No free will = giving up?

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On a side note - can I ask what moral relativism has to do with free will or any lack of it?

Some people believe that free will must be completely unencumbered by rules of any kind.

Do you believe that pain and suffering are ever justifiable, on moral grounds? Is there an objective reason, for it to exist?

I have an idea forming that to the extent that people need to apply conclusions based on evidence which they can't understand, they have to accept those conclusions as axioms. That's how we get into the kind of debate we read in this thread. It's probably already been done, though.

Is that always true?

I suspect that the moral absolutist side feels protective of their certainty, and threatened by the research. From their perspective, we're just muddying the waters.

I have no idea if my way of thinking about this is The Right Way (TM) but, personally, I tend toward a modified utilitarian approach to this. On the most blunt level - the calculus with the least amount of pain and maximum pursuit of happiness and truth wins. Certain democratic numbers trade offs, such as leaving a majority well off and leaving a minority in exquisite agony isn't acceptable. Similarly the dumb-AI answer to put all of humanity in chemically-induced comas on morphine drip is equally the wrong answer and I'd class it as a type of human extermnism, which - true - would be an answer to all human suffering and whole planetary exterminism would also mean that a gazelle would never have to be eaten by a lion again nor another caterpillar be stung into paralysis and loaded up with wasp larvae for the Aliens food source experience. At the same time if a person has a contraption set to kill 100 people and torturing that person is the only way to assure that those people live - I don't think there's a particularly sound objection not to utterly invade any degree of that person's autonomy and take it apart, if not by weaponized psychology and administration of drugs also adding in things like sleep deprivation, shock treatment, etc.

That and if you're of the persuasion that life and consciousness are eternal commodities and that you might have to go on living after whatever happens here you very quickly realize that everything you do right now sets you on a future course that death won't abate. When you take that into account you really have to think carefully not only how you want to live the rest of your life, feel about yourself for the rest of your life, etc.. but you also want to think carefully of what sort of place you really want to go when you die, how you'd want to be incarnated again - as a baby and then child who has no hope of sorting out reality and is utterly dominated or aided by the quality of their surroundings whether that be good parenting or the depths of abuse, gaslighting, and utter twisting of reality the way you might find in a pedophile coven or in some place in the world where totalitarian fundamentalist religious beliefs are agreed upon without a second thought.

To that end, for lack of a better term, you shape where you're going in this life by the quality of your own reflections and subsequent actions on those reflections. I think it's quite possible as well that once you die you loose the training wheels and it's a bit like an astronaut letting go of the support beam on space station - they'll be floating on whatever trajectory that they let themselves on, the subconscious constructs they built through life will all they have left to rely on, and that could take them on a wonderful course, on a mediocre or mixed course, or a really awful course where their physical and or emotional suffering is greatly heightened as everything in them chafes against the fundamental structures of the universe and they get born in a body and into surroundings reflective of that chafing. True, in that case you technically didn't 'do it to yourself' because technically you didn't have a self to be other than what you became, just that if you can wrap your head around consequences like that and assuming that they do come to pass you may have truly and radically received an inject that changes the course of your future radically for the better.

In the course of determinism information and understanding are even more important because they can be the difference between futures that are qualitatively worlds apart.

It seems kind of clear to me - certain actions and cultural patterns make the world better, certain actions and patterns make the world worse. That's true whether recommendations to fix those patterns are in revealed books and stone tablets or whether they're arrived at by philosophic inquiry. I think one of the bigger challenges the religious do bring up is that yes - we're apes, and a lot of people are told that there's no Zeus to throw thunderbolts at them for failing morally but that it's just civically the right thing to do will tell the predominant culture to go screw and they'll leap down the rabbit hole of doing whatever they want to do. It's a real problem, just that I think it's a problem we should look to deal with while pursuing truth rather than phoning Pope Francis and telling him that we've come to the conclusion that Europe, the Americas, and Aus/NZ need to be placed under papal authority to solve our problems.

It's been called hedonism.



Moral absolutism associates pain with evil, and research assumes a level of certainty.

That doesn't actually mean anything unless you unpack it.

There's a whole other issue I didn't get to mention in my earlier post - distress and eustress.

The pain of a Navy Seal in training or a future or returning Olympic athlete in training, or a future medical doctor or engineer racking their brain on the books, is significantly different from the pain of a political dissident in a totalitarian gulag, a starving child whose of a particular local warlord's out-group and doesn't get food, or a child unlucky enough to be brought deep into the underground world of pedantry.

If a rustic believer in simple god-given revelation would say 'That's hedonism!', their criticism is 'if it feels good do it' and that's, by the biblical definition, the sinful life. The 'sinful life' is destructive to cultures because it's a woefully incomplete idea that would suggest that if heroin feels great - do it! Marquis de Sade and all that. Since that objection is so obvious and is completely obvious in its problems without even needing to pick up religious scripture we can say that it's a non-starter because a pain-based morality of any proper depth would measure short term vs. long term tradeoffs, compare a whole network of moral goods and evils, etc..

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 21 May 2017, 2:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Eustress assumes that there is some net gain, under physical stress or reproductive pressure, but noone will ever willingly play the masochist. Noone starts damaging themselves, willingly. Is it used as an excuse to inflict harm, upon others.

Okay, that's great. You still haven't told us anything about why saying 'that's hedonism!' means anything.

Go back and see my edited post - I tried to take a stab at what I *think* you're saying, although I have to admit that I'm really getting tired of guessing what you mean.

Can you anchor this to some type of example? It's dangling out in space and I can't tell whether you're saying that people won't do things that are harmful to themselves for no gain (which is partially true but I think it misses that some people have pathologies or neuroses that they're waking out) or whether you're trying to suggest that eustress is a fiction in a hedonistic world for some unspoken and unprovided reasons. If you're saying the later you haven't made any case at all for it.

Oh for goodness sake, read that Wikipedia entry again! What does it say? Well, let me quote your quote of it:

Scientism = "universal applicability of the scientific method", and "constitutes the most authoritative worldview", "is the most valuable", "the only source of genuine factual knowledge", and that it "alone can yield true knowledge". That sums it up perfectly, and is why I reject this daft and dogmatic philosophy of knowledge. It claims to be universal, authoritative, the most valuable, the only source of knowledge... Do I REALLY need to spell it out for you here? It's basically a religion - "only through me will you find salvation and the truth".

Scientism is not science, nor the method of science, but (and as I pointed out to you before) a philosophy of knowledge, a worldview, paradigm, one of many ways to view reality. It isn't universally applicable, I don't care whether or not it is 'authoritative', the claim that it is the most valuable is purely subjective opinion in my opinion, and I care not for its claim to being the only avenue to truth.

Let's take unrestrained hedonism as an example. It has consequences. Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure, AIN'T EASY. Let's say our hypothetical hedonist has perfectly socially acceptable vices. Even then, those things cost money, time, and energy. Choices must be made. Speaking as an economist, no one can have it all. It's dangerously axiomatic and intuitive, but supported by the evidence of many dead young rock stars. So, there are natural limits, and Keith Moons to test them, even for that pernicious hedonism.