Evolution by natural selection is a mechanical process, like water vapor condensing into rain. Water vapor condensing into rain does not imply that th...
I see everything above out of context. The context is very specific. It is not "Why do people steal?". It is "Why do people marginally choose stealing...
Depends on what you mean by "money". If you mean something intangible like the quantities reported on an account statement then, no, it probably does ...
None of that answers why stealing is chosen rather than non-stealing alternatives such as begging, purchasing, tricking a person, etc. Straw man. I ne...
Serving to end the war is not an intrinsic quality/property of the plans. Serving to end the war is something extrinsic. The intrinsic qualities/prope...
Using an established dating technique, getting an age of around 10,000 years for a fossil, and believing that the fossil is around 10,000 years old. B...
That's not the question. The question is if it is possible to do science while not believing the truth of the results. Didn't Michael Behe study and s...
I have read that artificial intelligence may replace humans and do all of the science. I doubt that AI believes anything about anything that it perfor...
The plans could be stolen with a number of intentions. Selling them as a historical artifact. Using them to blackmail somebody. Etc. No intention to s...
We're talking about the marginal choice to steal or not to steal, and the role of the good stolen in that marginal choice. Unless you are saying that ...
Then it is the good cause, not the thing stolen, that the choice to steal is based on. Or if we eliminate the good cause would the theft of the partic...
Look at the part that I bolded. Are you saying, like I have been saying, that the good itself is not why people steal? You say that the good could be ...
You bring up some good points. What I am addressing is the folk psychology that basically says that the bottom line is that if somebody steals a tangi...
If an economic good does not inherently possess any value, then value is arbitrary. Furthermore, it would not be an economic good. It would not even e...
I don't know how anybody else is reading it, but I think that I have misread the statement "Determinists hold that the present and future are causally...
It is like almost none of the respondents in this thread have any concept of acquiring goods without stealing them being honorable, enhancing one's se...
All of this seems to support what I have been saying. It is not the intrinsic qualities/properties of the good itself, but things other than the good ...
"Finally, the necessity that metaphysical fatalists attribute to everything is not the necessity of causes to produce their effects. Clearly, many thi...
G = a good. No matter if you steal G, beg for G, solicit a donation of G, or use some other method to acquire G, you get G. Therefore, something other...
There are two sets of choices: 1.) Stealing. 2.) Alternatives to stealing, such as begging. I think that it would be a great contribution to psycholog...
That sounds like Baudrillard's simulacra. There is nothing with value, there are only values arbitrarily being assigned to non-value entities. The poi...
No. It is objective. If I had the credentials and the funding I might investigate it and publish the results, so it is something objectively verifiabl...
Economic decision making is not limited to commodities exchanged at prices set by markets. It is conceivable. But I don't think that it happens. I thi...
I am not a theologian or a philosopher of religion, but I--and also people who know more about it than me, it is my understanding--see people's person...
But the fatalism I am talking about is not an attitude. It is a metaphysical theory that says that everything is set in stone. Whatever happened yeste...
But the distinction often is arbitrary. The most powerful illustration is biological race. Biological race does not exist. Race is a cultural construc...
If the goal was an about-face but you end up in the same direction on the same path, the effort failed. Maybe I am misunderstanding what is meant by "...
In Riddles of Existence: A Guided Tour of Metaphysics, by Earl Conee and Theodore Sider, the authors say that fatalism and determinism are not the sam...
A problem with this is that just because one person says "I believe A to be true" and another person says "I believe A to be true" doesn't mean that t...
Atheism as a proposition/conclusion, or atheism as a subjective emotional/rational/spiritual experience? You could probably produce a zillion papers, ...
We are supposed to believe that it is not a zero-sum game. But they all seem to behave like it is a zero-sum game. Think about it. If resources (publi...
I would argue, based on what I know about the Enlightenment, that it does not merely call for applying things. Pre-modern / pre-Enlightenment people a...
I would say that there are two kinds of lies: 1.) A lie in a situation where the liar contributed to the formation of what he/she lies about. 2.) A li...
For a riveting account of an alternative view read Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures, by Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash....
There's a bigger picture than a few metrics like life expectancy. Anthropologists tell us that hunting and gathering was an easy life and that this wa...
Greater wealth does not necessarily mean better off. Just because aggregate measurements such as life expectancy and health increase does not mean tha...
Probably for the same reasons that in contemporary society people who are introverted are considered inferior to those who are extroverted, those who ...
It means that if it is true then the Enlightenment progress narrative is false, delusional, dangerous, etc. It is not an aspiration. It is a belief, m...
How do you know? How was this utilitarian calculation made? Would India have even had those conditions in the 1960's if they had never been subjugated...
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