Kuba Adamów

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Are you attempting to get an ought from an is?

You can get an ought from an is, if one of the is’s is a desire or goal.  In the absence of desires, goals, passions, values, etc., it’s not possible (according to David Hume, and I agree with him).

Here’s an example of groups that do immoral things, while being moral within themselves:  the Pirate Code.

Unseen wrote:
I can recognise nagging problems, I just haven’t mentioned any.

Gee, I wonder why(?). OK, give us some examples of issues in your theory yet to be explained.

I can’t think of any.  I’m sure there are some.

Value theory isn’t about standards or measures or, if so, only obliquely. The “value” in this case has more to do with what one…

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Unseen wrote:
Telling us how we make moral choices doesn’t tell us where morality comes from.

It’s the other way round – telling us where morality comes from tells us how we make moral choices.

You are doing description, not philosophy, and your descriptions are reductionist (you don’t recognize any nagging problems, there’s no area yet to be ex…

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Unseen wrote:
And yet, that often happens. Look at the January 6 conspirators, the Manhattan Project, and The Beatles. Prosecutors take advantage of this sort of thing in building cases all the time.

Then, they’re being competitive with each other and not moral.

So, but you are not engaging in moral philosophy, which would be telling us what…

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Natives are still being persecuted, its insane to think otherwise. If the Russians occupied New York somehow and invited Natives to come “share” Manhattan, heavily support them financially and with arms, and when Manhattanites inevitably resisted (as if Americans in any place would not LMAO), and then partition the Island into highly favourable…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Rome did a lot to civilize the world and it do so by subjugating peoples, often brutally. Were the Roman emperors acting morally?

Once the Romans had decided to achieve their goals at the expense of others – you still wouldn’t expect them all to turn into thieves and liars towards each other, and start fighting like rats in a sack.

Unseen wrote:
Rome did a lot to civilize the world and it do so by subjugating peoples, often brutally. Were the Roman emperors acting morally?

It’s possible to follow moral rules while doing immoral things.

Unseen wrote:
By that definition, if I were to find myself the last person on Earth and thus not a member of any community or group of any sort, could I even have a morality? Or can someone live by a code of their own without reference to anything other than himself?

By that definition, you would require instrumental rather than moral…[Read more]

unapologetic wrote:
Do you think they started from the selfish behaviors of microbes and became cooperation out of necessity?

I would say your intuitions are pretty spot on.

Normativity is the pressure to achieve goals.  Morality comes in two parts: instrumental normativity, and joint or moral normativity.  The second is the joint version of t…[Read more]

Enco, would you support expelling most New Yorkers from Manhattan and giving it over to the Native American population of New York state, funding and arming them and supporting them when Manhattanites resist? I would be quite curious to hear everyone’s response to this (and some bullshit answer about how “it is not the same thing”).

Enco, you are wrong for two reasons:

1. Calling them “people of death” is a blanket attack on them. It is no different when people used to outrageously call Jews “money scroungers”. That isn’t directly calling an invidual a money scrounger, but the harm is still there (hence virulent voilence against Jews for most of European history). Calling…[Read more]

I’ve been studying evolutionary ethics for about 13 years.  I’ve found that morality is both simpler and more complicated than people think.

Morality is the self-regulation within a cooperative unit or group.  So, I govern myself; you govern me; I govern you; we govern each other and ourselves on behalf of the group, in the directionof the j…[Read more]

I would say any answer than “no” is ghastly. Calling for a genocide against a people (outside of some ill thought absurdity, bad humour or thought experiment) is inciting violence, hate speech and extremely dangerous. I am aghast at her answer. It is at the very least, in the grey zone of anti-semitism, if not symbolic of a lax attitude towards…[Read more]

If only he wasn’t so overwhelmingly self-centred to the point of stupidity.

Unseen wrote:
Increasing the producton of vegetable-based foods has environmental problems of its own, since it has a negative effect in terms of reducing habitat for natural animals and plants whereas cattle, for example, can share habitat with the plants and animals that live on the land on which they graze.

But it’s many times more efficient…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Cattle and other animal crops serve a valid purpose. Every creature on Earth is food for something else.

They serve a purpose (food) but they’re also suffocating the Earth, with their greenhouse gases and environmental degradation.

unapologetic wrote:
I apologize for not remembering the source.

Was it Michael Tomasello and the Leipzig Institute for comparative primatology?

Yes, we’re W.E.I.R.D.

There are religions without Gods (some native Australian, Native American and indigenous African ones). They are still atheists (they lack belief in a God). Some versions of Bhuddism, Taoism, Confucianism etc are also Godless.

I mention frequently that we should be careful not to talk about the average atheists as a Western skeptic humanist. We…[Read more]