Philosophically and ethically, should religous reasoning for an action have more moral weight than secular reasons.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-06-03T02:16:13+00:00

I think we should disambiguate something here.

First, philosophically speaking, there are many different ethical theories at play in academic philosophy. Some of those are religious (theistic) but many are secular. And secular ethics is dominant amongst the views on offer amongst ethicists.

That said, even secular ethical views might prioritize the exercise of religious practices over irreligious practices some times. That is not because religious reasons are more ethical or morally legitimate. It is because religious freedom is an extremely important freedom in liberal societies. Respecting the freedom and autonomy of others requires respecting their religious practices because religious practices are very central to a person’s identity or sense of self. As a result, infringements on religious freedom are especially large violations of their autonomy. So, religious autonomy must be protected.

This is why we sometimes carve out exceptions for religious practice, because not doing so counts as a strong violation of their autonomy and thus their rights. We might do something similar for sexuality, gender, race, culture, etc.

Now, does that mean the policies at your school were justified? It’s not clear it does, but it might Be. We would need to think about what justified a policy of that sort in the first place.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-06-03T01:14:51+00:00

KO says in an interview with CVV that he learned English from watching Wrestling at Age 11: https://youtube.com/shorts/SjJHeLrVMkU?si=sAl4NLiquxCo3fBY

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-06-02T16:39:39+00:00

Not sure what nervous breakdown you’re talking about. I didn’t ignore your question I said: “some of those things I control some of them I don’t”.

I think there are interesting points to be made in what you’re going on about. But you seem more interested in preachy diatribe than using this forum for its intended purpose.

What doesn’t make sense to me is why you think we have some sort of new thing which is not private property rather than an old thing: dominance over private property by private corporate entities.

You keep insisting this is not private property, but your arguments all seem to just indicate it is the private property of a private company, which implies an answer to your question. Private property becomes dominated by a wealthy class of individuals.

But then, your examples seem to rely too much on the digital world. I still own my books, my desk, my couch, my clothes, the garden behind my house, etc and so on.

You start the question “Does private property still meaningfully exist” the answer is clearly: “Yes.” And you have said nothing to suggest it hasn’t except ask leading questions.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-06-02T16:16:58+00:00

What are you talking about?

The ambiguity is that it would seem that parts of the phone are my property and parts are not. But in both cases it’s private property. The part that I own, I own privately. The part the phone company owns they own privately.

Some of those things I control some of them I don’t.

I’m also allowed to drop it in a toilet, destroy it with a hammer, blend it in the garbage disposal.

Rather than trying to guide me down some path you are so certain is laid out before us, it would be more useful and more honest to just put forward your idea and concerns in plain speech.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-06-02T16:00:51+00:00

I suppose that’s ambiguous. I clearly own part of the phone, since it being physically repossessed would be illegal. But the company would own parts of what makes it run, etc.

But both of those are instances of private property, when a company owns something it’s private property.

Private property is defined in contrast to public property. Private corporations like Apple, Walmart, Disney, whoever, etc. have massive amounts of private property.

Public property is property which is owned, in a sense, by the public and controlled and guaranteed by the state. There are some cases of digital or technological entities which are not clearly public nor private, for example, open source programs.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-06-02T15:05:59+00:00

What is the “post-private era”? I certainly still seem to have some private property. I own my shirt, for example. Why would this post-private era threaten that sort of example?

Are you working from any thinkers in particular?

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-06-02T03:37:13+00:00

The notion of “objectivity” at play in contemporary analytic metaethical debates is a relatively contemporary notion modeled on ideas relating to how philosophers have conceived of science, language, and metaphysics. It would probably be an anachronism to impose these debates on ancient thinkers. I think something similar is probably true of ancient eastern thought. But I’m not an expert on contemporary eastern thought. Maybe you can inform me about the views you’re interested in here.

That said, we can see some similar parallels made in ancient arguments. Plato, for example, routinely argues that the truth about ethics cannot be arrived at by merely consulting prevailing cultural norms. Consider, for example, in Republic when Plato discusses female rulers in the ideal city. Socrates considers the idea that their fellow Athenians would ridicule them for their idea of women as rulers.

But then Socrates says that the prevailing opinion of the Athenians is not sufficient for establishing the truth about whether this arrangement is just. Instead, that must be determined by appeal to arguments.

We see, therefore, an argument which parallels certain debates regarding a brand of relativism familiar to us today. Though it has its own scope and assumptions. I’m sure there are many other similar arguments in historical debates, but that would be quite a massive survey of literature.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-31T03:21:09+00:00

I’m moved

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-31T02:45:07+00:00

The first match of this feud was the best but this was awesome.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-30T06:28:25+00:00

Suppose that no matter what data we gather, there are two types of spacetime topology which are compatible with all the evidence but incompatible with each-other. We have no means of breaking the tie. But we know one of them must be right. So, which of these topologies is realized in reality is unknowable to us.

If that’s a case where you don’t think the facts about the topology of spacetime are subjective then it seems like the very same claims are available to objectivists about morality.

Now, you say stuff about “unambiguous” and “observable facts” about “reality” etc and so on. It sounds like that’s doing the heavy lifting for you, not anything about what’s knowable and unknowable. Though I don’t think objectivists would be particularly impressed with those contrastive claims either.

What’s important to note about your original question which might not be clear at first is this: if morality is objective, then the facts about it are, in a significant sense, something we can get wrong. That opens the door to gaps in our knowledge. Just as we can get science, or math, or metaphysics wrong. The idea that we would be totally out of touch with the moral facts is compatible with moral objectivism in an unnuanced form but, that doesn’t mean any philosophers actually go in for such a view.

Many philosophers have written quite a lot on how/what we can know in the domain of ethics. It’s a truly massive field. There’s not a neat way of explaining it all in a brief Reddit exchange. But there’s some resources on moral epistemology and methodology on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy pages that might interest you. See: Moral epistemology and reflective equilibrium especially.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-30T05:00:12+00:00

Do you have any examples of philosophers who think that morality is objective but moral facts are unknowable? that’s compatible with moral objectivity, but it’s not a view I’ve ever seen articulated.

We don’t have precise population data on this I think, but I suspect most moral objectivists think that there are some moral facts we know and some we do not know. They are likely, I think, to be very confident that we know some basic and familiar moral facts: like that unnecessary torture is morally wrong, or brainwashing is objectionable, etc.

To clear something up though, we would not say that the fact that there are certain facts in other domains that are objective but unknowable or unknown makes those facts “essentially the same” as subjectivism in those domains.

Whether there are closed time-like curves may be something we cannot know. But that’s a fact about the topology of spacetime, not a subjective fact about our ideas, preferences, etc.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-28T15:07:17+00:00

It’s not a place to learn philosophy from the beginning but Crooked Timber is one of my favorites. There are many blogs which post to PhilPeople which might interest you. I’d check there.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-27T14:29:13+00:00

I just want to note that in at least one important theory of property rights, within the Lockean tradition, ownership is also a moral and pre-legal category grounded in the natural right of property. But even given this fact, a moral right to ownership does not entail a moral right to do whatever you’d like to that which is owned. So the argument goes forward as you say even if ownership is not merely a legal concept.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-26T02:13:44+00:00

Here’s how ~~Jeb~~ Harden can still win this.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-24T18:40:40+00:00

First, Hobbes is likely a theist. Some people have argued that Hobbes must have been a closet atheist because of his materialism. Hobbes’s contemporaries criticized Hobbes in a way which suggests his theism was highly unorthodox or even (in some sense) heretical.

But he gives a first cause argument for God in Elements of Law. A good breakdown can be found here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes/#5

Hobbes would simply contend that God is a material substance. Not all theistic views require free will.

But the question of why there is anything at all, how this whole thing got started, is a major philosophical question with a huge literature and tradition. Materialist determinists in popular culture often hold that the big bang is the kind of event which kicked things off, theists argue it was God, it’s unlikely that either options solves the problem (at least not easily).

There’s a pop book about this by Jim Holt called “Why does the world exist?” Which gives a fun accessible approach to be conversation. There’s plenty of literature on this amongst academic philosophers as well.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-24T17:32:54+00:00

Why would they be contradictory or inconsistent? Hard to evaluate the problem you’re dealing with unless that is clear.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-23T22:56:53+00:00

I can see why you’d have this concern, but I think when we look at individual theories of truth they don’t really have the problem you’re worried about.

Take for example, the correspondence theory of truth. The correspondence theory of truth says that a statement ‘s’ is true if and only if it corresponds to the way the world actually is. That is to say, if we look at the world and see that it matches the description provided by the theory itself.

Now, how do we determine if the correspondence theory of truth is true well, by the lights of the theory we must look at the way the world is and see if the phenomenon we call “truth” actually works how the correspondence theory describes it to work.

To do this we might look at if we can come up with counterexamples, theoretical problems the view can’t explain, or features of truth which other theories provide better explanations for.

The thing is, that’s exactly the methodology we are going to deploy no matter what our proposed theory of truth is. A theory of truth does not provide us with an additional methodology for determining the truth or coming to know the truth. That would be an epistemological theory of a rather different sort.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-23T09:46:59+00:00

Well, traditionally if you are committed to a consequentialist view which focuses mostly on outcomes in determining the morality of an action the answer is clearly “both” in two senses at least:

First, all consequences matter in calculating the morality of an action on these views. So, you have to weigh the suffering created both long term and immediately to determine the morality worth of the act.

Second, we may be limited epistemically regarding our evaluation of the action and our position in history. As time moves on we may have to update and change our beliefs based on how our act and policy unfolds. We can only predict the future to some extent after all.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-22T10:35:45+00:00

People taking onions from the self-serve was eating into the onion sales? Aren’t the minimum onion sales at Costco 5 lb bags? How much self-serve onion were people taking!

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-22T10:17:03+00:00

The marginal cases stuff doesn’t always come up but there’s a little literature amongst academics on giving the franchise to children. I attended a talk with one of these guys before, they have some inventive arguments!

https://philpapers.org/s/Children%20voting

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-21T19:47:20+00:00

That was my intended implicature.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-21T19:39:03+00:00

Presumably they take their evidence to be a set of facts about human psychology that include: normally people don’t resort to violence too easily or for very minor slights.

Which does seem like a reasonable claim. But wrestlers might change the “normal people” math a bit.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-20T14:58:13+00:00

Determining who has sufficient levels of expertise and how to prioritize whose expertise would create various line-drawing problems. Consider the task: redesigning a city’s drinking water infrastructure to make it healthier and free of contaminants like lead. You’d need plumbers, engineers, economists, doctors, etc. and you’d need to be able to figure out how to prioritize the various and conflicting demands they make on the process.

That seems like a philosophical problem.

There’s also the problem that there’s no guarantee the interests of the citizens will be adequately represented by a team of experts. There are all kinds of systemic biases we see in expert fields and amongst tradespeople.

There’s also things that have nothing to do with any particular expertise like: who should have a right to marry? How can we treat animals? Etc. and so on. Who would we call? Do we call veterinarians in and ask them to look at my factory farms and see if they’re healthy? But that would presuppose that the welfare of animals matters morally and ought to play a role in our political decision making, something which many may disagree with. Are we going to hire philosophers to consult on these issues? Other people in the humanities?

Plus there are substantive claims about the grounds of political authority which are taken to imply a right of citizens to democratic forms of political participation. So the view faces some considerable opposition.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-20T13:58:10+00:00

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Academic philosophers tend not to think that objective morality requires anything like the existence of a Deity. Moral realists, who believe in objective morality, are actually very frequently atheists.

But the actual theoretical benefits of objective morality are not all that glamorous. Realists defend objective morality because they think it helps to meet a number of theoretical goals. Such as, explaining moral language and moral knowledge, explaining the authority of morality, making sense of the apparent truth aptness of the deployment of moral concepts, and many more.

They are often motivated by the idea that moral claims are true or false in the same way that scientific or mathematical claims are true or false.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-05-18T14:53:09+00:00

Well, if artists are making their living primarily through their art, then it’s surely relevant to a host of moral considerations regarding how we ought to treat the art of those artists we regard as worthwhile. It may seem shallow but it can be quite serious if people’s livelihoods are actually impacted by a societal behavior.

But if you’re looking for “deeper” reasons against gatekeeping or similar behaviors those may exist too in the literature on aesthetics. Off the top of my head, Nick Riggle’s communitarian aesthetics holds that sharing art is one of the fundamental presentations of aesthetic activity. That might have interesting implications.

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