SenK
@SenK@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Sometimes I wonder if the subtext of religion is; if you join one youre telling on yourself that you can easily be manipulated. 2 days ago:
I’m actually starting to question that. Rich people would fund school and hospitals because they figured being nice would get them into heaven. As much as I dislike Christianity, I’d say they current 1% could do with a little fear of divine punishment.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
Have fun reading that wikipedia article. My OP is specifically an argument against essentialism.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
Do you want me to regurgitate my views on “decent person” or a “monster”?
Think for yourself. Starting with questioning if such categorizations are even useful or justified.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
Alright, you win the argument.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
He’s a compatibilist. Which I admit we can then break down into compatibilist determinist, which is a different thing from a (hard) determinist.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
Yeah I have read on empathy and mental health issues. Good vs. Evil aside, it’s a terrible and ableist lens to view people through. Sorry you had to go through that.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
I agree that treating people with empathy is beneficial for their well-being.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
Dennett is just a determinist who really, really doesn’t want to admit he is one (probably because he’d have to admit he’s wrong and everyone hates doing that, particularly white men at the top of their fields). I’ve read him and watched his debates.
I said “culturally Christian”. You can’t just shake off the centuries of Christian philosophy that has informed Western thought by just “not believing in God”. One of the symptoms of that specifically is the belief in free will, as Christianity requires there to be some kind of a pure, untarnished essentiality to people that can choose to be evil or good. It’s been hammered into us in media since we were kids, baked into everyday language.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
My capacity for empathy has nothing to do with anything.
Again: I just happen to value human well-being, and as literally everybody in the universe, I will seek to act in accordance to my values, which usually easily puts me in the same camp as other people who value human well-being.
There are people out there who value “the word of the lord” or something like that more. Like they would prefer to kill wrong-believers because they value their religious text more than human life. They think they are “good” too. I don’t agree with them, but if MOST people did, then they would get to decide what “good” is.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
That’s not how burden of proof works. Just because a lot of people (particularly those with culturally Christian backgrounds…) “believe” it’s real, doesn’t make it so.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
That’s a lot of text, sorry, but it was therapeutic to type it out.
Actually I’m really glad if so. Thank you!
My point is that you don’t have to have a perfect support network that’s always there. Sometimes even indifference is better than actively having one’s teeth kicked in for trying to be kind.
I always got good grades
The fact that you had an education at all is also a support network.
I don’t mean to belittle your own efforts at all, but it’s easy to overlook a lot of environmental factors that help shape who you’ve become.
My OP on “support network” was vague on purpose. I’m seeing a lot of people take it to mean wildly different things.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
How about not judging? How about just asking if they cause harm or not, and how to prevent that harm.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
First I can look at my own values and discover that I happen to value human well-being. I like it when people are happy, healthy and free of suffering. It doesn’t make me a “virtuous” person, I’m a human too so I could be purely guided by self-interest.
Then I can look at science and reason and conclude that by those things, I can generally figure out what kind of things impact human well-being and how.
Then I can look at someone’s behavior and conclude that it’s either beneficial or detrimental to human well-being.
Then I can look at science and reason again to find out how to address that behavior in order to reduce (or even entirely prevent) harm.
I don’t need a moral framework for any of that, and I certainly don’t need to judge people as essentially “good” or “evil”.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
You’d have to now prove that free will is real.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
First of all, please don’t kill yourself.
Second, if you think you’re a shit person and want to kill yourself… how are you a shit person? I mean I’m merely assuming here that you think you’re shit because maybe you sometimes do shitty things, and because of that you should kys. If you at least recognize that you can do harmful things, you aren’t irredeemable, you can start taking steps to avoid doing that.
Everybody does shitty things sometimes, some more than others. I don’t think anyone deserves death but in terms of just shittiness, people who don’t even recognize that in themselves are way more unpleasant to be around. And if you have a great support network, maybe they don’t entirely agree with your self-assessment.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
It takes incredible resilience to consciously choose a different path when you haven’t been shown a healthy one. My point is that a support network acts as a buffer against radicalization or becoming an abuser yourself. Without that, it requires extraordinary mental effort to not pass on that pain, effort that not everyone has the capacity for. And if they inherently don’t have the capacity, I don’t see the grounds to judge them as monsters: they literally cannot do otherwise.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
I wasn’t ironic but you make a very important point: “even mosters can manipulate the public opinion to appear as decent people,”
This, or, “monsters” can manipulate the public to the point that what their opinion of what is “good” is accepted as a fact. See: religious extremism. See: fucking TRUMP.
Which then leads to: “even decent people can be unjustly flagged as monsters and will be helpless to prove their innocence”
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
You’re seeing a “self” or an “identity” where there are only conditions. My point is that your friend didn’t “choose” virtue in a vacuum; he finally encountered conditions - perhaps a moment of stability or a specific mentor - where pro-social behavior wasn’t actively punished by his environment, or it was even rewarded in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.
In places like Gaza, prosociality isn’t a miracle of “free will”; it’s a survival requirement. When the external world is hostile, the internal community must be hyper-cooperative to survive. That is a reinforced behavior.
If you put a “good” person in a system that rewards predation and punishes kindness with death or starvation, that “virtuous identity” eventually collapses into survival. We aren’t essentially “good” or “bad”, we are reflections of the resources, safety, and reinforcements available to us. Character is just the name we give to a long chain of causes and conditions that happened to go right.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
Even your counterarguments rest on the assumption that this is true. You suggest that if it’s not a support system they must be “inherently” good or evil, completely ignoring the more likely possibility that there are countless other variables that could factor into what kind of person someone becomes.
Like what? You have inherent factors (genes) or environment (the support network, “the village that raises the child” etc.).
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
So if someone literally cannot “act” in some way, you get to decide if they are good or evil?
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
That statement dangerously oversimplifies human behavior and stigmatizes neurodivergent individuals, particularly those on the autism spectrum, who may experience empathy differently but are not inherently “bad.”
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
You’re mixing up two things: knowing right from wrong and having the capacity to act on it. Hume’s right: you CAN be brilliant and still vicious. But that’s not an argument for inherent morality; it’s proof that knowledge alone doesn’t shape behavior. Your literate friend ‘chooses virtue’ because he can. His life gave him stability, models, and the luxury of slip-ups. Your dad, the lawyer who cheated? He had power without consequences, which is its own kind of support system: one that rewards harm. The difference isn’t ‘moral vs. monster.’ It’s who had the tools to practice what they preached. and who didn’t. You’re arguing that ‘good people’ are the ones who succeed at morality. I’m saying morality is a skill, and skills require resources. No resources? No skill. Just survival.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
Indeed.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
‘Plenty of monsters with support systems’ - so were they inherently monsters? If yes, then they couldn’t help it, like a polar bear can’t help hunting. We don’t call polar bears ‘monsters.’ We call them predators, which is what humans become when their ‘support’ teaches them cruelty, not care.
‘Plenty of decent people beaten down by life’ - same logic. No inherent goodness, just luck: someone, somewhere, showed them ‘don’t be cruel’ before it was too late.
I don’t believe in inherent good or evil.
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
So you thankfully was able to live in a place where the only media you were exposed to wasn’t fascist propaganda?
- Comment on The only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network. 1 week ago:
How did you learn what a decent human is?
- Submitted 1 week ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 61 comments
- Comment on People who reject challenging ideas as stupid without engagement are like intellectual nepobabies 2 weeks ago:
So we got right back to where we started.
I rather practice Buddhism.
- Comment on People who reject challenging ideas as stupid without engagement are like intellectual nepobabies 2 weeks ago:
You personally don’t have to engage at all. In fact with the way algorithms work, very specifically do NOT engage if you’re not ready to go all in. But be aware that there are plenty of people out there ready to fill the information void with whatever nonsense that benefits them.
Nobody has to be a crusader against misinformation, but I’d strongly caution against thinking that just ignoring the problem will make it go away.
- Comment on People who reject challenging ideas as stupid without engagement are like intellectual nepobabies 2 weeks ago:
If you define this subjectively, from where comes the wording “we must” and “we need to” in your earlier messages?
Your words: “we must destroy consensus reality” “We need to kill the idea of objective reality”
In your world of free, subjective experience first, are people not allowed to form consensus that disagrees with your subjective ideals?