In a country that is democratic, reporters must be allowed to report anything that is true.
I agree with you on this. However, I think it is also the case that in a country that is democratic, media comapnies must be allowed to fire reporters who violate their stated policies in obtaining that truth.
That's some pretty serious twisting of the facts there to suit a particular worldview.
Atheist does not mean "non-monotheist". The Romans were by no means atheists. While there is evidence of persecution of Christianity for some time, it was eventually absorbed as the state religion, and coalesced into the Roman Catholic Church. The title of Pontifex Maximus, now applied to the Pope, was once held by Julius Caesar.
To assert that Christianity has been unchanged before or since this time is just strange. Ever heard of the Council of Nicaea or Vatican II? How about the fate of Gnosticism?
Your desert claims are ridiculous. Where did Jesus go for 40 days and 40 nights, to be tempted by the devil, if there was no desert in Ancient Israel?.
It is hard to buy your argument that Christianity somehow "works". It has split into innumerable denominations, further underlining its mutability. Allegedly righteous Christians launched the Crusades and used their religion as justification for colonialism and slavery for centuries. The modern world only even began to "work" when Europe was released from religious domination of state affairs.
I do agree with you that not all ideas ideas in established religions are simply random. Successful religions will tend to have properties that lead to that success. There is no reason to believe, however, that benefit for believers or alignment with actual truth about the world are well-represented among these properties.
Which fields? I also am a trained observer, and my observations are somewhat different.
I have submitted to conferences and journals in two rather distinct fields (cognitive science and natural language processing) and have come across few that did not accept LaTeX, though sometimes in cognitive science it was a bit of an uphill battle.
Most commonly for conferences (which in natural language processing and some other computer science fields are the main up-to-date research publication avenue) there is a style file and document template for LaTeX, which you use as the starting point for your document. You then send through a PDF which is already formatted exactly according to their guidelines from the moment of submission.
The premiere journal in natural language processing (Computational Linguistics) for example, certainly requires LaTeX.
I'm not saying you're wrong, as I'm sure there are plenty of fields where Word is the norm. It just varies. Personally I find LaTeX extremely frustrating, but it is sufficiently less frustrating than Word that I strongly prefer it. The key benefits for me all flow from the separation of format from content. The formatting instructions are explicit, rather than hidden in invisible characters and attributes of the document. If you keep the text-based source in version control, you can always get back to a previous state, and don't wind up have multiple divergent copies as attachments to a multitude of emails. Manually merging a word document that has branched is a bit of a pain, to put it mildly.
Are you sure that a country that has repeatedly elected one of the richest men in the world as Prime Minister is a good example of a one-person-one-vote outcome as opposed to one-dollar-one-vote?
I don't disagree that he, or several of the others are 'bad'. I just think that when someone is an immensely wealthy and powerful media baron, you can't really discount the impact of that wealth and media power on their political success.
There is a point to copyright law, and there is a point to drug prohibition laws. Neither of these do more harm than good... Similarly, if you had really been affected by drug abuse whether personally or by those close to you, you wouldn't be spouting such jibberish about ending it.
I know this is getting off-topic, but...
You imply that the effects of drug abuse which someone plausibly might have experienced are terrible. Given that these terrible effects can and do occur under the current prohibition laws, doesn't that give a strong indication that prohibition is ineffective?
Prohibition renders massive numbers of people who haven't harmed anyone into criminals, and pushes up the profitability of participating in the drug trade, funneling money to organised crime, militant groups and helping foster corruption in poorer states. Taking this along with its ineffectiveness in preventing drug abuse, I think the position that the current system does more harm than good is at least arguable. You are free to disagree with it, but it is hardly "jibberish".
All of my code was reviewed by a senior developer for a period of time until I gained their trust and I could work independently.
...
Every development crew needs to have senior folks to show the junior people the ropes and talk them through the pitfalls that all young programmers fall into.
I agree that it is a good idea to have senior developers review junior developers' code - but I don't think this should ever have to stop. Having someone else actually pay attention to and sign off on code before it goes out is a good idea, irrespective of seniority. Having a less experienced person reviewing a more experienced developer's code is also useful: it can help them to understand the codebase and learn from the experience. They might even catch problems or laziness in the code, or have some useful ideas of their own.
I imagine most people would agree with you that people who set out to deliberately kill civilians are bad.
The trouble is that the words bad guy conjure up a simple caricature of people doing evil for no reason other than their own intrinsic evilness. This may be expedient in actual combat situations, but it is grossly inadequate when dealing with the underlying causes of the conflicts we're talking about.
A "broader view" about WWII for example, would not necessarily argue we should not have been fighting the fascists - but might say that the causes and justification for the conflict were more nuanced than simply asserting that the Axis countries were bad guys, and we were good guys.
Dismissing people simply as "bad guys", without consideration of the political, historical, economic and religious factors in the motivation and behaviour of those we are in conflict with is just as much a delusion as suggesting they just need a hug.
For many distributions (including normal distributions - which often model population characteristics, such as intelligence, quite well) the median and the mean are statistically indistinguishable.
No, logic nothing to say about that - it only concerns the way in which we manipulate logical statements. What you are talking about is empiricism - the idea that because something has always happened before, it will happen again next time; this is a useful notion in many sciences, but there is no logical reason why it should be valid. I think that's inductivism, rather than empiricism. Empiricism is the idea that knowledge comes from experience and observation. Inductivism (at least the naive form expressed by the GP) is logically unsound. It can be a useful way of finding new hypotheses (as you allude to) but it's not just that there's no reason it should be valid - there are plenty of plausible situations where it fails, and it's generally agreed upon to be invalid.
I was taught the creationism thing at home. I was taught the evolution religion at school/college/university.
I do not think it's a coincidence that you see evolution as a religion when it conflicts with the religious explanation you were always taught to believe was true.
Accepting evolution for the successful scientific explanation it is mandates no behavioural changes. You are not compelled to pray, fast, pay any sort of tithe, attend any group, nor to attempt to convert any one else. Unlike religious beliefs, it does not comprise any supernatural elements. It doesn't and can't attempt to offer any moral framework. It is not supposed to be a replacement for religion, it just happens to be incompatible with some claims of some religions.
For some reason it seems to piss off some of the science people if religion is left unchallenged though. Why it that?.
I would be surprised if most science teachers for example didn't try their best to walk a pretty fine line between teaching the material and respecting people's beliefs.
But isn't it at least logically possible that the beliefs of biblical literalists and people who accept the scientific theories are genuinely mutually incompatible? Wouldn't this mean that having the science understood requires people to reject those components of their beliefs that don't fit?
As I understand it, there are two chronologies for the order of creation of species in genesis (chapter 1 and chapter 2), and neither of them matches the currently accepted scientific order.
The order of living things in Genesis 1 is: plants, then fish, whales and fowls, then land animals, then man and woman simultaneously.
In Genesis 2, the order is: man, then plants, then beasts and fowls, then woman (from man's rib). I think we can safely dismiss a chronology that has the two sexes of a single species being created at opposite ends of the time scale.
Concentrating on the first account (which includes the "day" wording), this would mean birds and whales were created before reptiles and insects, and land plants before any animals. These are both in contradiction with what is currently understood from the fossil record and phylogenetic studies.
You are right that the details are largely left out. Unfortunately where they are left in, they do not match with what we are able to infer happened in the past. Genesis is - at best - an allegory.
This is a very good point I did forget, though I think it might be because the law works differently where I am from. Although I have also driven in Canada and the US, I have done most of my driving in New Zealand and in New South Wales, Australia. In neither jurisdiction are you likely to personally pay for injuring someone, even if you are at fault.
In New South Wales, you cannot register (and thus legally drive) a vehicle, unless Compulsory Third Party personal injury insurance has been obtained from an approved insurer. So if you do hurt someone who requires medical care, that is exactly what this insurance is for, and you won't have to personally pay.
In New Zealand, the right to sue for personal injury has been removed in most circumstances - instead, through levies on fuel, vehicle registration and a few other sources, money is paid into a nationalised compensation scheme: the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC). If you are injured in an accident (motor vehicle or otherwise), the commission will compensate you, and largely foot the bill for medical expenses. Some one else does not have to be found at fault, though if their driving was dangerous or negligent the police may well charge them.
In both places, the largely socialised medicine systems also take up a lot of the slack, in terms of who has to pay. As the national medical systems are funded by the taxpayers, and thus managed by the government, the government has a very strong interest in making sure their costs are minimised, quite apart from the general desire to protect people from injury. Thus, compulsory seatbelts.
...economic prosperity and theism are inversely related...
This is false. The United States is one of the most religious countries, yet it seems to be doing pretty well for itself economically.
The existence of a single country that is both highly religious and economically successful does not necessarily mean that the inverse relationship does not hold overall. It could be an outlier.
There are potential costs to others if you don't wear a seatbelt, but I don't think that's the main reason they are compulsory in most Western jurisdictions.
The risk of death and severe injury is reduced when people wear seatbelts. Premature death and debilitating injuries carry real costs to society, such as lost productive capacity, medical services and long-term care, in addition to the personal and emotional costs to the victims and their families. It is prudent social policy to attempt to minimise these costs.
In my opinion, mandating seatbelt use when travelling on public roads is a reasonable component of the social contract you agree to when being granted your driver's license. If some people don't like this impingement on their freedom, that's fine - don't drive or be a passenger on public roads.
I would be surprised if the article you link to is in many local libraries. The journal "Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift" is not the sort of periodical I would expect to have very broad appeal. I used electronic access, provided by my university library.
I read the article. It is not a clinical trial - it is a summary of a small pilot program using homeopathy in emergency medicine. There is no indication of any administration of placebos, patients had the "reservations assuaged" by the homeopaths, and the article discusses how both the patients and other medical staff were openly suspicious about the homeopathic remedies applied. No-one is blind in this article, not the experimenters nor the subjects. The number of patients involved is very small (less than 30) and there is no significance testing and only a few, mostly qualitative, results.
The authors refer to another article (Frass et al. 2005, "Influence of Potassium Dichromate on Tracheal Secretions in Critically Ill Patients", Chest 127:936-941.) claiming to show the efficacy of a certain homeopathic remedy on patients with a history of tobacco use being weaned from ventilators. I also read that article, which was double-blind. I am surprised it passed peer-review. The sample size is very small for a clinical trial (50) and the claims of significance in the text are greater than warranted by the statistical test used (they use Kruskal-Wallis which can give a statistically significant p-value between groups with identical means).
So at least one article does exist. But it wasn't the one you said, and I wouldn't rely on it.
I, for one, sometimes mix up between when to use "I" and "Me" in sentences like "Both I and Mr. X went..." or "it was trying get him and me to sign this...". Will check up the usage rules one of these days when I am not feeling this lazy.
I am a native speaker, so this might not help you, but your English seems proficient enough to me that I would be surprised if it doesn't also work for you. I find it easier, rather than remembering some specific rule, to instead use a test that only requires a little intuition. Simply remove the other person/people and any associated conjunctions etc from the sentence, and see whether "I" or "me" fits better. In your examples, this would lead to "I went..." and "it was trying to get me to sign this" which are both much more natural than "Me went..." and "it was trying to get I to sign this".
You need to check your dictionary. Understanding the experience of another without them explaining that experience is empathy. That's it, it doesn't require you to sympathize, pity, or show compassion as a result of that understanding.
The definition doesn't concern me particularly. My point is that pyschopaths are intelligent, and a definitional characteristic of such people is that they profoundly lack empathy. This is a counter-example to your claim that empathy necessarily flows from intelligence.
You're missing the point. It doesn't matter whether all of concious thought or intelligence matters to you. It doesn't matter WHAT similarity leads you to compassion or that it isn't every similarity. That point is made by the reason being a similarity.
I'm not sure I follow you here. It seems to me that you are seeing everything through the prism of similarity-makes-value. The particular item I focus on (the satisfaction of preferences, particularly the preference not to suffer) is common to people and many other animals, but it is not the commonality which makes it important.
Okay, so you 'would not like to be denied your own preferences', therefore empathize with those who are denied their preferences and as a result have chosen to demonstrate the value you attribute to having preferences granted by show compassion to those whose preferences would be denied.
I concede that the ability to recognise preference satisfaction is universal is very much aided by the presence of empathy, and also intelligence. I hope that this is enough of a concession for you - but I stand by my original disagreement about whether it is only similarity that motivates vegetarians.
On a side note, you should probably think your philosophy through a bit more. After all, preferences can conflict, for instance the preference for a real burger over a soy burger. If your belief is just that preferences should be fulfilled that preference is just as valuable as that of the cow.
I have been deliberately hazy on the details of preference satisfaction on purpose, as it has been an entire detailed argument for centuries and doesn't seem central to our main discussion. Let me offer the words "Preference Utilitarianism" to you as a name for the ethical system closest to my own, and very strongly recommend anything by Peter Singer to you, if you don't already know him. He is very much against the "sanctity of life" position, and I think you would enjoy his work.
Some of this strays from the core debate and I think we should get back to it. I am saying that both the existence of moral codes and the criteria used to determine what is morally considerable are at the core based upon empathy. If you disagree, then why do you believe that preferences and suffering are the defining factor of moral consideration and what is your basis for believing that moral consideration is legitimate at all?
This is a very profound question, and I thank you for asking it so directly and clearly. In an amoral universe, there is no a-priori reason that we should expect any moral absolutes. However, I think that ethical reasoning addresses the question of how an entity capable of such reasoning should behave, and this means trying to act in such a way that normative improvements are made, i.e. the universe is made more as it "should be". I do not believe that normative desires should be privileged on the basis of being held by any particular individual, thus all preferences have some degree of legitimacy.
Again, I am willing to agree with you that empathy facilitates the realisation of this, but I do not think it is required for the reasoning to be sound. It is more like scaffolding.
You have conceded that compassion is the result of empathy so the question is not whether you can imagine an intelligent species without compassion but whether you can imagine one without empathy. Empathy is a function of logic, something is similar to yourself, your intelligence allows you to recognize the similarity and to understand experiences that result from it.
OK, I think it is possible to imagine an intelligent species without empathy. I disagree that empathy is an inevitable consequence of logic. I think its existence in people is due to its being an adaptive trait for the type of social species we are. I can see how intelligence should mean that an individual is able to recognise similarities between it and another individual, but I do not agree that it will necessarily take these into account. For example, psychopaths lack empathy, but are often more intelligent than average.
You do not eat animals because you believe they are capable of concious thought and therefore you can empathize with their suffering. You would not like to suffer yourself, you value concious thought and the ability to understand suffering and therefore your empathy leads you to compassion.
'Conscious thought' brings along a whole host of other ideas, many of which are not relevant in my view. It is the sentient capacity for suffering that is of importance to me. It is not because "I would not like to suffer myself". I recognise that there are preferences in the universe, and my normative belief is that states where preferences are satisfied are better than those that are not.
There is no cosmic right or wrong in any code of morality or ethics, there is nothing special or sacred that makes creatures capable of suffering or understanding suffering to be innately more valuable than those that are not.
I agree very strongly with the lack of any cosmic right or wrong. I think that sacredness is an absurd concept. I disagree, however, that creatures capable of suffering are not at all 'special'. All other things being equal, I believe that universes where creatures capable of suffering have their preference not to suffer satisfied are better than those where that preference is thwarted.
It is your (and others) empathy and compassion that led to the morals and ethics, not the other way around. You only consider making something 'suffer' to be bad because you are capable of suffering and empathize with that state.
The first sentence here is certainly true. We were empathising long before morals were invented. This does not mean that moral reasoning is invalid, nor that it is only empathy that can lead to sensible normative statements. I see all suffering as bad. It is not so much that I recognise the suffering in others is as unpleasant for them as when it happens to me - it is more that I do not privilege my own preference to avoid suffering above that preference in others.
The same true for valuing intelligent life over that which is not, those that are aware of themselves over those that are not. Being intelligent and self-aware is not innately superior, being intelligent and self-aware is BEING MORE LIKE US.
I am finding this an extremely interesting conversation, but I must say that last statement in caps is starting to sound a little dogmatic. I never said anything about innate superiority. I am talking about preferences and suffering, and I argue that if an entity is not capable of suffering or having preferences then it is not morally considerable. Animals have preferences, and are capable of suffering, so how our actions affect them come within the purview of ethics. The same would be true if we met a super-intelligent computer with these qualities.
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First CD I bought was a then brand new Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms in 1984. Good as the day I bought it.
Wow, old CDs would even let you time travel!
In a country that is democratic, reporters must be allowed to report anything that is true.
I agree with you on this. However, I think it is also the case that in a country that is democratic, media comapnies must be allowed to fire reporters who violate their stated policies in obtaining that truth.
That's some pretty serious twisting of the facts there to suit a particular worldview.
Atheist does not mean "non-monotheist". The Romans were by no means atheists. While there is evidence of persecution of Christianity for some time, it was eventually absorbed as the state religion, and coalesced into the Roman Catholic Church. The title of Pontifex Maximus, now applied to the Pope, was once held by Julius Caesar.
To assert that Christianity has been unchanged before or since this time is just strange. Ever heard of the Council of Nicaea or Vatican II? How about the fate of Gnosticism?
Your desert claims are ridiculous. Where did Jesus go for 40 days and 40 nights, to be tempted by the devil, if there was no desert in Ancient Israel?.
It is hard to buy your argument that Christianity somehow "works". It has split into innumerable denominations, further underlining its mutability. Allegedly righteous Christians launched the Crusades and used their religion as justification for colonialism and slavery for centuries. The modern world only even began to "work" when Europe was released from religious domination of state affairs.
I do agree with you that not all ideas ideas in established religions are simply random. Successful religions will tend to have properties that lead to that success. There is no reason to believe, however, that benefit for believers or alignment with actual truth about the world are well-represented among these properties.
Which fields? I also am a trained observer, and my observations are somewhat different.
I have submitted to conferences and journals in two rather distinct fields (cognitive science and natural language processing) and have come across few that did not accept LaTeX, though sometimes in cognitive science it was a bit of an uphill battle.
Most commonly for conferences (which in natural language processing and some other computer science fields are the main up-to-date research publication avenue) there is a style file and document template for LaTeX, which you use as the starting point for your document. You then send through a PDF which is already formatted exactly according to their guidelines from the moment of submission.
The premiere journal in natural language processing (Computational Linguistics) for example, certainly requires LaTeX.
I'm not saying you're wrong, as I'm sure there are plenty of fields where Word is the norm. It just varies. Personally I find LaTeX extremely frustrating, but it is sufficiently less frustrating than Word that I strongly prefer it. The key benefits for me all flow from the separation of format from content. The formatting instructions are explicit, rather than hidden in invisible characters and attributes of the document. If you keep the text-based source in version control, you can always get back to a previous state, and don't wind up have multiple divergent copies as attachments to a multitude of emails. Manually merging a word document that has branched is a bit of a pain, to put it mildly.
Are you sure that a country that has repeatedly elected one of the richest men in the world as Prime Minister is a good example of a one-person-one-vote outcome as opposed to one-dollar-one-vote?
I don't disagree that he, or several of the others are 'bad'. I just think that when someone is an immensely wealthy and powerful media baron, you can't really discount the impact of that wealth and media power on their political success.
There is a point to copyright law, and there is a point to drug prohibition laws. Neither of these do more harm than good... Similarly, if you had really been affected by drug abuse whether personally or by those close to you, you wouldn't be spouting such jibberish about ending it.
I know this is getting off-topic, but...
You imply that the effects of drug abuse which someone plausibly might have experienced are terrible. Given that these terrible effects can and do occur under the current prohibition laws, doesn't that give a strong indication that prohibition is ineffective?
Prohibition renders massive numbers of people who haven't harmed anyone into criminals, and pushes up the profitability of participating in the drug trade, funneling money to organised crime, militant groups and helping foster corruption in poorer states. Taking this along with its ineffectiveness in preventing drug abuse, I think the position that the current system does more harm than good is at least arguable. You are free to disagree with it, but it is hardly "jibberish".
All of my code was reviewed by a senior developer for a period of time until I gained their trust and I could work independently.
...
Every development crew needs to have senior folks to show the junior people the ropes and talk them through the pitfalls that all young programmers fall into.
I agree that it is a good idea to have senior developers review junior developers' code - but I don't think this should ever have to stop. Having someone else actually pay attention to and sign off on code before it goes out is a good idea, irrespective of seniority. Having a less experienced person reviewing a more experienced developer's code is also useful: it can help them to understand the codebase and learn from the experience. They might even catch problems or laziness in the code, or have some useful ideas of their own.
I imagine most people would agree with you that people who set out to deliberately kill civilians are bad.
The trouble is that the words bad guy conjure up a simple caricature of people doing evil for no reason other than their own intrinsic evilness. This may be expedient in actual combat situations, but it is grossly inadequate when dealing with the underlying causes of the conflicts we're talking about.
A "broader view" about WWII for example, would not necessarily argue we should not have been fighting the fascists - but might say that the causes and justification for the conflict were more nuanced than simply asserting that the Axis countries were bad guys, and we were good guys.
Dismissing people simply as "bad guys", without consideration of the political, historical, economic and religious factors in the motivation and behaviour of those we are in conflict with is just as much a delusion as suggesting they just need a hug.
I see we are unfamiliar with the use of sarcasm.
According to Google, 65 mpg is 3.6 litres per 100km.
Are you sure you used US gallons (3.7 l), rather than UK gallons (4.5 l)?
I find changing proxies annoying too, but there is an add-on that can help you handle this more easily: SwitchProxy Tool.
Sort of like how "aluminum" is also called "aluminium" by people unfamiliar with the etymology, etc.
Or by people whose dialect of English has "aluminium" as the standard word, and don't really care about the etymology one way or the other.
For many distributions (including normal distributions - which often model population characteristics, such as intelligence, quite well) the median and the mean are statistically indistinguishable.
I was taught the creationism thing at home. I was taught the evolution religion at school/college/university.
I do not think it's a coincidence that you see evolution as a religion when it conflicts with the religious explanation you were always taught to believe was true.
Accepting evolution for the successful scientific explanation it is mandates no behavioural changes. You are not compelled to pray, fast, pay any sort of tithe, attend any group, nor to attempt to convert any one else. Unlike religious beliefs, it does not comprise any supernatural elements. It doesn't and can't attempt to offer any moral framework. It is not supposed to be a replacement for religion, it just happens to be incompatible with some claims of some religions.
For some reason it seems to piss off some of the science people if religion is left unchallenged though. Why it that?.
I would be surprised if most science teachers for example didn't try their best to walk a pretty fine line between teaching the material and respecting people's beliefs.
But isn't it at least logically possible that the beliefs of biblical literalists and people who accept the scientific theories are genuinely mutually incompatible? Wouldn't this mean that having the science understood requires people to reject those components of their beliefs that don't fit?
So "there was light" on (or before) the first day, and the difference between light and dark marked the first day.
Going along with the story, we see the sun and stars were made on the fourth day.
Where did the earlier light come from?
As I understand it, there are two chronologies for the order of creation of species in genesis (chapter 1 and chapter 2), and neither of them matches the currently accepted scientific order.
The order of living things in Genesis 1 is: plants, then fish, whales and fowls, then land animals, then man and woman simultaneously.
In Genesis 2, the order is: man, then plants, then beasts and fowls, then woman (from man's rib). I think we can safely dismiss a chronology that has the two sexes of a single species being created at opposite ends of the time scale.
Concentrating on the first account (which includes the "day" wording), this would mean birds and whales were created before reptiles and insects, and land plants before any animals. These are both in contradiction with what is currently understood from the fossil record and phylogenetic studies.
You are right that the details are largely left out. Unfortunately where they are left in, they do not match with what we are able to infer happened in the past. Genesis is - at best - an allegory.
This is a very good point I did forget, though I think it might be because the law works differently where I am from. Although I have also driven in Canada and the US, I have done most of my driving in New Zealand and in New South Wales, Australia. In neither jurisdiction are you likely to personally pay for injuring someone, even if you are at fault.
In New South Wales, you cannot register (and thus legally drive) a vehicle, unless Compulsory Third Party personal injury insurance has been obtained from an approved insurer. So if you do hurt someone who requires medical care, that is exactly what this insurance is for, and you won't have to personally pay.
In New Zealand, the right to sue for personal injury has been removed in most circumstances - instead, through levies on fuel, vehicle registration and a few other sources, money is paid into a nationalised compensation scheme: the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC). If you are injured in an accident (motor vehicle or otherwise), the commission will compensate you, and largely foot the bill for medical expenses. Some one else does not have to be found at fault, though if their driving was dangerous or negligent the police may well charge them.
In both places, the largely socialised medicine systems also take up a lot of the slack, in terms of who has to pay. As the national medical systems are funded by the taxpayers, and thus managed by the government, the government has a very strong interest in making sure their costs are minimised, quite apart from the general desire to protect people from injury. Thus, compulsory seatbelts.
...economic prosperity and theism are inversely related...
This is false. The United States is one of the most religious countries, yet it seems to be doing pretty well for itself economically.
The existence of a single country that is both highly religious and economically successful does not necessarily mean that the inverse relationship does not hold overall. It could be an outlier.
There are potential costs to others if you don't wear a seatbelt, but I don't think that's the main reason they are compulsory in most Western jurisdictions.
The risk of death and severe injury is reduced when people wear seatbelts. Premature death and debilitating injuries carry real costs to society, such as lost productive capacity, medical services and long-term care, in addition to the personal and emotional costs to the victims and their families. It is prudent social policy to attempt to minimise these costs.
In my opinion, mandating seatbelt use when travelling on public roads is a reasonable component of the social contract you agree to when being granted your driver's license. If some people don't like this impingement on their freedom, that's fine - don't drive or be a passenger on public roads.
Google and your local library are your friends.
I would be surprised if the article you link to is in many local libraries. The journal "Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift" is not the sort of periodical I would expect to have very broad appeal. I used electronic access, provided by my university library.
I read the article. It is not a clinical trial - it is a summary of a small pilot program using homeopathy in emergency medicine. There is no indication of any administration of placebos, patients had the "reservations assuaged" by the homeopaths, and the article discusses how both the patients and other medical staff were openly suspicious about the homeopathic remedies applied. No-one is blind in this article, not the experimenters nor the subjects. The number of patients involved is very small (less than 30) and there is no significance testing and only a few, mostly qualitative, results.
The authors refer to another article (Frass et al. 2005, "Influence of Potassium Dichromate on Tracheal Secretions in Critically Ill Patients", Chest 127:936-941.) claiming to show the efficacy of a certain homeopathic remedy on patients with a history of tobacco use being weaned from ventilators. I also read that article, which was double-blind. I am surprised it passed peer-review. The sample size is very small for a clinical trial (50) and the claims of significance in the text are greater than warranted by the statistical test used (they use Kruskal-Wallis which can give a statistically significant p-value between groups with identical means).
So at least one article does exist. But it wasn't the one you said, and I wouldn't rely on it.
I, for one, sometimes mix up between when to use "I" and "Me" in sentences like "Both I and Mr. X went..." or "it was trying get him and me to sign this...". Will check up the usage rules one of these days when I am not feeling this lazy.
I am a native speaker, so this might not help you, but your English seems proficient enough to me that I would be surprised if it doesn't also work for you. I find it easier, rather than remembering some specific rule, to instead use a test that only requires a little intuition. Simply remove the other person/people and any associated conjunctions etc from the sentence, and see whether "I" or "me" fits better. In your examples, this would lead to "I went..." and "it was trying to get me to sign this" which are both much more natural than "Me went..." and "it was trying to get I to sign this".
Hope that helps a little.
You need to check your dictionary. Understanding the experience of another without them explaining that experience is empathy. That's it, it doesn't require you to sympathize, pity, or show compassion as a result of that understanding.
The definition doesn't concern me particularly. My point is that pyschopaths are intelligent, and a definitional characteristic of such people is that they profoundly lack empathy. This is a counter-example to your claim that empathy necessarily flows from intelligence.
You're missing the point. It doesn't matter whether all of concious thought or intelligence matters to you. It doesn't matter WHAT similarity leads you to compassion or that it isn't every similarity. That point is made by the reason being a similarity.
I'm not sure I follow you here. It seems to me that you are seeing everything through the prism of similarity-makes-value. The particular item I focus on (the satisfaction of preferences, particularly the preference not to suffer) is common to people and many other animals, but it is not the commonality which makes it important.
Okay, so you 'would not like to be denied your own preferences', therefore empathize with those who are denied their preferences and as a result have chosen to demonstrate the value you attribute to having preferences granted by show compassion to those whose preferences would be denied.
I concede that the ability to recognise preference satisfaction is universal is very much aided by the presence of empathy, and also intelligence. I hope that this is enough of a concession for you - but I stand by my original disagreement about whether it is only similarity that motivates vegetarians.
On a side note, you should probably think your philosophy through a bit more. After all, preferences can conflict, for instance the preference for a real burger over a soy burger. If your belief is just that preferences should be fulfilled that preference is just as valuable as that of the cow.
I have been deliberately hazy on the details of preference satisfaction on purpose, as it has been an entire detailed argument for centuries and doesn't seem central to our main discussion. Let me offer the words "Preference Utilitarianism" to you as a name for the ethical system closest to my own, and very strongly recommend anything by Peter Singer to you, if you don't already know him. He is very much against the "sanctity of life" position, and I think you would enjoy his work.
Some of this strays from the core debate and I think we should get back to it. I am saying that both the existence of moral codes and the criteria used to determine what is morally considerable are at the core based upon empathy. If you disagree, then why do you believe that preferences and suffering are the defining factor of moral consideration and what is your basis for believing that moral consideration is legitimate at all?
This is a very profound question, and I thank you for asking it so directly and clearly. In an amoral universe, there is no a-priori reason that we should expect any moral absolutes. However, I think that ethical reasoning addresses the question of how an entity capable of such reasoning should behave, and this means trying to act in such a way that normative improvements are made, i.e. the universe is made more as it "should be". I do not believe that normative desires should be privileged on the basis of being held by any particular individual, thus all preferences have some degree of legitimacy.
Again, I am willing to agree with you that empathy facilitates the realisation of this, but I do not think it is required for the reasoning to be sound. It is more like scaffolding.
You have conceded that compassion is the result of empathy so the question is not whether you can imagine an intelligent species without compassion but whether you can imagine one without empathy. Empathy is a function of logic, something is similar to yourself, your intelligence allows you to recognize the similarity and to understand experiences that result from it.
OK, I think it is possible to imagine an intelligent species without empathy. I disagree that empathy is an inevitable consequence of logic. I think its existence in people is due to its being an adaptive trait for the type of social species we are. I can see how intelligence should mean that an individual is able to recognise similarities between it and another individual, but I do not agree that it will necessarily take these into account. For example, psychopaths lack empathy, but are often more intelligent than average.
You do not eat animals because you believe they are capable of concious thought and therefore you can empathize with their suffering. You would not like to suffer yourself, you value concious thought and the ability to understand suffering and therefore your empathy leads you to compassion.
'Conscious thought' brings along a whole host of other ideas, many of which are not relevant in my view. It is the sentient capacity for suffering that is of importance to me. It is not because "I would not like to suffer myself". I recognise that there are preferences in the universe, and my normative belief is that states where preferences are satisfied are better than those that are not.
There is no cosmic right or wrong in any code of morality or ethics, there is nothing special or sacred that makes creatures capable of suffering or understanding suffering to be innately more valuable than those that are not.
I agree very strongly with the lack of any cosmic right or wrong. I think that sacredness is an absurd concept. I disagree, however, that creatures capable of suffering are not at all 'special'. All other things being equal, I believe that universes where creatures capable of suffering have their preference not to suffer satisfied are better than those where that preference is thwarted.
It is your (and others) empathy and compassion that led to the morals and ethics, not the other way around. You only consider making something 'suffer' to be bad because you are capable of suffering and empathize with that state.
The first sentence here is certainly true. We were empathising long before morals were invented. This does not mean that moral reasoning is invalid, nor that it is only empathy that can lead to sensible normative statements. I see all suffering as bad. It is not so much that I recognise the suffering in others is as unpleasant for them as when it happens to me - it is more that I do not privilege my own preference to avoid suffering above that preference in others.
The same true for valuing intelligent life over that which is not, those that are aware of themselves over those that are not. Being intelligent and self-aware is not innately superior, being intelligent and self-aware is BEING MORE LIKE US.
I am finding this an extremely interesting conversation, but I must say that last statement in caps is starting to sound a little dogmatic. I never said anything about innate superiority. I am talking about preferences and suffering, and I argue that if an entity is not capable of suffering or having preferences then it is not morally considerable. Animals have preferences, and are capable of suffering, so how our actions affect them come within the purview of ethics. The same would be true if we met a super-intelligent computer with these qualities.