Philosophy Now Forum

My point is that decisions in governance should be guided by evidence, data, and a clear understanding of the deterministic forces shaping human behavior. And my point is that when you proffer an argument in disagreement with others you are involved in notions of free will. If someone did not belie...

You’re mistaking the experience of disagreement for evidence of free will. You're not following. I am not arguing for free will. I am arguing that your denial of free will in the context of promoting your political program is incoherent. And it is. BigMike : Choice does not exist, so we're going to...

Disagreement doesn’t require free will Sure it does, in the sense that the one who takes himself to be disagreeing is taking himself to have free will and the power of free deliberation. You are involved in a performative self-contradiction. --- "bigmike" has, a few times already, been sh...

Perhaps it's time to reconsider the foundation of governance itself. What if we designed systems that acknowledge the deterministic nature of human behavior? What if, instead of relying on elections and majority rule, we built governance models rooted in data, evidence, and a deep understanding of ...

It seems to me that a problem with modern moral philosophy is that there is an undue assumption that each system fits neatly within the single genus of "prescriptive, universally rationally-accessible moral propositions." Whereas in the old days it was well-known that the Stoics, Epicurea...

So please can you explain the error, and the refutation? I assume that can be done concisely. Actually, feel free to disregard those papers. I was in a rush earlier, but I now see that you are drawing a different conclusion than the one that Mckim and Simpson address. We once argued on a different ...

I'm going to comment on this before getting into the other comments... Thanks, but your argument here amounts to this: what all of us want is morally right, and what all of us don't want is morally wrong. For example: Premise: Everybody wants to experience pleasure, and nobody wants to experience p...

The critique of cultural relativism is on point, but the Enlightenment anti-authority angle is rather oblivious to the last 300 years of history. " Sapere aude " was Kant's clarion call, but it became apparent very quickly that the masses shouldn't think for themselves because they think v...

Missed this - Thanks Leontiskos. I have very little formal education in philosophy. It's almost exclusively consisted of several new vocabulary terms I've learned from a philosophy teacher in a club I'm in, and the ensuing reading I've done after that...so there's a lot I don't know. There's nothing...

Hello, it seems your posts are worth reading, and that's surely a strange occurrence on a philosophy forum. So wrapping up the previous stuff I wrote into a more compact and helpful unit: Any moral requirement to maximise pleasure on such a universifiable basis would be a requirement only if it were...

Acording to excluded middle either non-contradiction is false and the negation of non-contradiction is true; OR non-contradiction is true and the negation of non-contradiction is false. The question at hand is whether the law of identity and the law of non-contradiction are the negations of one ano...

But I am saying either equality (identity) is true or its negation (non-equality (non-contradiction)) is true. It is perhaps worth noting that the law of identity is subsumed under the law of non-contradiction. The violation of the law of identity is a contradiction . When one violates the law of i...

I do think I'm using a clear and orderly way of combining the ingredients to achieve a specific result. I think I'm engaging in utilitarian calculus...the specifics of which are nearly always going to be too long to describe in detail. I have to do a lot of estimating. Thinking about exactly why I ...

Building on what I said in my last post, the law of identity and the law of non-contradiction both apply to Aristotelian substances and accidents, but they simply are not mutually exclusive in the way you suppose. It can be true that something is identical with itself while at the same time it is n...

In all seriousness: Is it worth considering the possibility that the necessity of such immense mental gymnastics itself invalidates act utilitarianism? Your post seems to indicate that the problem of sex crimes cannot be sufficiently addressed by act utilitarianism. If one expends a great deal of t...