I didn’t say anything about using numbers to justify morality, and neither did the OP. My point is that a lot of real-life moral dilemmas that involve uncertainty, and it’s very hard to resolve them if your moral framework isn’t comfortable with probabilities to some extent. For instance, how would you respond to the two scenarios I gave above?

> How do they draw the line without using numbers on at least some level?

You can't use numbers to justify your morality. You can only optimize it if your morality happens to be purely utilitarian.

Math isn't only a tool for utilitarians, though. The real world is fundamentally uncertain--people are forced to make decisions involving probability all the time. To use an example in the essay, consider driving: If there's a 0.0000001% chance of killing someone while driving to work, is that acceptable? What about a 5% risk? Most deontologists and virtue ethicists would probably be okay with the first option (they make that choice every day!), but not the second (also a choice commonly made when e.g. deciding not do drive home drunk). How do they draw the line without using numbers on at least some level? Or what will they do when confronted with a charitable intervention that, because the details are complicated, will save someone's life for $1,000 with 50% probability?

A comprehensive moral theory can't operate only in the realm of thought experiments and trolley problems where every piece of the situation is 100% certain. They have to handle uncertainty in the real world too, and the only way to do this is to be comfortable with probabilities, at least to some extent.

I’m in Sweden! That’s interesting, here you can barely buy hyacinths before mid november, unless there are different seasonal variants? I don’t really know, but the ones they sell for christmas smell lovely!

I do spend Christmas eve with my family but because that day is no longer the big event that the whole month of december has been leading up to, I don't feel the pressure of it all having to go smoothly. If it gets too much, I'll excuse myself and head home. I know this won't work for everyone; my family is small and we live close together. But just this simple change in my mindset has helped me personally reduce the anxiety that the holidays would give me every year.

This sounds like me 100%. LOL. I always try to buy gifts early. But the problem with that is forgetting you bought it or hid it so well that I can't find it. LOL.

I really do agree it's critical thinking, but it's even even more moral values/laws/schemes ingrained in an individual, that may use maths like a tool, not pure maths that solve the moral problem.

It's easy to prove, because you may consider other criteria than the number as the age, the gender, the weakness, the social "utility", according to your moral internal scheme (moral values).

This article decide you will always use the number to decide, but it is totally wrong, one can save 5 children and let the adult to drown, because it's their moral value, or save 5 people because they are of their family. Or even from their ethnicity. Or because their moral value is "to help weak people first", they could try to save disabled people first, or save the guy who is a doctor, an artist, a politician, etc...

There are a lot of possibilities because there are a lot of moral schemes guiding the logical decision of a person, and they could take several different "logical" paths according to their own logics.

Of course, if you ask the solution of this problem with disembodied people that are only imaginary silhouettes, people will use the pure logics, the mathematical one, but in real situations, where the people to saved are "embodied" and real, the moral choices can be different.

So, it is a really big simplification, It's really simplistic to consider maths alone, detached from the internal moral schemes (that have more weight than theorical pure logics) the main determiner for moral choices.

Pure maths can also lead to decisions that would be judged as really non moral in some cultures or situations (culture: people with common moral schemes), if used as a pure tool, like the villain in movies deciding to sacrifice some lives for the good of a greater amount of individual.

If this article was true, and mathematical really so important as a pure tool for chosing moral decisions, nobody would frown upon having some economic slaves for exemple for the great good of more people than there are slaves or exploiting ethnic minorities.

Maths are really not a moral tool, especially if taken alone, as the article tries to suggest.

See I feel the same way about Halloween. Where I'm from, we have more communal Halloween time/ harvest parties and the whole community participates in Trick-or-Treating. there are ads and events and people talk about the scary movies they're marathoning. It feels very communal, Maybe even more so than Christmas, which for us is mostly family centered. It's a feeling that I just catch every year.

Its usually critical thinking that solves moral problems.

Like so:
To address the subject of morals we must consider the broader spectrum of which it covers.
The end goal is to live in a way that is rational, as such it must be considered for all life because life lives.
With consideration to unbiased critical thinking we must challenge our own cultures which influence assumptions and biases, because such man-made constructs have no meaning to living things other than humans.
As such you must consider what it is that influences unethical behaviour in our decision making so that we may avoid it.

Unbiasedly we must strive for an unbiased ethical approach to morals because the study of such a subject requires critical thinking.
To simplify the goal: You can't value a social construct or object over the lives or wellbeings of others.

Literally this. I grew up in a house where Christmas was the thing. We would start in November finish by Thanksgiving. Enjoy it for December and pack it by my birthday in January.

To say my parents had an obsession with Christmas is an understatement. And as a kid I enjoyed the fruits of my parents labor. It was truly magical. But then I became a teen. And part of the magic was now my job. Hanging lights. Spending hours after school setting up the tree and going through and putting wreaths up in the windows. Or lining the stairway with garland and red bells.

And I quickly learned I didn't love Christmas as much as my parents. It's to much work. So I abandoned it. It kind of broke my mother's heart but it just wasn't something I wanted to devote the time to.

Now that I'm an adult I have exactly what I'm willing to put into it. I have 5 strands of prelit garland inside the house. 4 in the living room and one in the kitchen. A Christmas tree. A ceramic tree with colored lights probably 18 inches tall. And three strands of lights on the gutters outside.

Takes a day to put up and less to take down.

Gift giving is gone except for kids. My nephew's will get a few things. But me and my siblings aren't trading anything. And I might buy my dad a small thing this year but it's less of a Xmas gift and more of a thing I'd buy him just cuz.

The only other person I buy gifts for is my fiance.

Summer is overrated by far.

The best times of year are September, October and May.

Summer is for hiding from the sun and trying to not get sweat-glued to your chair.

The moral rule of the universe is built from it's construction. Basically everything is one thing so whatever you do to others you do to yourself. There is simply the illusion of separation. Basically all religions hint at this truth in one way or another.

In Catholicism the same idea is essentially present. When Jesus is asked who he is he simply states “I am" and his Golden rule is to treat others as you want to be treated. Which is implied if you understand that everything is one with god.

Lucifer is associated with the deadly sin of pride. This is because his sin is thinking he is separate from god when the true nature of reality is that he is god. For this he falls into hell, which is described as eternal separation from god. All the other sins emerge from this as the prerequisite for all bad action is to not recognize the entity you're transgressing against is yourself.

The trinity is simply three aspect of god but each imply the existence of each other.

The Father is simply the unknowable force of creation, The holy spirit is the moral virtue of god(The Golden rule) and the son is supposed to be the knowable face of god(the manifestation). The tauist's have similar lingo when they speak about similar subject's.

This rule is the only implied virtue of the universe and it is not subject to change. This is a constructionist view of morality as it is derived from a belief on how the universe is actually constructed and not made up from some arbitrary authority. It is true everywhere at anytime and in any culture. Good and Bad are not relative terms, there is an objective standard and it's the universal will. Treat others as if they were you because they are literally you.

It is important to note that since everything is one thing this also implies that you are the environment around you as well. So the rule even implies respect to the environment and animals.

May seem far fetched but if you drop enough psychedelic drugs it makes sense as you will certainly feel and see it yourself. This is the reason you hear every hippy ever say "one love mannn. They may not be able to articulate the rational behind it but in that state the connection to all things is undeniable. This is how I came to the conclusion. Basically thought about a 6g mushroom trip for a year and half and realized what it was trying to show me about the nature of good and evil.

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Same! I hate it so fuckin' much, I never have any idea what to give anyone else, and whatever I do find never feels like enough. I'm one of those people who holds real high standards for myself and I never reach them, so it's pretty depressing. My ever-elusive goal is to get it all done by Thanksgiving so I can just take the month off and actually enjoy the Christmas season.

I don't think this article sees or explains the full extent of how far math can go to describe morality. All it talks about are utility functions, but math can go so much further than that.

Many moral rules can arise naturally from social, iterated game theory. Some of you might know how iterated prisoner's dilemma gives us the "golden rule" or "tit for tat" (for those of you that don't, look at this first before reading further https://ncase.me/trust/), but stable strategies for more complex social games gives rise to social punishment and as a result, rules for deciding who and what actions to punish.

Most people would believe that this merely explains how our moral rules became accepted and use in society, and doesn't really tell us what an "ideal" set of moral rules would be. But I think, even if it might not uniquely specify what morality is, it puts some strong constraints on what morality can be.

In particular, I think that morality should be (to some degree) stable/self-enforcing. By that, I mean that a moral rules should be chosen so that if most of society is following that set of moral rules, then for most people following moral rules as opposed to discarding them is in their personal self-interest, in the same way that cooperation is in each of the player's self=interest in the iterate prisoner's dilemma under the "golden rule" or "tit for tat" moral rule.

You can't solve moral problems with math. You can only express your moral beliefs in symbolic forms and manipulate them with the tools of mathematics. If you describe a moral problems in utilitarian terms, then you'll get utilitarian results. But who is to say that a moral problem requires a utilitarian result? That's just begging the question.

You can recreate this experience through your children or grandchildren.

I find joy in the Christmas season. The cold air, the music, apple cider. I have both fond and dreadful memories of a life rapidly passing by. Enjoy all of it while you can :) Merry Christmas!

Ok maybe I’m an idiot, but the way this article was written felt very pseudo-intellectual to me. I could only get through half it. I don’t actually think I’d disagree with their overall points but they took forever to get there.

We would get along well 💜💖

https://youtu.be/B818DE3EsHY

I didn’t grow up with Christmas except for more repenting for being alive. I wish I knew what this felt like… I want to feel the magic, and the sentiment so much.

I truly believe the winter holidays are the most ‘warm’ and ‘appreciative’ because the latter half of the year = serotonin heavy, the summer = dopamine heavy.

Just like the day is for developing, the night for recovering, it seems that the summer is the same ‘inverse’ to the winter, a year seems to be a ‘day’ oscillating at a higher scale, carrying with it a relatively longer ‘release schedule’ from a single day.

Schopenhauer and Plato both address this issue in different ways. Plato describes Akrasia as weakness of will, where one knows what reason dictates but fails to pursue that goal. Though he does identify it as a phenomenon he can't explain it. Mostly because, as Schopenhauer points out, it is based on an empirically flawed moral psychology. Reason for Schopenhauer does not motivate us to act, desire is an exclusive function of the Will, which always motivates us to act. Reason is simply an instrument to guide us in efficiently and effectively fulfilling desire.

That doesn't mean rational approaches to ethics have no place. They are best utilized in collective tools like government to assure good outcomes when using public or finite resources.

The great articulator of this debate is Richard Taylor, the beekeeping philosopher, in his book Good and Evil. The most underrated philosophy publication of the last 100 years imo.

Basically the whole Nutcracker soundtrack for me.