It's like rain on your wedding day. This should be the first post in a new sub;

/selfindulgentsophistry

So other people get to decide about the fate of a coma patient? How you know it is voluntary? I don’t see how the capacity argument works if there is no active participation to decision making. If an unborn baby ”wakes” up earlier than a coma patient, I would say that baby has more capacity to decide than that coma patient who let’s say wakes up in 5 years. (The chaotic slippery slope here is that we need to give birth to all potential babies)

Okay. The coma patient has showcased his capacity at some point but what if the rules have changed since and there is no evidence that he agrees with the common train of thought or whatever the given fixed point is.

Ty. What other reading critical of psych (inc the wider mental health professions) would you recommend?

I wonder if you are creating a more black and white version of the position given making it easier to dismiss - the suggestion isn't that all mental illness is only a tool for capitalist exploitation but that the system of responding to mental distress is vulnerable to being used that way with numerous features, like the DSM and professional activities /treatments, having been so influenced that they become blunted, useless or - often - worse by only emphasising the individual. Asking whether a particular condition (like schizophrenia or depression) exists as defined is different than saying the symptomology doesn't exist. The implication is that we should do a far better job of "carving nature at the joints" in our categorisation and redefine the meaning of symptomologies and recognise social causes of distress, working on those, rather than blaming individuals for not being able to respond well to the craziness of their situation. Working to improve society and our group-think doesn't require that we locate all distress in social ills but that we should not deepen their harm by pretending the solution lies with adjusting individuals to better tolerate misery in miserable conditions. A therapy that supports the client would be working to change those conditions as well as empowering the client to do so themselves.

I'm currently writing an essay on the way we treat AI and if it's supposed to have rights. While writing I came to a point, where my anthropological research became more and more focused on the nature of AI itself, rather than the comparison to humans. But because of Anthropology being the science of the nature of humans, I am tempted to call it Xenoanthropology, a branch of science, I literally just know from movies. But because of the name itself being a combination of "xeno" (greek for foreign) with anthropology, I am unsure if the name fits. What do you think of the idea?

Thanks for the comment

I’ve addressed why utility isn’t foundational here

https://open.substack.com/pub/garik/p/the-utility-coach-thought-experiment?r=1pded0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

And free will here https://open.substack.com/pub/garik/p/why-free-will-exists?r=1pded0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Freedom is foundational in that it’s required to underlie ethics and has a strong factual ground in our experience. And ethics needs to be built from there. A concern for the worlds welfare or our moral intuitions meanwhile are weak foundations and can’t be the basis of morality. Also, utilitarians have claimed we commit moral wrongs even as a result of actions beyond our control since outcomes matter rather than agency. Although since we can’t do anything about them, not focusing on them is strictly practicable.

I’ll be making more posts on utilitarianism in the future and I’d appreciate your thoughts.

You’re making a strong case for the argument that people shouldn’t be compelled to do things they provably cannot do. But nobody disagrees with that. Proving that freedom is in any sense meaningful or valuable is where you fall short. You don’t provide a way to compare freedom with utility or a reason why freedom would ever be more valuable than flourishing.

As far as I’m concerned the lack of free will makes freedom an illusory goal. The illusion of freedom is a path to well being, and any code of conduct should probably only ask for conduct that’s possible. But our code of conduct should be based entirely on utility.

I’ll be discussing reason, the authority over freedom, in a later post.

Some people have expressed concern that morality is a restriction on freedom, as if we are slaves. Yet normativity is the exchange of freedom for reasons. Any time there is an “I should” there is a reason that justifies restricting one’s freedom to do otherwise (see Kants hypothetical imperative).

Only when we get to morality do these reasons that restrict freedom take the form of universalizable moral principles (categorical imperative).

I prefer to understand the moral problem as being one in which morality and duty are incompatible. But in freedom we claim rights and rights cannot exist unless duties are imposed on others. All regulations and laws are duties imposed on us by those with the right.

I agree we cannot have morality without freedom but the barrier to freedom is duty and duty in the way i see it is another mans freedom. A plain example is the duty of the slave is the freedom of the master.

Very poor artists and deep thinkers. lol

Which would prefer to not be suffering from their poverty, so they have the luxury of thinking about philosophy more. lol

Lol suffering will always be subjective to the sufferer, there is no such thing as universally objective suffering that you could measure and apply to every person on earth.

The point is, subjective suffering is still suffering and you cant say someone is or is not suffering if they themselves are screaming in pain from their suffering, be it physical, mental or circumstantial.

Not having beluga caviar is a very rare subjective suffering, if you can even call it that, unless you have some sort of severe mental illness where not eating them would make you become suicidal and scream in pain. lol

is that you Bo?

Sure, I agree, but if you are suffering intensely, it wont matter what anyone says, the only thing that concerns you then would be to fix the suffering first.

There is no such thing as an extremely happy sufferer of extreme pain, no matter how much they may try to rationalize their suffering.

Thanks for the comment. I’ve addressed how we get to actual morality from freedom elsewhere.

https://open.substack.com/pub/garik/p/why-should-i-be-moral?r=1pded0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Summary: we don’t have morals with freedom alone. Rather we need reason as an authority over our freedom.

Freedom by itself does not create morality, yet the starting point for any moral system must be personal agency.

Let me know if there are necessary points of clarification and I’ll write about it in the future.

Sleeping people definitely have rights, as well as people under anesthesia. It’s the existing capacity for consciousness that’s morally relevant.

Submitting a text post and engaging in discussion within the comments is one thing, linking a blog post with some pseudo academic/self-help philosophy article to feed an illusion that you’re a writer is another. People linking their blogs here are pretentious wannabe intellectuals for the most part.

Gallows humour is a life saver.

Posting about Nietzshe on a Philosophy forum? How dare they! It'll be Wittgenstein next, honestly these kids.. (this is how your comment reads)

Observation without analysis is equally meaningless, to give one priority over the other is silly.

Is it better to have corruption while saving more lives or no corruption while more people die seems to be the scenario of this hypothetical.

The captain will know he traded lives for money as will all the survivors. This will either haunt them or they rationalize it making it more likely for them to do corrupt things in the future or a bit of both.

This has future impacts and in the long term seems worse than having more people die, because it could lead to more corrupt decisions that get rationalized.

So I think system 1 is better because of long term impacts

Freedom is not moral and in fact is a nonsense (meaningless) term. To start with it is relative and often incompatible. My free speech is your hate speech. This is why every nation pays lip service to freedom while bounding it and containing it with innumerable laws.

If you wish to argue freedom is an average state of a population, you are faced with the moral dilemma that those who allocate and distribute the freedom packets must be superior in freedom compared to the average.

Ought may imply can but you would have to convince me duties can be moral and that might be a task you would prefer to forgo. You have no duty to attempt it and no moral obligation to demonstrate ought is a moral factor.

NOTE: My argument is not restricted to or by known social systems. In a system in which administrative hierarchies exist, moral duties must exist and be free to exercise.

I feel like nihilism only survives because of a blindspot. Like if you are really that worried about the idea that maybe nothing matters, that means something does matter to you. I don't think things can stop mattering to people. I feel like it's an axiom ingrained in our biology. Things matter to us, and it's not our choice. To find what matters just ask yourself "what do I want?". And then to the answer of that question ask "why do I want that?" And then keep asking that to each answer until you come to the point where you have no answer as to why you want it, it's just a feeling that you want it, and it's beyond you. Then that must be the axiom ingrained in your biology. And that's what matters to you.

Mere rat! Imma murder your arm pits! Die mfer die mfer die!

So a sleeping person has no rights? An embryo has no rights although he is like a sleeping person who wakes up later - in this case only much later?

Well-fucking-said. Kudos.