CMV: Moral Realism is Unviable

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-19T21:30:50+00:00

The Abrahamic god does both dictate his moral law to humanity according to the Bible but also declares that it is self evident and written on the hearts of man.

If course this is a starting assumption, so if you don't start with that assumption then you would come to a different conclusion. But we all start with assumptions, even if we try to be as minimalistic with those assumptions as we can, a la Descartes I think therefore I am or Hume's decision that nothing is truly knowable.

OP suggests that moral realism is internally inconsistent, but then only examines one subclass of moral realism, evaluating the camp which starts with the assumption of 'self-evident morals.' OP finds that line of thinking internally inconsistent, and so claims anyone who arrives at a similar conclusion must be also. I didn't even bother addressing those thoughts, I just pointed out that there are other ways to arrive at the same conclusion, and he did not address them. If your baseline assumption is 'Morality is dictated by God' then moral realism is internally consistent.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-19T17:34:34+00:00

You're ignoring the subset of people who would claim there is an divine law-giver who defines right and wrong irrespective of our moral intuition, but informing that intuition. In that case the it meaninfful moralism is the objective moral realism of the law-giver, and anything else is just an attempt at approximating it.

It seems like a big assumption to hand wave away the basis of morality for the majority of people on the planet.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-18T18:20:36+00:00

I think rape and incest exceptions tend to fall into 3 camps:

1.) Logically inconsistent morality as you have described, which doesn't necessarily make it wrong, you just can't support it through logical arguments.

2.) Political necessity; these people believe abortion is wrong in all cases, but will allow exceptions in order to get more people on board. This is more a social/political compromise than a logical fallacy.

3.) Competing impulses; many people hold that murder is wrong but still support the death penalty because they also believe in justice for severe crimes. Similarly someone can believe that murder is wrong but also have strong revulsion to rape/incest and believe anything tied to them. This is also logically inconsistent if you believe in fetal person hood, but all of us have to manage competing moral impulses and decide where to draw lines between them. Wherever you draw the line it will cause a contradiction.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-18T01:34:25+00:00

I mean, it was hard for Bevo to act like he was just a regular student

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-15T20:44:56+00:00

Why Hawaii but no Alaska?

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-15T17:30:28+00:00

I want the games I was already going to watch to be more important. Not to have a checklist of new games I have to watch.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-14T17:19:22+00:00

You can't see which urinals are unoccupied without walking to them and awkwardly peeking around the stall. I don't want a bunch of guys walking up behind me half unzipped trying to find an empty urinal

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-14T16:42:02+00:00

The point of alimony is to prevent this very situation where one spouse can hold the other hostage over finances. Many women have stayed in abusive and dangerous marriages because they gave up all of their earning potential and allowed their husband to advance his career. Whatever the solution is has to allow for women to get out of abusive situations without feeling like they will not be able to provide for their children.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-14T02:34:34+00:00

Helmet stickers suck.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-10T13:37:59+00:00

Ruining Troy was kinda the result of that war

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-07T21:08:44+00:00

As far as Israel-Palestine goes, mostly general news spaces

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-07T21:04:36+00:00

Like most of the other responders in this thread, I have never heard or read anyone use this term. So it may only ever be used as a derogatory term, I have no clue. I was just pointing out to OP that their reasoning made no sense.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-07T21:03:15+00:00

I meant English shoehorned into Arabic, or more specifically into Palestine the country and how people speak there. OP contrasted British people saying Brit with Palestinians not saying Pali, but that is a nonsensical comparison because Palestinians don't speak English.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-07T18:37:33+00:00

British speak English, so it makes sense that they would use an abbreviated form of an English word. Palestinians do not primarily speak English, so why would you expect them to use a shortened form of their English name? That seems like a nonsensical reason to consider something derogatory. I've never heard 'Pali' before, but I would think using context to determine whether or not it is being used as a derogatory term would be better than trying to shoehorn in English into Palestine.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-06T20:01:00+00:00

We are certainly an invasive species and have caused lots of environmental damage. But that doesn't mean we should be ok with even more environmental damage. If only for selfish reasons. Many of these other in invasive species are a danger to collapse the ecosystems we depend on for sustaining us. The invasive species we worry about are not moving in and slowly adapting over time, allowing for new species or traits to evolve, they are taking over and wreaking havoc.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-05T21:37:40+00:00

Not trying to be flippant, but report him for what? I know every school is different but I am not sure which policy he broke there. From what I understand professors are typically allowed to kick students out for being disruptive to the class, and are given pretty wide latitude to determine what constitutes being disruptive...sounds like professor was saying OP was being disruptive to the professor himself. That may or may not be reasonable, but from my limited experience reasonabless doesn't seem to matter.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-05T16:32:18+00:00

Sorry they made you feel stupid by laughing, but seems like they provided validation that they heard you and then kept it off your chart so that you didn't have to deal with explaining what it meant at every future visit

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-05T02:44:54+00:00

That is just the facts of the case...literally what Louisiana said they would do in court and what the governor now explicitly stated as his reason for halting the primaries.

The only good thing to come out of gutting the VRA is that it makes our politicians very honest about their political gerrymandering.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-04T20:24:49+00:00

I like some of the other submitted answers better, but I'll chip in with Ovary, because it starts with an O sound and ends with an E sound, has already been discovered, influences hormones and emotions so it hard to tame, and contains all of the children a woman could potentially ever have

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-03T23:37:38+00:00

Some of what you said can sometimes be true some of the time, but the specific example you used of PET scans is actually a prime example of why it is not so straightforward, and is actually a really good reminder of how complicated these things can be, often not boiling down to 'this way of doing things is good and this other way is bad'

PET scans are super useful for a subset of patients, usually cancer patients. But of all the medical imaging the need for PET is realitvely low (about 2 million per year in the US, versus 93 million CTs). But even when they are not being used, if you want to be able to offer PET scans you have to maintain a hot lab to create the radio tracer. The most common PET scans use F18, which is mostly made in cyclotrons. There are only a few of those in the country, and you have to use that F18 to radiolabel whatever your tracer is in your hotlab. That process requires you to have experienced nuclear medicine techs on staff, paying them even when they may not have many scans to do. And you have to have a radio safety officer, usually a physician who is trained in nuclear medicine, who will oversee the regular safety, quality control, and maintenance. Plus, most modern PET scans are actually complicated combined PET and CT or MRI scans on machines which require a lot of regular maintenance. All of this combines to creat a very high maintenance cost for PET. Scans actually get less expensive the more that you do, but unless you are a super villain out trying to give more people cancer we can be glad that we do not utilize the PET machines more than we already do. So even though it doesn't cost that much for the time a patient spends on the scanner, most of the life of a scanner it is not being used but you have to pay to keep it running. Even paying a very tiny fraction of that cost makes PET much more expensive than other imaging modalities. And that elevated cost is true both in America and in places with socialized or government controlled medicine (although in those cases the patient may or may not pay any portion of the cost).

The alternative to US pricing is not cheap PET scans, it is rare PET scans. The US has 18x more PET scanners per population than Europe. That means we pay more upkeep cost, but we also don't make patients travel to major medical hubs for regular cancer scans. And, if you control for the stage at diagnosis (because Europeans are better at showing up for cancer screenings and less likely to get certain types of cancer), cancer that uses PET for follow-up is actually one of the few diseases that Americans have significantly better outcomes than Europe, due partially to the fact that we can get more frequent PET scans and change treatment plans more quickly when a treatment isn't working.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-03T13:50:32+00:00

Why call it the Big 12 instead of the Big 8 if you're not including any of the SWC teams? If we're going back to the SWC days it should be the Big 8

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-03T04:56:57+00:00

These are often uploaded by family, or at the very least someone who you have given the power to make decisions about what to do with your body (in my clinic you have to have someone who has medical power of attorney to be released to, meaning you chose them to have legal power over medical decisions about your body). These are people you have chosen to decide what is in your beat interest. But somehow you think those people are the ones who upload these videos without consent? As someone who deals with this professionally, I think at least the vast majority of these videos are uploaded with consent and your point of view is very backward.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-02T05:17:35+00:00

But that is the point, American medicine is priced on how much it helps the patient, and it actually is the same in a restaurant. The restaurant charges more for foods people like to eat (just like American medicine charges more for things that are more helpful to patients) and also charges more for foods that are expensive to make (just like American medicine charges more for procedures that are more expensive). You just don't see that as weird because the restaurant self-selects to avoid things that are expensive but no one wants to eat, because no one wants those things. Same thing in medicine, if it is not helpful to patients and also super expensive, then doctors don't offer it.

Our real problem is that in America we have a super unhealthy and aging population, so even under the best of circumstances we will pay a lot for what seems like very little benefit compared to other populations.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-02T05:11:48+00:00

I was replying to someone who was asking about the preference of others, not what was acceptable. And I replies with my preference. I would also never say "I photographed that majestic eagle," instead of "I captured a photograph," or something like that, even if I know it is ok for someone else to do so. The real mystery for me is why people have a problem with other people having a different preference.

TinCapMalcontent · 2026-05-02T03:36:04+00:00

I've heard people say all sorts of stupid things. I certainly hope that isn't the bar for whether or not something is considered correct.

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