10k Philosophy challenge

[Atla]

Look it up if you want.

It's a crap figure foisted up by reductionists. They believe man is just meat so their assessments reflect that. But, please, offer a citation.

every time you say "Every person knows X" you're just projecting to no end.

No. I'm stating what's obvious. Everyone -- including you -- knows his life, liberty, and property is his alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocia ... y_disorder
Here it says 1-4%, seen 4.5% figure elsewhere. It's generally untreatable, therapists don't even try to develop a conscience in these beings.

Nothing to do with reductionists. Look you can lie to yourself all you want about these alleged natural rights, and pretend that your projections are obvious universal truths, I don't care.

[henry quirk]

Here it says...

Even if true (and I don't concede it is, cuz wikipedia) that only means some segment feel no empathy. Empathy is not morality or the foundation of morality. Morality is acting in accordance with recognizing the other guy has the same right to his life, liberty, and property as you have to yours. Empathy might help that along, but empathy is not necessary to that recognition.

Nothing to do with reductionists.

It has everything to do with them. They see man as meat. Everything a man is, is to them, explainable as a product of chemical/biological process. Man as free will, as moral being, is alien to them. I'm pretty sure if I follow up on the various citations listed at the end of the wiki piece I'll find every researcher listed is a reductionist.

Look you can lie to yourself all you want about these alleged natural rights

Seens to me you're the one pullin' the wool over his own eyes.

I don't care.

Case in point: if you truly don't care, why continue the conversation?

[Harbal]

Here it says...

Empathy is not morality or the foundation of morality. Morality is acting in accordance with recognizing the other guy has the same right to his life, liberty, and property as you have to yours. Empathy might help that along, but empathy is not necessary to that recognition.

I think it no coincidence that your belief in your right to your life, liberty and property corresponds with your strong wish to keep your life, liberty and property, and your recognition that others will feel the same is due to your empathy, so I would say empathy is not only necessary to morality, but the crucial factor in it.

[henry quirk]

I would say empathy is not only necessary to morality, but the crucial factor in it.

Not so. For example: I have no empathy for you. For a variety of reasons, I actively dislike you. But, I'll still refrain from violating your life, liberty, or property.

If empathy were the sum if it, as Atla sez, or were truly important to it, as you say, then morality would be for crap. It would just be the personal opinion you both seem to think it is.

Morality is what is permissible between and among persons, not what is permissible between and among persons we like or feel for.

Empathy can grease the wheel, but it's not the wheel.

[Immanuel Can]

P1 If some physical effects (events) have physical causes, then physical causation exists.
P2 Some physical effects (events) have physical causes.
C Therefore, physical causation exists.

Well, what does this prove? Something that nobody ever doubted. Everybody knows that SOME things have physical causes. A rock falls off a mountain, for example. But, if I might risk sounding skeptical here, so what? There isn't even the possiblity of sentience being involved in that sort of event, and it's really the ability of sentience to commence a causal chain that we're debating. The existence of "some physical events" that "have physical causes" was never in doubt -- at least, not to me.

Something to ponder.

Hmmm...not really. It's really an argument nobody here is having.

[Harbal]

I would say empathy is not only necessary to morality, but the crucial factor in it.

Not so. For example: I have no empathy for you. For a variety of reasons, I actively dislike you.

How could you say such a thing, henry, how could you?

[Immanuel Can]

I would say empathy is not only necessary to morality, but the crucial factor in it.

Not so. For example: I have no empathy for you. For a variety of reasons, I actively dislike you. But, I'll still refrain from violating your life, liberty, or property.

If empathy were the sum if it, as Atla sez, or were truly important to it, as you say, then morality would be for crap. It would just be the personal opinion you both seem to think it is.

Morality is what is permissible between and among persons, not what is permissible between and among persons we like or feel for.

Empathy can grease the wheel, but it's not the wheel.

I'd even argue, as Paul Bloom has cogently argued in his book Against Empathy, that "empathy" can be highly toxic. We know that many mass-murderers serving life sentences have scores of "empathetic" women writing them love letters, believing they can turn the 'bad boy' with their wonderful love. "Empathetic"? No doubt. Sane? Possibly not. And narcissists and confidence men routinely use empathy to manipulate their victims; they're masters of doing it. And the fact that their victims are filled with emotional sweetness over them, or reluctance to hurt their precious feelings, does not prevent them from abusing their victims.

You've got to be empathetic with the right kind of person or thing, or it's just bad news. It's certainly not the hallmark of wisdom to empathize with soembody who's not deserving of empathy.

At most, "empathy" is a description of how a person is privately feeling while he or she is doing something; but it's neither proof of her integrity nor of her intelligence...just of her susceptibility to her own feelings. These feelings have no automatic or causal relation to justice, fairness, truth, or any other virtuous outcome.

[Atla]

so I would say empathy is not only necessary to morality, but the crucial factor in it.

I think it's a little complicated (I don't claim to have this topic figured out with any certainty). In people who have normally functioning empathy that is both felt and thought, the fully working conscience is established, and the feelings/sensations of moral rightness and wrongness are the core part of the conscience.

All the moral systems are deep down based on the feelings/sensations of moral rightness and wrongness. That's what makes them "moral", no matter how much other stuff gets added to them. Otherwise they are just a bunch of rules.

Many people who don't have fully functioning empathy can still experience some semblence of moral rightness and wrongness. But they often don't really associate them with others. These people are in a grey area. Henry might be in this group.

Those amoral 4% however typically have no empathy that is felt, no conscience, no feelings/sensations of moral rightness and wrongness at all.

Psychopaths are the most shocking, they have their empathy circuits turned off but can turn them on when asked to do so. But that doesn't seem to be enough to maintain a conscience.

[Immanuel Can]

Psychopaths are the most shocking, they have their empathy circuits turned off but can turn them on when asked to do so. But that doesn't seem to be enough to maintain a conscience.

Narcissists, con men and bullies aren't just people without empathy. They are often people who are accutely aware of empathy in others, and how it is provoked, and how to use that for their own ends. They know how to appear full of emotions, and appearances of tenderness and good-feelings themselves, so as to create feelings of trust and alliance with their victims, so that they can exploit them all the more fully.

Conscience, rightness and empathy are not automatic partners. Empathy can be no more than a soft-heartedness that rots the head. Or it can be that radar the exploiter uses to gouge the gullible. Empathy may be good; or it may be very, very bad.

[Dubious]

But despite all manner of different outlooks and religions and states and notions about everything, the one universal is this deep in the bone intuition every person has: my life, my liberty, my property are mine.

Ever think of designing your own flag of independence from the state which constitutionally guarantees your life liberty and happiness, placing it over your home or business thus proclaiming your own Independence Day from a system that would thus encumber you!

I'd help you with the design but I don't think you'd agree to an upside down swastika!

[Atla]

Psychopaths are the most shocking, they have their empathy circuits turned off but can turn them on when asked to do so. But that doesn't seem to be enough to maintain a conscience.

Narcissists, con men and bullies aren't just people without empathy. They are often people who are accutely aware of empathy in others, and how it is provoked, and how to use that for their own ends. They know how to appear full of emotions, and appearances of tenderness and good-feelings themselves, so as to create feelings of trust and alliance with their victims, so that they can exploit them all the more fully.

Conscience, rightness and empathy are not automatic partners. Empathy can be no more than a soft-heartedness that rots the head. Or it can be that radar the exploiter uses to gouge the gullible. Empathy may be good; or it may be very, very bad.

Normally, empathy has both cognitive and emotional (thought and felt) parts, but these people usually only have the former one.

[Immanuel Can]

Psychopaths are the most shocking, they have their empathy circuits turned off but can turn them on when asked to do so. But that doesn't seem to be enough to maintain a conscience.

Narcissists, con men and bullies aren't just people without empathy. They are often people who are accutely aware of empathy in others, and how it is provoked, and how to use that for their own ends. They know how to appear full of emotions, and appearances of tenderness and good-feelings themselves, so as to create feelings of trust and alliance with their victims, so that they can exploit them all the more fully.

Conscience, rightness and empathy are not automatic partners. Empathy can be no more than a soft-heartedness that rots the head. Or it can be that radar the exploiter uses to gouge the gullible. Empathy may be good; or it may be very, very bad.

Normally, empathy has both cognitive and emotional (thought and felt) parts, but these people usually only have the former one.

That's the problem. Empathy untethered from intellect and morality can be a real liability. What a person "feels" is entirely up to them, and is private: but what it being "thought" as a result is much more decisive of what will happen, and can have lots of external consequences that aren't very nice, both for the exploiter and the exploited.

[Atla]

Narcissists, con men and bullies aren't just people without empathy. They are often people who are accutely aware of empathy in others, and how it is provoked, and how to use that for their own ends. They know how to appear full of emotions, and appearances of tenderness and good-feelings themselves, so as to create feelings of trust and alliance with their victims, so that they can exploit them all the more fully.

Conscience, rightness and empathy are not automatic partners. Empathy can be no more than a soft-heartedness that rots the head. Or it can be that radar the exploiter uses to gouge the gullible. Empathy may be good; or it may be very, very bad.

Normally, empathy has both cognitive and emotional (thought and felt) parts, but these people usually only have the former one.

That's the problem. Empathy untethered from intellect and morality can be a real liability. What a person "feels" is entirely up to them, and is private: but what it being "thought" as a result is much more decisive of what will happen, and can have lots of external consequences that aren't very nice, both for the exploiter and the exploited.

Please stop pretending to know what a conscience is, it's not working.

[Immanuel Can]

Normally, empathy has both cognitive and emotional (thought and felt) parts, but these people usually only have the former one.

That's the problem. Empathy untethered from intellect and morality can be a real liability. What a person "feels" is entirely up to them, and is private: but what it being "thought" as a result is much more decisive of what will happen, and can have lots of external consequences that aren't very nice, both for the exploiter and the exploited.

Please stop pretending to know what a conscience is, it's not working.

I wasn't talking about "conscience." I was pointing out that empathy isn't actually a good thing all the time. It's often empathy with the wrong thing, for the wrong reasons.

[Atla]

That's the problem. Empathy untethered from intellect and morality can be a real liability. What a person "feels" is entirely up to them, and is private: but what it being "thought" as a result is much more decisive of what will happen, and can have lots of external consequences that aren't very nice, both for the exploiter and the exploited.

Please stop pretending to know what a conscience is, it's not working.

I wasn't talking about "conscience." I was pointing out that empathy isn't actually a good thing all the time. It's often empathy with the wrong thing, for the wrong reasons.

Well duh