The Based Life

Two agents may be differently morally assessed on the basis of a difference in their actions, even if that difference is due to factors beyond their control. The chosen position is an ethical statement asserting the fact that we can ascribe different moral worth to actions whose agents had the same intent but due to some factor, one of them was not able to fulfil the action for a reason that was not under their direct control while the other was able to go through with the intent. This ethical position is stating that moral luck is a justifiable reason as to ethically judge the two agents in a different manner. This position goes in direct contradiction to the corollary of the Control Principle which affirms that two individuals should not be judged differently for factors out of their control which derives itself from the Control Principle which essentially states that we can only be judged for what we can control (Nelkin).           ...

This was written in September 2020   It is three days before I start my degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, a degree pioneered by Oxford University in 1920 to replace the classics and instead offer a more modern and up to date version to provide the knowledge and skills for future civil servants to effectively govern. In the a year and a half that I've thought about pursuing this degree and in the eight months since being accepted I've had a lot of time to reflect upon the nature, the purpose, the scope, the benefits, the limitations about pursuing such a degree as it really is an outlier in terms of what the traditional university degree is supposed to accomplish.  I personally am against specialization, the idea of 'specializing' in a particular subject makes me shiver with dread, I don't think there is anything more unpleasant to my intellectual drive than the idea of tunnel visioning in a narrow and isolated subject. To me it seems that a true un...

Okay so I think it is here where we have to answer the question at the end of the Inequality video, the question being:   would I rather pick a country to live in where everyone has the same amount of wealth ($5000), or would I pick a country that has wealth inequality (half $10.000 and half $500).  My first thoughts regarding the question proposed is that we are missing a very crucial piece of information in regards as to  why the inequality exists in the first place . This question determines exactly what type of economic and political system I/we would be living under, since if we leave out this piece of information I think it is obvious that we would all pick the  everyone is equal option  since why would we not want, if we had the power, to allow everyone to live equally as prosperous? But alas we have to confront that crucial piece of information if we would really want to answer this question truthfully because the fact of the matter is, inequality is a r...

                   In the beginning, man lived in a state of war of all against all, constantly in an environment of uncertainty and anxiety. In this primitive state of existence every individual of the tribe had to contribute in order to sustain the existence of the group, the art forms expressed in these societies were very primitive since it reflects the aspirations of individuals whose main desire was to survive. But as Nietzsche noted no individual striving for existence can become an artist (Nietzsche (1911), 4). The explanation for this statement is the following, according to Nietzsche the Will of culture seeks to express itself through the art of the individuals of a higher caliber, called the genius, if one is concerned with matters other than singularly being the vehicle of culture then the art expressed is not the expression of culture but of a base desire. No art that is not the expression of higher culture is justified...

Descartes objective in his Meditations on First Philosophy is an epistemological task to ground knowledge in what can be known as absolutely certain i.e. that which can not be doubted. Descartes rather than evaluating his beliefs one by one strikes at the core of that which is necessary in order to be able to come to judgements in the first place, he states “I will attack straightaway those principles which supported everything I once believed” (Descartes, 60). One of these preconditions being that of sensory experiences, if he finds sufficient reason to doubt the truth validity of his senses, he must therefore doubt every belief which has been predicated on the certainty of his sensory experiences. The task Descartes embarks upon in his first meditation therefore is to doubt whether we can trust our senses. This is done through an argument based upon our experiences of dreams. Descartes observes that there is not enough sufficient differences between our experiences in the real world...

Reading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy I stumbled across a section which reminded me of the importance of Ernest Becker's later work regarding the role of heroic culture as a means to deny finite existence i.e. death. We can find the origins of the denial of death  in Greek society when king Midas asks the wise Silenus what was the best of all and most desirable of man. The demon laughing responded:  Oh, wretched race of a day, children of chance and misery, why do ye compel me to say to you what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is the best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you, however, is soon to die The Greeks were keenly aware of the terrors and horrors of existence, in Becker's words the finitude of existence with all the pain and suffering involved, in order to be able to confront these terrors what the Greeks did was to come up with a mechanism in order to deny their meaningless existe...

Chapter 5: Property and Power section 5.13 The textbook gives an example with West Bengal in which the distribution of the crop used to be distributed 50% for the farmers who worked on the land of the landowners and the other 50% for the landowners, a system that had been in place since the 18th century (basically feudalism). The problem was that the peasants lived in miserable conditions, understandable, so what the government did was pass a law where the farmers got 75% of the crop and could not get evicted by the landowners,  Operation Barga , the textbook claims that this was the reason total output shot up 28% in the region which is something I am not going to dispute. The textbook claims this was a great achievement and increased the amount of  output  the farmers received as well as  income ,  even the World Bank endorsed this policy for economic development .  Now you may be asking, why are you mad? do you hate poor people? and the answer, to the la...

Determinism is the view that human action, derived from thought, is determined by the laws of nature. Libertarianism is the view that free will is incompatible with determinism but don't worry determinism is false so everything is cool. Now to me it seems as if the entire debate is really about answering the question:  are my thoughts,  assuming the cogito ergo sum is true, that I am my thoughts, and my thoughts are me,  determined by the laws of causality . If determinism holds true, if we take the Universe at the beginning of time when the Universe we live in was merely the size of a dot on a piece of paper, we could theoretically use the Laws of Nature (LoN) to work out, even though its very complicated, what I am going to decide tomorrow to eat for lunch.  If this turns out to be true then Inwagens proof that Determinism and Free Will are incompatible holds true. If determinism holds true the Universe at Time 0 and Place 0 entails, and can only entail, the result...

Meditations on Moral Theory For the past few days I have been reflecting on the nature of the foundations of different moral theories, for some reason I couldn't put my finger on the arbitrariness of each theory, it seemed as each one had sound arguments and could work within a given society. After some discussions and further reflection I believe I was able to finally grasp what my issue was with the foundations of all moral theory: the foundation of every moral theory requires  faith. Faith is required for either: to believe that the presupposition is true within itself, without further demonstration or if with further demonstration, that the method of arriving to the conclusion is  the correct way to arrive at the moral maxim warning: my knowledge regarding moral theory isn't very extensive so it is most likely I will commit some mistake.  This foundation I will call the presupposition of faith , from this presupposition every moral theorist can ...