Philosophy Now Forum

Who you are and what you are is an accident.

This can't be true. Can it? What about ancestry and environment and nurturing. Surely we are what our past history made us?

Or have I misunderstood the post.

I agree MysticRose, you seem to have read my answer of Fri Apr 30, 2010 10:32 pm in this thread.

Maybe but as an intuitive I don’t believe in accidents or coincidences. We might not be in agreement about where we came from or how we got her but THIS is not an accident! We are here and some of us have spent our life trying to figure out the whys and the wherefores! I’m not a negative person but I can’t claim to be an optimist either. The best I can hope for, given my personal circumstances, is to be an optimistic pessimist.

MysticRose wrote:

Who you are and what you are is an accident.

This can't be true. Can it? What about ancestry and environment and nurturing. Surely we are what our past history made us?

Or have I misunderstood the post.

You have misunderstood the post.
The chain of events is accidental; whether you happen to be a peasant farmer in China or the offspring of an oil millionaire in Texas the circumstance is accidental. Whatever happens by environment and nurturing is an accident also.

I think differently even about that causal chain (of events) mainly because of the mystery of consciousness. However, it's not significant in its ethical value whether you as an example of the human kind has been born in South-Africa or Japan or anywhere else.

It's quite unknown to us what exact role consciousness plays in transforming "signals" or creating its own "signals" to act upon in that causal chain.

Not to override the question entirely, but can we earnestly implicate scientific theories into the philosophy of ethics?

Certainly, from the theory proposed, it would seem that persons naturally lack any moral judgment if they are to satisfy the sum over histories (Feynman). However, if we are to incorporate ethics on a multiversal scale, how should we hold those alternate selves accountable for their actions? I think that inevitably this argument breaks down, because if it is to be taken seriously we must have knowledge of what occurs in other universes to hold those alternate individuals accountable. But we do not have access to such knowledge, and therefore we have no moral interest in these alternate individuals. Why should we therefore take such alternate individuals into account with regard to those individuals we do have access to, knowledge of? Even if their actions are a matter of multiversal symmetry, they must still take account for them. If you want an appropriate metaphor: action and reaction.

Note: If there is no choice, there is no morality. Thus the inquiry breaks down before it even begins.