Julius H.

Voting to close pending edits. The question is both about "simplifying" philosophy, and about "thinking for ourselves". Minor edits to the phrasing might make it be "singularly answerable", i.e., a question which has a single correct answer, rather than embracing a multiplicity of competing answers. This is my way of characterizing "opinion-based" questions.

You could start by studying logical positivism, since it provides a bridge between logic and philosophical ideas in general.

@al-Mu'tamid Your comments on this post and its answers are copious. Can you please integrate the clearly extensive amount of thought you have put into this topic into your own question, and/or an answer of your own? We can clean up the comment threads if their content is worked into the actual posts. Also, I can’t make edits right now. In order to try to re-open the question, would you please change the question title to, “What are the moral arguments for slavery?”

There are too many comments and this should be moved to chat.

The question isn’t framed in a very philosophical way. The economics of slavery would be better handled on Economics Stack Exchange. Although the economic aspect may be nuanced, at first glance, a relatively obvious answer to the question as currently formulated is: it is economically advantageous to have free labor power. If you want to focus on the philosophical aspects of the question, might you be interested in the moral justifications for slavery, instead? That could be a more interesting philosophical question.

I think the moderators should move these comments to chat. The answer is already of acceptable quality and almost none of the comments are suggesting improvement or asking for clarification, except for on the topic of if apartheid accurately describes the situation in Israel and Palestine.

These are some words and phrases from the above comments: ‘dishonest’, ‘ridiculous’, ‘it’s rather tiring [when somebody…]’, ‘the tired line of…’, ‘you can bet your last dollar [that…]’, ‘X is getting tiresome’… The comments in Stack Exchange are supposed to be for constructively improving the post quality. There is too much emotionally charged rhetoric here. I think the site needs a way to prevent these kinds of rhetorical exchanges from springing up in the comments of divisive topics. It seems to be more common in Politics SE than other SE sites.

“and runs a little too close to the tired line of 'criticism of Israel is antisemitic'.” Are you saying that what I wrote implies that I think that, or relies on that as an argument? I don’t see how that follows. Are you saying even if South Africa did not see Jews as oppressed, they could still see Israelis as oppressed? Maybe; I’d never considered that possibility.

I don’t think that’s a “conclusion” because I used terms of possibility, saying: “the answer could be”. I don’t know if you think I was saying that I think that. I was saying that I think people in South Africa could think that.

@FShrike I do not fully understand. Acccumulation said, “And Jews also have been facing violence and dispossession for many years.” I took this to mean, “If South Africa empathizes with oppressed people, they should also empathize with Jews.” The topic of discussion is “Why does specifically South Africa side so strongly with Palestine?” I offered a possible explanation: “Maybe South Africa doesn’t currently perceive Jews as being oppressed.” Then you say I “jump to conclusions”. What conclusion did I jump to? The conclusion that maybe South Africa does not currently view Jews as oppressed?

Following @Acccumulation ‘s comment, the answer could be improved by the answerer explaining why they feel the state of affairs in Palestinians qualifies as “apartheid”, or if it shares some characteristics with apartheid, and which ones.

Here is just one ethical idea that might help us in kicking off determining why anything is or is not ethical, before being applied to the specific case of sexual relationships. Is-Ought

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem A really easy way to problematize the question is that different countries have different ages of consent. Assuming we do not hold that all of those ages of consent are the morally correct one, we must turn to a different argument to determine when a person is ethically sanctioned in having sexual relations.

@LudwigV “You are missing a simple reason why it is unethical and that is the general ethical principle that you should obey the law unless that law violates an important ethical principle.” If you hold that as an ethical truth, you should present your argumentation as to why. It could make an interesting answer. “I can't imagine any ethical principle, never mind an important one, that would justify you in having sex with a minor.” One can generate a counterexample by thinking of a bad state of affairs that could be averted by sex with minor, like the trolley problem.

But so far, I do not know a) What he is actually claiming, about matter, regarding “divisibility”; and b) What he thinks that concludes, about some other topic. (TBD).

I’ll come back to this since I like to have time to let ideas settle in my mind, but so far, it appears that contra what I said above, Kant was heavily motivated to work on “natural philosophy” (/physics) because it related heavily to his philosophy, topics like form, substance, reason, judgment, mind, objects, etc.

Basically section 2.3 Dynamics of the article explain Proposition 4 and the relevant material heavily.

As a result, any division of the relevant spheres of activity does not compromise the simplicity of the substances themselves, since the spatial properties of substances (including the infinite divisibility of space) arise from the interaction between their activities rather than from their intrinsic features. In the course of the Physical Monadology, Kant also argues for the necessity of attractive and repulsive forces and attributes a significant role to the force of inertia.

Specifically, Kant asserts that simple substances fill space not by means of their mere existence, but rather in virtue of their spheres of activity.

As was the case with his earlier works, the essential feature of his reconciliation lies in the way in which his matter theory is supported by his metaphysical views.

Kant’s Physical Monadology (1756) articulates a theory of matter that can reconcile the infinite divisibility of space, as maintained in geometry, with the simplicity of substances, which Kant believes is required in metaphysics.

According to mathematical mechanics, a body cannot accelerate unless an external cause acts on it; for that reason, Kant declares, the Cartesians’ quantity mv is the only one appropriate measure of force in this context. “Natural bodies,” in contrast, have features that mathematics brackets. One such feature is a capacity for “vivification,” whereby a body increases by itself the force of motion that an external cause merely “awakens.”

Kant distinguishes two ways of studying bodies, “mathematical” and “metaphysical,” and claims that they presuppose distinct conceptions of body.

“Because physics was Kant’s primary (though not exclusive) focus over the course of his lengthy career, his views on physics during his pre-Critical (1746–70), Critical (1781–90), and Post-Critical periods (after 1790) will be discussed in separate sections. Subsections will be devoted to each of the chapters of Kant’s most influential work in philosophy of science, the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786).”

This prompts me to reflect on how atomic theory (as we know it today) was developed in the first half of the 20th century (I think). Thus, Kant is essentially “dabbling” in (engaging with) the physics of his day - it’s not any different than Aristotle theorizing about four essential elements (?), or Democritus that “everything is infinitely divisible” (I think).

Thus far, it appears that Kant genuinely attempted a straightforward theory of physics - which would have been called “Natural Philosophy” at the time.

“Historians of science reflect on how Kant’s position fits in with the views of other natural philosophers of the period, such as Newton and Leibniz. Historians of philosophy of science investigate, among other things, Kant’s work in the conceptual foundations of physics — in particular, his matter theory, his theory of motion, and his account of the basic laws of mechanics.”

“Historians of modern philosophy are especially interested in determining how Kant’s views on science might complement or clarify his distinctive metaphysical and epistemological doctrines…”

(It sounds like Kant is saying that space is distinguishable to infinity, but not divisible - as in, you can mentally/conceptually think about smaller and smaller regions of space, but space is not physically breakable, like matter is. Still, what “geometric proofs” is he referring to, which apparently support this?)

(This is the core of the question, but it’s not that the rest should be pared away. It’s just the focus: the space filled by matter is mathematically divisible to infinity, that is, its parts can be distinguished to infinity, although they cannot be moved, and thus cannot be divided (according to geometrical proofs).)

plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-science

Question 1: General Background: I know nothing about this text. What does Kant try to show, in writing it?

Much more to think about here, will come back to this.

I feel like the proof should therefore use a notation which represents “modal strings”, to make it explicit.

L contains “some n-level bridging principle”. This is any axiom of the form M1p -> M2p, where M1 and M2 are strings of a modal operator.

I am going to assume that D-WHITE is for a single proposition p, and not for all atomic propositions in the system.

Another important thing is that D-WHITE is not a formation rule, it’s just a single starting axiom. Again: why? It doesn’t seem intuitive why that would be needed as a basis for this.

(Again, I find these axioms unintuitive. I would rather use axioms like “necessarily true implies true”, and “true implies possibly true”. -> How would the theorem change if we tried using these axioms instead?)

(Intuitively, it says that necessarily-p implies possibly-p.)

10. D-WHITE says WHITESQUARE-p -> WHITEDIAMOND-p.

9. D-WHITE implies the SERIAL FRAME CONDITION on possible worlds.

8. Logic L contains D-WHITE as an axiom.

So, to try to put it intuitively in a verbal style (since I can’t write mathtype directly into philosophy stack exchange), we have a logic which is BLACK-NECESSARY and WHITE-MONOTONIC.

(In other words, this is a special formation rule where the modal operator can be applied to formula of the form “a implies b”. -> What is an intuitive example of something that actually has this property?)

7. It says if p -> q is a true formula, then so is WHITESQUARE-p -> WHITESQUARE-q.

6. RM-WHITESQUARE is the MONOTONICITY RULE.

5. L is closed under RM-WHITESQUARE.