As a study of the physical world, science can help morality, but science and morality are a separate matter.

Hi. By determinism, are you referring to the absence of free will? If so, what arguments made you come up with this conclusion? The fact is that we all feel like we have free will, and we all behave as though everyone else has free will. I.e. if I do a bad deed intentionally, it seems correct to blame me personally, as opposed to blaming nature which made me act this way.

Yeah, things could definitely be better, but I do like the opportunity to discuss the ideas. There is legitimate evidence to prove the theory although the 2007 piece is small and incomplete.

Determinism and nihilism

A few years ago in the midst of an existential crisis I had a little epiphany and did some googlin’. I soon realized that in my naïve depressive pondering I had accidentally discovered determinism. I’ve since been in a constant nihilistic state and it’s been detrimental to my existence.

Has anyone else experienced this philosophical conundrum and pulled themselves out of it? I’ve talked to therapists but none of them have has the slightest understanding of what I’m talking about.

Hi! I want to read more cultural critical analysis by smart, reasonable, and logical thinkers. Can anyone here recommend philosophers/thinkers who fall into this category? It would help if they were accessible (not too difficult to read). Some writers I’ve been recommended before when I asked this question were Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson. I tried reading In Defense of Lost Causes by Zizek, but it was a little dry and I had a hard time getting through it. If you have any specific works, that’d be helpful, too.

Didn't say a virtue ethicist can't consider the system, just that only a virtue ethicist could get away with not considering the system and remain consistent.

>you'll live in a world where the unlikely never happens

No, I'm living in a world where there is a wide range of probabilities and where I'm taking into account all available data instead of just basing the probabilities on a single factor. We had mountains of polling data both before and after the democratic primaries on people's willingness to vote for Obama, and it was far from impossible. But after he won the democratic primary, the conditional probability for him winning shoots way up.

You're living in some weird world where there's only one degree of "unlikely". If something has less than a 50% chance of happening, it's "unlikely". Sure, maybe Obama had a less than 50% chance of winning. But any third party candidate has less than a 0.000000005% chance of winning. It's not just "unlikely" it's "implausible", it's "nearly impossible", or in colloquial terms it is impossible.

If you wanna bank of nearly impossible outcomes because they might happen, go buy lottery tickets.

a black man won in 2008. never happened before. it was unlikely at best.

but he won twice.

you'll live in a world where the unlikely never happens. i'll live in the real world where it does.

>that helped us figure out who would win in 2016?

Yes, it helped us know that no third party candidate had any chance of winning. And it helped us know that both the R and D candidate had a reasonable chance of winning.

>Because we have past data on voting patterns.

that helped us figure out who would win in 2016?

based on past voting data no black person should ever be voted for because they've only won once in the history of the country.

that's ridiculous. things change. if you discard changes in favor of past mediocrity then you'll always have the same results you always had.

>how are people supposed to know in advance of the election that they are voting for losers?

Because we have past data on voting patterns. We have countless examples of third party candidates failing to get even a single electoral vote. We also have plenty of survey data and mountains of other evidence that points to the fact that many voters just vote for whoever has the R next their name every time or whoever has the D next to their name every time. We do have evidence that there are voters who aren't fixed in their voting patterns, and who sometimes vote R, sometimes vote D, and sometimes vote third party; but these non-fixed voters do not represent a large enough proportion of voters to be able to elect a third party on their own. So, we KNOW with very high certainty that in order to win, you MUST win either the voters that only vote D or the voters that only vote R, while also capturing some of the voters that aren't fixed. Therefore, we can rightly conclude that any non-R or non-D candidate has virtually zero chance of winning; more surely than one's chances of winning the powerball.

No. You're speaking in absolutes when the person you replied to said "no chance", which means near zero probability. Because you don't know the outcome ahead of time, but you can still reasonably predict no third party candidate will win. Hillary did have a chance. Indeed, she won the popular vote.

You're trying to weirdly pretend like we both:

A) don't have any predictive power about the likelihood of a third party candidate winning.

B) Have complete predictive power about who will win between the two main candidates.

But we have neither of those. We do know that no third party candidate has any chance of winning. And we do know that both of the candidates from the main two parties have a reasonable shot at winning, but that it will be close, and therefore voting for one of the main two does stand a shot at affecting the outcome.

Voting third party only makes sense in a different voting system like ranked choice. The Nash Equillibrium for a first past the post, single vote system where we have access to limited information about voting patterns of others and engage in repeated elections is for two dominant groups/parties/candidates to emerge that vie for control. Go learn some game theory.

> Oh, if only there is a non governmental organization that is funded by taxpayers but totally impartial and will simplify the facts about policies, laws, budgets, big projects for the voters and inform them better?

There are various organizations like this here and there:

https://www.democracy-international.org/direct-democracy

https://compdemocracy.org/about/

They haven't amounted to much so far, but who knows what the future holds.

> You're not protecting your integrity, or furthering your own projects toward certain aims, by taking an anti-participatory stance in electoral systems. On the contrary, you are eliminating what little effect your actions do have on the system.

If one's actions are limited to only not voting....but it can be one small piece of a much larger initiative to eventually overthrow the archaic system of "democracy" that has humanity locked in a local maxima.

> That this article doesn't even talk about the system is silly. I don't know how anyone can expect to work out the ethics of actions within a system without considering the structure of the system.

It's like the giant elephant in the room that not only do people not see, but they are strongly averse to discussing.

Propaganda works.

Well that sucks. I’m sorry for that to have happened to you. I will give Infinite Reincarnation a read for sure.

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Fair observation. As my professor like to say when he is corrected: “I put that there on purpose to make sure people are paying attention” 😂

I was going to put it this way:

1. IFF people have the right to life.
2. Murderers are people.
3. So, murderers have the right to life.

Anyway, the growing pains continue 😉

Not an American but from an outside perspective it seems like the defacto two-party system is long term a bigger problem than any individual party. Unless people vote third party it will never ever change.

The point of the egg came from the essay Word for Word. The bulk of the egg, at least God’s dialogue, came from the conversation on MySpace word for word.

Word for word plagiarism or just the idea?

The conclusion should be: If rights exists, murderers have right to life.

But the first premise in updated argument is still unfortunate, since there could exist rights other than the right to life.

The premise you want to make is that there is an universal right to life, applicable also to criminals - people in favor of capital punishment would reject that premise. The entire argument seems as circular, given it's propose.

Of course actual harm to the outgroup is wrong and because there are sadists doesn't mean the happiness of a sadist is somehow outweighed by the damage they do. I felt like this was an obvious response any consequential would give.

Of course bdsm is consensual. This is why I am not sure why sadistic glee is some sort of counter example.

Sorry you took it as aggressive, but I was clear in my definition of what I meant by happiness from the start as how you want to feel. Frankly sentences like "I would be happier in misery than in pleaure" seem meaningful and productive sentences. Dictionary mongering is just silly.

Goodbye.

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The Egg is plagiarized and stolen from a conversation on the MySpace religion and philosophy forum in 2007 about the essay Infinite Reincarnation.