I’m surprised to hear you admit this.
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It does.
No.
Wrong from the start.
And your justification for thinking they don’t but we do…is?
Animals aren’t moral agents.
Humans are moral agents.
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Every time he says something disparaging, it’s “we” or “us.”
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Believing in the concept of “moral agents” requires me to believe morality is objective.
This is like using the bible for proof of something in the bible.
Give me one good reason other than something that requires believing in some sort of inherent gifted morality why humans have morals but animals can’t.
Your goal is to convince, not proselytize.
Truth need not facet itself within a box of one’s limited perception.
Fasc only need say what he knows. He need not contort himself in knots to persuade one who simply seeks to affirmation and not confirmation.
There is no onus to convince–particularly when the convincee seeks an answers that support his presupposition rather than challenge it. In which case, you’re not looking to be convinced of anything other that you were right all along.
Which is either…
A. Not much.
Or
B. Too influenced by indoctrination to be taken with any merit.
You literally just described Fasc and the best methods for dealing with him. Look inward, apprentice.
You don’t even know what his influences are.
This makes no sense. I didn’t describe anyone.
Git gud /10
Not at all…
Being a moral agent can still allow you to be a complete moral nihilist (no morals whatsoever, or at least none that we can know), as you can still make decisions based upon that moral framework rather than some physical urge.
Being a moral agent means that you have the capacity to make a decision or be motivated by a metaphysical ought as opposed to a physical need, no more, no less. Animals aren’t moral agents, they don’t contemplate whether they ought to eat or not, they just follow their basic programming.
A toddler can rationalize (albeit often very poorly or myopically) in a way that no animal can.
The very fact we’re having this conversation (an act of creativity and choice) regarding self-awareness and states of being (metaphysical concepts) presupposes moral agency. This is why folks like Daniel Dennett have twisted themselves (unsuccessfully) into knots trying to maintain a compatiblist theory of determinism and free will. Dennett correctly understands free will can’t be discarded for a variety of reasons (with the existence of reasons at all being damning proof in and of itself), but just can’t allow himself to avoid the physical determinism he clings to… so he creates a very insulated and externally incoherent web of ideas and never moves from there. This is why Dennett was hot stuff in the late 90’s and early 00’s… only to quickly be left behind since his theories couldn’t really budge the needle against folks that went the whole hog in denying free will entirely or folks that wrecked his determinism position.
PS - You’ve put yourself into a corner with your belief (tee hee) that free will doesn’t exist, which is why I referenced Dennett. Because you dismiss free will, you reduce yourself down to merely an animal. You also place each and every one of your beliefs, political leanings, views on science and religion, opinions about this game, everything out of reach as something cultivated and learned. You dislike theism not out of any reasoned position, but because you have no choice but to reject it. You play your Druid not out of any preference or choice, but because this was always going to be your fate.
Without free will, you have no dignity, no opinions, no worth. Any assessment that Blizzard was or is abusive to its employees is nonsensical as no one involved has any say in the matter, and Blizzard can’t change by any efforts on their own part. You strip away free will and nothing you’ve ever said, argued, believed, or professed matters. You have nothing to be proud of, as you’ve done nothing and earned nothing. This is Nietzsche’s conceit through and through, and a requirement to achieve whatever Übermensch he had in mind.
Problem is… how the hell are you supposed to cultivate a strong will that rejects the moral fantasies of society if you are neither responsible for your circumstances nor your responses??? Nietzsche can’t answer this, just as Nietzsche can’t explain how and why the priests he so loathed somehow managed to convince people they had free will (while lacking free will themselves) so as to shackle men to something that doesn’t exist. For all of Nietzsche’s thoughtfulness and sheer cheek (he’s beyond entertaining to read, and he is otherwise correct in his vicious dismantling and dissection of Kant and other post-Enlightenment thought), his end-goal just always fell short. Nietzsche demanded that every idea be taken seriously and thought through, and if it didn’t follow, you reject it… so that’s what I did with Nietzsche and so duly rejected him.
PPS - The only logical outcome of Nietzsche is what folks like Huxley and Lovecraft determined, it is only fear of the unknown that keeps us from embracing death, and embracing death is the only relief from such a terribly hopeless and deterministic world. Rejecting free will is alluring in how it frees us of responsibility for a time, but leaves us bereft of everything.
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Mike Ybarra was the replacement, she was the diversity hire.
I haven’t put myself in any corner.
This is all a reasonably close-to-accurate description of how things work. I seem to be doing a mostly good job explaining the circumstances, since you seem to be able to reiterate it somewhat.
However, tied to your accurate summary are injected ideas that are not what I am saying at all, typical you, because you literally smoke strawmen on your free time like it’s your job. Here I go, having to clean up your gigantic wall of mess because you continuously fail to ever properly steelman an argument because doing so would require defeating yourself instantly.
Our ability to do so is no better than an animal’s ability to do so. You only think your ability to do so is better simply because you believe you are “better” than animals due to your religious beliefs, particularly on one axis: intelligence.
Intelligence isn’t special, though. In fact our intelligence might be the reason our species goes extinct, which renders intelligence a handicap in some contexts of persistence. We are exactly the same as animals, we simply have the capability to think a few layers deeper on any given subject. That doesn’t make us moral agents. It just means our brains are bigger and we have more neurons firing at any given moment than other animals. There is literally nothing special about this. Unique? Sure. We can do things other species cannot utilizing this trait. So can other animals do things other species cannot utilizing their unique traits. There is nothing inherently special about intelligence.
In fact we’re relatively inferior to other animals in many ways. We’d lose in a fist fight to a bear, and we’d be wiped out to a nuclear bomb unlike the cockroach.
That’s called instinct. Not morality.
No it doesn’t. It just means we have bigger brains than other animals and can communicate in ways other animals can’t.
It’s the cutest when you actually believe you’ve “trapped” someone on something because usually following this assertion you leak an absolute truckload of misrepresented tripe as some kind of stand-in for actually understanding the point, but your filter just won’t let you get it.
Just like dual spec, I bet you’re inherently incapable of steelman-ing the argument, and if you tried, it would be a laughable document.
Because we have bigger brains than other animals. There’s no mystery or burning question here that you’ve presented. It’s a simple answer. Which you interpret simply. The rest of this post is nothing but pontification.
You suffer from something called “speciesism”, direly.
You reject the existence of plentiful science available for you to google at your fingertips or leisure, so you can keep forcing us all to suffer your wordy slop that is usually just a giant smokescreen for the idea that everything you believe is infused by faith in a God and everything his teachings relay.
The level of intelligence humans possess gives us the ability to have superficial free will. There’s nothing wrong with that either. Even though everything is deterministic, and I’m most certainly always going to do what I end up doing, I still enjoy my daily life regardless, and love my family, etc. It doesn’t automatically make everything pointless because the actual act of living through the process is enjoyable and filled with love, etc.
So your problem is that you think omittance of free will from the human condition makes us empty robots who might as well lemming off a cliff for all we are worth, but that’s the divergence here, because no, that’s not what needs to occur.
I am perfectly happy, regardless of the inherent knowledge that I am shaped by a cause and effect chain that will continue until “me” ceases to exist. Was I always going to be in this moment, happy about this? Yep. Does that make it any less enjoyable? Nope.
Coming to terms with this notion is going to be impossible for you. You believe in God, so most of this is absolutely antithetical to what you are taught to believe, and is incompatible with the idea of God, so there’s really no point trading words any further on this. At the end of the day, your beliefs are centralized around an already-irrational belief that you couldn’t prove if your life depended on it. So that’s naturally going to mean that many of your lesser beliefs will be irrational.
I’ve never been interested in “converting” anyone to atheism, and you’re not special.
You have no idea what any of this means, and I know you have no idea what any of this means because you keep trying to pack everything into the above quoted statement. You’re actually incapable of having this conversation because your presupposition that we’re nothing more than animals literally forces you to avoid logic and rationality to maintain the conclusion you’ve already presupposed.
The moment logic points away from us being animals, logic itself is just devolved into “bigger brained-ness”. Moral queries? More proof of better brains! Justice? Brains! Your position is unassailable because it is divorced from logic and reasoning.
Unfortunately, Karl Popper noticed something, something which today we would call “confirmation bias.” He noticed it particularly among the Marxists and the Freudians, both groups of which insisted that their respective disciplines of dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis were indeed SCIENCES. He noticed it personally in his friend Alfred Adler, the Freudian heretic who had ‘discovered,’ contra Freud, that sexual repression was not the key to the human psychē, but the inferiority complex instead.
What Popper noticed is that when a Marxist or a Freudian attempted to give a scientific account of a historical event in terms of class conflict or a psychological phenomenon in terms of sexual repression and neurosis, they were able to do this, no matter what the circumstances were. A Marxist could, and did, explain anything and everything by means of class conflict. A Freudian could, and did, explain anything and everything by means of sexual repression and neurosis. And each “explanation” which was given was considered by each as a “verification” of either Marxism or Freudianism, thus further proving each theory correct and scientific. Nor could one criticize Marxism or Freudianism: it was obvious that the critic of Marxism was a bourgeoise apologist, which proved Marxism’s class conflict theory, and the critic of Freudianism was sublimating his sexual repression into a neurotic attack on Freudianism, which proved Freudianism. (As you can imagine, when a Marxist got into a head to head argument with a Freudian, it was like a perpetual motion machine of pointless back and forth!)
Popper regularly dined with his friend Adler, with whom he often quarreled about this issue. One time, Popper discovered a psychological case that seemed clear to him could not be explained by means of Adler’s go-to explanation for everything, the inferiority complex (which had the same self-confirming structure as the Freudianism from which it sprang; e.g. A man sees a drowning child: if he fails to jump in the water to save her, it was due to his feelings of inferiority; if he does jump in to save her, he was overcompensating due to his feelings of inferiority, etc.).
Popper waited for his moment and sprang his example case on Adler, hoping to baffle him. Instead, to his astonishment, Adler immediately analyzed the case in terms of an inferiority complex. Popper managed to sputter “But … how do you know this?” To which Adler replied, in a magisterial tone, “Based on my thousandfold experience.” To which Popper, having recovered, replied “And I suppose now your experience is a thousand-and-one-fold!”
You’re an Adler Zipzo.
Self-delusion is meaningless no matter how much you think you can take joy in wanton hedonism.
You do realize that free will is perfectly sound without a SINGLE theological argument or axiom… right? I don’t get why you’re so threatened by this.
Someone who denies free will exists claiming anything is irrational is hilarious. Nothing can be irrational or rational in the absence of free will. Your condemnation is entirely flaccid.
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I pretty much consider it a win when you decide to go after individual supporting points rather than actually address the main topic.
Somehow in your response I seemed to miss where you made a good argument for the existence of free will 
It’s because there is none, so all you will do is pick out phrases, quotes, sentences, and isolate instances of logic you think are flawed so you can avoid outing yourself for being irrational.
By the way, you’re right, you were always going to be this irrational. It’s not really “your fault” so to speak, you’re just living your life the way it was going to always be lived.
It doesn’t mean I don’t take joy in making fun of you for it. Like I said, there’s something to be said for the enjoyment of having superficial free will.
Your main topic is summarized by your insistence that we are just our brains, all is reducible to a brain, and the proof of that is that we have brains, because that’s what we use. Your argument is tautological.
The.
Ability.
To.
Make.
An.
Argument.
Presupposes.
Free.
Will.
Without free will, there is no argument. There is no act. There is no decision. There is just existence. You continually AFFIRM free will by making these statements.
You’re sociopathic.
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You’re saying this is…false?
Remove or damage one single area of your brain can render you a completely different personality.
We have real life examples of this from car crash victims, or other accidents that resulted in brain damage.
Your brain is who you are and changing any single part of it drastically affects that.
Unless you have convincing science that says there’s something else that affects who we are, I’d like to see it, but I’m prepared to be disappointed.
No. It. Doesn’t.
Repeating this over and over doesn’t make it so, broken record-kun.
How little this means coming from a cultist
If you’re about to confuse the instrument with music I’m going to just be very disappointed in you.
This right here is the box you put yourself in. Science can only study the physical, by definition. Science itself is metaphysical, which is why Popper’s falsification solution to the demarcation problem (the line between science and non-science) is ultimately faulty. So here you are, forced to place everything into physical-only boxes, in which you reaffirm using a method of study that is literally limited to physical-only.
You might as well describe the world only in terms of lengths because your only tool is a ruler, as you decry the existence of temperature because despite lots of people telling you they experience temperature, none of them can establish the existence of temperature using your ruler.
Then you don’t understand the problem. Dunning-Kruger.
See above.
You’re afraid of anything being non-physical, so you have to reduce the mind to just our brains.
Ah, okay, so “magic”.
Point your criticism inward, young jedi.
Afraid is a pretty strong word, more like I lack any sort of consideration for anything outside of perceivable scientific fact because it has yet to make a convincing argument for being considered.