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GreecePwns wrote:john, my post is saying that it does not matter whether or not they have advocated altruism. Altruism is just one of many conditions they attach toward avoiding eternal damnation/reaching the promised land. It is possible to separate altruism from the rest or religious belief, which is overwhelmingly negative for the individual and for society. You can have one without the other. That's my point.Some guy didn't make that up, its a central belief of the religion for nearly every case.I know what you mean, about eternal damnation anyways. I came across that realization a long time ago. But is that what "the religion" did? Or is that what some guy who wanted to control people did and instituted?I've listed a few in my above posts.Also, what are the better ways? Have they been tried? (I'm guessing recently they have been)
natty_dread wrote:Do ponies have sex?
(proud member of the Occasionally Wrongly Banned)Army of GOD wrote:the term heterosexual is offensive. I prefer to be called "normal"
So what? Examples of total free market healthcare don't exist either, I guess people on this forum should stop talking about that too.john9blue wrote:GreecePwns wrote:john, my post is saying that it does not matter whether or not they have advocated altruism. Altruism is just one of many conditions they attach toward avoiding eternal damnation/reaching the promised land. It is possible to separate altruism from the rest or religious belief, which is overwhelmingly negative for the individual and for society. You can have one without the other. That's my point.Some guy didn't make that up, its a central belief of the religion for nearly every case.I know what you mean, about eternal damnation anyways. I came across that realization a long time ago. But is that what "the religion" did? Or is that what some guy who wanted to control people did and instituted?I've listed a few in my above posts.Also, what are the better ways? Have they been tried? (I'm guessing recently they have been)
well then maybe you can show me societies that have performed well without being influenced by altruistic religions?
you guys talk about your atheist utopia, but examples of it don't exist.
Chariot of Fire wrote:As for GreecePwns.....yeah, what? A massive debt. Get a job you slacker.
Viceroy wrote:[The Biblical creation story] was written in a time when there was no way to confirm this fact and is in fact a statement of the facts.
john9blue wrote:GreecePwns wrote:john, my post is saying that it does not matter whether or not they have advocated altruism. Altruism is just one of many conditions they attach toward avoiding eternal damnation/reaching the promised land. It is possible to separate altruism from the rest or religious belief, which is overwhelmingly negative for the individual and for society. You can have one without the other. That's my point.Some guy didn't make that up, its a central belief of the religion for nearly every case.I know what you mean, about eternal damnation anyways. I came across that realization a long time ago. But is that what "the religion" did? Or is that what some guy who wanted to control people did and instituted?I've listed a few in my above posts.Also, what are the better ways? Have they been tried? (I'm guessing recently they have been)
well then maybe you can show me societies that have performed well without being influenced by altruistic religions?
you guys talk about your atheist utopia, but examples of it don't exist.
GreecePwns wrote:So what? Examples of total free market healthcare don't exist either, I guess people on this forum should stop talking about that too.
Or, we can talk about the idea and its merits instead of using that as a cop-out. I admit, I've use that exact phrase for free market healthcare not as a replacement for arguments about its merits but as a chance to ask for empirical proof. On this issue I haven't presented sources, only because denying that the tax deductibility of donations and the chance for college kids to get something on their resume or a myriad of other things don't compel them to do help those in need (and that more awareness and abundance of these incentives would lead to more of the wanted behavior) is to have your head firmly entrenched in the sand.
chang50 wrote:
I can't recall ever talking about an atheist utopia.or reading about one here.Atheism has no position on what is good for society.Theism could be wonderful for societal health but still be untrue.Seems like you are more interested in what you perceive to be good for society than in what is true.
natty_dread wrote:Do ponies have sex?
(proud member of the Occasionally Wrongly Banned)Army of GOD wrote:the term heterosexual is offensive. I prefer to be called "normal"
john9blue wrote:Haggis_McMutton wrote:The fundamental process by which religion functions and evolves is seriously flawed. Religion is to science/philosophy what absolutist hereditary monarchism is to a democratic republic.
Was absolutist hereditary monarchism useful 2000 years ago? Maybe.
Do we still need it now that we have a much better alternative? Hell no.
what's the modern alternative to religion? obama worship?
john9blue wrote:well then maybe you can show me societies that have performed well without being influenced by altruistic religions?
you guys talk about your atheist utopia, but examples of it don't exist.
well then maybe you can show me societies that have performed well without the detterant of public, state sanctioned torture?
you guys talk about your "life is intrinsically valuable" utopia, but examples of it don't exist.
john9blue wrote:
what's the modern alternative to religion? obama worship?
Haggis_McMutton wrote:john9blue wrote:Haggis_McMutton wrote:The fundamental process by which religion functions and evolves is seriously flawed. Religion is to science/philosophy what absolutist hereditary monarchism is to a democratic republic.
Was absolutist hereditary monarchism useful 2000 years ago? Maybe.
Do we still need it now that we have a much better alternative? Hell no.
what's the modern alternative to religion? obama worship?
See bolded.
Haggis_McMutton wrote:john9blue wrote:well then maybe you can show me societies that have performed well without being influenced by altruistic religions?
you guys talk about your atheist utopia, but examples of it don't exist.
Sorry but when I hear stuff like this I just hear your equivalent saying this in the 16th century:well then maybe you can show me societies that have performed well without the detterant of public, state sanctioned torture?
you guys talk about your "life is intrinsically valuable" utopia, but examples of it don't exist.
PLAYER57832 wrote:john9blue wrote:
what's the modern alternative to religion? obama worship?
Because Obama worships Christ, acknowledges God, any kind of "Obama worhsip"" could not rightfully be an atithesis to religion.
While I realize this was rhetoric, such statements and claims are stupid and disrespectful at best and pretty close to blasphemous.
natty_dread wrote:Do ponies have sex?
(proud member of the Occasionally Wrongly Banned)Army of GOD wrote:the term heterosexual is offensive. I prefer to be called "normal"
john9blue wrote:so you think a modern society could be full of people who have read aristotle and kant and mill and can make thoughtful decisions about their actions?
i don't really know what to say to that lol...
i can't see that happening anytime within the next 100 years, and that's a very conservative estimate.
Haggis_McMutton wrote:john9blue wrote:well then maybe you can show me societies that have performed well without being influenced by altruistic religions?
you guys talk about your atheist utopia, but examples of it don't exist.
Sorry but when I hear stuff like this I just hear your equivalent saying this in the 16th century:well then maybe you can show me societies that have performed well without the detterant of public, state sanctioned torture?
you guys talk about your "life is intrinsically valuable" utopia, but examples of it don't exist.
well, firstly, there have been successful societies without PSST, so that's not really a good comparison.
secondly, if PSST could effectively reduce the crime rate in the US, then a solid case could be made for doing it. just saying...
chang50 wrote:
I can't recall ever talking about an atheist utopia.or reading about one here.Atheism has no position on what is good for society.Theism could be wonderful for societal health but still be untrue.Seems like you are more interested in what you perceive to be good for society than in what is true.
Metsfanmax wrote:MeDeFe wrote:Alright, I expressed myself unclearly there. Allow me to reformulate.
In his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant (among a lot of other things) develops a system of virtue ethics, in which the categorical imperative is the central concept.
In all there are nine different ways in which Kant expressed the categorical imperative. The following are rough translations of two others of them by me.
"Act such, that you always treat humanity, both in your own person as well as in the person of everyone else, as an end and never as a mere means."
"For reasonable beings are all subject to the law, that each should never treat themself and all others merely as means, but always also as ends of themselves."
That goes way beyond weighing consequences and is in direct opposition to utilitarian theories. They are also expressions of exactly the same idea as is expressed in "act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
Those formulations, at least in the way you seem to be interpreting them, are very clearly not equivalent to the formulation I proposed.
Metsfanmax wrote:Consider the scenario where you have diverging train tracks, and one path has a person tied down, and the other path has two people tied down. The switch is currently set so that the two people would be killed by the oncoming train. What would Kant propose that we do in this scenario? The only possible answers are: 1) flip the switch and save the greater number of people, or 2) do nothing, because we are not responsible for deaths that we did not cause. If you treat your formulations as applying at the individual level, so that it is wrong to treat the single person as a "means" to saving the two, then you are left with a clearly unpalatable distinction between acts and omissions. You could have been responsible for saving a greater number of lives, but you didn't because you were afraid to treat the one person as a "means to an end." That absolution of responsibility can never be justified in a serious pragmatic ethical theory, and it shows why your interpretation of his statement fails -- it offers us no real solutions to the actually hard problems that affect real lives.
Metsfanmax wrote:A more reasonable interpretation of his formulations is to say that he is advocating equal consideration of interests: when making an ethical judgment, you have to consider the preferences of all individuals involved, instead of ignoring the preferences of some minority in favor of a majority. If we treat it this way, we still have a clear and easy choice in the train scenario, because we weight equally the preferences of all involved and find that since all three of them probably have similar desires to continue living, we should save the two instead of the one. One should read Kant as expressing the idea that you should never commit an act against a person without first considering how this will affect that person's preferences/desires/happiness. Reading it as an ethical dictum to never weigh human interests makes you ethically paralyzed.
Metsfanmax wrote:MeDeFe wrote:What do you mean by "even a utilitarian"? Their problem is that there is more than one way of determining what is good, and that their theory can work perfectly well without any "objective sense of what it means to be good". That leads to some interesting consequences (getting drunk can be more ethical than reading a philosophical essay, torturing one person can be ethical if it makes many others happy. That's also why I found your previous assertion that "consequentialism is the form of ethics that makes the least number of arbitrary assumptions about the way things should work" somewhat amusing. The only way for consequentialists (like utilitarianists) to get rid of the unpalatable consequences of their premises is to introduce criteria that can only be described as "arbitrary". Of course, the criteria can be argued for and good reasons can be listed for why they should be included, but in doing so you move away from the simple theory you said it was and get swamped in exceptions to the rule.
You find it problematic that people have different interpretations of what is "good;" I do not, because a shallow utilitarian "maximize the good" standard is not what I advocate. I am advocating something more in line with preference utilitarianism or act utilitarianism. This can still give reasonable answers (yes, torturing a person can be ethical if it would save many lives) without even responding to things outside the ethical sphere (like whether it is better to get drunk than read an essay). Perhaps you are struck by the many consequentialists who shy away from the "unpalatable" consequences of their broad stances. I do not. It can be "right" to do harm to one to save the lives of many, and it is very definitely "wrong" to kill a person without some good being achieved that is at least equivalent to the death of that person (which is very serious). The fact that some people might wrongly take from this that they could torture someone in front of a cheering crowd does not change the justification of the theory, it just makes those people stupid. The principle of equal consideration of interests must surely be weighted by the seriousness of those interests if we are to get meaningful results; but when we do this, we find that it is easy to show why you cannot torture someone just to get temporary happiness for a crowd.
MeDeFe wrote:They are equivalent. If you claim any differently you only prove that you haven't even begun to understand Kant's system of ethics.
Metsfanmax wrote:Consider the scenario where you have diverging train tracks, and one path has a person tied down, and the other path has two people tied down. The switch is currently set so that the two people would be killed by the oncoming train. What would Kant propose that we do in this scenario? The only possible answers are: 1) flip the switch and save the greater number of people, or 2) do nothing, because we are not responsible for deaths that we did not cause. If you treat your formulations as applying at the individual level, so that it is wrong to treat the single person as a "means" to saving the two, then you are left with a clearly unpalatable distinction between acts and omissions. You could have been responsible for saving a greater number of lives, but you didn't because you were afraid to treat the one person as a "means to an end." That absolution of responsibility can never be justified in a serious pragmatic ethical theory, and it shows why your interpretation of his statement fails -- it offers us no real solutions to the actually hard problems that affect real lives.
Flipping the switch would cause a person to die. That is a clear violation of the categorical imperative. Therefore, we do not flip the switch.
That has nothing to do with being "afraid to treat one person as a 'means to an end'". It has everything to do with understanding just how absolute the categorical imperative is.
It's good to see you're abandoning the pretension that a consequentalist system of ethics makes the least number of arbitrary assumptions about the way things should work.
natty_dread wrote:Do ponies have sex?
(proud member of the Occasionally Wrongly Banned)Army of GOD wrote:the term heterosexual is offensive. I prefer to be called "normal"
Haggis_McMutton wrote:john9blue wrote:so you think a modern society could be full of people who have read aristotle and kant and mill and can make thoughtful decisions about their actions?
i don't really know what to say to that lol...
i can't see that happening anytime within the next 100 years, and that's a very conservative estimate.
Come on. If you wanna have a serious discussion I'm game but I'm not gonna waste 5 pages chasing around each other.
What are you asserting? That religion is the thing that keeps society civilised?
Are you aware that violence has been steadily declining since, basically, forever? A couple centuries ago it was considered good fun to go see a guy being broken on the wheel. Now we think water boarding is inhumane.
What caused this change? Religion has only decreased since then.
Science/philosophy determine culture. Culture determines violence. Like I said 4000 years ago religion was the only science/philosphy we had, so it fullfilled that purpose. Now we have something better.
Haggis_McMutton wrote:
As a european in the 16th century would you have had knowledge of societies that were nearly as succesful as the european countries without employing PSST? If not then you would have made the argument that PSST is vital, correct?
PSST did reduce crime rates 2000 years ago, like religion it has become obsolete by cultural changes.
Edit: I like the acronym btw. I'll have to find more excuses to use it now.
chang50 wrote: The only thing you can know about atheists in general is they don't believe in the existence of gods.Period.
natty_dread wrote:Do ponies have sex?
(proud member of the Occasionally Wrongly Banned)Army of GOD wrote:the term heterosexual is offensive. I prefer to be called "normal"
natty_dread wrote:Do ponies have sex?
(proud member of the Occasionally Wrongly Banned)Army of GOD wrote:the term heterosexual is offensive. I prefer to be called "normal"
natty_dread wrote:Do ponies have sex?
(proud member of the Occasionally Wrongly Banned)Army of GOD wrote:the term heterosexual is offensive. I prefer to be called "normal"
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