Notices by Escarpment (escarpment@mastodon.online)

@quinn I have done therapy for over a decade.

@quinn No, the main attraction is the solution to philosophical problems that have caused me years of anxiety and stress trying to understand.

@quinn No idea what you mean about ubermensch. I didn't mention Nietzsche nor believe in that philosophy. One day I'm sure moral skepticism will be as mainstream among liberals as atheism. Moral skepticism aligns with the liberal belief that criminals or drug addicts or women seeking abortions ought not to be stigmatized. So liberals are selective moral skeptics, but still revert to moralizing on certain topics.

@quinn Working with one's hands (which you also assume I don't or have never done) is orthogonal to these questions. Working with one's hands provides no additional perspective on the merits or not of a philosophical argument. Working with one's hands does not magically grant the worker a solution to a philosophical problem.

@quinn Yeah, thinking the world was round was a stupid position, as was germ theory. Difficult ideas are always met with suspicion and anger by people too ignorant to approach new ideas with gentleness and curiosity.

@quinn You are reacting to something you don't understand and find scary with condescension and aggression. It's a natural response, but a more enlightened response would be curiosity and openness to learn this perspective and see the merits of this philosophical perspective.

To me, moral skepticism *solves* many philosophical problems that moral realism cannot.

@quinn I use grammatical gender as an analogy. There are plenty of legitimate philosophers who are moral skeptics. JL Mackie primary among them. This is not a fringe position. It just seems fringe to people ignorant about philosophy.

@quinn You can certainly define sociopathy in a clinical physical sense as a type of brain structure or chemistry that lies on a very low percentile of empathy. That is a physical fact. But it is counterproductive and ignorant to label sociopaths as "evil." Why stigmatize and invoke supernatural concepts of "evil" to describe a group of people? Why not instead, given their brain chemistry and structure, work to prevent sociopaths from harming others or themselves?

@quinn Yes, I'm aware with what that is having studied psychology at the collegiate and graduate level. However, even psychology can't escape the philosophical limitation of the fact that physical or clinical reality is not imbued with morality.

@quinn I am saying there is no scientific experiment you can conduct to "prove" objectively that murder is bad or charity is good, because moral goodness and badness is not a physical feature of the world. Similarly, you can't conduct an experiment to prove that a bridge is masculine or a boat is feminine, even though many human beings speak languages that engage in the mass delusion that all nouns have a gender.

@quinn This is common, albeit ignorant, response to the premise of moral skepticism. Moral skeptics are not sociopaths. Moral skepticism does not lead to the conclusion you ought to engage in anti-social behavior. The first impulse most people take refuge in when faced with this difficult philosophical idea is to conclude that "neither good nor bad" means "bad is good." That does not follow. I am not saying murder is good and charity is bad.

@quinn I don't like the term nihilist (seems like a pejorative term). I am a moral skeptic who replaces morality and principles with preferences and power as the drivers of human behavior. Humans act to align world to preference. Power is the measure of an individuals ability to align world to preference. Morality and principles are window dressing or post hoc rationalizations for this reality.

"Moral non-objectivism only applies to inanimate objects."

Most people, when presented with moral non-objectivism for the first time, show this level of ignorance, and then double down on moral realism and assert that something is good or evil.

Even as atheism gains some traction, the binary belief in good and evil will probably never fade for as long as any of us live. This is religion's biggest "gift" to humanity.

@lauren What if you give the prison time and the breaches keep happening?

@lauren What if you plot the prison time against breaches and you determine there is 0 correlation- that they are completely independent variables.

What I'm getting at is "the problem of punishment"- that you see some outcome, 1, which you want to be 0 (no breaches). To attempt to coax that variable back to 0, you introduce some independent variable, punishment. It has no effect on the outcome, but now you have breaches *and* people in jail.

@ryanhoulihan The aid Israel and Palestinians receive from the United States is conditional. Israel has not violated any of the conditions of US military support. UNRWA has violated those conditions by employing several people who perpetrated the October 7 attack.

@futurebird ChatGPT says it means your problems are self inflicted. Whatever large problems you have (the sweater) are caused by your own bad decisions and actions (your wool).

@aral @3x10to8mps People at "pro-Palestine" marches chanting anti-Semitic slogans such as "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" but no condemnation for Hamas.

Israel is not committing a "savage" attack. This is the ugly task of disarming an enemy that does not value human life. That's why Hamas convinced children to be suicide bombers earlier in their sordid history, and it's why now they use civilians and children as human shields.

@aral @3x10to8mps No, there hasn't been the condemnation of the October 7 attack. No one hanging Israeli flags. No one wearing "Israel Strong" shirts. Just a whole lot of "what Hamas did was bad, BUT..."

Jewish people around the world who have stood side by side other causes have been betrayed yet again by an anti-Semitic world.

@aral It is a shame that Hamas has put their citizens, many of them children, in such a dangerous predicament with their violent and anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions.

Hamas should finally swallow their pride, lay down their weapons, and surrender instead of forcing their citizens to stay in the path of destruction and using them as human shields.