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Private video of private Romney Fundraiser leaked - IceCream - 2013-01-14
hahaha i think you've missed some fairly important news on this topic.
Private video of private Romney Fundraiser leaked - Tzadeck - 2013-01-14
IceCream Wrote:Now, as long as i have nothing better to do, and Hiiro was getting something out of it, it doesn't necessarily matter. But neither of those conditions seems to be fulfilled, and frankly, i'm bored of trying to speak to people who aren't actually interested in examining their ideas.I'm impressed you went on as long as you did, haha. I branded him almot immediately as 'not actually listening' and then promptly gave up, despite being annoyed by his conceitedness. But I think just a few years ago I would have got down and dirty arguing a bit. My patience has waned over the years I guess.
Private video of private Romney Fundraiser leaked - HiiroYui - 2013-05-13
prink
Reply #442: “Or you could respond to my post in context.” Do you promise to not take someone’s comment out of context and promise to encourage others to make the same promise? Is it possible to scientifically prove that a person took someone’s comment out of context? Which part of your post did I take out of context? The fact that IceCream doesn’t consider empathy to be an emotion is a big deal to him.
Reply #445: “I support a preemptive lock.” Do you promise to prevent someone from calling someone bad names (that’s what a flame war is, right?) and promise to encourage others to make the same promise? I think it’s simply illogical to call someone bad names, which is why I don’t do that in debates.
Reply #448: “HiiroYui revived a two week old thread to respond to someone who already said they had enough and has been using logical fallacies to troll.” Where are my logical fallacies? I did not use the “argument from ignorance”. I did not say IceCream cannot prove he feels empathy, therefore he doesn’t feel empathy. I said it is not possible to scientifically prove that a person is feeling empathy, so there is no point in debating about promises to feel empathy.
Zgarbas
If you would like, I could mention what Romney said in the video in my next posts. So many people here wanted to understand why Romney and libertarians hold the views they do that I wanted to explain things using a broader set of issues than what was mentioned in the video.
blackbirch
“Sometimes you look at the first post of a thread, then skip to the last few replies and just wonder. How the **** did we get here.” You didn’t have to skip this far. Mentions of Romney’s video got sparse around Reply #100.
Tzadeck
“For a long time now this has just been HiiroYui and IceCream having some sort of meta discussion about ethics and a few other topics, and they seem to sometimes have breakthroughs where they understand each other a bit better.” Thanks for this post. It's like you finally understood that my goal is to change people’s views using logic, not to call people names.
“I branded him almot immediately as 'not actually listening' and then promptly gave up, despite being annoyed by his conceitedness.” Do you promise to actually listen and encourage others to make the same promise? Is "giving up" different from "not actually listening"? How could I have understood IceCream better, as you admit, but not actually listen?
IceCream
“It's just me getting frustrated, as i seem to have often lately, there's no need to take it especially seriously.” If a person performs an action and someone else feels frustrated, does that mean the person who performed the action did something you promise not to do and you promise to encourage others to make the same promise? Is it possible to scientifically prove that a person feels frustrated?
“…frankly, i'm bored of trying to speak to people who aren't actually interested in examining their ideas.” Same as above with “bored” replacing “frustrated”, plus: “Do you promise to examine your own ideas and promise to encourage others to make the same promise?” and “is it possible to scientifically prove a person is not examining his own ideas?”.
“I'm better off just discussing stuff with my friends, who do not cling dogmatically to their beliefs…” Do you promise to change your views and promise to encourage others to make the same promise?
“…at a guess Hiiro is quite young, and at least is trying to think about stuff.” I’m 28, and I work at a mail sorting facility where we receive packages, separate them based on their zip codes, and send them back out. Do you promise to try to think about stuff and promise to encourage others to make the same promise? Isn’t it contradictory to say I am trying to think about stuff after saying I’m not interested in examining my own ideas?
“I've tried to draw out the implications of your views, to show you where their weaknesses are. Simply repeating those same views without addressing the points i made isn't going to convince me of anything.” Continue to show me where you think the weaknesses in my views are. If you think I ignored something you said, let me know. My feeling is that my responses to your objections were so broad and powerful that I didn’t need to keep repeating them every time you made similar objections.
“I tried to question you on your belief that it is morally good to work hard at work, by showing that the consequences of holding that belief leads to conclusions which should contradict your intuitions.” I define morality differently from how you do. You have yet to acknowledge that my use of the word is different, and apply that difference consistently. Ever since I started debating here, I’ve been talking about a system of promises. When you quote what I say, please consistently reflect that in your wording. I promise to work hard at work and promise to encourage others to make the same promise. This promise does indeed contradict the emotions (and empathy) I feel in certain cases, but because it is not possible to scientifically prove that a person is feeling an emotion (or empathy), I have to ignore the emotions (and empathy) and refrain from saying “I promise to do this action when I feel this emotion (or empathy) and…”.
“Half the time you seem to collapse "what is morally good" down into "what promises i feel i can make".” Do you see that there is no collapsing? I’ve been talking about promises, while you’ve been talking about empathy, feelings, and emotions. Using your words, I openly admit that I ignore what is morally good/bad in order to keep my promises.
“The other half, like in that last post, you say that whether something is morally bad is decided prior to what i do or don't make promises about.” I see that I used the word “bad” in that post in a way that may have been confusing. Let me rewrite that part. “I want people to promise not to do certain actions, promise to encourage others to make the same promise, and then keep those promises (it’s not enough to just criticize others). You say you feel empathy for the animals when you eat meat, yet you eat meat anyway (whether reluctantly or not). You’d consider it to courageous for you to criticize others for eating meat even though you won’t promise to not eat meat (and won’t promise to encourage others to make the same promise). I’d consider it hypocritical.” In other words, you may feel empathy for the animals when you imagine people eating meat, but the moment you decide to criticize others, you need to have decided to make the related promises and keep them. When you criticize someone, you are encouraging them to promise not to do that action again. Why do you want them to make a promise you won’t?
“When i question you further on what constitutes what is good or bad, your answer at best seems to be that it is just whatever you happen to have decided it to be; i.e. it's totally subjective, and therefore the only thing that is criticisable is whether someone is hypocritcal or not (thereby again, collapsing the concepts into each other).” If by “collapse” you mean there is a contradiction, you are wrong. I promise to not act hypocritically, promise to work hard at work, and promise to encourage others to make the same promises. Therefore I can praise someone for working hard at work, criticize someone for acting hypocritically, and praise someone for making the same promises I made. I choose which promises I make based on logic, and I do change my mind and make different promises when I see a logical reason to. Different people will use different logic to arrive at different promises, and I will have to encourage them to make the same promises I made by getting them to see that my logic is better. In that sense, logic itself is subjective.
“At one point you brought in something resembling the categorical imperative, but you dropped it again in favour of pure subjectivity of morality when i pushed you a little on the consequences of that.” I don’t know what you mean. What did I drop?
“The consequences of having a completely subjective moral system are again absurd. You may as well simply annihilate the concept of morality completely.” Yes, I am completely ignoring the concept of empathy, feelings, and emotions in debates about promises.
“…if someone comes and tortures your family tomorrow, slices them into pieces, you watch them die in utter agony, then you cannot say one word about how the torturer should not have done it, was wrong to do it, because he never promised not to.” Indeed, that is one option. Another option I would have is to decide right then to promise to not torture or kill and promise to encourage others to make the same promise, at which point I can criticize the torturer freely.
“The idea of what is criticisable morally is the same as the idea of taking moral responsibility for your actions…. If you don't act in accordance with what is good, you should take responsibility for that, just as i should for eating meat.” It seems like you’re saying “to take responsibility for one’s actions” means “to accept criticism of one’s actions”. Let’s define “to accept criticism” as something scientifically provable: “to not fight back against criticism”. Since you used “should”, I can ask you: do you promise to not fight back against criticism of your actions and promise to encourage others to make the same promise? Notice the position this promise would put you in. If someone who promises to protect England at all costs walks up to you and criticizes you for opposing torture, you wouldn’t be able to fight back without breaking your promise. The promises different people make are different because their logic is different. He thinks it is logical to support torture, you think it is logical to oppose torture. You need to debate using logic to convince him his logic is flawed, and vice versa.
“Those things are wrong regardless of whether i have made any promise about them or not, and i would have to accept the responsibility for them no matter what.” How can you be forced to not fight back against criticism? It sounds like you’re saying “to take responsibility” means “to be charged with a crime or arrested”.
“In fact, i have no need to make promises like that, because i would simply never do those things.” If you change “would” to “will”, this is basically a promise. Do you deny that “I will never do those things” is basically a promise? I don’t consider a statement to be an actual promise until the person saying it makes it explicit, but I do consider this to be hinting at a promise.
“For example, it is difficult for me to not eat meat in the social context i live in now. It is not difficult for me to not enslave anyone. If i were a white land owner in America at a certain time in history, it would be a lot more difficult to not enslave anyone. That doesn't absolve me, or the slave owner from responsibility…” Is it possible to scientifically prove that a person is having difficulty not performing an action because of his social context? Do you mean you might enslave blacks like me if the whites around you start doing so? Do you see a logical reason to enslave blacks, or is it just because everyone else would be doing it? Remember what toshiromiballza was saying about blacks being a different sub-species of humans from whites and evolving to have lower IQ’s than them? You don’t believe this now, but is this starting to look like a reason you could accept to enslave us if everyone else started saying it? It seems like when you say “I have no need to make promises like that, because i would simply never do those things”, you mean “I would simply never do those things unless the people around me start doing them”. If “to not be absolved of responsibility” means “to not fight back against criticism”, you won’t have to worry about criticism from whites, and if your slave criticizes you, you can’t fight back (though you could whip him and tell him to get back to work). If “to not be absolved of responsibility” means “to be charged with a crime or arrested”, who’s going to arrest you? Slavery will already be legalized because most whites will support it. How will you be forced to “take responsibility”?
Let me quote a few things from different posts and address them at once
#449) “Promises are useful to the extent that they direct action, but i find them pretty ineffective in actually changing the causes of people acting badly…A pledge to have no more than 2 children is a tool for raising awareness of a social issue, it's not meant as a literal thing…But then, i just think, why would i bother making a promise like that? Who would care?” (#426) “i can simply admit that i am not acting morally when i eat meat and deal with the cognitive dissonance that brings until my will is strong enough to change that, and work on strengthening my will.” (#429) “Someone calling me a hypocrite is not going to change how i act.” I think you are unique in the way you understand promises and hypocrisy. Consider the possibility that the people around you take these concepts more seriously than you do. A person makes a promise not so he will be more likely to do the action in the future. He make a promise to assure the listener what his action will be in the future. When the listener is assured, the listener may make decisions about what actions to then take. You must have thought it was strange that witnesses swear on the bible to tell the truth before taking the stand, that people are asked to sign their names on contracts saying that they will not sue others for certain things, and that engaged couples take vows and say “I do” before getting married. Have these situations always seemed mysterious and pointless to you? I define “to lie” as “to intentionally say something that is not true”. Because the word “intentionally” adds a purely mental aspect, it is not possible to scientifically prove that a person is lying. Acting hypocritically (making, then breaking a promise), however, is scientifically provable. In order for person A to rest assured that person B will behave in a certain way, A might ask B to make a promise. If B makes and breaks the promise, A won’t know if B intentionally said something that is not true, but A will know for a fact that B made the promise, then broke it and A will treat B almost as if he lied. A witness swears to tell the truth to assure the listening jury, lawyers and judge that his testimony can be relied upon to reach a fair verdict. People sign contracts so the other party knows they won’t be sued for no good reason. A husband takes a vow so the wife knows he won’t leave her if she gets sick. During pledge drives and telethons and other fund-raising events for charity, people make pledges to donate money so the people needing help will know that help is coming. These are not to raise awareness of a social issue. When person B promises person A, then accidentally breaks the promise, A still criticizes B because it’s impossible to scientifically prove that it was broken accidentally. A also feels that if B was not certain he could keep the promise, he shouldn’t have made it in the first place. This is why you sometimes see movie characters saying “I can’t make that promise” or “I can’t promise you that” even though the words of the promise themselves are easy to say.“The thing is, i have no need to define torture, or murder, or rape because it is not those actions themselves that are wrong, but the hurting someone.” Is it possible to scientifically prove a person is hurting someone? My answer is “no”, and that’s why I think almost everyone tries to define those words. You must think it’s strange that those words are defined by laws as more than just “to hurt someone”. Some men believe rape feels good to the woman and women actually fantasize about being raped, but don’t want to admit it. That’s why women and rape victims define rape using words like “by force” or “without consent”.
“It's a result of your own lack of a coherent moral system that such logical definitions become important.” Are you willing to say this to everyone that gives a definition of those words?
“Empathy doesn't always tell you how to act, but it does tell you that if you've acted in a way that's hurt someone, that's wrong.” But you basically keep saying empathy always tells you to praise/criticize the person. If you don’t praise/criticize, you are lying to yourself, pretending you don’t intuit anything, or trying to escape your responsibility.
“Again, whether empathy is observable is completely irrelevent. Suppose someone was incapable of empathy itself, but could make a shortcut to the same conclusions as someone else through using logic (in fact, i think this is actually what most people do a fair amount of the time, based on their memory of past empathic events). Then the fact that they don't feel empathy itself is irrelevent… Nobody is being criticised for not feeling empathy, only for not using it as the moral faculty it is.” I can scientifically prove that you criticize others for not feeling empathy. (#347) “i don't get the impression that nadiatims is a psychopath like Ayn Rand was.” (#418) “It's hard to imagine true goals for society that would do the opposite of these things unless someone really were a psychopath. In which case, we can return again to "social goods" and discount their opinion.” If do you not count name-calling as criticism, what about (#429) “More often i would criticise someone for… not using empathy.” Just in case you are distinguishing between “feeling empathy” and “using empathy”, if a person is incapable of “feeling(?) empathy” as you said above, how could he then use logic to reach the same conclusions as someone else, yet avoid your criticism for not “using empathy”? Such a person would be incapable of using his “memory of past empathic events” as well, right?
“Now, if you wanted to have a discussion about morality that was actually interesting, you could have questioned why my idea of moral responsibility falls outside of my concept of normativity, and what that implies about whether one "should" accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions.” I don’t know what you mean by responsibility falling outside of normativity, but I think I found problems with all your statements involving responsibility.
“…even discussing the interrelations between the moral, social, selfish, and other wills could have been interesting. And at that level, coherence as a concept is much more interesting too, because it's not only about definitions, but building a coherent overall will.” It was you who said you didn’t want to explain how the different wills fight against each other. If it is not possible to scientifically prove that a person performed an action because a certain will is in control of him, we can’t debate promises about will.
You didn’t respond to the scenario of a lazy friend who says he supports a carbon tax and believes in climate change, but continues to waste energy and doesn’t recycle (though you did say (#426)“You should stand up for what is right, even if you can't follow though on it yourself”, so maybe that's your response). I got you to agree that it doesn’t make logical sense to criticize someone for causing someone’s death whether he flipped the switch or not. Do you agree that the same is true for praising someone in a similar situation? If so, you admit you are not using empathy to praise/criticize, which you said is cowardly (in the case of eating meat, for example). Making a decision based on what a scientist says/ the majority of scientists say/ “real” scientists say is not part of the scientific method. Making a decision based on evidence is. If you believe a scientist based his view on strong evidence, mention just the strong evidence, not the scientist’s name or that his opinion is part of the majority.
In conclusion, the main problem I have with what you say is you keep using actions that are scientifically unobservable. You said before that empathy can be scientifically observed. I am interested in any evidence you have.
qwertyytrewq, welcome back. Do you admit defeat? Why don’t you just say you changed your mind about admitting defeat?
Private video of private Romney Fundraiser leaked - blackbrich - 2013-05-13
I don't agree.
Private video of private Romney Fundraiser leaked - Tzadeck - 2013-05-13
HiiroYui Wrote:Communication is a two-way street. You can't expect people to continue to be patient with you when you aren't actually making an effort to listen to them, when you have trouble saying your ideas in a more concise and clear way, and when you act full of yourself. So, it's not hypocritical of me. I tried to communicate with you and listen to you; it broke down and I gave up.Tzadeck Wrote:“I branded him almot immediately as 'not actually listening' and then promptly gave up, despite being annoyed by his conceitedness.”Do you promise to actually listen and encourage others to make the same promise? Is "giving up" different from "not actually listening"? How could I have understood IceCream better, as you admit, but not actually listen?
You made some small breakthroughs talking to IceCream, but you did that despite the fact that you are an awful listener--not because you are actively listening.
We all have limited free time, so we can't spend forever thinking about every topic and arguing with every person.
Private video of private Romney Fundraiser leaked - IceCream - 2013-05-14
.
Private video of private Romney Fundraiser leaked - qwertyytrewq - 2013-05-14
LOL!
Private video of private Romney Fundraiser leaked - undead_saif - 2013-05-15
qwertyytrewq Wrote:LOL!Yeah, WTH was that! LOL!
Edit: IceCream is Banned?!
Private video of private Romney Fundraiser leaked - Zgarbas - 2013-05-15
She asked for her account to be disabled, and there is no other way to disable/delete accounts other than banning them.
By the way, I hope you guys don't mind, but this thread has gone on long enough =). Thread closed.
Private video of private Romney Fundraiser leaked - ファブリス - 2013-05-15
I put in "Closed Account" in the title, seems to work.