The Trolley Problem has a consistency problem
There is a runaway trolley speeding down the tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You have the capacity to pull a lever, which will redirect the trolley to a different set of tracks. There is only one person tied up on the side track. You have two options:
1. Do nothing, in which case the trolley will kill the five people on the main track.
2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.
The silent premise of the trolley problem is that you have the moral obligation to save people from death, just because they are people. It follows that the obligation extends to all people, therefore you also have the obligation to save the person you would have to kill in order to save the others, therefore the choice entails a contradiction. The binary choice must be rejected as absurd.
There is a runaway trolley speeding down the tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You have the capacity to pull a lever, which will redirect the trolley to a different set of tracks. There is only one person tied up on the side track. You have two options:
1. Do nothing, in which case the trolley will kill the five people on the main track.
2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.
The silent premise of the trolley problem is that you have the moral obligation to save people from death, just because they are people. It follows that the obligation extends to all people, therefore you also have the obligation to save the person you would have to kill in order to save the others, therefore the choice entails a contradiction. The binary choice must be rejected as absurd.
The view that ‘vaccine mandates are morally wrong because they amount to killing some people for the benefit of others’ is logically incompatible with the view that ‘proportionate killing of civilians for the sake of national security is morally right’ (unless the person holding these views does not regard the killed civilians as human).
There is no right or left wing in logic, there is no cultural, national or tribal logic, no progressive or conservative laws of sense. There is only sense and non-sense.
The primitive Man is connected to the land and identifies with the land, above all else. The transcendent Man is connected to humanity and identifies with rational consciousness, above all else.
It is possible that what was presented to the general population as ‘nudges’ were in fact ‘sludges’: “sludging involves interventions that decrease well-being while also respecting autonomy, whether intentionally or unintentionally.” Misrepresenting a sludge as a nudge could be a part of its sludge-effect, a sludge amplifier. The sludge effect consisted in penalising the behaviour that irrationally engages with authority and thus acts to self detriment and to the detriment of others, under the guise of this behaviour being rewarded. https://philpapers.org/rec/HORBPP
philpapers.org
Alejandro Hortal, Behavioral Public Policy and Well-Being: Towards a Normative Demarcation of Nudges and Sludges - PhilPapers
Nudging and sludging are forms of choice architecture that shape behavior. While it is generally believed that nudging should improve well-being and sludging should decrease it, there has been debate about ...
And just like that, the voluntary, private data gathering stage of the programme is concluded. The programme knows your personality, wishes, doubts, strengths, weaknesses, and interests, which are all associated with your phone number. When an AI company loses money providing you with their service, it proves that it is you who is commodified, and the profit part will happen later, at your expense. https://theintercept.com/2024/01/12/open-ai-military-ban-chatgpt
The Intercept
OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare”
The Pentagon has its eye on the leading AI company, which this week softened its ban on military use.
BREAKING NEWS: The word of the year for 2024 is “de-escalation”.
People believe that being able to own land is their right, paid for with their ingenuity and hard work. They have contempt for those who who do not “really work” but only philosophise. These proud owners are oblivious to the fact that 400 years ago some philosopher whose name they do not care to know convinced the owner class and the kings to let the little man have a bit more power, freedom and rights, to give him a chance to demonstrate human equality through moral conduct. It appears that the little man has failed.
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It is not just a conflict of philosophical beliefs; the concept of self-assessed gender identity is itself logically inconsistent. The legal requirement to recognise a male as a woman amounts to mandating that a person who regards womanhood as inextricably determined by sex must deny her own gender identity. Proponents of transgender identity misgender everyone else. https://archive.md/3sZPB
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You shall not mirror the irrationality of others, lest you too would become irrational. You shall not engage with the aberrant in others as if it were an argument that needs refuting; aberration becomes emptiness when faced with silence.
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If our rulers intended to radically depopulate the planet they would not bother about lab grown meat and maggots for human food. It would be pointless. At least one of these stories must be false, or both could be false, in which case the stories are intended only to elicit a defensive reaction. People expect a climax, some great catastrophic event, but it does not come. Rather, the political reality is like a permanently festering wound. The business machine grinds on, taxes must be paid, lawns have to be mowed.
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In every war everyone is only defending themselves. Self-defence is clearly not a very good argument for systematic killing; a misleading argument.
It is not possible to have world peace if 80% or even 10% of the population are murderers at heart, as symbolised by Cain in the Book of Genesis. It was in Cain’s nature to use murder instrumentally, to justify murder in self defence, whereas Abel could not do so under any circumstances, it was not in his nature, and this was the difference of kind that was plain from the position of the ideal personhood. If peace is not possible then ‘standing for peace’, or being ‘on the side of peace’ is a hollow gesture; war is inevitable. Since it is inevitable then the most just management of this instinct is to allow those who are murderers at heart to fight those who are also murderers at heart, and keep everyone else out of harm’s way. The only other way would be general oppression, because anyone could be a covert murderer until circumstances or ideology would reveal their true nature.
It is an error to idolise one’s own ethnic ancestors instead of learning from all past human achievements, errors and crimes without distinction on the basis of culture or ethnicity.
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White agitators attempt to incite hatred against black Aboriginal people by committing hate-crimes in their name, to ‘liberate’ them from racial equality.
Honest people do not care whether other people trust them. The preoccupation with public trust is a hallmark of sociopaths.
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Forwarded from Normal (Michael Kowalik)
The pursuit of decolonisation is at best meaningless, at worst self-defeating, a tribal vanity project. We are all human, and to be ‘colonised’ by other humans does not change the fact that both the ‘colonised’ and the ‘coloniser’ are still human, rational beings who possess the capacity to deliberate and generate common meaning. Colonisation brings us together, transgresses the tribal boundaries, challenges our inconsistent cultural conditionings, and relativises insular traditions, compelling both the colonisers and the colonised to deliberate, to come to terms, and thus to affirm our common humanity as the sole source of meaning.
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Forwarded from Normal (Michael Kowalik)
Colonisation and the Colonised
It is an arbitrary value judgement to regard cultural colonisation as morally wrong and the preservation of native cultures as morally right. All conceptual progress and cultural evolution was accomplished via disruption of land-bound communities that became culturally inert and therefore conceptually oppressive, stuck in conceptually irreconcilable dead ends. Colonisation stimulated conceptual development and transcendence, incrementally advancing towards human integration as a universal kind of rational beings, beyond tribal identity. In this light it were the colonised cultures that impeded universal humanity and universal morality, obstinately irrational and conceptually fallow and therefore posed an obstacle to human reflexivity based on conscious, rational agency. It is only through colonisation that universal humanity became a meaningful idea, a new possibility of universal belonging, and the price to pay is the same for everyone: to reject their cultural conditioning and group identity and embrace what we all have in common.
It is an arbitrary value judgement to regard cultural colonisation as morally wrong and the preservation of native cultures as morally right. All conceptual progress and cultural evolution was accomplished via disruption of land-bound communities that became culturally inert and therefore conceptually oppressive, stuck in conceptually irreconcilable dead ends. Colonisation stimulated conceptual development and transcendence, incrementally advancing towards human integration as a universal kind of rational beings, beyond tribal identity. In this light it were the colonised cultures that impeded universal humanity and universal morality, obstinately irrational and conceptually fallow and therefore posed an obstacle to human reflexivity based on conscious, rational agency. It is only through colonisation that universal humanity became a meaningful idea, a new possibility of universal belonging, and the price to pay is the same for everyone: to reject their cultural conditioning and group identity and embrace what we all have in common.
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