Recent content by Tiberius1701

I agree with Vertigo that the value can't be considered infinite. Especially blunt systems that make no distinction between murderous villains and good people. Of that I can tolerate no equivelancy, sorry. As for government having too much power - it already has great power over a lot of...

The purpose of the death penalty is not deturrence. It's not even really to keep us safe from that one person. The primary purpose is to fulfill Justice. The death penalty does not deter, that much is shown statistically. And, we could keep someone from killing others most of the time...

Evil people do not use violence because they are "worried about being harmed". They do it because they have mal intent and want to kill, destroy, and dominate for its own sake. Not all conflicts are the result of evil people - some are just misunderstandings. But the idea that we're all "just...

That's nice but meanwhile, those who use violence for the wrong reasons are being born, as well as hanging around. The result would be that they would end up ruling the world. It is fortunate that this bizarre philosophy never took much of a foothold on a grand level, because it would only...

Ah, now that is a great point and makes the argument much more interesting. I see your point that not all people are able to intelligently and/or objectively conduct moral deliberation. So, I agree with you that it is important in society to have propagated general "principles" which form...

I read an excellent observation about the question. It pointed out that "meaning" always implies a meaning TO someone. When you look at it that way, you realize that the question only makes sense when you ask, "what is the meaning of life TO x". As a humanist, I believe the great thing...

Just curious, but what do you think of my response to his statement?

When you say that each unprincipled action diminishes us, it is your definition of "unprincipled" that I object to. I see this sort of thinking a lot in ethics and it makes no sense to me. What I mean is, that it is not acceptable to me that we take a laundry list of abstract actions and call...

Do the ends Justify the means? Here's my answer... 1) Usually the question of means/ends (or any ethical delimma for that matter) doesn't come up unless there is a conflict of principles. 2) Each principle we have, we associate a relative value to it. Not murdering people is of a higher...

There's something closely related to this that I think should be pointed out... Before the enlightenment, the common understanding was that things COULD be proven through logical argument alone. You can easily see this in methodology the Dialogues of Plato for example, where they would seek...

Talus, You are treating the concept of a "theory" as though it were a "hypothesis". In common usage, theory may mean this but in scientific usage it is quite the opposite (perhaps hypothesis is simply too cumbersome of a word for people to use on a casual basis). A theory is not an...

Yes Grim (apt name here), but not many are aware that every single measurable pollutant has been declining dramatically since the industrial revolution in parts/million and continues to drop (dramatically). This includes water purity as well. This is shocking to most people, but its that...

I think Juxt is referring to the odds of the universe coming into being in such a way as to allow for life (the exact properties of subatomic particles, the cosmological constant, and so on). The problem with this view is that we have only a sample of one. With that you can't really form a...