over moral issues. Whe...
Well, of course anything that is true must be in concordance with facts, but it’s not necessarily correct the other way around. A philosophy can be in...
Some approaches to philosophy contradict each other – realism and idealism can’t both be true- while others merely present different perspectives or i...
Well, very often good news just isn’t interesting, not even for positive minded people like you guys. Good news is just normality hence no news is goo...
It’s a curious question. In general, doing something responsibly means realizing the foreseeable consequences of your actions and being willing to fac...
It desires to be alive in the same way as an insect desires to be alive. An insect struggles for its life. I don’t mean desire as in being conscious o...
Preference utilitarianism can also be used to argue against abortion. Any living organism has at least one clear preference: to stay alive. Not much c...
I don’t quite believe you think it’s that relative. If a society/group considers that donating a chewing gum makes up for murder, they would be plain ...
So, we are back where we started then. It’s not just that people tend to feel that way, and it’s not about how people in a given collective would give...
So people may tend to think that way and I conceded that I may instinctively do so myself. (“He has done some bad things and some good things, so I gu...
So people are judged morally in any given society by adding and subtracting good and bad actions according to the standards of their society. So what?...
So now you are moving from a universal standard for ethics (at least that’s where I thought you were in your OP) to a community based practical agreem...
Your original question was: “Can we pay off moral debt?” and I realize that the question is one of principle and not concerned with the exact measurem...
How can you know what satisfies if you are not talking about an individual? Compensations that are actually unconvertible seem to work because the ind...
No, the principle of paying off moral debt doesn’t make sense even to start with, and the reason is what I have been trying to convey: There is no cor...
We have to be dealing with the same consciousness to decide if the compensation is appropriate since there is no objective way to measure it. Say some...
If the only connection between two acts is that they are committed by the same person, it makes no sense to talk about debt and cancellation of debt. ...
The free will explanation of the problem of evil imagines that alternatively God could have created human beings so that it was impossible for us to d...
Morality or amorality refers to individual conduct. If you lived in a society without laws or with bad laws, your behavior would still be moral or imm...
Saying “I know” means “I have information from a reliable source and that information is actually true. I can say “I know” but later find out that the...
The laws have very little to do with actual morality. They are there to make society function as smoothly as possible. Sure, often law and morality co...
Any background information you could provide about a work of art would not leave us “where we were”. Any details about the artist’s biography, his tim...
I said he has no special interpretive authority, meaning that he doesn’t possess the right to give a final and uncontested interpretation of his work....
I could try to interpret the work but whether I’m able to do it well or poorly is not the point. I’m sure you could do it better, being intimately acq...
If you are a visual artist, a painter or an installation artist, you have presumably chosen that profession because you have something to tell the wor...
Well, that would be merely a practical consideration. Obviously, destroying your goal in the quest for that goal would be a rather imprudent strategy ...
The reason the dictum “the ends justify the means” is usually dismissed, is that it would allow for an action that are unequivocally bad in itself if ...
That’s right, you have no moral obligation to society at large since you have never willfully committed yourself to it. An obligation can only arise w...
The tree would never give up stretching out for water and sunlight. The wolf would never give up looking for prey. That would be self-destructive. Not...
Giving up is contrary to the innate purpose of anything in nature. This is not an external purpose handed over by God or society but inside any organi...
“Pleasing to the eye” can’t be a criterion for good art. Wallpaper may be pleasing to the eye or a Mercedes Benz for someone who likes expensive cars....
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