The Impending Death of Modern Capitalism
Let's make sure we're all on the same page on the definition of capitalism.
It's basically a system in which private owne
Our brains are now 0.5% plastic by weight. A doubling in just a decade.
Maybe the plastic is the thing which is disabling our survival energy ???
Despite all the evidence that God has provided us that we are animals ... you refuse to believe.
God gave us the brains to unravel the mystery of DNA and evolution. God is revealed through scientific investigation.
Right. No animal can do any of those things. That's what makes us categorically different. Animals have awareness of self and of others, but only people have awareness of God and can employ the Scientific Method.
God speaks, but you refuse to listen and cling to fairy tales which effectively claim that God is deceptively planting false evidence like DNA.
I thought you disapproved of 'accusatory language.'
I don't think there is anything 'false' about DNA. What in Sam Hill are you babbling about?
It's very interesting. I have come to this place in an effort to try to get people to participate in an effort to make the long-term survival of our species the top priority of our social policy. To the extent that they are unaware of the threats we face, I have provided a willingness to hold hands and walk people through the rabbit hole of ecological destruction. To build that
Who specifically has claimed to be an 'authority' on ethics?
Why do you believe that others here aren't also interested in making the world a better place?
It's very interesting. I have come to this place in an effort to try to get people to participate in an effort to make the long-term survival of our species the top priority of our social policy. To the extent that they are unaware of the threats we face, I have provided a willingness to hold hands and walk people through the rabbit hole of ecological destruction. To build that
I think you use terms imprecisely and are not only confusing us but also yourself. That’s why I said your understanding of normative ethics and metaethics leaves something to be desired.
It’s just an observation.
Right. No animal can do any of those things. That's what makes us categorically different. Animals have awareness of self and of others, but only people have awareness of God and can employ the Scientific Method.
?
Please explain to me how you used the scientific method to arrive at the following conclusions ....
a) that humans are not animals
b) that other animals have no awareness of God
The evidence that we are indeed animals seems to be overwhelming.
Who specifically has claimed to be an 'authority' on ethics?
Why do you believe that others here aren't also interested in making the world a better place?
checkraisdraw is the one who is claiming to be an authority on ethics.
Also .... I never claimed to be interested in making the world a "better place". I claimed a personal preference that our species doesn't go extinct in the near term. I never claimed that was better than our going extinct. We will eventually go extinct anyway regardless as our sun and solar system have a limited life span.
Well for instance you make posts like this that imply you think some actions are normatively better than others, but you also want to say that morality doesn’t exist. And while I don’t think that stance-independent morality is true, I think it would be less confusing if you clarify precisely what you mean by “I don’t believe in morality” because what I suspect you actually mean is that “I think the traditional conceptions of morality are false and I have an alternate theory”. Which again, is fine, but it doesn’t mean you “don’t believe in morality” because you do end up speaking in very robust ways about others being wrong.
Let's begin with the premise that life is better than death. And if the current system is resulting in a world war of aggression and conquest (Ukraine, Gaza, Greenland, Panama Canal, Canada. etc) and the elimination of a middle class which can afford to purchase a home and the demand for a fascist dictator with zero regard for the environment .... then maybe a lower GDP situati
First of all .... please watch the accusatory nature of your language which is unnecessarily prosecutorial.
I have made the statement that I don't believe in ANY notions of morality whatsoever. I am not, as you imply, specifically excluding the mass murder of millions as being amoral while holding other actions to be amoral.
When lions and hyenas occupy similar hunting territory, they will kill each other to establish their claim and drive competition away. Does that mean that lions and hyenas are immoral ? No .... they are just acting according to their primitive nature.
Humans are animals, just like lions and hyenas and those mass murders 500 years ago were an example of our primitive, competitive and brutal nature. A similar event is taking place in Gaza here in the year 2025. Do I want this kind of behavior to stop ? Yes .... desperately !!! I prefer to belong to a species that can transcend it's brutal primitive nature. Buddhists try to teach this .... but the larger and killer tribe seems to Christian. No religious tribe has a record of killing and conquest that can compare with them.
Personally, I would never kill someone with the potential exception of self defense and I susbcribe to the buddhist guidance to defend myself with the minimum force necessary. Fortunately, my conduct doesn't get me into any physical altercations with others so I never have to defend myself physically.
Normative ethics is a branch of moral philosophy that focuses on establishing criteria for what is considered right and wrong. It involves the formulation of moral rules that guide human actions, institutions, and ways of life. Normative ethics seeks to define what should be considered morally acceptable and unacceptable, distinguishing it from other areas of ethics such as metaethics and applied ethics.
Metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, ground, and meaning of moral judgment, ethical belief, or values.
For the first 4 billion years of life on this planet, there was no such thing as ethics. Only human animals are known to concern themselves with the concept of ethics.
We didn't have ethics when we were hunter gatherers prior to the agricultural revolution. We survived via brute force, cunning and an ability to organize cohesive teams for hunting, foraging and territorial protection.
The agricultural revolution paved the way for larger tribal populations which provided a competitive survival advantage in competition with other tribes.
But how do you keep a large tribe cohesive when tribe expands into the thousands ? How do you keep people from become chaotic and disobedient ?
You do it with fear. You tell them a story that they will be in hell for eternity if they step out of line. And in order for this story to make sense .... there has to somewhere be a power with the willingness to judge whether or not you go to heaven or hell. And so, the legend of the "God who judges us" came to be.
Ethics are simply a tool to maintain an orderly tribe for the purpose of maintaining its competitive survival advantage.
I was born into the Jewish tribe and brainwashed to believe that my tribe was "the chosen people" just like other tribes do the same with their members. I once dated an ex-LDS woman .... same deal.
The Jewish tribe reached out to the world for sympathy for the way they had been genuinely unethically dehumanized and exterminated. But now they are participating in a similar situation where they are dehumanizing and extermination their Arab neighbors in their pursuit of territorial expansion. Which just goes to show that they don't really give a damn about ethics .... it's all about tribal loyalty and survival advantage.
I hate to break it you .... God is everything .... not just the things you want to attribute to your fairy tale versions. God is simultaneously compassion and the brutal and vicious competition to survive. We are part of God, not separate entities.
If we want to survive as a species, we have to let go of tribal division and learn to cooperate as a cohesive global tribe.
By the way I do disagree that we didn’t have ethics as hunter-gatherers. We likely had some beliefs about morality that I would say are wrong, but morality to me appears to be a universal feature of cognitive life, on the very meager thesis of moral subjectivism (moral statements can be true or false, moral statements are true based on the attitudes of the evaluator, and moral statements are propositional).
The important thing here is that being false is not the same thing as not existing, so even saying you think people had incorrect conceptions of morality doesn’t mean they don’t have a concept of morality. And you can have a metaethical position that still applies to people that don’t have the same concept that you have, so long as they are taking the actions you would consider to be right or wrong.
For instance, a utilitarian would disagree with you that in principle animals can’t act in morally bad ways. If a lion kills an herbivorous animal, torturing it while it is killing the animal, they might say that’s bad because on the net it lowers the amount of net utility. So even if we deny the moral agency of early humans, we can still have views where they act immorally. I think that’s plausible because when we see a horse kill the young of his mate to remove the genetic competition, we just see that as something that is really sad and gross. So I do think that if someone wants to make that move it’s generally fine.
Or maybe you want to go another way and just say that morality is non-cognitive, so it can’t even be evaluated as true or false in principle, because moral statements are not propositional. Well in that case it seems perfectly consistent with that thesis that they did have morality even if they aren’t moral agents because they could still have emotive states towards certain actions and potentially even express disapproval with various behaviors such as crying out if some kind of harm happens or smiling if someone does something good to them, or just generally expressing good or bad attitudes.
I’m not saying I’m an expert on ethics or anything, I just find these sorts of ideas to be helpful in orienting the conversation towards something productive. And it’s not like I’m the one that brought up morality, so I wouldn’t make those comments if the nature of morality wasn’t already being discussed at length.
Well for instance you make posts like this that imply you think some actions are normatively better than others, but you also want to say that morality doesn’t exist. And while I don’t think that stance-independent morality is true, I think it would be less confusing if you clarify precisely what you mean by “I don’t believe in morality” because what I suspect you actually mean
Lots of word salad there checkraisdraw,
Let's try a simple thought experiment .... provide an example of a behavior which you consider "moral" which isn't rooted in survival imperative.
My view is that nature weeds out everything which isn't a survival advantage. I see a world which doesn't reward devoting time and energy to superfluous features. Morality is just the rationalization of survival imperatives.
Lots of word salad there checkraisdraw, Let's try a simple thought experiment .... provide an example of a behavior which you consider "moral" which isn't rooted in survival imperative. My view is that nature weeds out everything which isn't a survival advantage. I see a world which doesn't reward devoting time and energy to superfluous features. Morality is just the rationaliz
You thinking that’s word salad is the problem.
They sketch out the most common positions in analytic philosophy in this video:
You thinking that’s word salad is the problem.
They sketch out the most common positions in analytic philosophy in this video:
You're dodging the question .....
If you can't name a moral behavior which isn't rooted in survival imperative ..... then it's fair to conclude "morality" is just a synonym for whatever assists our survival as a group.
You're dodging the question .....
If you can't name a moral behavior which isn't rooted in survival imperative ..... then it's fair to conclude "morality" is just a synonym for whatever assists our survival as a group.
What’s the point?
You can’t have a moral discussion with someone (you) who views both suicide and ritualized child sacrifice as motivated by survival.
Anyone who tries to deny moral reality to that degree is unreachable.
What’s the point?
You can’t have a moral discussion with someone (you) who views both suicide and ritualized child sacrifice as motivated by survival.
Anyone who tries to deny moral reality to that degree is unreachable.
If you would just open your mind and read more carefully .... the answers would become clear.
What did I write .....
I wrote that all behavior is a reflection of the survival motivation of the group. Not the individual.
All groups require a hierarchy for making decisions and allocating mating rights which are typically assigned to dominant males. Look at a lion tribe for example. The ration of mature females to mature males is many to one. Female lions generally stay with the tribe for life while males are evicted or killed when they are replaced. Nature provides a path for the obsolete male to depart for the benefit of the pride as a whole.
Look at the ratio of completed suicides between males and females in the US. It's between 3 and 4 to 1.
Why do people commit suicide ? Because a) they come to the conclusion that they are no longer a benefit to the group and b) the group shuns them because they have no more utility. From a very brutal natural perspective .... it's not in the best interest of the group to allocate scarce resources to members who are not contributing.
If you want to understand the rationale for child sacrifice or abandonment, the following is an article about the practice in Rome.
https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/lucius-romans/2...
Among the reasons cited ....
a) economic - someone got pregnant with a child they couldn't afford to take care of. They didn't have abortion pills back then.
b) health - children born with birth defects
c) infidelity - the shame of having a bastard child
d) power - it was not specifically discussed in the article ..... but look at what is happening in Gaza today. Tens of thousands of children have been killed and are currently being starved to death in Gaza and the United States govt is supporting this. Why do we as American tolerate this. Because Israel is a powerful ally with incredible leverage as a nuclear power which makes them "too big to fail". Israel is asserting itself as the dominant lion in that patch of territory and ridding itself of competitive threats just as a dominant male lion evicts the younger males when they become sexually mature.
Nature is simultaneously beautiful and brutal.
It helps to be a student of history to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
During the neolithic / agricultural revolution which commenced ~ 10,000 years ago, there was something called the y-chromosome bottleneck which happened all over the populated world simultaneously even though the groups were geographically disparate.
90-95% of male DNA lineage disappeared all over the world at the same time.
Q: Why did this happen and why did groups who were not in contact with each other all fall into the same pattern ?
A: Because the development of agriculture provided a pathway to larger populations. Larger populations required a steeper social hierarchy in order to provide the necessary group decision making apparatus. When wars erupted between neighboring tribes, the victors generally killed or enslaved the men and assimilated the women who were necessary to make babies to enlarge the tribe for competitive reasons. There are mass gravesites from the era which contain only the bones of males.
Look at the world today ... China is run by a competent dictatorship and look how their economy has thrived under his leadership. The US is moving in the direction of a dictatorship .... the people who support Trump want a person with the authority to make decisions. The whole Project 2025 thing has at its core the concept of the unitary executive. Effectively a king.
The people who are attending the "No King's" demonstrations ..... how do they want or envision decisions to be made ?
I wasn’t unclear on what you wrote. The idea that suicide and ritualized child sacrifice are motivated by group survival is false.
“Group selection” is the catch all go-to explanation evolutionists use to make Darwinism totalizing.
What’s the value in feeling guilty / the conscience? “Group selection.”
Dumb.
“Group selection” is the catch all go-to explanation evolutionists use to make Darwinism totalizing.
.
How would you prove them wrong?
You can bitch and moan about it all you want .... but the shoe fits. It's so obvious as to be self-evident.
There are 5 stages of grieving. You don't have to spend your entire life stuck in Denial.
How would you prove them wrong?
You can bitch and moan about it all you want .... but the shoe fits. It's so obvious as to be self-evident.
There are 5 stages of grieving. You don't have to spend your entire life stuck in Denial.
Reality is the ultimate judge. The more you align yourself with ultimate reality, the more you will be rewarded.
I’m not being critical for my own benefit. I’m good.
One of us is in denial, no doubt.
You thinking that’s word salad is the problem.
They sketch out the most common positions in analytic philosophy in this video:
THIS!!!
Cite?
He certainly knows more about it than you and I put together, but I don't recall him claiming to be "an authority" on the subject. (maybe he is, I dunno)
Also .... I never claimed to be interested in making the world a "better place". I claimed a personal preference that our species doesn't go extinct in the near term. I never claimed that was better than our going extinct. We will eventually go extinct anyway regardless as our sun and solar system have a limited life span.
Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you believed that UBI and getting rid of money would make the world a better place than it is right now.
Please explain to me how you used the scientific method to arrive at the following conclusions ....
a) that humans are not animals
b) that other animals have no awareness of God
The evidence that we are indeed animals seems to be overwhelming.
Well, here are a few things that give evidence for my thesis:
1. Only people do philosophy.
2. Only people write novels and plays.
3. Only people improve their lot over time with technology.
4. Only people compose music, play music on instruments, sing songs..
5. Only people have a written language that can be read by other people and understood thousands of years later.
etc.....etc....etc.....
Cite?
He certainly knows more about it than you and I put together, but I don't recall him claiming to be "an authority" on the subject. (maybe he is, I dunno)
Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you believed that UBI and getting rid of money would make the world a better place than it is right now.
UBI would contribute as part of a package that contributes to my preference that human life on Earth doesn't go extinct.
A Jehovah's Witness or a 7th Day Adventist might have a preference that human life on Earth does go extinct as a perceived necessity to heavenly ascendance.
I am not representing myself as an objective arbiter of the differing viewpoints between myself and those who adhere to apocalyptic prophecy. So, I can't say that my preferred outcome is better than theirs. I'm competing with them.
The best I can do is illustrate the contrast between my position and theirs and inform the world that their apocalyptic scenario is in the works. I can ask people which option they find more attractive and ascertain their preference. If more people want human life on Earth to keep going, then let's make that happen.
Well, here are a few things that give evidence for my thesis:1. Only people do philosophy.2. Only people write novels and plays.3. Only people improve their lot over time with technology.4. Only people compose music, play music on instruments, sing songs..5. Only people have a written language that can be read by other people and understood thousands of years later.etc.....
You are a human and are therefore expert in human qualities.
What you fail to represent is the human quality of humility and acknowledging what you don't know about other creatures.
Other creatures have qualities which you don't comprehend because you don't live inside the body of those creatures. You don't have their sensory apparatus.
Birds can fly, people can't. Alligators can live under water, people can't. Animals like dogs and lions have olfactory capacity that humans don't. Bats and dolphins use echolocation that humans can't. Sea turtles live longer than humans.
By the way ... humans are not the only composers of music. Wake up in the morning and listen to the birds or the crickets in the evening. Listen to the howl of a wolf. The human voice is a musical instrument just like an animal's voice or vibration.
Chimpanzees have been trained to learn a rudimentary vocabulary. A parrot can be taught to recite human speech.
Most of the cells in a human body are not human cells. They are bacterial cells. The idea that humans can do anything whatsoever without our microbial teammates is egotistical. We are not separate from the rest of the animal kingdom .... we are an integrated part of an integrated system and you are obsessed with this immature notion of our separateness.
There is a big difference between implying that someone is OK with mass murder and criticizing logical positions which convey cognitive dissonance.
Which has what to do with 'accusatory language'?
Accusing someone of cognitive dissonance might include accusatory language, right?
That aside, as an amoralist, you most certainly are (morally) OK with mass murder.
