If it's not inflation adjusted then they'll probably just pay for it with a few bottle caps that they find on the ground.

The biggest issue I have with this is that it tacitly assumes that we have the ability to choose what we believe. Barring that there are some additional issues.

I don't think P1 or P3 have been sufficiently demonstrated. For one thing I think we're double counting utility because implicitly a belief that accepts death as a terminus to life is seen as having infinite negative /marginal/ utility relative to a belief that doesn't see death as a terminus to life. Therefore we can't say that a belief which doesn't see death as a terminus to life as having infinite /positive/ marginal utility without switching frames to view the opposite belief as our default/0 point.

It's important to understand it in marginal terms because this shows how in absolute terms we actually still have cumulative positive utility even if believing that death is the ultimate endpoint somehow precludes the possibility of infinitely more positive utility in the future.

More importantly though, it's not clear how a belief that death is the terminus to life or a belief in naturalism results in infinite negative marginal utility relative to the contrary beliefs. It seems like you might be conflating someone's belief about how much utility is possible with the actual utility attained. If I believe that death is the ultimate endpoint then that may lead me to conclude that any possible utility I can accumulate stops at the point of my death (not obvious that this follows though) and therefore that I may only attain finite cumulative utility. If death ends up not being the endpoint then I may end up attaining infinite positive utility over an infinite timespan. Why would my belief that entails I can only achieve finite utility prevent me from attaining infinite utility unless we're saying that believing is a prerequisite for eternal life in which case this is sounding more and more like Pascal's wager.

But further still, why would my belief about death or naturalism even cause me to conclude that my ability to accumulate personal utility ends after death? Are you saying that the examples you give at the end such as trying to leave the world a better place for your children are invalid for Atheist Naturalists? A belief in the possibility of eternal life doesn't seem to be required for someone to have or even for them to justify desires they may have about the future state of the world after their death. I would point out though that if we're appealing to the values that people demonstrate having in every day life outside of any philosophy or theology that people seem to care much more about the immediate future after their death then about the long term future and their concern seems to dwindle exponentially the further out into the future you go. Therefore it would be reasonable to conclude that although most people implicitly have values that extend after their death that nevertheless they also seem to implicitly believe that their possible utility is bounded.

But that would seem to imply that I want other people to have freedom which I thought we agreed doesn't follow.

Well in that case my critique of what you're saying is entirely based on me misunderstanding you.

However, if all you're saying is that we acknowledge that freedom as value regardless of whose freedom it is, how does that belief lead to any constraints on our own behavior? If we're acknowledging that I may have a reasonable reason not to want other people to have freedom then it would seem my actions aren't necessarily constrained in any way and therefore I don't have to be moral.

I think saying X's value here is confusing. If I say that I value my neighbors Tesla then the implication is that I want it for myself. If I say that I value my neighbors freedom the implication is that I want my neighbor to have freedom which is actually contrary to the first example.

Ah ok. I think my argument still works if you substitute valuing the same for valuing at all but at least I understand you better now.

>If we both have possession X, and I value my X for itself, then I can’t say that your exact possession X isn’t valuable because I am me. It’s not a reason that can’t be reasonably rejected.

Since the question is whether I should value you you having freedom as much as I value me having freedom the proper analogy would be the question of whether I should value you you possessing X as much as I value me possessing X. In that case, again, the obvious reasonable reason for someone to prefer themselves having X more than someone else having X is because they are themselves and other people are other people. What's unreasonable about this?

>Children meanwhile are valued through an agent-relative relationship, unique between child and parent. But agency isn’t agent-relative but it’s agency itself. It’s a possession which everyone has in equal capacity and no justifiable difference exists (you can’t say that one is more free than others).

I'll give you that freedom is not an entity whose value is agent-relative so in that sense my example falls down here. However, as I've said above, the question is not whether my freedom is more valuable than someone else's it's whether there is any reasonable justification for me to value myself having freedom more than I value someone else having freedom and there the obvious reason is that I am me and they are them. In this sense all values are agent-relative. I don't value things from a third-person perspective.

The reasonable basis for valuing ones own freedom over others is that the questioner is himself and other people are not. You generally are not making decisions about what to value from an external reference point otherwise I'd be just as motivated to raise other people's kids as my own.

Ok can you help me understand? You say you don't care about anything but you don't want the Earth to be destroyed because it's pretty. How is not wanting something to be destroyed different from caring about it?

It's not clear to me what the psychiatrists position on meaning actually is. He says that it's a human construct; does that mean that we invented it? He later says that it's irrelevant after prescribing that the patient use his intuitions alone to resolve the issue. Why give him advice on how to resolve the issue if it's irrelevant? Is the psychiatrist really a nihilist with respect to meaning or merely a relativist and an intuitionist.

I think you're very apt to point out that it's not surprising that our intuitions will often contradict each other. The solution is clearly that we can't rely on intuitions as foundational truths. If two intuitions contradict each other then at least one of them must be unreliable.

Does that mean that we are epistemically (as opposed to metaphysically) hopeless with respect to meaning? Well only if we accept that intuitions are the only candidate for foundational knowledge about meaning. In this piece the phrase "feelings and intuitions" is used but I think that they're importantly different. One can have an intuition that A is true and also a different intuition which logically implies that A is false. But a feeling is actually nothing like a belief in this respect. Feelings can't contradict each other in this way. They can be inconsistent in the sense that yesterday I was sad and today I'm happy. They can even be inconsistent in what once made me happy may one day make me sad, but there is no actual contradiction here.

I would argue that it is only through examining what feels meaningful to us that we can learn what is really at root meaningful to us. To the extent that our beliefs about what is meaningful to us are dependent upon other beliefs then they're going to be dependent on those other beliefs in specific ways and knowing in which ways they are dependent upon other beliefs will help us to further abstract those beliefs away and get closer to the root of what is meaningful to us.

I would differentiate what is meaningful from what is good generally speaking and say that meaning is a specific type of good. To the argument about instrumental vs intrinsic good I would say that I think we both agree that there are instrumental goods and I think we both know what we're talking about when we use that term. Could it be that all goods are instrumental? Not unless you believe that there is a never ending infinite chain of good things. Since I find that implausible I have to say that there probably are goods which are not instrumental and I would call those intrinsic goods.

Now are the good and the meaningful specifically "human constructions". I'm not sure I know exactly what that means but let's suppose that they are. Does knowing that make a difference? Perhaps what is meaningful to me is purely a product of the culture I was raised in. So what? If that's really true then that means that fundamentally the type of entity that I am is culturally determined. Does that make it any less relevant? If so, why?

So you care about the Earth because it's pretty? When you say you don't care about anything I think perhaps you mean you don't care about anything in the moral sense but you do care about some things in a broader sense.

I'm familiar with the dictionary definition, as you can see it's too broad to do any philosophy with, that's why I was asking for the op to clarify.

Didn't have time to finish this this morning, only got through the section about meaning but I'm curious: can you define nihilist for me in the context in which you're using here.

So you do care about something?

I think people who believe in the death penalty would probably say the right to life is not absolute.

I don't disagree with that though, at least I don't think I do. If there is no evidence for a claim then it should be disregarded. But disregarding it is not the same thing as accepting the negation of it.

Ah, I didn't realize "fallacy fallacy" was actually an established term, I was just being cheeky. The definition I gave was just me stating my intended meaning.

I suppose I agree that the "fallacy fallacy" you're referring to is a red herring although that's not necessarily clear to me either. It might be important to note that when you've struck down an argument for A that doesn't mean that you've successfully made an argument for not A. Rather what you should do is downgrade A to whatever epistemological status it had before the aforementioned argument was made.

The fallacy fallacy doesn't apply to arguments that are indeed fallacies but rather that appear to be fallacies.

ah the fallacy fallacy

I agree with everything you're saying. Two things to add to this:

Rosenberg brings up the Euthyphro Dilemma only to eschew it at the end. Are things good (from our perspective) because of our emotional reaction to them or do we have a positive emotional reaction to them because they are good (or seem good to us)?

Additionally as is often the case with this kind of moral relativist argument there's an implicit turn towards moral realism at the end which contradicts its premises. What authority can his argument have to me if he says we ought not to judge people for holding moral viewpoints which appear abhorrent to us if I accept that the good is simply that which I react positively to? Only if I find the idea of judging people from a non-objective standpoint more abhorrent than I find honor killings could this hold water for me, and I don't think most people would.

In this episode (https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/abusing-dolores) Sam Harris argues (as he has many times before) to Paul Bloom that moral blame is irrational in that it is impossible to blame someone once the truth of determinism is understood and hence it is understood that they couldn't have done otherwise.

Can this argument be correct if we're interpreting blame to be an emotion?

Though we have some control over our emotions in the long term we really don't choose them in the short term and generally speaking even when we do choose them that choice is not typically done within a hyper-rational framework although perhaps in principle it could be. To the extent that emoting in a particular way is viewed as an agential behavior it should be possible to at least intentionally calibrate our emotional responses in a rational way.

However I don't think that Sam is arguing that the practice of blame in general is going to have greater costs than benefits. His argument hinges on the premise that moral blame is predicated on the idea that the transgressor possesses libertarian agency (not sure if this is a term but I mean the type of agency which an agent which had libertarian free will would have). Therefore he is saying moral blame is irrational in the sense that it is a consequence of an irrational belief (the belief in libertarian free will). This strikes me as very odd that something which human beings seem to do innately could be predicated on something which in his view (and mine as well) is not even a coherent concept. When I think about blame from a first person firsthand perspective it also doesn't seem to be predicated on libertarian agency.

I suppose it's possible that all he really means is that if one really understood and accepted that a particular transgressor couldn't have done otherwise in the most general sense then it would simply be impossible to blame them. If we view this as a phenomenological claim then it seems at least plausible to me except that I think perhaps there are two types of moral blame which can be differentiated by their function. The function of the first type is to facilitate some sort of behavior modification algorithm in order to correct the behavior of the blamed. The function of the second type is to simply identify the transgressor as an enemy of the social group to facilitate the removal of the transgressor. The second type of blame seems possible even without any conception of agency at all. In fact it is possible (although generally considered wrong in our society) to blame someone specifically because of their immutable characteristics.