What philosophy offends you most?

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Consul
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

Post by Consul »

GE Morton wrote: June 21st, 2022, 11:22 pmOf course I reject the taxpayer-financed welfare state, or any other tax which finances programs from which the taxpayer derives no benefit, or which seizes wealth from those who earned for transfer to someone who did not.
That people in need benefit from the taxpayer-financed welfare state is its raison d’être. Of course, if you are rich and healthy throughout your life, then you are independent of it and you don't benefit personally from it; but then your tax money will help other people who are not so lucky in life.

What about people who are willing yet unable to earn money for themselves owing to a physical or mental illness or disability, or people with a badly paid job that doesn't enable them and their families to survive with the money they earn? Don't they deserve to be taken care of by a welfare state? Don't they have a right to live in dignity too?
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

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Consul wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 2:15 am
GE Morton wrote: June 21st, 2022, 11:22 pmOf course I reject the taxpayer-financed welfare state, or any other tax which finances programs from which the taxpayer derives no benefit, or which seizes wealth from those who earned for transfer to someone who did not.
That people in need benefit from the taxpayer-financed welfare state is its raison d’être. Of course, if you are rich and healthy throughout your life, then you are independent of it and you don't benefit personally from it; but then your tax money will help other people who are not so lucky in life.

What about people who are willing yet unable to earn money for themselves owing to a physical or mental illness or disability, or people with a badly paid job that doesn't enable them and their families to survive with the money they earn? Don't they deserve to be taken care of by a welfare state? Don't they have a right to live in dignity too?
Not in the opinion of sociopaths/libertarians.
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

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Consul wrote: June 21st, 2022, 6:22 pm "Deep diversity" multiculturalism with its cultural and moral relativism undermines social cohesion, but even modern societies (especially qua nations) aren't just heaps or jumbles of "unrelated, independent, autonomous individuals." There are still social and emotional bonds. Yes, society is a society of individuals, and it is not one organism with a collective consciousness; but, as the sociologist Norbert Elias puts it, there are "figurations of interdependent individuals", with individuals being embedded in different kinds of "nexuses of interweavement" ("Verflechtungszusammenhänge").
OK, perhaps society is "not one organism with a collective consciousness", but it can often look and act as if it were.

I offer this only as an observation; it's too complex to say one way or the other, and there's no gain in "yes, it is", "no, it isn't".
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

Post by Gertie »

GE
Gertie wrote: ↑June 15th, 2022, 2:56 pm
Nothing you say here contradicts what I said. Subjects create knowledge (via/as subjective experience) and we test its reliability inter-subjectively.
Saying we "create" knowledge is, for most knowledge, inaccurate. As Consul said, we acquire it; it comes to us unbidden and with no effort on our part.
No. That's a linguistic habit. The tree doesn't give me its knowledge when I look at it because presumably the tree doesn't know anything.

Only Subjects are Knowers, we each know directly via our interaction with the world which results in us each creating experiential representations of that world. And we compare notes with other Subjects about their private models to create a shared model of the world we share. This shouldn't be controversial.


Intersubjectivity is one way to test the reliability of knowledge, but not the only way --- constancy is another. That is the only available way for knowers in non-social settings (such as Crusoe). Crusoe will know where the beach is on his island, because every time he walks for 10 minutes in a certain direction he reaches it. No confirmation by other people is necessary for him to know that, or for him to consider that knowledge reliable.
Each of us create consistent, coherent models on the basis of utility from the cacophany of sensory and other experiential states which would otherwise be unintelligible and useless. (Seth calls consciousness an organism's prediction mechanism). But in order to create a shared model of our shared world we use third person inter-subjective falsification. Crusoe might be having a dream, he might be deaf and not know sound, he might be colour blind, psychotic, etc. We can inter-subjectively deal with anomalies from our shared norms, but our shared norms are still limited and flawed models we create.
Same issue. "Objective facts about the world" are not flawed or models of reality. That Paris is the capital of France, that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that I have five fingers on each hand are "objective facts about the world" and are neither flawed nor models. They are features or aspects of experienced reality (and that is the only sort of "reality" deserving of that name).
You're conflating ontological reality with our subjective experience of that (presumed) reality, and calling them both ''reality''.
Any "ontological reality" is our invention, a hypothetical reality we postulate to to explain experienced reality. I.e., Kant's noumena. And it is presumptuous to consider experienced reality to be "experience of" the noumenal reality. We have no idea what sort of relationship there may be between experienced reality and the noumena, beyond the raison d'etre for postulating the noumena --- that it somehow causes the reality we experience. We can say nothing more about it.
Fair point. But if we're to escape solipsism we each have to assume our experience represents some ontological reality. As soon as you said ''we'' you'd made that assumption, and that's fair enough otherwise you're just talking to yourself.

Same with Kant I think, as soon as he generalises about ''our'' phenomenal experience rather than his own, he's made the assumption other people (experiencing subjects) exist. He's assumed there is an ontological world containing other Subjects. And his knowledge of that comes packaged within a whole lot of other experienced knowledge too, that trees and gravity and Paris exist,etc.

Unless he has a way out of that or I'm misunderstanding? Otherwise Kant's already assumed an ontological world exists and has cherry picked from the experiential package of his own experience the actual existence of the conscious experience of other existing Subjects to treat as ontologically real. (As opposed to their bodies with fingers, trees, gravity, etc which he doubts).


The experience is real, it's a real model/representation of our interactions with the real ontological world.
That "real ontological world" is a theoretical world --- one we have invented.
If you disentangle this I think you're actually left with either -

A) Your personal experience represents something else (a world independant of your experience) which ontologically exists, or -

2) All that exists is your own experience.

Either solipsism is true, or there is an ontological world your experience is representing. We each can't know the answer to that, but solipsism literally isn't worth talking about, so we assume a real world exists which we can inter-subjectively compare experiential notes about. Having made that assumption, we're left with the problem of knowing how accurate our individual and shared representations are. And we devise methodologies like predictability and inter-subjective third person falsifiability to assign more or less credibility and value.

But the problem remains that we are flawed and limited observers and thinkers who create models of the real world we interact with.
A human experience of seeing a tree isn't a tree, it's a flawed and limited experiential representation of something we compare notes about, and call ''a tree''.
The tree we see (and can touch, climb, savor its fruit), is the "real tree." That those sensory experiences "represent" something beyond them is an assumption --- a theory --- we've conjured up (though it's a pretty good theory).
If ''we'' see the tree, there is already an assumed world containing other seeing Subjects, right?. The choice here is solipsism, or a real world exists containing experiencing subjects who each create representations of it, then compare notes to agree something we call a tree exists which we similarly see, touch, etc.
We can postulate other "realities," of course, and indeed are forced to do so, in order to get a satisfying explanation for experienced reality. But we can say nothing about that "noumenal" reality. We can take our experienced reality to be neurogenic model of the noumenal reality, but we have no grounds for assuming any tweaks we make to that model get us any "closer" to the noumenal reality. Improvements to the model only make experienced reality a bit more coherent and comprehensive. That is enough to justify them.
It's enough to justify them as working models of the ontological reality they represent. And the more consistently detailed and predictive the models we create are, the more fine tuned they become at detailing our Subjective interactions with the world. That increased understanding of the interaction in itself might be telling us more about ontological reality. It's a reasonable, but untestable, assumption.
I agree. We just have to keep in mind that is an assumption, a "working hypothesis." And it works pretty well.
Right.
We've found ways of discovering Russell's table isn't solid, brown with defined edges - that's an improved understanding of the flaws and limitations of how we create the experiential representation of a table, which looks like a step closer to ontological reality. Maybe.
Oh, no. The table is still solid, brown, has defined edges, etc. What our physical theories do is provide us explanations for "solidity," color, geometric properties, etc. Those explanations are not more "real" than the experienced properties; they're less "real," being theoretical. But highly useful.
(Again, as soon as you say ''we'', ''us'', ''our'' you've assumed the ontological world exists -the options are solipsism or a real world exists containing other Subjects who are known to us in the same experiential package as tres and tables and every other experience).

I think what you say here would be right if ontological reality is fundamentally relational - by which I mean that there's no 'set' reality of the world to be discovered, rather the fundamental nature of everything exists only in relation to everything else. So to feel a table as solid is as real as to think about a table as made mostly of empty space. QM might be pointing us that way, I dunno.

Otherwise the other explanation for experiencing the table as solid is that we are flawed and limited observers of ontological reality. In other words our direct experiential knowledge of the table is a limited and flawed model we create of the ontological reality of the table.


It's a Subjective experience! Limited, flawed and even when that's accounted for you might be in error. The experience of having 5 fingers is what you know to be real.
"Limited, flawed" --- in what way? "Experience of X" is the same thing as "Knowing that X." Knowledge by acqaintance just is experience.
Yes! Knowledge by acquaintance is experience, experience is knowing. There is no other knowing than experientially by Subjects. If this experience results from interacting with a real ontological world it is either a perfect and complete knowing of that world or it is limited and flawed. Subjects have a specific pov, and when Russell moves around his table his knowing of the table changes, because his experience creates a different perspective.

There is one type of knowledge we can file under Authoritative - knowledge of our own experience. This tells us such authoritative knowledge is possible, but strictly limited to first hand subjective experience. Every other type of knowledge is based on assumptions made about the content of that experience, and comparing notes to assess working reliability.
I agree. But your knowledge that you have five fingers on each of two hands just is your experience of that fact --- you can feel them, move them, count them. Those experiences constitute your knowledge of them.
And no knowledge would exist if Subjective experience didn't exist.
Well, that is true. All knowledge is subjective. I can no more know what you know than I can know what you think, or feel, or what red looks like to you --- unless you tell me. There can be information that is unknown, but no unknown knowledge. To count as knowledge it must be known to someone.
We pretty much agree here.

Because Subjects create all knowledge via/as experience.
No, we don't create (most) knowledge. "Creation" implies intention, and some willful acts to realize that intention. But most of the knowledge we possess just comes to us, unsolicited and unexpected.
Knowing is something experiencing Subjects do, whether it's intentional or not.
What I think PM importantly does is ask us to to take seriously the flawed and limited nature of Subjective experience as the basis for all of those categories, and then grapple with what justifies those categories. When no two Subject's models of the world are identical, because knowledge itself is a form of experience. There is no Authoritative shared model, just ways of categorising the value of knowledge-experience by comparing notes and making judgements. That responsibility lies with us, methodological justifications are tools we use as we deem appropriate.
Oh, but there is an "Authoritative shared model." It is called "science." It is authoritative, not because it is shared, but because its claims for the most part are objective, i.e., publicly confirmable. That is criterion for any model to be deemed "authoritative." If someone constructs or adopts an alternative model whose claims are not publicly confirmable, it will not be authoritative. Contrary to PM, not all world models are equal; some are authoritative and some are nonsense.

''Publically confirmable'' = inter-subjectively comparing notes. When something is observable and measurable this third-person comparison is fairly straightforward, tho it doesn't mean we don't all just share the same flaws and limitations. This third-person falsifiability is what we generally treat as objectively true. But even objective truth is really just a form of inter-subjective agreement by flawed and limited observers and thinkers.

Experiencing Subjects are essential, foundational, to all knowledge. And our knowledge reflects the nature of being a Subject as much as it represents the nature of the world - in that it's what is created when experiencing subjects interact with the world. (Including knowing you have a material body with 5 fingers, a brain which is connected to experience, etc).
Again, wrong criterion. We can't speak of the noumena, and that includes saying what is true of it, or how close our models come to representing it. We have no way to assess that. The criterion for deciding whether our models are adequate is how well they work in explaining experienced phenomena.
We compare notes and use tools like third person falsifiable observation and measurement, and find commonalities and differences. The commonalities become part of our shared world model. How those individual and shared models relate to ontological reality independantly of Subjective experience is ultimately unknowable.

First person knowledge - we each create an experiential model of the world through interacting with it.

Third person knowledge - we compare notes about our experience of what is third person falsifiable (observable and measurable physical stuff I think)

God's Eye Knowledge - complete and perfect omniscience which isn't available to Subjects with a first person perspective.
The noumena is unknowable. But the criterion for the adequacy or accuracy of a model is not how close it comes to "ontological reality" --- which is a theoretical "reality," a will-o-the-wisp --- but how well it integrates empirical knowledge (knowledge by acquaintance) and allows us to predict future experience.
I get your point. Not sure. We can correct our own anomalies, we can theorise beyond what is observable, note patterns, make predictions, etc in meticulous detail. It seems to me this all likely reflects some aspects of ontological reality, if only in a limited and flawed way.
Well, now you're entering a different realm of discourse, the realm of feelings and affective reactions to facts, rather than the facts themselves. That the sun rises in the East and sets in the West is an objective fact, and knowledge. What it "means" to different people, how different people feel about it or think or believe about it or react to it, is a different subject. None of those subjective consequences alter the fact.
To call it a ''different realm of discourse'' is to categorise types of knowing-experience, right? ''Facts'' are what we call one type of knowing-experience which are justified in particular ways - third person falsifiable subjective commonalities which comprise our shared model. Which we consider reliably consistent and predictive - until it isn't.
As I said above, third-part verification is not the only way we distinguish facts from fantasies or delusions. Independence and constancy are also sufficient. Facts are not social constructs, and do not require or presume a social context. Claims alleging facts --- propositions asserting them --- do assume and require a social context to be deemed "objective." Propositions per se assume a social context --- why forumlate or assert one if there is no one to hear it?
We each have our own created world model according to our own experience, no two are identical. We create a shared/social model through comparing notes and categorising types of knowledge we give more or less shared credibility and value to.

There are different types of discourse afforded different types of authority. We should all easily agree on third person falsifiable issues amenable to observation and measurement, I ought to agree that when I move around Russell's table it is my perspective which changes not the table, that the table is mainly empty space even tho it feels solid, etc. But when it comes to areas like psychology, social issues, art, etc we don't have that observation and measurement falsification tool. We have a tradition of authoritative figures making their best guesses inevitably drawing from their own understanding and experience. Even creating the language that discourse is framed in.


Ignoring that isn't helpful, it perpetuates narrow (if often unintentional) bias. You ignored my points about Hobbes' mum and Shakespeare's sister. Our culture, the knowledge air we breathe, isn't someimpartial recording of the world, it's models authored and adapted by the individuals and groups afforded the ability and authority to do so.


PM goes some places which look daft to me too, but we see much exploratory daftness in new ways of re-framing society till new norms emerge which knock off the odd edges and don't rock the boat too much. Our newly adjusted shared model. We're still in a PM limbo I think, and the challenges it presents require responsible reflection. Not defensive dismissal or to take it as license to make everything about me-me-me.
But yes much received wisdom isn't third person falsifiable via observation and measurement. Some people have/had positions where-by they establish what constitutes reliable knowledge which we have come to conform around. They are considered authoritative.
Well, that's true enough. People often do "consider" authoritative claims and doctrines which are not authoritative, per the above criterion.
Our culture is soaked with bias which continues to be taught as authoritative received wisdom.
Nonsense is pervasive in all cultures, and always will be. But we do have tools for identifying it as such and refuting it. PM assumes we do not.
Oh come on. It invites us to think about what knowledge is, who constructs it, how that plays out in a world of Subjects. The Death of the Author is metaphorically akin to the Death of God as the reliable authoritative voice. Shared knowledge is an inter-subjective process of creation by flawed first person Subjects, some of whom are given special privilege in the discourse.
Meh. Evolution Theory is similarly self-refuting in that it tells us we're incapable of creating true theories. (the theologian philosopher Plantinga has a nifty take on this). Logic, our metaphysical toolkit, is refuted if we're designed for utility. Knowledge is created by Subjects, such paradoxes are the nature of the beast. PM takes that on.
There are no "true theories." Theories are only good or bad, depending upon how well they predict future experience. "True" and "false" are properties of propositions, not theories. Nor does evolutionary theory "tell us we're incapable of creating true theories." Where did you get that nugget? Evolutionary theory has nothing to say about such matters.
This isn't difficult - if we evolved for evolutionary utility rather than perfect and complete knowledge, then we are flawed and limited creators of theories - including evolution. We somehow have to integrate such paradoxes of being Subjects into our models.

And PM certainly doesn't "take anything on," in the sense of endeavoring to solve a problem. Instead it seeks to "cancel" the difference between sense and nonsense, so that the nonsense it is can be considered wisdom.

PM is what happens when the old framings no longer hold water, don't do the work of the shared model. Either we deal with it, think through the implications and find ways of dealing with what it means to be a Subject, or retreat to tidy, comfortable authorities which work for those with most say. Right now there's a horrible, irresponsible tribal tug of war going on and we're all over the place.
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

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Gertie wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 7:40 am But if we're to escape solipsism we each have to assume our experience represents some ontological reality.
People say this sort of thing all the time. I've never been sure why, though. Solipsism is one of many possibilities; it could be true. We all think it is not true, but that is wishful thinking. What we actually know is that it might be right, and it might not, and we don't have any means to discover which. So why do we assume, without discussion or even serious consideration, that solipsism should and must be "escaped"?

For me, the lesson of solipsism is that it is possible. It is one of many possibilities, but it is possible. Much as we would rather it was not, apparently. I wonder why? The universe, from our individual point of view, would be indistinguishable if solipsism was true, just as it would be if we were brains-in-vats, or as it would be if Donald Trump ever became President! 🤣 ... 😮
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

Post by Gertie »

Pattern-chaser wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 9:06 am
Gertie wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 7:40 am But if we're to escape solipsism we each have to assume our experience represents some ontological reality.
People say this sort of thing all the time. I've never been sure why, though. Solipsism is one of many possibilities; it could be true. We all think it is not true, but that is wishful thinking. What we actually know is that it might be right, and it might not, and we don't have any means to discover which. So why do we assume, without discussion or even serious consideration, that solipsism should and must be "escaped"?

For me, the lesson of solipsism is that it is possible. It is one of many possibilities, but it is possible. Much as we would rather it was not, apparently. I wonder why? The universe, from our individual point of view, would be indistinguishable if solipsism was true, just as it would be if we were brains-in-vats, or as it would be if Donald Trump ever became President! 🤣 ... 😮
Steady now, there's no possible world Donald Trump could be president!

Yep I agree there's no way to know if solipsism is true, that's just the reality of being a Subject. But if it is I'm talking to myself not you, you're just content of my experience not real - so it's something worth acknowledging but is a bit of a conversational dead end. :wink:
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

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Gertie wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 9:22 am But if [solipsism is actual] I'm talking to myself not you, you're just content of my experience not real...
The universe would be indistinguishable from the universe as we see and live in it now. So you would still be talking to 'me'. Nothing has changed, and you are talking to me now, yes? Why would you stop? There would have been no announcement that solipsism would, in future, be the Source of All. Solipsism would be the basis of the universe, and it would always have been thus. Your concerns seem not to apply...


Gertie wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 9:22 am ...but is a bit of a conversational dead end. :wink:

Indeed it is. 🙂
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

Post by GE Morton »

Consul wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 2:15 am
What about people who are willing yet unable to earn money for themselves owing to a physical or mental illness or disability, or people with a badly paid job that doesn't enable them and their families to survive with the money they earn? Don't they deserve to be taken care of by a welfare state? Don't they have a right to live in dignity too?
No, to both. No one "deserves" to be taken care of by anybody, or to anything merely because they exist, or due to natural facts about them. Deserts ensue from merit, from acts of the agent that are beneficial, that meet some challenge, or are praiseworthy for some other reason. E.g., the Olympic sprinter who wins his event deserves the Gold Medal; the worker who puts in his 40 hours deserves his paycheck; the 3rd grader who aces her spelling test deserves a gold star; the physicist who discovers radioactivity deserves the Nobel Prize. "Deserts" apply to evil acts as well: the murderer deserves his prison sentence. Deserts are conditional rewards or penalties --- conditional upon some praiseworthy or condemnable actions. They are not not unconditional entitlements or benefits conditioned upon status or benign facts about a person.

Nor does anyone have any "right to live in dignity." Rights are entitlements to things you have acquired righteously, i.e., without inflicting loss or injury on another moral agent. E.g., your life, your body, and anything you produce or discover after arriving in the world, provided you do so without inflicting loss or injury on anyone else. Dignity --- a nebulous term --- is manifested in others attitudes and behaviors toward you, which will largely be reactions to your own attitudes and behaviors, and thus under your control. It is not something to which anyone is entitled, or has any "right."
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

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Pattern-chaser wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 6:57 am
Consul wrote: June 21st, 2022, 6:22 pm "Deep diversity" multiculturalism with its cultural and moral relativism undermines social cohesion, but even modern societies (especially qua nations) aren't just heaps or jumbles of "unrelated, independent, autonomous individuals." There are still social and emotional bonds. Yes, society is a society of individuals, and it is not one organism with a collective consciousness; but, as the sociologist Norbert Elias puts it, there are "figurations of interdependent individuals", with individuals being embedded in different kinds of "nexuses of interweavement" ("Verflechtungszusammenhänge").
OK, perhaps society is "not one organism with a collective consciousness", but it can often look and act as if it were.

I offer this only as an observation; it's too complex to say one way or the other, and there's no gain in "yes, it is", "no, it isn't".
I vote an unequivocal yes. Human societies are indeed organisms, but I would posit that they are at this stage quite unsophisticated, not yet sentient. Basically, societies eat and process information so as to grow and expand their influence, like its denizens and everyone else in the biosphere.

9/11 was an extraordinary example of how an injury to small but fairly central parts of the global community reverberate throughout a huge proportion of humanity. I remember that morning when reports replaced the news on the radio. It was strange, shocking. I walked to the train station and everyone I saw appeared pensive, lost in thought. This was from 16,000 kilometres away!

There are many organisms, eg. sea sponges, plants and fungi that can suffer a major injury to one part, while the rest of the organism continues as if nothing happened. So humanity is more interconnected and sophisticated than they are, with an obvious nervous system analogue. However, I think we can all agree that, if a brain analogue has emerged in humanity, it is still rudimentary, as evidenced by our inability to respond effectively to an existential threat like climate change.
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

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GE Morton wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 7:02 pmNo, to both. No one "deserves" to be taken care of by anybody, or to anything merely because they exist, or due to natural facts about them. Deserts ensue from merit, from acts of the agent that are beneficial, that meet some challenge, or are praiseworthy for some other reason. E.g., the Olympic sprinter who wins his event deserves the Gold Medal; the worker who puts in his 40 hours deserves his paycheck; the 3rd grader who aces her spelling test deserves a gold star; the physicist who discovers radioactivity deserves the Nobel Prize. "Deserts" apply to evil acts as well: the murderer deserves his prison sentence. Deserts are conditional rewards or penalties --- conditional upon some praiseworthy or condemnable actions. They are not not unconditional entitlements or benefits conditioned upon status or benign facts about a person.

Nor does anyone have any "right to live in dignity." Rights are entitlements to things you have acquired righteously, i.e., without inflicting loss or injury on another moral agent. E.g., your life, your body, and anything you produce or discover after arriving in the world, provided you do so without inflicting loss or injury on anyone else. Dignity --- a nebulous term --- is manifested in others attitudes and behaviors toward you, which will largely be reactions to your own attitudes and behaviors, and thus under your control. It is not something to which anyone is entitled, or has any "right."
I don't endorse socialist egalitarianism with its total rejection of meritocracy, which doesn't only demand equality of opportunity but also equality of outcome ("equity"). On the other hand, there is such a thing as "the myth of meritocracy", because the truth is that the two main roads to wealth aren't hard work or personal achievements, but inheritance and stock-market speculation. What's the merit in being a child of rich parents? If merit determines desert, then nothing is more undeserved then inherited wealth. And what's the merit in having one's stockbroker fill up one's bank account by pushing some buttons at the right time? Is that money well-deserved? I don't think so.

Do you seriously think that if someone has a bad life in poverty, illness, or loneliness due to bad luck—such that s/he isn't morally responsible for it—, then s/he doesn't deserve any better life?
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

Post by GE Morton »

Sy Borg wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 8:34 pm
I vote an unequivocal yes. Human societies are indeed organisms, but I would posit that they are at this stage quite unsophisticated, not yet sentient. Basically, societies eat and process information so as to grow and expand their influence, like its denizens and everyone else in the biosphere.
Human societies are not organisms; they are complex adaptive systems (CAS's). Other CAS's are weather, economies, organic evolution, the internet. A CAS is a system of autonomous but interacting agents whose interactions propagate, prompting adaptations by other agents, which in the aggregate tend to preserve a dynamic but meta-stable equilibrium. The differences between an organism and a CAS are:

1. Organisms adhere to a design --- a blueprint --- which precedes them and guides their construction and governs their function. Biological organisms are the prototypes, of course, but complex machines qualify also. An animal is "built" according to a design coded in its DNA; an airplane or a skyscraper from actual blueprints. Once built, an organism is stable, though subject, of course, to external forces and entropy. CAS's have no design; their structure at any given moment results from random movements and interactions of their constitutive elements, and is constantly changing.

2. Organisms are constituted from specialized parts designed to fulfill a particular role in the whole, e.g., muscle cells, nerve cells, liver cells forming discrete functional components in an animal; steel beams, concrete panels, pipes, conduits, elevators, all made from different materials, in a skyscraper. The constituents of CAS's tend to be of all one or sometimes a few types, who are "generalists" and can take on any role, join to form meta-stable structures within the system --- oxygen, nitrogen water vapor molecules in the atmosphere, which can form air currents, cyclones, tornados, thunderstorms; or people in societies, who can form cities, countries, alliances, corporations, teams and numerous other smaller groups, all of which, like storms, are temporary and subject to disruption by internal dissolution or envelopment by larger structures.

3. The structure and lifecycles of organisms --- though not their individual behaviors --- are predictable, those of CAS's are not. When a baby is born we can predict pretty well how long it will live (if not killed early by a random event) and what changes it will undergo as it moves through its life cycle. But we cannot predict what the weather will be like a month from now or how human societies will look a century from now.

Confusing CAS's with organisms leads one to attribute properties to the former they don't have and will never have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

Post by Leontiskos »

Consul wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 9:16 pm
GE Morton wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 7:02 pmNo, to both. No one "deserves" to be taken care of by anybody, or to anything merely because they exist, or due to natural facts about them. Deserts ensue from merit, from acts of the agent that are beneficial, that meet some challenge, or are praiseworthy for some other reason. E.g., the Olympic sprinter who wins his event deserves the Gold Medal; the worker who puts in his 40 hours deserves his paycheck; the 3rd grader who aces her spelling test deserves a gold star; the physicist who discovers radioactivity deserves the Nobel Prize. "Deserts" apply to evil acts as well: the murderer deserves his prison sentence. Deserts are conditional rewards or penalties --- conditional upon some praiseworthy or condemnable actions. They are not not unconditional entitlements or benefits conditioned upon status or benign facts about a person.

Nor does anyone have any "right to live in dignity." Rights are entitlements to things you have acquired righteously, i.e., without inflicting loss or injury on another moral agent. E.g., your life, your body, and anything you produce or discover after arriving in the world, provided you do so without inflicting loss or injury on anyone else. Dignity --- a nebulous term --- is manifested in others attitudes and behaviors toward you, which will largely be reactions to your own attitudes and behaviors, and thus under your control. It is not something to which anyone is entitled, or has any "right."
I don't endorse socialist egalitarianism with its total rejection of meritocracy, which doesn't only demand equality of opportunity but also equality of outcome ("equity"). On the other hand, there is such a thing as "the myth of meritocracy", because the truth is that the two main roads to wealth aren't hard work or personal achievements, but inheritance and stock-market speculation. What's the merit in being a child of rich parents? If merit determines desert, then nothing is more undeserved then inherited wealth. And what's the merit in having one's stockbroker fill up one's bank account by pushing some buttons at the right time? Is that money well-deserved? I don't think so.

Do you seriously think that if someone has a bad life in poverty, illness, or loneliness due to bad luck—such that s/he isn't morally responsible for it—, then s/he doesn't deserve any better life?
But it seems that GE would straightforwardly assert that an inheritance is not merited. Further, I have never seen him commit to the view that everything which one receives must be merited, so this poses no problem for him.

He really does have the better part of the argument here, and he abides by the true definition of words much more carefully than his interlocutors do. That's laudable. For example, by what definition of desert does a person deserve to not have bad luck? These are equivocations, and are likely at bottom borrowings from a providential metaphysics.
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

Post by Sy Borg »

GE Morton wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 11:17 pm
Sy Borg wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 8:34 pm
I vote an unequivocal yes. Human societies are indeed organisms, but I would posit that they are at this stage quite unsophisticated, not yet sentient. Basically, societies eat and process information so as to grow and expand their influence, like its denizens and everyone else in the biosphere.
Human societies are not organisms; they are complex adaptive systems (CAS's). Other CAS's are weather, economies, organic evolution, the internet. A CAS is a system of autonomous but interacting agents whose interactions propagate, prompting adaptations by other agents, which in the aggregate tend to preserve a dynamic but meta-stable equilibrium. The differences between an organism and a CAS are:

1. Organisms adhere to a design --- a blueprint --- which precedes them and guides their construction and governs their function. Biological organisms are the prototypes, of course, but complex machines qualify also. An animal is "built" according to a design coded in its DNA; an airplane or a skyscraper from actual blueprints. Once built, an organism is stable, though subject, of course, to external forces and entropy. CAS's have no design; their structure at any given moment results from random movements and interactions of their constitutive elements, and is constantly changing.

2. Organisms are constituted from specialized parts designed to fulfill a particular role in the whole, e.g., muscle cells, nerve cells, liver cells forming discrete functional components in an animal; steel beams, concrete panels, pipes, conduits, elevators, all made from different materials, in a skyscraper. The constituents of CAS's tend to be of all one or sometimes a few types, who are "generalists" and can take on any role, join to form meta-stable structures within the system --- oxygen, nitrogen water vapor molecules in the atmosphere, which can form air currents, cyclones, tornados, thunderstorms; or people in societies, who can form cities, countries, alliances, corporations, teams and numerous other smaller groups, all of which, like storms, are temporary and subject to disruption by internal dissolution or envelopment by larger structures.

3. The structure and lifecycles of organisms --- though not their individual behaviors --- are predictable, those of CAS's are not. When a baby is born we can predict pretty well how long it will live (if not killed early by a random event) and what changes it will undergo as it moves through its life cycle. But we cannot predict what the weather will be like a month from now or how human societies will look a century from now.

Confusing CAS's with organisms leads one to attribute properties to the former they don't have and will never have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system
Mere technicalities. The behaviour of our own CAS is predictable enough. It is increasingly working to spread its influence, where it will be sending blueprints of Earthly features and sending them to other worlds, where local resources can be used to 3D print the Earthly structures according to the blueprints.

Like organisms, there is a top-down and bottom-up synergy in the biosphere (and at least parts of the geosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere).

The CAS has a number of elements too, structured into a wide range of industries (just as cells and organs have varying functions) and communities.

Humans are inside looking out, hence the tendency not to notice what they are doing collectively as humanity, outside of obvious exigencies. We humans are the means by which the Earth can spread its influence, like intelligent gonads. Why should the Earth's nature differ from the denizens it produced?
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

Post by GE Morton »

Consul wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 9:16 pm
I don't endorse socialist egalitarianism with its total rejection of meritocracy, which doesn't only demand equality of opportunity but also equality of outcome ("equity"). On the other hand, there is such a thing as "the myth of meritocracy", because the truth is that the two main roads to wealth aren't hard work or personal achievements, but inheritance and stock-market speculation. What's the merit in being a child of rich parents? If merit determines desert, then nothing is more undeserved then inherited wealth. And what's the merit in having one's stockbroker fill up one's bank account by pushing some buttons at the right time? Is that money well-deserved? I don't think so.
No, one does not "deserve" an inheritance. Nor does one "deserve" any sort of luck, good or bad. But there is a difference between deserts and entitlements: a desert is an earned reward (or punishment); an entitlement is a morally defensible claim. Deserts imply entitlements, but entitlements don't imply deserts. That is because one can be entitled to something he did not earn: all that is necessary for a claim to be morally defensible is that the thing claimed was acquired without inflicting loss or injury on another moral agent. So if a diamond-laden meteorite falls in your back yard and you take possession of it, you are entitled to it --- because you inflicted no loss or injury on anyone else by that acquisition. Similarly with inheritances, or lotto winnings, and even your life, body, good health, talents, etc. --- you earned, deserved, none of those, but since you acquired them all without inflicting loss or injury anyone else, you're entitled to them --- you have rights to them (i.e., your acquisitions of them were righteous).

BTW, your claim above that "the two main roads to wealth aren't hard work or personal achievements, but inheritance and stock-market speculation," is false. Without someone's hard work and personal achievement there would be no wealth to inherit, nor any valuable stocks. Wealth has to be produced before it can be inherited. Moreover, according to Forbes and other sources, the fortunes of 70% of US billionaires, and 68% globally, were "self-made."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsand ... e14d0a30c2

https://www.statista.com/statistics/621 ... lionaires/
Do you seriously think that if someone has a bad life in poverty, illness, or loneliness due to bad luck—such that s/he isn't morally responsible for it—, then s/he doesn't deserve any better life?
Answered above. No one deserves luck, good or bad. No one is morally responsible for bad luck, but neither does one "deserve" a better life merely because he suffered bad luck. Nor does Alfie's bad luck impose any moral obligations on Bruno, or Bruno's good luck create any entitlements for Alfie. Luck has no moral implications.
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Re: What philosophy offends you most?

Post by Consul »

GE Morton wrote: June 23rd, 2022, 11:28 am
Consul wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 9:16 pm I don't endorse socialist egalitarianism with its total rejection of meritocracy, which doesn't only demand equality of opportunity but also equality of outcome ("equity"). On the other hand, there is such a thing as "the myth of meritocracy", because the truth is that the two main roads to wealth aren't hard work or personal achievements, but inheritance and stock-market speculation. What's the merit in being a child of rich parents? If merit determines desert, then nothing is more undeserved then inherited wealth. And what's the merit in having one's stockbroker fill up one's bank account by pushing some buttons at the right time? Is that money well-deserved? I don't think so.
BTW, your claim above that "the two main roads to wealth aren't hard work or personal achievements, but inheritance and stock-market speculation," is false. Without someone's hard work and personal achievement there would be no wealth to inherit, nor any valuable stocks. Wealth has to be produced before it can be inherited. Moreover, according to Forbes and other sources, the fortunes of 70% of US billionaires, and 68% globally, were "self-made."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsand ... e14d0a30c2

https://www.statista.com/statistics/621 ... lionaires/
First of all, I said "the two main roads to wealth" and not "the only two roads to wealth", and I've been referring to the population as a whole.

The billionaires are but a teeny-tiny and hence non-representative percentage of the population. But given those statistics, inheritance still plays a crucial role in 27.5%/29.5% of them. There is also the (Forbes) category "self-made who got a head start from wealthy parents and moneyed background". Alas, the percentage of billionaires in this category isn't mentioned. Moreover, what exactly does "self-made" mean? Does it include the easy way of getting rich through purely financial economy (including stock-market economy) rather than through real economy (i.e. the production, purchase and flow of goods and services)? What's the percentage of "self-made" billionaires who acquired (most of) their wealth through pure money business (input = money & output = more money), including investor business?
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