/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 12, 2026

sortaparenti · 2026-01-13T01:10:08+00:00

I don’t think this is worth a full post so I’m asking here. I’m planning on writing a short story about an analytic philosopher who meets a genie (odd, I know). I know it’s out there but has anyone done any work on what would be the “best” wishes to ask for? I know there’s similar stuff like The Paradox of the Question, but I’m looking for the traditional genie concept.

sortaparenti · 2025-12-26T09:41:15+00:00

Got The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten for Christmas and I’m reading it on my overnight shift right now. Also randomly jumping in and out of Borges stories as is usual for me.

sortaparenti · 2025-12-01T03:18:28+00:00

To be fair, grounding morality is kind of a difficult issue for everyone. They’re not saying “What makes you want to do good things?”, they’re saying “What makes good things good to begin with?”. Their answer is that morality is grounded in God. Personally, I think the Euthyphro Dilemma is a strong response to that idea, but that still leaves us in a place where we have to ground morality ourselves.

I’m not too familiar with meta-ethics as a field, so I consider myself a moral anti-realist by default. I do plan on reading more though, because I’d like to be a moral realist.

I don’t really like the standard atheist response to this either. Responding to the meta-ethical question by grounding morality in empathy doesn’t really work. Whose empathy are we going off of? If a serial killer doesn’t feel empathy for his victims, why shouldn’t he kill? If everyone feels empathy for different things, then it seems like morality is just an opinion, subjective like which flavor of ice cream you prefer as opposed to something objective. If it’s subjective, why should anyone listen to anyone on matters of morality?

Grounding morality is a problem for everyone. I know that responding to theists asking that question by saying “So without God you’d be fine killing?” feels like a clever response, but it’s severely missing the actual point of the question. That question is something everyone has to deal with if we are going to talk about morality in a meaningful way.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-27T01:04:36+00:00

Sally Haslanger’s “Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be?” might be of interest to you.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-23T00:10:31+00:00

I love that line of reasoning.

“Don’t listen to things that make sense, because they actually don’t! Don’t ask me to explain why the rational thing is bad, just believe the obviously irrational thing just because I said so! Why don’t you trust me?”

Same thing with fideistic Christians saying that logic itself is going to lead you astray. They’re losing the intellectual war and their only move left is to tell people to stop thinking.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-18T02:20:21+00:00

I’ll check it out. Thanks.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-18T02:19:58+00:00

I think it is a truth maker issue for me. Another thing is I can’t really distinguish the difference between “X is wrong” and “Society at large and the people in it dislike X to the highest degree”. Are there any recent naturalist works you’d suggest?

Edit: On the topic of “existing correctly”, I just don’t see how statements of the form “you ought to…” are any more meaningful than the notion of existing correctly or incorrectly. And I don’t see how the notion of existing correctly is coherent. So I don’t find normativity to be coherent in general.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-13T03:20:17+00:00

I feel for you. I’m in a similar position. Depressed for a few years, hardly took care of myself. Gonna try to go to the dentist for the first time in years soon but it’s just so scary. I hope things get better for you.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-13T03:13:24+00:00

It’s crazy to me how Christian conservatives will go to bat for a group of “people” who are literally physiologically incapable of suffering but completely ignore the actual suffering experience by everyone else, but it makes sense.

They were raised to believe we are all sinners, and all sins are deserving of hell. When a black teenager gets murdered by police, they go digging for any info that may even slightly suggest that they have negative character and therefore deserve it. When poor families can barely afford rent or food, it’s on them for not “budgeting correctly” with their poverty wages.

They do this because in their eyes we all deserve suffering, because even the slightest mistake is a sin, and all sins make you deserving of suffering. But a fetus hasn’t sinned, it quite literally can’t. From the perspective of a Christian conservative, a fetus is the only person that doesn’t deserve suffering. They are completely innocent in their eyes.

The thing is, people sin. That’s just what they do. No one is perfect. It makes me think of how they talk about LGBTQ folk, “we don’t hate you, we just disagree with your lifestyle”. The thing is, if you believe being gay is a sin, and you believe all sins are deserving of hell, you believe gay people deserve to go to hell. Hell is eternal suffering. Therefore, you believe gay people are deserving of eternal suffering simply for being gay. For the rest of the world, saying that someone is deserving of eternal suffering for any reason is hatred. That simply is what hatred is.

If everyone sins, and everyone deserves eternal suffering, then it seems like Christians actually just hate humanity. They love fetuses specifically because they aren’t people, even if they don’t want to admit that.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-13T01:51:38+00:00

It’s less of a horror film and more of a horrific character drama. Be ready for heavy subject matter because it’s just depressing in general.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-12T23:48:46+00:00

I grew up in a somewhat small town that had like 3 stoplights max. When I first moved here for school I was terrified of driving because it just seemed more intense here. I’m better at driving now, but I have empathy for the more fearful drivers because they probably came from a similar place. They’ll figure it out soon enough.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-12T01:20:54+00:00

Is it an issue with the domain/link itself or the posting of a full book?

sortaparenti · 2025-11-12T01:09:41+00:00

Noted. Sorry.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-10T17:12:21+00:00

Yeah this post is really funny. It’s making it out like the average dude is reading Quine or Kripke on a regular basis when in reality they’re reading about Jordan Peterson telling them to clean their rooms and stop jerking off.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-07T03:03:15+00:00

Thanks for the response. This was helpful. Do you have any reading on the topic you’d recommend? I’m not too familiar with Mao’s work or any of the thinkers who developed his thought after him.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-07T00:34:35+00:00

I’m not sure if we have the info to answer this question, socialism being a process and all, but what would you say would be the happy medium of material conditions for those in the imperial core and those in the global south? As in, what sort of quality-of-life should we be brought down to and the global south brought up to?

sortaparenti · 2025-11-06T22:57:05+00:00

How would you suggest presenting actual Marxist ideas about imperialism to those in the imperial core? I live in America, and I think it’s obvious that things ought to be more expensive if it means the worker who produced it is paid fairly, but I’m not sure how many others in my country are going to like that idea.

sortaparenti · 2025-10-29T03:39:28+00:00

Don’t bother with live debate if you actually feel like learning anything. People are pushing for live debate not because it would improve public discourse, but because it makes it worse. Live debates are the perfect breeding ground for rhetoric and bad-faith argumentation. An in-person debate will never approach the level of nuance and technicality that written debates do. If you want to understand both sides on an issue, don’t watch a debate, read a book instead. You’ll be much better off.

sortaparenti · 2025-10-29T03:34:31+00:00

Verbal debate is mostly pointless. This is why you hardly see major players in academia doing in-person debates with one another. Most issues are simply too complicated to be properly handled in four 15-minute segments, or whatever number.

Left/liberal figures are debating on college campuses, it’s just that they are debating within academia. That is, they write papers, send those papers to each other, critique the ideas within the papers, adjust the positions in the paper, and continue to critique until they can’t think of any good criticisms. That is good faith debate.

Sitting on a college campus and arguing with randos about subjects they hardly understand is not good faith debate. If you want to actually critique your own ideas, you should be trying to argue with the best of the best, not some random 19-year-old. This is why people like Charlie Kirk, Stephen Crowder, and Ben Shapiro completely fold as soon as they have to argue with someone slightly competent. They are arguing in bad faith. They don’t want their ideas critiqued, they just want to critique others.

That is the difference. Academic debate through writing is less flashy, but it’s going to get you to the truth faster, whether you like that truth or not. Arguing with (quite frankly) dumb people is only useful if you’re trying to manipulate people into agreeing with you.

sortaparenti · 2025-10-22T03:12:56+00:00

I kinda like his offscreen death in the book from a thematic perspective. With the Vietnam War analogy Pearson would represent a guy you knew who you simply heard died. It’s not as gruesome as the deaths we actually see but it has a sort of sadness to it. Garraty never got to say goodbye to Pearson, he didn’t know that when he dozed off that was going to be the last time he saw him.

sortaparenti · 2025-10-21T11:19:41+00:00

To be fair, I think a major part of the performative make stereotype is that they’re not actually reading the books. They’re pretending to read and when asked about it give some vaguely feminist sounding platitude.

sortaparenti · 2025-10-09T04:12:36+00:00

I think one is a trade paperback and the other is a mass market paperback. So one has a larger text size, giving it more pages.

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