This, though, wouldn't be murder (except maybe technically legally). A desire to fulfill a loved one's wish to end their life, produced from compassion, empathy, loyalty, etc., is far difference than a freely induced, unprovoked, "chosen" feeling of uncaused rage directed at a person for no other reason at all than that they asked you to freely choose to do it (which of course for some people may be enough a trigger, in combination with their bodily states, but this again wouldn't be free).Juana wrote:I will not delve into this but if I knew someone WANTED to die I would do it out of loyalty.Adurentibus Spina wrote:I guess this was a response to my post about challenging my friends to murder me?Juana wrote:LOL just make sure none of those friends has a pig farm...
Yeah, really... but the idea isn't for them to actually attempt to try, but to recognize the force of their (moral) character on what they are actually able to choose to do. They can't actually *choose* to murder me, because there isn't anything in the past that suffices to cause them to do so.
Try arbitrarily willing yourself into a murderous rage... it's pretty difficult. Not even method actors can really pull that off.
The fact that your view here is intelligible to you (and to me) leads me to believe that not only is it not something you choose from free will, but it is something you MUST deeply identify with because of your particular moral character, which you did not choose.
I agree with your thought that we aren't built, generally, to randomly kill (it isn't evolutionarily adaptive). But I don't agree that ANYONE would kill if they felt their livelihood was threatened. Maybe I'm wrong about myself, but I don't think I would.As for the murderous rage it seems we're built to survive and not just randomly kill (obviously except the % that are socio/pyschopaths and violent) but I think if anyone felt their lively hood was threatened in ANY shape they would kill. Even if it was just a 1% possibility... so what makes us not weigh the other 99% in that situation? I mean in that situation there are more reasons not to snap than there are to go on a rampage. I know why it happens from a clinical point of view... but those feelings were they always there? were they developed? or was it just a person that didn't want to lose their pool in the back yard?
I have been asked by people the following question which I find very strange: how come the Jews allowed themselves to be systematically slaughtered so easily in the Holocaust? Why didn't they fight back?
The answer is of course that many did fight back, but the power imbalance was stark from the beginning. When German troops have surrounded you, have a gun to your wife or daughter's head... it's not so easy to just "kill".
Well, it isn't quite "guessing". But you are right to be skeptical about what exactly the "laws of nature", or the propositions we call by that phrase, actually are. There is a philosopher named Nancy Cartwright (not the same woman as Bart Simpson's voice) who has argued for decades that the laws of nature are not real. But she means something technical. For scientists it isn't about establishing absolute certainty, but about establishing the common features of regularities we observe in nature. So when you see the planets orbit the Sun, you try to find a way to symbolize the paths they take, and this produces a pattern with such a deep regularity that we can derive laws of gravitation from it. The reason we can call it a 'law' is that we have discovered something which shows itself to be applicable universally, not just in some small area of the universe. Things which are only applicable sometimes, or in some places, are not laws of nature. So we do have ways of trying to establish truths about all things in the universe. The fact that after Newton it took LaPlace and, (among others) eventually, Einstein, to fine-tune the details of the abstract symbolic representation we have for the laws we observe about planetary motion and light, and other things doesn't mean we're just "guessing", it just means that the scientific method proceeds (how fitting) methodically, aiming at higher levels of accuracy over time. There are, however, certain foundational principles which probably aren't questionable. These, in my view, are certain very basic logical laws. There may be only a couple, and they aren't necessarily the symbolic laws of modern "logic" as we have it. Something like A = A & A does not = not-A, and if P implies Q, then if P, then Q. Those are not observed laws, but laws which are integral to making sense of the universe at all.As for the laws of nature we want a structure, housing, food, reproduce, etc... but why the need to just one up everyone else in the community?
Things like that make me think that because man will NEVER know/understand ALL the laws of nature that some of the other views are flawed... not wrong, but not 100%.. just thousands of years of educated guessing.