Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[GE Morton]

That’s a pretty convincing defense. On the other hand I do think having free health care for all is something that we should all pay for regardless of whether or not we use it. I also think free education is essential too.

Well, you'll need a moral argument justifying that "should." There is no such thing as "free" schooling or health care. It is all paid for by someone. A claim that Alfie has some obligation to pay for Bruno's schooling or health care, and forcing him to do so, requires a compelling moral argument

I do also understand that if you pay 10% and earn say $1000 the difference of 10% when earning $1,000,000 is astronomical and hardly comparable with one perso paying $100 and the other paying $100,000. When it comes to being fair this doesn’t seem to balance out well.

Not quite sure what you're saying there, but apportioning taxes according to some percentage of income is prima facie unfair, as the burden thus imposed bears no relation to the benefits the taxpayer receives from government.

[Burning ghost]

GE -

Well, you'll need a moral argument justifying that "should." There is no such thing as "free" schooling or health care. It is all paid for by someone. A claim that Alfie has some obligation to pay for Bruno's schooling or health care, and forcing him to do so, requires a compelling moral argument

It is my opinion. My reasoning not separate to my personal moral sensibilities, the country I was born in, and what I am used to. You don’t have to agree with it.

As a defense I would just extend what I said above. Just because someone who chooses private care over public care I do not believe it morally justified to deny them access to public healthcare if they’ve never paid a penny of tax toward such a socialist idea - they may fall on had times and would therefore have those who’ve paid taxes for healthcare trying to block them receiving it. The argument pushes both ways here. The other practical problem would be the level of care involved and whether specialist treatment is of a higher standard in or out of public healthcare.

Note: I am from the UK so I have a natural bias in this argument. Even though people have been complaining about the NHS ever since it’s birth over all it’s managed to do a pretty good job imo.

As for the second part. Yes, that is exactly what I was saying. It woudl be unfair and I agree with you. Yet I believe some people here would argue otherwise and I can understand that because it is a particularly difficult balance to make and leave the majority of people feeling they’ve received “fair treatment.”

[ThomasHobbes]

No taxpayer has any a priori duty to relieve someone else's poverty or educate someone else's kids.

All members of society have a moral duty to the rest of society. If you ain't worked that out you are just immoral.

[GE Morton]

All members of society have a moral duty to the rest of society. If you ain't worked that out you are just immoral.

There are, and can be, no duties to "society." Nor can "society" have duties to anyone. It is of the wrong ontological order for attaching moral predicates.

"Society" is collective term denoting a number of interacting individuals. It is not a moral agent; it is a collection of them, and one can have duties only to the individual moral agents constituting it.

So if you wish to speak cogently you'll have to specify the duties you are asserting, identify the individuals who have these duties, to whom they have them, and the basis, empirical or logical, for your claims.

But perhaps, for you, morality is not based on evidence and rational argument, but upon "intuitions" or "gut feelings." If so, then there is no need to respond; only rational arguments can be profitably debated.

[LuckyR]

All members of society have a moral duty to the rest of society. If you ain't worked that out you are just immoral.

There are, and can be, no duties to "society." Nor can "society" have duties to anyone. It is of the wrong ontological order for attaching moral predicates.

"Society" is collective term denoting a number of interacting individuals. It is not a moral agent; it is a collection of them, and one can have duties only to the individual moral agents constituting it.

So if you wish to speak cogently you'll have to specify the duties you are asserting, identify the individuals who have these duties, to whom they have them, and the basis, empirical or logical, for your claims.

But perhaps, for you, morality is not based on evidence and rational argument, but upon "intuitions" or "gut feelings." If so, then there is no need to respond; only rational arguments can be profitably debated.

That is the sort of description that sounds good on paper, yet can fall apart when viewed through the lens of life experience.

[Belindi]

GE Morton wrote:

People can become more --- or less --- empathetic over time, with no intervention, due to maturation, personal experiences, or some internal neural process not understood, just as people who, say, ignored classical music in their youth can come to enjoy it later in life. But there is no evidence that they can be "taught" empathy (that I know of).

Empathy is taught 1.by induction into a society of peers, parents or teachers who practice empathy 2. by the arts including literature, drama, and psychodrama. 3. Occasionally simple explanation will be enough.

I am not sure what you mean by "taught". Education is not training or indoctrination and education requires that the learner is motivated. Motivation can't be forced, for instance by punishment, but has to be presented as a possibility with some reward if possible.

Christians, among others, have been trying to "teach" empathy for two millennia ("love thy neighbor as thyself") with no notable success.*

There is no complete empirical record of successes and failures. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the American We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
are notable successes. As always, it's easier to identify evil than to identify good.I guess this is because good is the default, in other words, evil is absence of good.

There are, and can be, no duties to "society." Nor can "society" have duties to anyone. It is of the wrong ontological order for attaching moral predicates.

Reciprocity is basically what differentiates a society from an aggregate of people.

[Steve3007]

Replying to this:
viewtopic.php?p=320775#p320775

which was a comment on my post addressed to ThomasHobbes, here:

viewtopic.php?p=320744#p320744

TH appears to subscribe to a non-cognitivist view of ethics, perhaps the the emotivist view:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/

https://moralphilosophy.info/metaethics ... ressivism/

Possibly. ThomasHobbes (if you're reading this) is this you?

Many propositions asserting moral principles or judgments indeed express nothing more than the speaker's unfounded and uninformed opinion, likely derived from his emotional responses to morally problematic scenarios.

I would put it like this: Many propositions asserting moral principles or judgements are actually, on closer inspection, propositions as to what course of action will (the speaker suggests) most likely lead to what outcome. In other words, they are not, in themselves, declarations of the speaker's "core values" (as I've called them). They are propositions about cause and effect.

I am a moral cognitivist. I think moral theories can be, and ought to be, as sound and rationally defensible as theories in any other field, and that moral judgments and principles have truth values which can be determined analytically or empirically.

I agree that they have potential theoretical truth value if they are as I have described them above - theories about cause and effect. But if they are about what I have described as "core values" then I think arguing about them is analogous to trying to argue about personal taste. It's not possible because in this case they are the axioms on which the argument sits. Arguments about the rights and wrongs of abortion often illustrate particularly clearly what happens when core values differ and persuasion on the basis of rational argument (by either side) is therefore impossible.

But also, even if our axioms are the same, it may be impossible in practice to agree because it may be (and frequently is) impossible in practice to unambiguously demonstrate causal links in an extremely complex world, most of which we only have indirect access to.

Hence most "moral arguments" consist of people throwing supposed facts at each other that they've found on the internet. And they also usually involve anger of some kind. In a "real life" situation (as opposed to here) they also often involve such things as shouting, repeating slogans, ignoring each other, talking over each other, failing to properly understand each other's language, threatening each other with violence, or running out of time for the debate because it's nearly 9 O'Clock and someone needs to read out the weather forecast and news headlines.

Such is the messiness of real life.

A moral theory is a theory for generating rules governing interactions between agents in a moral field (a social setting).

I agree,

Like all theories it proceeds from one or more axioms expressing the aims of the theory, which are assumed to be true without proof, and from which subordinate theorems --- principles and rules --- can be logically derived.

Yes, these axioms are what I was referring to earlier as "core values"; the things that each speaker assumes to be the self-evident underlying goal of the exercise; the end to which all other sub-goals are a proposed means.

It also stipulates certain features of "human nature" and the moral field, which it takes to be either self-evident or empirically verifiable.

These count as part of the proposed cause/effect. It is proposed that human beings tend, by their nature, to act in certain ways that tend to explain/describe the reasons for certain moral problems in life. A classic example is tribalism. We often say that the tribal instincts which we evolved in small groups, though still useful in some respects, can cause some problems in others.

In principle the rules generated can be tested empirically to see whether or not they further the aims of the theory declared in the axioms.

In principle yes. In practice, experiments as to what works for entire societies over long periods of time are complex and, for reasons already described, rarely lead to objective consensus.

A sound moral theory does not depend upon anyone's values. Rather, it assumes that everyone values certain things, and that agents differ in what they value and the values they assign to different things. The theory is indifferent to values, and to the various interests and goals of agents; it is concerned only with the means agents employ to attain those goals or realize those values.

Yes, the process of constructing a rational argument does not depend on core values. It sits on top of them.

[Steve3007]

Many propositions asserting moral principles or judgments indeed express nothing more than the speaker's unfounded and uninformed opinion, likely derived from his emotional responses to morally problematic scenarios.

Another thing to add to my previous comment on this:

These "uninformed opinions" are propositions about cause and effect. If they are indeed uninformed then they're likely to be found to be factually incorrect propositions. I take the point that strong emotional responses can sometimes lead to proposed actions which are not based an assessment of whether those actions will likely serve the speaker's underlying goals.

"String 'em up! The bastards! Death's too good for 'em! Come the revolution they'll be first against the wall!"

That kind of thing.

But, on the other hand, it is our emotional responses that lead us to generate the axiomatic goals on which we base our cause/effect arguments. So emotional responses are not entirely without utility.

[Steve3007]

All members of society have a moral duty to the rest of society. If you ain't worked that out you are just immoral.

If that were true and he hadn't worked it out, it would make him bad at working things out. Not immoral. If it were true and he was immoral (but good at working things out) he would have said something like: "I know all members of society have a moral duty to the rest of society, and I don't care! Ha Ha Ha!" (evil laugh).

[SimpleGuy]

Prisons are a word for confinement of freedom, if one could replace this word with something at least as effective for protection of the rights of other this could be a point to discuss. The problem is, that the bci-technology , although capable for hitachi to implement a crime prediction system
(look at https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news ... on-system/) as well as capable for the depiction of brain movies ( look at http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/) is not well enough evolved to provide a replacement ,like a prision inside of your brain (without beeing lobotomized).

[SimpleGuy]

Then three years of brain detention center could replace in mild cases (no murderers etc.) three years of prison with lesser monetary effort.

[SimpleGuy]

In case of existence of such a technology, this could be something like a biological reversable autism (bci -induced) for a certain time. Just in case that the person could take care of his own work etc. But how such a brain detention center would look like is unclear.

[SimpleGuy]

At least i interpretated this sort of question like the previous made remarks. Due to the fact that a prison is a stately induced confinement of personal freedom. The word prision would then be replaced via bci-brain detention center. Which could prevent people from developing social relationship to other people for example and make him a loner or something else.

[GE Morton]

Empathy is taught 1.by induction into a society of peers, parents or teachers who practice empathy 2. by the arts including literature, drama, and psychodrama. 3. Occasionally simple explanation will be enough.

Perhaps we have different understandings of what "empathy" means. As I said earlier, I take "empathy" to be an emotional response to the suffering or struggles of others, just as fear is an emotional response to perceived danger, and anger an emotional response to a perceived wrong. It is not a behavior (something one "practices"). Here is the dictionary definition:

"1. The ability to identify with or understand the perspective, experiences, or motivations of another individual and to comprehend and share another individual's emotional state."

https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=empathy

Christians, among others, have been trying to "teach" empathy for two millennia ("love thy neighbor as thyself") with no notable success.*

There is no complete empirical record of successes and failures. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the American We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
are notable successes.

Neither of those is an example of empathy, or teaching empathy. The UN Declaration is a document constructed to placate various political constituencies and codify an ideology fashionable at the time, and the The US Declaration is an abstract of Locke's theory of the purpose of government.

Reciprocity is basically what differentiates a society from an aggregate of people.

A "society" (in the sense understood in political science) is a group of people so situated as to be able to interact, and who do interact. It does require reciprocity, but reciprocity is not empathy, and does not depend upon empathy. Every contract requires reciprocity; few of them involve any empathy on the part of any of the parties.

[Belindi]

Empathy is taught 1.by induction into a society of peers, parents or teachers who practice empathy 2. by the arts including literature, drama, and psychodrama. 3. Occasionally simple explanation will be enough.

Perhaps we have different understandings of what "empathy" means. As I said earlier, I take "empathy" to be an emotional response to the suffering or struggles of others, just as fear is an emotional response to perceived danger, and anger an emotional response to a perceived wrong. It is not a behavior (something one "practices"). Here is the dictionary definition:

"1. The ability to identify with or understand the perspective, experiences, or motivations of another individual and to comprehend and share another individual's emotional state."

https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=empathy

There is no complete empirical record of successes and failures. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the American We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
are notable successes.

Neither of those is an example of empathy, or teaching empathy. The UN Declaration is a document constructed to placate various political constituencies and codify an ideology fashionable at the time, and the The US Declaration is an abstract of Locke's theory of the purpose of government.

Reciprocity is basically what differentiates a society from an aggregate of people.

A "society" (in the sense understood in political science) is a group of people so situated as to be able to interact, and who do interact. It does require reciprocity, but reciprocity is not empathy, and does not depend upon empathy. Every contract requires reciprocity; few of them involve any empathy on the part of any of the parties.

True, empathy involves emotion but especially emotion which has been refined through reason into feelings. Reason is deficient unless it involves feelings. An example of reason which is deficient in feelings is that displayed by persons who have severe frontal lobe lesions.It's unlikely that a society where the individuals lack fellow feeling will endure however well the repriprocity of contracts is administered.This is because humans are endlessly creative and their societies adapt.

If you pardon the anachronism do you think that Jesus' message was socialist?

Your " Every contract requires reciprocity; few of them involve any empathy on the part of any of the parties." is an example of necessary but not sufficient.