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[LogicLabyrinth]

Dear all,



Some reflections that I'd like to be challenged (sorry for the many points, I hope they are connected enough to make sense)

• we are (morally) responsible for the foreseeable effects of our actions and inactions.
• I understand this to be a consequentialist view. I see that the "double effect doctrine" seems attractive, but I think its core insights can be captured in other ways (e.g. that somebody that has the intention to harm, or that harms as a direct objective, is more likely to commit such acts in the future). Similar comment for virtue ethics, etc, but I understand this is an enormous topic.
• most events have multiple necessary causes. It seems a common fallacy (is there a name?) to pick one such cause and assign it full moral responsibility: "if X had not done Y, this would not have happened. Therefore X is fully responsible for the harm caused". It seems to me that in debates, the different parties pick different such "one true" causes, as they fit their narrative / world view.
• assigning responsibilities is not a zero sum game ("if I increase the responsibility of Y, the responsibility of X is equally reduced"). Some events seem to have long chain of responsibilities where many parties should be responsible. Other harm just happens mostly because of "bad luck".
• From the above I derive some (I think) controversial positions
• If I put my son in a dangerous position I am (in part) responsible for the harm that might happen. This does not depend on how the harm happens, but it is linked only on how much the harm could have been predicted (let's skip for the moment discussions about the epistemology of uncertain events, statistical models, etc. ...)
• If bring him to live on a dangerous active volcano, I am responsible if he is harmed during an eruption
• If I take him on a dangerous street at night, I am responsible if he is harmed. My responsibility is not reduced by the fact that I could point to another person that committed a crime (it's not a zero sum game).
• If I bring him to live on a dangerous war zone, I am also responsible. It doesn't matter that I can point to another entity (state, terrorist group, etc) as responsible of violence.
• even more controversial: if I live in a war zone, procreation makes me responsible for the harm that my child can suffer. I am particularly more responsible if I reproduce in order to fight some demographic battle with another party (where each wants to have a higher population).
• reason: there is nobody who doesn't exist. Existence is not desired by anybody, since nobody lacks it.
• by creating a child to fight a "demographic battle" I am putting him in a dangerous scenario, enrolling him in a battle to which he can neither consent nor easily reject (one he's older, assuming it's hard to move to another country).
  - Every society can go back in time to find some level of injustice and violence that is causally linked to the current status-quo. If we want to live in relative peace, we need some kind of mechanism to "discount" older events, eventually making them irrelevant. What matters is today's injustice and harm, since only people alive today can be harmed.
• It seems to me that the inherit and inevitable parental responsibility might be a mechanism to discount, across generations, such historical responsibilities. But I'm not sure.

thanks for your comments.

[Lagayascienza]

•

we are (morally) responsible for the foreseeable effects of our actions and inactions.

This is a big topic. Ultimately it all boils down to the question of whether or not we have free will. Certainly we are held morally responsible by the law, by those we may harm or help and by society generally. But this does not mean we actually are morally responsible unless we really could have done other than we did, unless we really do have free will.

I take it that your question assumes that we do actually have free will. However, this is a much disputed issue in philosophy and science.

There is also the question of what you mean by "morally responsible". If, as some clam, there is no such thing as objective moral truth, then our actions are "morally" nothing. That does not mean however, that we should not be appalled by certain actions and feel good about others. We cannot do otherwise. But that is perhaps ranging too far from central issue of whether we should be morally accountable for our actions in the commonly understood sense of "morally".

[iiQ007]

I would initiate the discussion by delving into the fundamental questions of morality and legality, exploring their intrinsic connection and divergence. Both concepts represent distinct facets of human evolution, diametrically opposed yet intricately intertwined.

When it comes to the legal realm, it revolves around addressing issues of damages, responsibility, and accountability. The law meticulously determines the placement of liabilities and quantifies damages and losses. The examples you provided illustrate the fear that stems from bearing responsibilities, especially in the context of child conservation. As a natural guardian, one is inherently burdened with the duty to safeguard the child's welfare.

On the other hand, delving into the realm of morality and free will, it becomes a labyrinthine exploration. While you might cease connecting the dots and tracing the series of actions once they lead to you, extending this line of reasoning beyond oneself often results in the inclination to assign blame to others. However, this pursuit of causality and consequence becomes a never-ending endeavour, marked by an infinite loop of introspection.

In my opinion, fear serves as a catalyst, compelling individuals to embrace their responsibilities and be accountable, especially when it concerns the well-being of a child. This accountability, rooted in fear, becomes the driving force behind taking decisive action in the child's case.

[Lagayascienza]

In my opinion, fear serves as a catalyst, compelling individuals to embrace their responsibilities and be accountable, especially when it concerns the well-being of a child. This accountability, rooted in fear, becomes the driving force behind taking decisive action in the child's case.

You make some good points here iiQ007. It is in our nature to LOVE and look after our offspring. Most of us can’t help it. Most of us would do anything for them, including sacrificing ourselves. And even if we’ve been ok parents, we can still sometimes be plagued by doubts and wonder whether we’ve done all we could/should have. And this can lead to that most awful of emotions, GUILT and also to FEAR of being judged a bad parent. We are social animals and don’t want to be negatively judged by our group. Evolution put these emotions of love, guilt and fear into us to ensure that we give carriers of our genes, our kids, the best chance of launching those genes into the future. And I’m glad evolution did that. While there’s not a lot of free will happening in all this, I’d hate not to love or be capable of looking after my children.

But genes are complicated things, they get all warped by lots of things. And it’s not just nature, there’s epigenetics and nurture to consider. If our parents were dealt a lousy genetic hand of cards and we inherit those genes and/or if we’ve done it tough as kids ourselves, this can negatively impact our ability to look after ourselves and our kids and this can propagate down through generations.

But, at the end of the day, all we can do is the best we can with what we have ended up with via nature and nurture. But this is where society can make a difference. Life doesn’t have to be dog-eat-dog existence; society can help smooth out the rough edges of nature and nurture and this can make the difference between a bad childhood experience and an ok one and then healthy, capable adults. It’s not good for society to have hordes of destitute people who are unable to care for themselves or their children. And it doesn't have to be like that, especially not in wealthy countries. We need more social housing, better schools and affordable health care so everyone gets the best start possible. If that means I have to pay a bit more tax to help level the playing field a bit, then I’m ok with that. I’d be paying that extra to fund busier criminal courts, more prisons, parole boards and the mental health crisis centres etcetera that are necessary in very unequal societies. We can do better. It would be a win-win for society and for kids and future generations. And for the country.

[iiQ007]

In my opinion, fear serves as a catalyst, compelling individuals to embrace their responsibilities and be accountable, especially when it concerns the well-being of a child. This accountability, rooted in fear, becomes the driving force behind taking decisive action in the child's case.

You make some good points here iiQ007. It is in our nature to LOVE and look after our offspring. Most of us can’t help it. Most of us would do anything for them, including sacrificing ourselves. And even if we’ve been ok parents, we can still sometimes be plagued by doubts and wonder whether we’ve done all we could/should have. And this can lead to that most awful of emotions, GUILT and also to FEAR of being judged a bad parent. We are social animals and don’t want to be negatively judged by our group. Evolution put these emotions of love, guilt and fear into us to ensure that we give carriers of our genes, our kids, the best chance of launching those genes into the future. And I’m glad evolution did that. While there’s not a lot of free will happening in all this, I’d hate not to love or be capable of looking after my children.

But genes are complicated things, they get all warped by lots of things. And it’s not just nature, there’s epigenetics and nurture to consider. If our parents were dealt a lousy genetic hand of cards and we inherit those genes and/or if we’ve done it tough as kids ourselves, this can negatively impact our ability to look after ourselves and our kids and this can propagate down through generations.

But, at the end of the day, all we can do is the best we can with what we have ended up with via nature and nurture. But this is where society can make a difference. Life doesn’t have to be dog-eat-dog existence; society can help smooth out the rough edges of nature and nurture and this can make the difference between a bad childhood experience and an ok one and then healthy, capable adults. It’s not good for society to have hordes of destitute people who are unable to care for themselves or their children. And it doesn't have to be like that, especially not in wealthy countries. We need more social housing, better schools and affordable health care so everyone gets the best start possible. If that means I have to pay a bit more tax to help level the playing field a bit, then I’m ok with that. I’d be paying that extra to fund busier criminal courts, more prisons, parole boards and the mental health crisis centres etcetera that are necessary in very unequal societies. We can do better. It would be a win-win for society and for kids and future generations. And for the country.

I agree with you. In the intricate tapestry of human existence, the threads of love, guilt, and fear weave a narrative that transcends individual lives. Our innate instinct to nurture and safeguard our progeny, a profound manifestation of evolutionary design, lays bare the very essence of our humanity. Balancing on the tightrope of nature and nurture, we grapple with the intricacies of genetic inheritance and the indelible imprints left by our formative years.

Yet, in this intricate dance of life, we find solace and hope in the realization that, as individuals, we are but players on a broader societal stage. A realization that beckons us to confront the disparities, injustices, and hardships that threaten the delicate balance of our collective well-being. Society, with its transformative potential, becomes the crucible where the rough edges of nature and nurture can be smoothed, paving the way for resilience and prosperity.

It is a call for a society that extends a helping hand to those who carry the weight of challenging genetic cards or bear the scars of a tumultuous upbringing. It is a call for social housing, quality education, and accessible healthcare—a recognition that a nation's strength lies not just in its prosperity but in the upliftment of its most vulnerable.

The government has to look into the matters of the well-being of society. If the question is asked, "Who is the government?" it turns to us who elected our representatives. The pursuit of a just society is not an abstract ideal but a pragmatic endeavor—a collective responsibility to break the shackles of destitution and pave the way for a brighter future, not just for the current generation but for those yet to come.

[HJCarden]

most events have multiple necessary causes. It seems a common fallacy (is there a name?) to pick one such cause and assign it full moral responsibility: "if X had not done Y, this would not have happened. Therefore X is fully responsible for the harm caused". It seems to me that in debates, the different parties pick different such "one true" causes, as they fit their narrative / world view.

This speaks to a tendency that sometimes we want to really find the MAIN cause of X. If we find the MAIN cause of X we can start to assign a hierarchy of blame where Cause A is the THE cause and lower causes contribute to, but ultimately do not have the importance of Cause A. Often of course when mapping the causes of an event we find ourselves in an infinite regress of finding the cause of the cause of the cause, and it becomes arbitrary as to what cause in this chain is picked out to be Cause A. Often times our intuitive selection of THE cause simply shows our personal biases towards the scenario, while not truly making a case for why that step in the causal chain is most critical.

If any agent in the causal chain has the ability to "choose" our instincts are to investigate any "choices" they made and asses their affects on the final outcome. This is the way we assign moral blame and responsibility to others. However, if these choices are mere illusions, searching for an agent as Cause A becomes futile.

The question of what cause is THE cause then becomes a question of if true agency is demonstrated to have a mitigating or aggravating effect on the outcome.

Here is where I am unsure. I so often believe that I am a genuine agent; I think that the choices I make are in some way my own, in some way original, in some way they belong to me and I carry responsibility for them. On the other hand, I cannot ignore how my choices can be slowly taken away from me by accidents of history and circumstance, slowly taking away my control/responsibility/agency in those actions. And furthermore. I cannot ignore that while I am arbitrarily making event X as the "end" of a causal chain, I must recognize that there is no end in sight to the longer causal chain that can be constructed, with event X simply another part of a long lineage.

I cannot be sure either way that my choices express genuine agency or are merely predetermined. However I am decently certain that time will continue on, and my only certainty is that event X will be a part of a continuing chain. Where do I go from here?