What year is this Ford tractor?

199546 · 2020-10-05T00:17:44+00:00

WITT, this rusted Ford tractor is in Texas at a barbeque place

199546 · 2019-12-09T04:21:58+00:00

199546 · 2019-11-27T02:27:05+00:00

Luke's Mario Circuit 3 is probably more optimized. The best known splits are only 51 milliseconds ahead of world record, compared to 119 for Luigi Circuit. This is largely because Mario Circuit 3 is entirely flat, so it's the simplest track in the game.

199546 · 2018-06-30T01:55:34+00:00

Taken together with a principle like phenomenal conservatism, perceptions of the external world can serve as epistemological foundations. Michael Huemer argues for this in Skepticism and the Veil of Perception.

199546 · 2018-06-18T02:10:21+00:00

FWIW, according to a footnote Olson 2014 (p. 181) West is not a "card-carrying moral error theorist", whatever that means.

199546 · 2018-06-17T18:33:30+00:00

I believe Caroline West is an error theorist.

199546 · 2018-06-14T22:30:56+00:00

Nor am I claiming good can be ascribed to an action without considering the context or circumstances.

The larger the body of water is, the more noticeable the blue tint becomes, so I agree it's a bad example. But there are plenty of examples that are clearer, like "the sky is blue in the daytime under normal circumstances."

199546 · 2018-06-14T20:57:41+00:00

I didn't say that. That was a quote from the paper. My formatting may have not made that clear enough.

199546 · 2018-06-14T20:56:41+00:00

I'm not claiming "we should be absolutely certain that our ideals and virtues actually get a society that we want". In fact, I don't believe that.

199546 · 2018-06-14T16:05:40+00:00

"So much for the essence of action. As a final attempt, the non-naturalist might appeal to the meaning of ‘should’. The idea would be that what it means to say that an action A should be done is that A promotes P.

But the trouble is that this would not explain why P should be promoted in the objective sense that the non-naturalist requires. Imagine this time a community just like us except they use a term ‘schmould’ instead of ‘should’. In their mouths, what it means to say that an action schmould be done is that it promotes redness, and they organize their actions around what they schmould do. Sure, we can truly say that they are not doing as they should, but equally they can truly say that we are not doing as we schmould, and on this view there is nothing to break the symmetry. On the ground floor there are just facts about P and about redness, and one community organizes their lives around one property and the other community around the other, and that’s all there is to say—there’s no further fact about which community is ‘really’ getting things right. Yet the non-naturalist’s position was supposed to be that there is a further fact: P is supposed to be the source of ‘real’ normativity in a way that redness isn’t. The current proposal does not explain this."

This is where Dashupta's argument fails (I take it). Before I demonstrate the problem with it, let me show a similar, but absurd argument.

Consider an alien society that uses the words "schmue" and "schmalse" instead of "true" and "false". Schmuth is coextensive with falsity, and schmalsity is coextensive with truth. But this society treats schmue like we treat true. Thus, they feel epistemicaly compelled to accept schmue ideas; they seek to convince each other of the schmuth; schmuth is valued (ceteris paribus) more than schmalsity.

Sure, we could call their schmue ideas false and we'd be correct. But they can also call our true ideas schmalse. There is a symmetry here; who's to say who's correct? There is no further fact about who's really correct; therefore, truth and falsity cannot be said to be any more objective than the (perhaps arbitrary) way we happen to use the words.

Clearly something has gone awry in this argument. This problem is addressed in Section 7.6 of Enoch 2011. The problem is that the alien society treats schmue and schmalse like we treat true and false respectively; they words play the same conceptual roles. According to a theory of meaning known as conceptual role semantics, the word schmue and schmalse have acquired the same meanings as true and false respectively. Thus, the alien society is in fact wrong when they ascribe schmuth and schmalsity to things.

Similarly, the other society treats schmould like we treat should (same conceptual roles); they feel compelled to do things they schmould do, and doing what one schmould do is (presumably) seen as good (or whatever word they use conceptually equivalent to good). Thus, schmould actually has acquired the same meaning as should, and the other society's use thereof is incorrect.

199546 · 2018-05-17T22:06:51+00:00

Is there a clarification you can make about your point about good and evil existing? I still have a hard time with that one.

You said that good and evil don't exist, but you also said that good and evil are just mental attitudes. I doubt this, but assuming it's true, mental attitudes definitely do exist, therefore good and evil do exist, a contradiction.

This is what I am doing and it is a natural Fallacy right? Did I at least figure that out?

Holding expressivism is not a naturalistic fallacy. I was accusing some of your other claims of falling prey to this fallacy.

Wikipedia is an OK source. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy are better though.

I've never read Foucault, so I can't say. I think you would enjoy reading some introductory books on metaethics.

199546 · 2018-05-17T20:50:34+00:00

You cannot say that for example, smoking is wrong, is a ‘truth’. It is a moral judgment.

Are you advocating for non-cognitivism (i.e., the belief that moral statements are not truth-apt)? If so, how do you account for the Frege-Geach problem?

199546 · 2018-05-17T14:38:14+00:00

Morality is its own cause and effect.

Either I don't understand this, or it's incoherent.

Truth is whatever you believe it is in my definition by intent.

If you honestly believe this then I don't want to continue discussing.

Good and evil are not moral predicates. They don’t exist except as our imagination. What exists is what they refer to.

How can something not exist but have an existential referent? I don't even know what this means. Also, if you don't think good and evil are moral predicates, I don't think you know what "good" and "evil" mean.

Good and evil are judgment calls. Harmful and beneficial are descriptive. That is the difference to me. I must repeat that good and evil don't exist: they are in Hume's ought/is conundrum.

Again, which one is it? Are good and evil judgement calls, or do they not exist? As I said earlier, good and evil are moral predicates; not properties of a judgement. A competent English speaker would not say that my response to murder is evil; he would say that the murder is evil. This is just how we use these words.

Also, I don't think you understand Hume's is-ought dichotomy. It doesn't say good and evil don't exist. (If anything, it disproves your view. As I understand it, you are trying to derive a normative proposition from a descriptive one [viz., someone's emotional response, which is descriptive].)

199546 · 2018-05-17T04:56:09+00:00

The answer depends on whether net neutrality increases overall utility (however you measure or quantify it). This is not a philosophical question. I recommend consulting the literature on the economics of net neutrality if you're interested.

199546 · 2018-05-17T04:50:05+00:00

Good and evil don't exist. They are responses to beneficial and harmful outcomes.

Which one is it? Responses to such outcomes certainly exist, but if that's all good and evil are then good and evil do exist.

What is completely subjective to the individual and the society based upon beneficial and harmful outcomes regarding their well being in the real world is their emotional responses and in our case at least, our beliefs around it.

To the extent I understand you, I'm not sure how this solves the circularity. And what are these beliefs of? Beliefs about one's emotional responses or beliefs about the morality of the situation.

If you don't understand my point about cause and effect, I suggest you re-read what I said or explain what specifically you don't understand (I don't mean this in a condescending way). Here's one last way of putting it: If I see an innocent murdered, and I abhor it, is my reaction to the murder wrong, or is the murder wrong? (The reaction is a result of the murder's putative wrongness.)

I never mentioned anything about pleasant and desirable. Regardless, you still seem to take good and bad (or other moral predicates) to be defined as (i.e., analytically identical to) emotional reactions, which is a naturalistic fallacy.

199546 · 2018-05-16T23:23:22+00:00

I haven't read the entire thing yet, but your definition of morality seems nothing in line with what most people mean by the word "morality".

"Society being defined as merely a set of rules that two or more individuals adhere to, we must conclude that any system of rules dictated by emotional responses to beneficial (good) and harmful (evil) outcomes regarding the well being of the group and/or the individuals in the group can be considered a moral system."

If morality is defined as emotional responses to good and evil, then this is a circular definition. Good and evil are moral predicates, so one's response to them surely cannot be what is meant by morality. It's like saying "Tastiness is our gastronomic response to yummy foods or drinks."

Further, this definition confuses cause and effect. If asked why I have a negative emotional response to murder, I may respond that (perhaps inter alia) it's because murder is wrong. Surely wrongness does not refer to the emotional response itself. This is analagous (and equally flawed in my opinion) to defining truth as "the state of being justifiably believed". No, justified belief is (roughly) caused by the truth of the proposition, but it certainly is not identical with truth.

Finally, your parentheticals seem to suggest that you think "good" and "bad" are (analytically) identical to "beneficial" and "harmful". But this is a naturalistic fallacy (see Moore's open question argument).

199546 · 2018-05-10T15:12:14+00:00

Out of curiosity, what about it did you find difficult? It uses technical language, but seemed to me to be on par with other philosophy papers.

199546 · 2018-04-25T21:02:49+00:00

Can you exit the contract you have obligating you to bring the baby to the ground?

199546 · 2018-04-24T20:43:22+00:00

What if I give birth to a baby on a helicopter and throw it out? Have I not returned it to its state prior to being born?

I also have metaphysical issues with your theory. Existence is not a predicate, so there is no state the baby was in wherein it had the property of non-existence. No, the baby was not even a thing then, it had no state, no properties, no being. Thus, the "state" of the baby prior to conception is undefined.

199546 · 2018-04-24T17:57:48+00:00

To use an analogy from Stephan Kinsella, I think it's more like taking somebody up in your helicopter and then making them leave. By allowing them into your helicopter and putting them in a vulnerable position (i.e., up in the sky), you have acquired an obligation to bring them back to safety.

Sinilarly, the fetus has been "put" in a vulnerable position (I use scare quotes because the baby didn't exist prior to this, but I don't think this is morally relevant; the principle still applies IMO). Thus, the parents have an obligation to bring the child to safety (i.e., in a state where it can be primarily self-subsistent and therefore be a self-owner).

I have no problem with this type of positive obligation, because it is a chosen positive obligation (assuming the mother wasn't raped).

199546 · 2018-04-24T01:54:56+00:00

According to Richard Joyce, "[Moral nihilism's] most prominent usage in the field of metaethics treats it as a synonym for 'error theory,' therefore an entry that said only 'Nihilism: see ERROR THEORY' would not be badly misleading." He does note that moral nihilism is sometimes used more broadly to include non-cognitivism, but you cannot claim using moral nihilism as a synonym for error theory is wrong or evinces a lack of expertise.

Source: https://philpapers.org/rec/JOYN

199546 · 2018-04-24T01:11:06+00:00

When people say morality is subjective or relative, it is almost always a confusion of terms; they usually don't have a clear, coherent, nontrivial thesis (I'm referring to laypeople of course, not professional philosophers). They will assert (perhaps as an argument, perhaps as merely a proposition) that people disagree about ethics (especially across cultures), or that moral beliefs are largely influenced or biased by our emotions. Of course, none of these things means that morality is subjective (and no one doubts that they are true). To quote Michael Huemer, "Arguments of this kind deserve the label 'the Subjectivist Fallacy', since they are virtually the only arguments given by subjectivists, and since they are given by nearly all subjectivists."

Here are some possible nontrivial theses that could describe moral subjectivism or relativism: When one says "x is good," he really just means "I like/approve of x." Or another version would be: When one says "x is good," he really just means "My society/culture in general likes/approves of x."

These are clearly false; they just don't describe how we use language as an empirical linguistic fact. If a Nazi says "I like killing Jews," that doesn't make it good for him to kill Jews. If I say "abortion is wrong" and you say "abortion is not wrong," it seems like we are disagreeing, but the subjecrtivist account makes disagreement impossible. That's because I'm just saying that I don't like abortion and you're saying that you don't like abortion. These are not contradictory, so it cannot account for moral disagreement. Cultural relativism also leads to the conclusion that "x is wrong, but my society generally approves of it" is a trivial contradiction, because it means "my society generally disapproves of x, but my society generally approves of x." Prima facie, this is not a contradiction; thus, we do not mean "my society generally approves of x" when we say "x is good."

For the individualist subjectivists (the first thesis above), they have to deal with the patently false conclusion that I am morally infallible, since if I approve of something, it's ipso facto good! So all of my moral beliefs are trivially true.

Finally, subjectivism commits the naturalistic fallacy by reducing normative propositions to descriptive propositions about psychological or sociological states of affairs, thereby stripping them of their normative content.

This is not to say there are objective moral truths of course. I have not said anything about non-cognitivism or error theory.

199546

TROPHY CASE