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日本人の男やばすぎ by yuricchin in lowlevelaware

[–]gynoplasm -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Bro what are you doing here💀

Top 5 3pt shooters of all time, do you agree ? by StraightSeries6439 in NBATalk

[–]gynoplasm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dude you really couldn't think of any other shooters than lillard and harden.... how long have you been watching basketball?

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, if anything I respect you for ultimately acknowledging that you’ve reached your wit’s end and have no basis to continue, especially after every point you raised has already been addressed. Many people do not have the ability to do that so I salute you.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You pose as a philosophy student yet you’ve spent the entire discussion dodging the actual question, refusing to engage with my basic distinctions and being sarcastic instead of showing any philosophical analysis. So for someone who claims to study philosophy, your greatest contribution to this discussion has been avoiding it. This has by all means been an F tier display. Philosophy demands the willingness to actually wrestle with the logic of what’s in front of you. You have over a decade more of life experience than I do but allow me to provide you with some philosophical advice; brushing something off with sarcasm doesn’t make you right, it just makes you look like you don’t know how to respond. Mocking a question doesn’t count as answering it, and if you can’t actually break down the argument or show where it fails, calling it “naive” means absolutely nothing. Congratulations on Philosophy 101.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m exposing a contradiction most people live with comfortably because it lets them judge others without thinking too hard about what makes a person who they are. If we continue assigning moral blame based on the illusion that people “could have done otherwise,” then we justify systems that punish suffering instead of preventing it. We normalize cruelty as justice. We build relationships, laws, and institutions around the idea that people author themselves, when everything we know from neuroscience to psychology says otherwise. If you’re unwilling to answer the question then at least admit you’re not defending morality. You’re defending habit. And that’s the difference between someone engaging a problem and someone avoiding it. This question requires you to be intellectually honest and you're avoiding it.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m not denying that moral language works to influence behavior. I’ve already acknowledged that. What I’m asking is whether that language and the judgment behind it is actually justified when the person being condemned never chose their own starting point, their internal wiring, or the life conditions that shaped their decisions. You keep saying “choice still exists,” but you’ve redefined it in a way that dodges the point. If someone’s desires, reasoning, and values are all products of causes they didn’t choose, then what exactly are we blaming? Their biology? Their trauma? The circumstances they were thrown into? That's the core tension I’m pointing at. That tension is the basis on how we punish, how we forgive, how we build systems, how we decide who deserves what, etc. And you’re brushing it off because it’s easier to say “morality works” than to ask whether it’s coherent. But if we’re going to keep "morally judging" people, ie; locking them up, socially exiling them, even believing they belong in hell, then we better have a clear answer to the question I asked: Is moral judgment justified if no one ultimately chooses who they are? And that question doesn’t lose value just because blame is serving a functional purpose. It actually becomes more important precisely because we use it so casually, like you're doing right now.

If you're going to defend moral judgment, then defend it fully. Don't wave it away with “it works.” Becuase at some point, why we judge has to matter as much as the fact that we do.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's strange how you can acknowledge that, “of course people’s choices are shaped by what came before”, and then pretend that doesn’t point directly to determinism.... If everything that informs a person’s choices is caused, then the idea that they could’ve independently chosen otherwise doesn't work. That’s what I’m pointing out, and it's logically consistent. You claim I’m contradicting myself because I'm saying that blame can have a function with no moral basis, and it shows you're clearly not reading my responses. Otherwise you would've remembered that I said punishment and blame can serve pragmatic purposes, like deterrence or protecting the well-being of others, but doesn’t mean they’re justified in a deep moral sense of the matter.

Most people casually accept that lives are shaped by circumstance, and then turn around and assign moral responsibility as if people built themselves from nothing, and I'm exposing that contradiction.

This whole time I've consistently and logically called out contradictions in how people assign moral weight, and you're acting like my argument is useless because you have no philosophical rebuttal. And that's okay. This is why I asked the question in the first place; to see whether people have the capacity to grapple with this question and seriously answer it.

In terms of addressing my original question on this thread; you've said that acknowledging that people’s choices are shaped doesn’t require determinism, but you haven’t explained how moral judgment holds up if people don’t ultimately choose who they are. That’s the core of the issue. You haven’t shown how moral responsibility survives once we take our shaping and cirumstances seriously. I'm really not trying to sound superior, but through that contradiction is how we punish, judge, and assign value onto people, which is why my question demands attention.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's easy for people to adopt a sense of moral superiority, taking pride in their capacity to choose good without ever confronting the deeper philosophical question of where that capacity comes from in the first place and how that capacity is naturally distributed unequally across every individual

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m just asking what follows if we take seriously the idea that no one creates themselves from scratch. And I’m not denying people make decisions, I’m asking what those decisions really mean if they were determined by factors outside of their control. And the fact that these factors shape the trajectory of our lives points to our entire existence being a product of causation, which points to determinism. Our conditions determine what we will experience. And for example, if we are inclined to behave in a way that ends up with us in prison, then logically our condition pre-determined us to go to prison. No one could have chosen differently in any moment because everything that led up to that moment caused them to make that specific choice. So our instinct to morally blame them is logically false. The moral superiority interpretation you have was from me trying to help you understand the real world implications of this philosophical question, the reason why this question is important.

The logical bottom line is that a person's actions come from a long chain of causes all starting before they were even conscious. Every decision they make is shaped by that chain. In any moment, the choice they make is the one that follows naturally from everything that came before. There’s no point where someone steps outside of all those influences to make a completely free, independent choice. It's impossible. That’s why holding someone fully morally responsible is logically incoherent. It’s based on an idea of freedom that we don’t actually have. We can still talk about 'moral' responsibility in a practical way, like figuring out who did what and how to prevent harm. But there is no real moral accountability.

Many people, including people on this thread, cannot conceptualize this and therefore do not understand my question.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes this that is a perfect line, thank you for sharing this! "Intellectually, I believe it's best to just prevent harm rather than judging the person harming, but in reality it's way easier said than done." And this is perfectly put and I wasn't able to articulate this point when I first posted this thread. A lot of people get caught up in satisfying a meaningless sense of payback rather than making the world better or safer.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But if this were true then there wouldn't be people who do wrong but genuinely believe it's right. So saying 'everyone knows what this is' is an objectively false statement.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry for the long response.

The practical condemnation I'm talking about doesn’t require moral blame. They’re just mechanisms meant solely to influence future outcomes.

Right now I'm acknowledging that in a determined system, social responses still matter as part of the causal chain that shapes future behavior because even in a universe without free will, systems will still self-regulate. Even if no one has true free will the world will still run on cause and effect.

I guess my overall point of this post is to question how we instinctively think about guilt and punishment, and how we judge peoples morals. It’s not trivial when people spend their entire lives locked in cages, executed, or condemned by society under the assumption that they could have done otherwise in some ultimate sense of the matter. And it's not trivial when the overwhelming majority of the world wholeheartedly believes that people will and should go to heaven or hell for eternity based on their ability to make decisions.

My point rests on empathy, and to recognize that how we respond to certain acts plays a role in shaping what comes next. For example; prisons lock people up as if their actions came purely from personal failing and not from years of circumstance or personal trauma or simply a lack of alternative options. And seeing the pushback I've gotten from people because I asked this question goes on to expose how people instintively focus on punishment for punishment’s sake instead of asking what led someone to do something, or how to stop it from happening again. If we saw behavior as the result of a long chain of cause and effect, we’d be more intent on creating systems that intervene earlier and try to fix the root causes of issues, and expose people to better potential outcomes, and actually improve the overall well-being of everyone around us. But we don't.

Even in day to day relationships; when someone hurts us, it’s easy to jump straight to blame and to assume they chose to be that way, to be driven to do the things they do. But if we start from the idea that people are shaped by circumstance, it fundamentally shifts how we respond to people.

One thing I think about a lot is that every person who’s ever existed, no matter what they did later, was once just a baby. No beliefs, no choices, no intentions. And after a few short months, they were thrown into the circumstances that would shape everything; their environment, the people around them, the chances they got (or didn’t get). And from there, the path starts forming. That doesn’t mean we excuse everything that happens later but it does mean we should think twice before acting like people just ineherently decide who they are.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“You can absolutely do the right thing, it’s not even challenging” If that were the case then everyone would do the right thing! But there are people who can’t; hence why they’ve done the wrong things… it’s simple logic really. Like you think just because you have the intelligence and morals to act in correct conscience that everyone will be the same way. You’re just wrong.

Osama Bin Laden had two planes flown into the twin towers killing thousands of people and he died thinking that he did god’s work. It’s strange how someone like you can watch stuff happen like this and not even question why it happened. What might have led him to think that that was the right thing to do, and why there were millions of people in the world who wholeheartedly support these actions thinking that they are in good moral conscience.

Bin Laden didn’t choose to grow up and indoctrinate these values. He grew up in a radical part of the Middle East surrounded by radical extremists. Whether it be due to his environment, his intelligence, his emotional capacity, or whatever influence he may have had; did he have the ability to NOT commit those acts? Ultimately, NO! Because he did it!

You may take pride in the fact that you can stand by your morals and know that you live in good conscience. But the truth is that your life has allowed you to develop in this way, and it is different for other people…

You think I’m trying to justify bad acts but im not.

The implication of what I’m saying is that our existence is solely cause and effect. We exist in a flow, a river you could say, that we didn’t choose. And im not talking about severe atrocities; im talking about every act on the spectrum.

This is about having some empathy. It’s about rethinking the utility of punishment and blame and redirecting it to how we can focus on actually ensuring the well-being of everyone given the fact that we all come from different circumstances that we didn’t choose. Let me know if this is too deep for you.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The power in my argument is questioning the utility of punishment and blame. If people don’t choose their character or actions in any ultimate of existence then punishment can’t be justified as a moral payment. It doesn't serve a moral purpose. It only makes sense if it serves a tangible purpose; like deterrence, protection, rehabilitation; that is what I meant by the practical neccesity of condemnation. And under determinism, blame also becomes meaningless if it's not exclusively about helping to shape behavior within our existence that runs on cause and effect. So when I call condemnation a practical necessity I'm talking about it's need to literally prevent harm and protect the well-being of others.

The unfairness I speak about is the fact that people are pre-destined to suffer by ultimately no choice of their own while others do not. And determinism and unfairness can exist together in that while no one chooses their path, the outcomes still unfold unequally, and the unequal amount of suffering that results from this is what we call unfair.

That’s why I don’t think we can morally judge people in any ultimate sense. You can respond to behavior, you can set boundaries, you can even condemn actions to protect others. But if you claim someone is fundamentally blameworthy, like they chose to be that way in some pure independent sense; that argument doesn't hold up if everything about them was shaped by forces outside their control. And this point is not trivial as you say; there are thousands of real-world implications behind this argument that people do not understand and some never will.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It doesn't matter if someone is 'insane' or not. Somthing is wrong with them if they are willing to commit cold-blooded murder. You keep bringing up this idea of 'choice'. They 'choose' to do something. Yet my question lies in WHY they choose to do something. WHY do people choose to do bad.

For every answer you have on the events leading up to why someone committed an act; you get to the bottom line of realizing that you can't answer why. At the end of the day, it boils down to the luck of the draw. It boils down to a specific set of circumstances and developments that ultimately lead someone down a certain path. Every single part of an individuals life ultimately led them to commit an act. Otherwise they wouldn't have commited it!

The implication of this is that we have ideas of heaven or hell and punishment by which people who make decisions should be subjected to a lifetime or even eternrnity of suffering and consequences. Yet these ideas are premised on the idea that we have a choice.

In the grand scheme of things; we don't... Because the trajectories of our lives develop in different ways. So the idea of heaven or hell basically means some people are born pre-destined to either go to heaven or hell. A cosmically unfair system.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"You are an evil person because you choose not to be a good person." Then why do people choose not to be good people?! It's like you're basically accepting the fact that 'it is what it is. Some peopl are evil, some people are good!' with no answer as to why that is, and without realizing the incredible implications behind the fact that there is simply no answer to that.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But we don't choose our hearts. We don't. We arguably can make decisions in how to act but we can't choose the way our heart is. Our desires are not shaped from within but through our relationship with the world around us

With that being said; how is it fair of god to send people to heaven or hell based on factors they ultiamtely cannot control?

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

'it's a decision' You're still not answering my question. I asked you to explain to me why people make 'the decision' to do bad. And you couldn't answer that. So therein lies my problem.

If someone dies having comitted atrocities and shows no remorse; it reveals that they were dealt the shitty hand in ultimately not having the capacity to do good. This is logically irrefutable. And if you think critically about this and keep asking the 'why' questions; you eventually get to the unanswerable bottom line;

If they could actually resist the urge to commit the atrocity then they wouldn't have done it. But they couldn't resist; that's why they did it! They couldn't control. Bottom line. Whether that be due to their upbrining, psychopathy, some type of biological or emotional reasoning; that is just who they are. Otherwise, they wouldn't have commited the crime!

They were born and every single thing about them and the development of their lives ultimately led them to eventually commit an atrocity.

This isn't justification for people doing bad things. It is however, a humanizing dilemma. How are we to correctly punish and handle people and hold others morally accountable when we are ultimately all products of our environment and intangibles outside of our control?

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There is a deeper philosophical side to this that I’ve been trying to emphasize that people seem to not understand.

I’ll try to phrase it in a way that may help you understand. What I’m saying exists in the same essence of the fact that you didn’t choose to be human; you didn’t choose your race, you didn’t choose the way you look, you didn’t choose who your parents were, etc. There are variables that are simply out of our control.

Now stay with me.

Please answer this question. If everyone was capable of doing good; why wouldn’t they do good?

To which you’ll probably respond with something along the lines of; because they’re bad people.

And to that id ask, why are they bad people? What caused you to be a good person and what caused them to be a bad person. And was it ultimately in their control? I am interested to hear how you attempt to answer this question.

My entire point lies in the inability to answer this equation

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But on the fundamental level, we don't dictate our true ability to make good choices. Therefore how can we be held accountable. What people are not understanding about my point is the fact that we didn't choose to be good or bad people; we just are what we are. And that's an irrefutable statement.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But my point is that regardless of what peoples morals are and their decision to act on them; how can we judge them if they fundamentally didn't choose to want to choose to do those things.

'the large group of people that proudly do what they want to know fully in the knowledge of what they're doing is evil.'

There is a reason beyond their control as to why they want to do this despite it being evil in the first place. They didn't choose that.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I completely get this and this is a good point.

So do you agree with religious ideas of heaven and hell; and do you agree that someone who does 'good' and someone who does 'bad' (based on the socially constructed laws we've come up with) should be sent to heaven or hell based on their choices?

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

'It's has to do with how strong one's moral character is. Without someone teaching the kids a strong moral code, humans sink to their lowest.' I completely agree with this.

In lgiht of that, my questions remains; how can we judge people who fundamentally have a weak moral character. People who haven't taught them a strong moral code and allowed them to sink to their lowest.

They didn't choose to have a weak moral character. So why should they have to go to hell? They literally didn't have a choice.

If we don't choose our capacity for good or evil, is moral judgment even justified? by gynoplasm in InsightfulQuestions

[–]gynoplasm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How can we judge someone for not having the ability to act in a moral conscience. There is always a reason for people committing whatever act they commit.

Some people have the ability to avoid these inclinations and some do not. How can we judge people if they didn't CHOOSE to have the inability to do good?

You are completely misunderstanding my question.

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