Every ethnic/cultural population can be radicalised to commit crimes against humanity, to commit mass murder, engage in sadistic terror and torture on daily basis, do so openly, gloatingly, proudly, and believe that they are morally justified in doing so. Based on recent history, only about 20% of the population have the capacity to resist such conditioning, to question it, and an unknown small percentage is perhaps immune to it.

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No amount of money can persuade a corrupt person to be an honest politician. Paying politicians ‘more’ does not alter their character or improve their integrity.

Utilitarian ethics faces what I call the Genocide Dilemma.

Is it more ethical/right (or less morally wrong) to kill 2 million people out of 4 million total population of a particular ethnicity, or kill 1 million people out of 1 million total population of a particular ethnicity? In the first instance, only half of the ethnicity is genocided, whereas in the second instance an entire ethnicity is exterminated. A committed utilitarian is obliged to choose which of these two measures of harm is objectively right, or accept that utilitarian ethics leads to contradictory conclusions.

The dilemma can be presented another way. Is it more ethical/right (or less morally wrong) to save 2 million people out of 4 million total population of a particular ethnicity by killing 1 million people out of 1 million total population of a particular ethnicity, or vice versa?

If harm (consequences) is the only measure of morality then our intentions can never be immoral, given that we can never know what the total, net consequences of any action will be in the infinite future. If morality can be judged only retrospectively or hypothetically, then it is irrelevant to our present actions.

Those who demand an apology for the harms of colonisation are implicitly committed to express gratitude for the benefits of colonisation. Nevertheless, expecting apologies from or showing gratitude to political ‘representatives’ (rather than those who did what the apologies and gratitude is about) is misdirection, false attribution, disinformation.

Political epistemology must account for possible conspiracies. In every apparent military or political conflict it is necessary to consider whether it is a real conflict or only the appearance of conflict, which would imply that the actual conflict is between those who appear to be in conflict and those to whom it appears to be a conflict.

The issue of transgender male inclusion in female change rooms has led to a wholesale degradation and legal erasure of womanhood, for the most part, because from the start women were not honest about it but, instead, capitalised on the opinions of female politicians and celebrities who appeared to be on their side but led them all up blind alleys while prattling about free speech. This was never a good enough explanation for exclusion, let alone the reason why naked females don’t like male bodies standing in the same shower. It seems that the actual reason for trans-exclusion is that naked females typically feel inexplicably uncomfortable, vulnerable, exploited and terrified in the forced presence of males, under their gaze, let alone in the forced presence of naked male bodies. Why is nobody saying it like it is?

Does the majority have an intrinsic authority over the minority? This is evidently not the accepted view, since some actions of the majority were historically judged as criminal and evil, despite not being against their democratic law. If the ‘democratic process’ of legitimisation is false then we are really subject to some other, unwritten law. What is the law? What makes it the law?

If the ‘authorities’ knew the difference between right and wrong, there would be no need for philosophers.

The term “authoritarian” is a misnomer. It is typically used to describe people who idolise and uncritically enforce whatever is presented to them as “the authority”, but the arbitrary acceptance of such a normative designation proves that they equate authority with political power irrespective of any underlying authority to exercise power (which is the sense of authority). They thus express the most anti-authority, lawless personality possible that flourishes under and easily adapts to any unethical, abusive or genocidal regime. “Authoritarian” is possibly the most socially harmful personality disorder.

It may be that what we value about our self-consciousness the most is not its duration (we accept that our conscious life will end, insofar as it is embodied) but its quality, its integrity as a one-Self. This would explain how some people are ready to die for others without a shadow of doubt and without diminishing themselves in the process. Time does not seem to matter to integrated consciousness.

Those who reject Moral Realism, reject the idea that there is an objective, stance independent distinction between right and wrong intentions. They are therefore committed to the view that there is no authority (to do what is right) but only force, which allows the strong to exact compliance with their preferences. This view could of course be right, but a) it is wrong to assert it as a fact without disproving moral realism in principle, or else the assertion violates the law of non-contradiction, b) I argue that moral anti-realism is provably false because conscious agency is constitutively limited by a range of moral conditions that are stance independent: https://philpapers.org/rec/KOWODO

I defend a type of moral realism according to which morally wrong actions have objective, negative consequences for any offending agent even if nobody else knows that the agent performed the intended action. Another way, by acting morally we are exercising the authority to do what is objectively right (and thus incur morally relevant positive consequences), and by acting immorally we are acting contrary to authority (and thus incur morally relevant negative consequences). I further argue that the negative consequences of morally wrong actions outweigh any benefits that can be derived from such actions, and contradict the reasons to act. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1763717216

Perhaps the easiest to understand example of moral realism (a stance independent distinction between right and wrong conduct) is Discourse Ethics. In order to understand the speech of others one must be willing to understand, to communicate consistently, discern intentions, and to exercise a degree of intellectual charity to identify interpretations that make the most sense. To violate discourse ethics by being obstinate, disruptive, dismissive of anything anyone says, would preclude one from understanding anyone or learning anything. One could not even learn to speak a language without it. Discourse ethics is essential to being a rational agent; to reject discourse ethics would have real consequences.

There is no victory through violence.

When people say they “believe in God” they mean something trivial: that they have an idea of true God. Another way, they assert what They subjectively conceive of, hence there is no need for any external validation/proof, just like expressing that they feel warm or cold. There is nothing wrong with this expression, provided it does not assume that everyone else has the same idea, just like it would be false to assume that everyone ‘feels’ cold just because you do. It is inconsequential whether a believer ascribes objectivity to their idea by saying that they believe in God as revealed in the Bible or another holy text, since it is still just their idea of how the holy text ought to be interpreted, hence the argument is moot. Objectivity begins with demonstrating what the idea of true God ought to be as a matter of logical consistency, which is no longer a matter of belief but knowledge, which requires the attitude of good faith.

When people ask “what does a word mean in a particular context” they more accurately mean “what context does this word mean?”.

A large proportion of human behaviour is irrational, typically violating the principle of sufficient reason, which can be reduced to the law of non-contradiction. In practical terms, we claim to know a lot of things that we do not know.
The largest proportion of human behaviour is possibly unconscious, consisting not of intentional actions, not of what we Do, but deterministic tendencies that ‘happen to us’. As such they are not subject to Our rationality, although it is rational to aim to manage any unconscious tendencies since they are contrary to our agency.
Subjective preferences are rational if they intentionally serve/support our conscious agency, because the value of conscious agency is affirmed in every action, in every choice, including our contingent choices of any secondary values. We can evaluate the rationality of our preferences by scrutinising the logical consistency of our explanations and justifications of those choices. Our behaviour may be unconsciously determined and our explanations of that behaviour may be irrational.

If I am mistaken, then it is my loss. If you are mistaken, then it is your loss. When people insist on being mistaken, it is their prerogative.

Moral anti-realists engage in a strange, overtly trivial pursuit: arguing that there are no universal moral laws. They invoke images of the king of the jungle devouring its prey, safe in its dominance over other beasts, but they are not a tiger or lion, they are fragile and insecure, living at the mercy of the power that dominates them, in fear of being stabbed to death by a mugger in a dark alley, dwelling literary at the bottom of the moral anti-realist food chain, bellow the street mugger or a military thug. If they are right then why bother, reality does not change, people still do what they do, each with their own moral point of view, the predator still a predator and prey still just prey; their arguments have no hope of any constructive effect on the conditions of their existence. I can think of only one rational motive for their apparently irrational behaviour: they do not really believe what they claim to believe but seek to confuse and disrupt the existing moral norms for some other reason, possibly to stimulate and improve our comprehension of objective moral norms by applying reverse psychology.