shirgall

There certainly is a moral difference, or we would be putting tigers on trial for murder. It makes no sense to put animals on trials for any of their actions, because it's clear they have no capacity for moral choices.

This guy continually devalues the meaning of words like victim, murder, slavery, oppression, innocent, rape, family, atrocity, etc. Animals do not exhibit conscious, moral thought. They are morally neutral. Just because he uses charged language doesn't make his statements arguments, it makes him an alarmist. Alarmists like this speaker are making extraordinary claims, and one should be particularly skeptical of everything he says, especially the anthropomorphizing of animals and their relationships. "If you are against veganism then you are against compassion." Sorry, this guy *is* selling something, even if he claims to not profit from it.

My point was that no reason was given for even wanting the apples, let alone distributing them, or even for saying that there weren't enough for everyone... There's no point in asking "How does UPB say the apples should be distributed" without understanding the economic situation, so you can see what is forced and what is a choice.

I'll bite. My grandparents and my parents never pushed religion on me. I never even went into a church of any type until I was practically out of high school. When I was old enough (mid-teens) I was provided with a number of religious books if I cared to read them and make up my own mind. However, my ACE score is 6... focused on the spanking and yelling side of the house.

Questions of how to handle scarcity are definitely economic questions. Dealing with scarcity is a fundamental economic question. Any particular approach to answer the question is really an economic theory. Not trying to be pedantic, it's just that a *lot* of effort has been expended on determining what to do about scarce resources or goods. The two apples egalitarian problem you listed was, essentially, "two apples, two men, no one should use more apples than their fair share." If there are enough apples for everyone, it's not a scarce resource. It has an effective price of zero. Why would either of them care if someone got two apples? Are they the only thing to eat? If there are not enough apples for everyone it will have a non-zero value, and the actors in the system will rationally negotiate in their own self-interest to get enough apples for their own use. However, this particular problem doesn't posit anything else other than two apples in the room. It is incomplete.

I don't think Stef will squirm with any reformulation of the "two apples" problem. You've just discovered Economics.

OCD is a comorbidity to a number of brain-affecting conditions, both physiological and psychological, including trauma and stress. Just remember that the "D" part of OCD means "disorder" and you should reflect on whether you really cannot function in normal life because of it, or if it's just a quirk. Do you really need to develop a coping mechanism to address it? It doesn't sound like a coffee ritual is bad at all, but self-knowledge and mindfulness about how the ritual makes you feel is certainly worth exploring. The development of ritual and habit is often a good thing when it comes to dealing with an overflowing inbox or a large to-do list, for example. Are you setting yourself up for a good day at work? When the ritual is interrupted (coffee is wrong, cups are different, out of straws) does it disrupt your day? ObligatoryCredential: My kids have OCD quirks related to ADD.

I'm sorry to be pejorative, but this guy's speech made me want to catch up on GamerGate.

This goes back to the doctrine of necessity. You can endanger or harm innocents if it would reasonably prevent a greater loss of life to the innocent and no other reasonable choice exists in the moment. These are lifeboat problems--you are severely limiting choices--but the principle is sound. The burden of proving it in a particular situation will be tremendous, and it should be.

The justification of force is the immediate and otherwise unavoidable danger of death or great bodily harm to yourself or the innocent. I hold this to be universal. Determining this danger usually involves three legs: ability, opportunity, and jeopardy. The use of force because of victimhood is revenge, and it is not justifiable. However, if someone or some country has attacked you, that have demonstrated ability. If they have attacked you and remain capable of conducting more attacks they have also demonstrated opportunity. If they make threats that they have attacked in the past and that they'll attack in the future they are also demonstrating jeopardy. It's a judgement call on how credible the threat is, of course, but once successful they become pretty credible. It certainly behooves us to find other ways to defend ourselves that are less violent and less expensive than war (such as curtailing the ability or the opportunity), but the self-defense justification doesn't take much to build when a group has definitely made attacks.

I have a problem with this restriction because all knowledge is temporal and it can be argued that life-saving information must be relayed to others. "Don't pet the cobra because it is poisonous."

If you don't like the UPB ways of arranging the argument, try the Categorical Imperative (First Formulation): (This is from Immanuel Kant claiming everyone has a duty not to follow contradictory maxims, among other things. I can't summarize Kant in a short sentence, pun intended.) I can understand that it is important to teach children about religion so they can understand it when they encounter it. However, the only way I can summarize teaching children to follow a religion is, "teach children to pretend to know something they do not know." Universalized there is no contradiction that is obvious. I can also universalize, "teach children to NOT pretend to know something they do not know." While I prefer this, it is subjective. It's clearly not universally preferable. If people choose to waste their time on religion, it's not evil it's just obnoxious. If they push it on children peacefully it's still only just obnoxious. If they force their children to follow a religion with force and threats of force, that's abuse.

More than projection, I think it's wishful thinking. They hoped to create a controversy... to sell the music.

The "stimulus" and "Quantitative Easing" stuff does go to those who are best at government schmoozing first, that's true. It "trickles down" a lot less fairly than the free market.

Indeed, both times was because of the potential to expand (in a sense). The first time I moved to a more senior position. The second time, the company reduced in size and the position for which I was hired was no longer there.

Let's throw in a lifeboat. Party A has recently suffered the loss of a child. Party B is a preacher. Party B claims that the dead child will be sent to heaven if one only donated some money to the church and performed some ritual. Party B has credentials from a 2000-year-old organization. Party B, in his heart of hearts, only got the credentials so he could have a cushy job of inflated importance. Party A consents to the transaction because she is desperately sad about the lost child. Was what Party B did immoral? Yes. Yes it was. Was what Party A did immoral? No. Credulous perhaps, but not immoral.

http://tellmenow.com/2014/10/atheists-outraged-by-carrie-underwoods-latest-song/ I'm outraged this wasn't filtered by my ad blocker. Yawn.

Let me add that there is no question that I can do the job. There is a question about whether I would be happy, as I have left two different jobs where I had the same role.

Neither one of these has anything to do with fraud. Fraud is the act of deliberately misrepresenting the value of one side of a transaction. Sorry about the "makes sense". Misrepresenting value in transactions is not universally preferable. This is not a personal preference. This is also not a requirement that all parties have perfect knowledge of the transactions. If I may quote Universally Preferable Behavior: If everyone lies about the value of their side of the transaction no transactions will occur. (Or, if they do occur, they'll be like hostage exchanges in the movies.) People will spend all of their time checking and rechecking and setting up perfect exchange systems that no will will trust to get to some approximation of perfect knowledge at the same time obscuring and lying to overstate the value of what they offer. Even when everyone knows that everyone else is lying you won't get to a usable market. Can you imagine someone trying to introduce bitcoin when it's universally preferable to defraud? Would anyone use it? UPB doesn't go so far to say fraud is evil because the victim has some agency in the transaction, but I hold that it is evil because universalizing fraud leads to an unusable market. People need to transact with others to live and universalizing fraud leads to starvation and exposure.

Actually, I gave how you I got to the conclusion, by universalizing the opposite and seeing if it worked. If it doesn't work, it's immoral. Just like, "it doesn't make sense when everyone murders therefore it's immoral" it's also "it doesn't make sense when everyone lies about the value of what they are trading therefore its immoral."

Careful, you are using a legal definition to defend a philosophical one, something I've drawn criticism for myself in the lethal force discussions, although I do try to relate it back to philosophical principles like you have. I didn't try to go this deep into contract law for this reason, I figure we can stop at the point of universalizing the thing we expect to be immoral, like I tried. I'm happy to learn what I did was not sufficient however.

Let's try universalizing the opposite: It is immoral to misrepresent the value you are exchanging in a trade because if it was the maxim that ALL people MUST misrepresent what they are selling then it would be impossible to make trades. All parties benefit from a fair exchange. Only one party benefits from an unfair exchange. It is unlikely that any party benefits if everyone cheats on an exchange. As above, lying itself may not be immoral, but lying about the value of an exchange cannot be universalized.

You are offering good advice, especially since I should be focused on my job search right now. The apparent argument of all religionists is "believe in things that cannot proven and act accordingly" which I interpret as a call to violence against logic and empiricism. I've even heard certain religious people call logic "dogma" which really riles me up.

I think the immorality enters is when you ask, "is this bracelet silver" and the seller lies and says, "yes". That is fraudulent if the seller knows it's silver-plated tin.

I'm not sure we can discard 2000 years of Christian sectarian violence so easily. As for today, how about the administration claiming that ISIS was executing Christians as a excuse for bombing, when the facts were that ISIS was executing far more of people from different Muslim sects? How about the neocons constantly harping on the 700 Club for war? Why don't they count?