All topics
-
I would plug into the experience machine, and most refusals are just status quo bias
Robert Nozick's thought experiment in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974): a machine can give you any experiences you like, indistinguishable from reality. You'd believe you were writing a great novel or climbing a mountain, but you'd be floating in a tank. Would…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Existentialism can ground an ethics, and Beauvoir showed how
The standard charge is simple: if there are no given values, then anything goes. Sartre promised an ethics at the end of Being and Nothingness and never published one; the Notebooks for an Ethics came out only after his death. Beauvoir did…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Voluntary assisted dying should be legal for competent adults
Sweden doesn't allow it. I've worked alongside people from the Netherlands, where it has been legal under statute since 2002, and I've read about Canada, where it became legal in 2016. The argument for, as I understand it: competent adults have the…
Started by Elin Hedqvist8 replies -
Hobbes’s ‘sudden glory’ explains far more laughter than its critics admit
Every textbook dismisses the superiority theory in a paragraph. Hobbes says in Leviathan chapter 6 that ‘sudden glory’ is the passion that makes the grimaces called laughter, caused either by some act of our own that pleases us or by seeing some…
Started by Javier Ferrandis6 replies -
The argument from marginal cases has never been properly answered
It pains me to agree with my effective altruism group on anything. But on this I do. The argument runs like this. Name the property that gives humans moral status. If it's rationality, language or moral agency, some humans lack it (newborns,…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
The actual infinite is a useful fiction, not something real
Aristotle, in Physics III, allowed only the potential infinite: you can always count one more, but there's never a completed infinite totality. For two thousand years, most mathematicians agreed. Then Cantor, in the late nineteenth century, treated infinite sets as completed objects…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Beauty is objective
I want to defend a thesis that's unfashionable in literature departments: beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder. Hume, in "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757), argued that though beauty depends on sentiment, some judges are better than others:…
Started by Kavya Menon6 replies -
Parfit was right: identity is not what matters in survival
I'm the resident sceptic in my effective altruism group, but on this one I'm a believer, so bring your best objections. Parfit's argument in Part III of Reasons and Persons (1984), roughly: Suppose your brain is divided and each half placed in…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
Barnes is right: being disabled is not in itself bad for you
I came to philosophy through effective altruism, where it's common to count disability as a reduction in wellbeing and to rank interventions accordingly. Elizabeth Barnes's The Minority Body changed my mind, and I want to defend her thesis. Thesis: disability is a…
Started by Ethan Mercer7 replies -
Free speech should protect offensive religious satire
I write this from a country with strict blasphemy laws, which have led to mob violence and killings. So I'm not neutral on this. The Jyllands-Posten cartoons in 2005, the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015 and countless cases in Pakistan raise the…
Started by Sana Rizvi8 replies -
The argument from divine hiddenness is stronger than the argument from evil
Here's a thesis I want tested. The argument from evil gets all the attention, but theists have well-developed replies: free will, soul-making, goods we cannot see. Whatever you think of them, they at least make sense of suffering as part of a…
Started by Ethan Mercer5 replies -
Consciousness is fundamental, not produced by the brain
Advaita Vedanta holds that consciousness is the one reality, and the material world appears within it. In recent years, several philosophers in the analytic tradition have defended views in the same family: Philip Goff's panpsychism (Galileo's Error, 2019), Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism.…
Started by Arjun Iyer9 replies -
Numbers exist independently of us: mathematical platonism is true
I'll defend platonism in its standard form: there are abstract mathematical objects, they don't depend on minds or language, and mathematical statements are true or false because of them. Main argument: indispensability, from Quine and Putnam. We ought to believe in the…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Large language models understand nothing: the Chinese Room still applies
This isn't idle for anyone who builds software on these models. I'll argue the thesis and see if it survives. John Searle's 1980 paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs" imagines a man in a room who receives Chinese characters, follows an English rulebook…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen9 replies -
Al-Ghazali was right: causal necessity cannot be demonstrated
In the Seventeenth Discussion of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali argues that the connection between what is customarily believed to be a cause and its effect is not necessary. When cotton touches fire and burns, observation shows only that the burning…
Started by Layla Sfeir8 replies -
Brain death is not death
I've seen the hospital handle brain death several times, and I'm told the clinical criteria are reliable. My question is philosophical: is a person who meets them actually dead? The 1968 Harvard ad hoc committee defined "irreversible coma" as a criterion of…
Started by Omar Ragab6 replies -
The institutional theory of art is circular, and it’s the vicious kind
A mate who did an art degree keeps telling me that whether my stand-up set is art depends on the "artworld". So I read up. George Dickie's later version of the institutional theory, from The Art Circle (1984), says roughly: a work…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies -
Affirmative action is required by justice, not merely permitted
In 2023, the US Supreme Court effectively ended race-conscious admissions in SFFA v. Harvard. India has the opposite constitutional structure: Articles 15(4) and 16(4) allow special provisions and reservations for disadvantaged groups, and Indra Sawhney (1992) upheld reservations for Other Backward Classes,…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Compatibilism answers a question nobody was asking
I have now heard about four lectures defending compatibilism, and every time I feel the same thing: it changes the subject. Hume says liberty is just a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will. Fine. When…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu6 replies -
Falsifiability is not a good criterion for what counts as science
Karl Popper, in Logik der Forschung (1934; English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959), proposed that a theory is scientific if and only if it's falsifiable: it makes predictions that could turn out false. As a physics teacher I used to…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha6 replies -
An unjust law is not really law: legal positivism is mistaken
H. L. A. Hart's The Concept of Law (1961) defends the separation of law and morality: what the law is is one question, what it ought to be is another. Lon Fuller argued against this in their famous 1958 exchange in the…
Started by Hamza Qureshi6 replies -
Mozi was a consequentialist two thousand years before Bentham, and lost the argument the same way
I read the later Mohist canons closely, so I live with this comparison. Here's the case. Mozi, writing in the fifth century BCE, argued that the test of any doctrine or policy is whether it promotes benefit and removes harm for the…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Algorithmic hiring tools are inherently unjust
I don't say this lightly. Algorithms trained on past hiring decisions learn past discrimination. The best-known case: Amazon built an experimental recruiting tool that, as Reuters reported in 2018, learned to penalise CVs containing the word "women's" (as in "women's chess club…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman6 replies -
Refusing to aggregate is contractualism’s best feature, not its embarrassing bug
Scanlon's transmitter room case: a technician is trapped under equipment in a TV station, receiving painful electric shocks. Freeing him means interrupting the broadcast of a big football match for fifteen minutes, and millions of people are watching. Add up the millions…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
A deliberate foul that accepts its penalty is still a move within the game
Here is a thesis from someone who builds rule systems for a living: a tactical foul, committed openly and paid for with the stated penalty, is part of playing the game, not a break from it. The strict formalist reading of Suits…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting6 replies -
There is no self: the Buddhist and Humean bundle views are basically right
Hume, in the Treatise (Book 1, Part 4, Section 6), says that when he looks within he never catches "himself", only some particular perception: heat, cold, love, pain. The self is a bundle of perceptions in constant flux. The Buddhist doctrine of…
Started by Priya Raghavan7 replies -
A universal basic income would make people freer, not lazier
Philippe Van Parijs, in Real Freedom for All (1995), argues that a just society should maximise everyone's real freedom to do whatever they might want to do, and that an unconditional basic income is the best way to do it. Republicans in…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Once you know how a food was produced, you cannot honestly taste it the same way
I grew up Jain, which means I have strong views on honey, onions and root vegetables, and I think every week about animal testing. So this is not a neutral thesis for me, but I want to argue it on terms anyone…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies -
Diogenes and the naked Jain monk are not doing the same thing
When I read about Diogenes, people kept saying he was like our Digambara monks: no possessions, no shame about the body, indifferent to comfort. There's even a historical thread: a writer called Onesicritus, said to have been a pupil of Diogenes, went…
Started by Hetal Shah4 replies -
Calling an outcome ‘efficient’ always smuggles in a value judgement
When people evaluate algorithms that allocate small loans, the word "efficient" comes up constantly. An allocation is efficient, a policy is inefficient, this change would improve efficiency. It is spoken as if it were a neutral technical description. I want to argue…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies