Your boss is a dictator over your life, personal capitalism

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You mean matters of intuition. The issue here is that the axioms upheld have to be upheld on an expected correctness. And yes, we can quibble about the value of each premise, that is the basis of philosophy, with the idea that human moral epistemology is valid and thus intuitions about proper morals are correct. You can ask me to flesh out my intuitions more, however, getting past the intuitive basis of ethics is an absurdity, even if you think that ethics is an absurdity.


Well, the issue is that the premises have to be evaluated in order to consider each argument equally valid. Showing that an argument is equally as valid is thus best done if the counter-argument carries similar structures and is only created by changing a single questionable premise.


Yes, and the question is equal soundness. The issue, once again, is the premises, and how you expect to have them be accepted as valid/rejected, particularly given that you have labeled the biggest mechanism for this matter, intuitions about the workings of ethics, to be subjective. I mean, if you were going to take that route, why not just do away with ethical considerations by saying that EVERY ethical problem has epistemic problems given that our grounding for ethics is a matter of intuition and sentiment? I would consider it a more valid approach as by openly taking that stand, it clarifies your real position, and allows for greater comprehensibility on the matter.

Evidently your comprehension skills are poor. I never said "last forever", I said this: "dying is painful". Now, if all life dies, and dying is painful, then all life experiences pain, no matter how long that life lasts. That has nothing to do with the duration of life. You seem to be introducing concepts that I am not saying at all.


This isn't about a non-existent being judging something, this is about the fact that pain necessarily exists(from 2), but joy doesn't necessarily exist in any amount, certainly not an amount that outweighs this pain. Nothing to do with a sense of values either, as the statement here is just analysis.


Sand, I never said that hammers are sentient. Here is what I said about hammers: "In any case, we create things all of the time that cannot distinguish between menaces and pleasure, such as hammers." Now, hammers aren't sentient, but that doesn't mean that they cannot be incapable of doing something. Hammers are also incapable of calculus.


This was your best argument. In order to beat Enamdar, all you have to do is construct an argument that ethics are irrational and thus appear to have no basis in fact.


Sand, you're the delusional one. I suppose senility might have set in for you. The standard proposed in 3 for claiming things were unethical was simple: "Creating something that may suffer net pain is an evil act ". That is a standard by which to measure the ethical nature of an act. You can argue that it is correct or incorrect, but it seems to follow from 3 & 4.

To knock out most of the crap you are trying to indicate a real attitude about life from a wild theory that "net pain" ( which I assume you are trying to indicate the sum of all the pain in a lifetime) is overwhelmingly horrible and therefore life has no justification for existence. This is not theoretical mathematics, it is a deep judgment on the validity of actually being alive. Your claim that the constant fear of death is sufficient pain to over rule the mere joy of being alive. And somehow you then cannot visualize that this death fear can be theoretically vanished by eternal life even though you have not explicitly pointed this out as the only alternative. Perhaps senility can commence at a rather early age. How old are you?

Your denial of the possibility of joy as a recurrent phenomenon in any life while insisting that pain is ever present is an unfortunate piece of depressive dementia that indicates you may need professional help.

You implied that a living being is somehow equivalent to a hammer which I accept as a highly amusing concept or perhaps an unfortunate conclusion from your associates and friends and I advise you to seek a wider circle.

Definition
Ethics (also known as 'moral philosophy') is a branch of philosophy which seeks to address questions about morality, such as what the fundamental semantic, ontological, and epistemic nature of ethics or morality is (meta-ethics), how moral values should be determined (normative ethics), how a moral outcome can be achieved in specific situations (applied ethics), how moral capacity or moral agency develops and what its nature is (moral psychology), and what moral values people actually abide by (descriptive ethics).
As I pointed out in a previous post morality is a set of rules that is highly variable depending upon various attitudes, cultures, personal opinions, fashions, etc. You are apparently widely read but seem to have neglected this basic concept.

Your extension of your original fantasy of an individual created only to endless suffering seems more based on the Christian concept of Hell rather than based on any realistic observation of being alive. If that's the way you view life, most certainly you should seek some way to end it. I and most of the other people I have met see no congruence with that and reality.

Your implicit assumption that any pain defeats the point of being alive more or less visualizes a sentient being like a stick of dynamite where sitting on a thumbtack should satisfactorily result in a totally destructive explosion.

One of the grossest fallacies promoted in this discussion is that pleasure and pain are positive and negative quantities on a continuous spectrum. Actually pleasure and pain are the warp and woof of existence and they are vitally necessary to each other.
When I recall memories of my dead father, mother, son it gives me great pleasure to trace our relationships and the specifics of our association. And it gives me equally great pain to be aware they are still not with me. And the greater the pleasure, the greater the pain since one is irretrievable tied to the other. There is a highly complex relationship in that interaction that cannot be abstracted and juggled in a distorted abstract algebra of faulty logic.

^^welcome to dialectics. seperate one from its dialectical opposite and both lose all meaning if not collapse utterly.

Matters of whose intuition? The majority as you called on earlier, although only_after selecting out the overwhelming majority (aka the religious) since your reliance on popularity cannot succeed even on that dubious merit?

I do not see that any axiom I have relied on fails to meet any standard meet by those in the argument that mine is a counter argument against. I see no reason to employ higher standards in an objection to a positive assertion than were met in the assertion itself.
I reiterate, my counter argument is no less factually true, than Benator’s, and it is valid.

If for any argument, there exists a valid counter argument, no less factually true, that necessarily implies either a contrary or contradictory conclusion to that argument, then it is not unreasonable to dispute or disagree with that argument.

Quite frankly, I do not feel obliged to meet the vague correctness standards airily appealed to by a self appointed participant referee. Arguably someone who makes this argument
The final conclusion stands somewhat against our way of looking at breeding I think, as most modern people don't feel a moral need to have children unless they are religious. Usually family planning is more important.
does not have a lot of recourse to lofty standards.
An appeal to popularity that relies on excluding the majority of the relevant populace?

Never mind the bit about "somewhat against our way of looking at breeding".
Apparently this “must meet some appeal to popularity within a selection biased group that rules out the majority of the planet’s inhabitants” is only a standard for arguments you wish to object to, or are you suggesting the majority, religious or otherwise view breeding as evil?

Further, the objection is even more ridiculous, since my argument does not actually claim that it is immoral to not breed.


I do not accept that your intuition is universal or superior in matters moral.

I would point out that in fact if a person’s intuition about ethics leads them to intuitively accept the conclusion “it_is evil to breed” as consistent with their moral/ethical intuition, that their intuition in this area is far from universal, and probably contrary to the moral/ethical intuition of the overwhelming majority of people, without any need for me to engage in selection bias with regard to “people”.


Unfortunately with this argument you have entirely ceased to make any sense to me. Validity refers to the logical relationship between premises and no amount of evaluation of any premise can give you any information about the validity of an argument. Premises can be evaluated for objective truth value, and as I have already asserted, none of my premises are less objectively true than are Benator’s.

There is no question there. The arguments are equally sound. I should think it is obvious and apparent that morals and ethics are subjective, but if you doubt me on this I suspect any entry level primer text in the subject of philosophy will explain this in the first few pages.


In all honesty you give me way too much credit; it is beyond my power to cause that which is subjective to be subjective, and it was not my idea since comprehension of this distinction between the normative and the factual existed many thousands of years before I did. I cannot be held responsible for the existence of this distinction nor its necessarily implications, because I did not make it that way, and frankly lack the power to wave a wand and change it.


To reiterate, in the first instance my argument is no less sound than that which it was posed as a counter to. This in itself is grounds to assert that it is possible to reasonably disagree on it, and this is all that I am asserting.

Even if we accept your argument regarding intuition (and your attempts to call premises invalid when premises lack the capacity to be characterized by such an attribute), this then requires that it is unreasonable to disagree on grounds of subjective moral preferences if I am to be proven wrong about the reasonableness of disputing Benator’s argument on these grounds.

Even if we go further and accept calls to popularity to settle issues of which subjective moral/ethical sentiments in the arguments are “most popular” I cannot see that my argument would be accepted by less people on these grounds than one which asserts that having human offspring is evil.

nice post