Abstract: We usually conceive of the world as being made up of different components and we set ourselves the task of identifying and understanding what each of these elements of reality represents. But with postmodernism came the realisation that we may never be able to fully grasp what the world is really made of. Instead, Hilary Lawson proposes a radically-different approach and supposed that the world is an unspecified other or an “openness” that we close into our ideas and the properties we assign to it. In doing so we give ourselves a means to intervene in the world but also distance ourselves from its openness. These closures can be developed and refined but they are not an ultimate description of reality, only a way for humans to be able hold the world.

>Did Epicurus practice what he preached?

We don't know. There's no evidence either way from people who knew him.

His last will and testament is available to us, and it makes no mention of his own children. I'm not an expert on ancient Attic laws of inheritance, but I'd assume his children would be mentioned in such documents.

>According to our testimonia collected by Peter Green:

That name is unfamiliar to me. Can you give me a link or citation?

>"[...] the Garden abounded in stimulating female company, of which he clearly approved."

The Garden was a philosophical school that accepted women as students and faculty, yes.

>'there is no need to assume that the relations between the male and female members of the school were platonic [Rist 11]'.

Apart from the fact that no self-respecting Epicurean would take advice from Plato? :D

But seriously... There is no reason to assume so, but neither is there reason to assume that the relations were in any way different from relations in similar situations.

We in fact know that such relations existed, produced children, and Epicurus didn't condemn it. His will mentions and provides for the children of his student Metrodorus, and those children must have been born during the Garden period.

> The Leader seems to have enjoyed droit de seigneur with several of his followers' wives and mistresses [Plutarch Moralia 1098B, 1129B].

Here Plutarch is straight-up lying... I mean... "provides no evidence to back up his argument".

>I've never seen this written as part of the definition of Epicurean pleasure.

I'm not trying to write the definition, just my understanding of what Epicureanism is about.

>This article is how I've usually heard it described.

I don't think that the author of that article would accept Nozick's machine either.

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Did Epicurus practice what he preached? According to our testimonia collected by Peter Green:

"His interest in women seems to have been strong, if tangential, and kept up (if we can believe Alciphron [Ep. 4.17]) into extreme old age. Though his professed attitude toward sex might be described as one of distrustful functionalism, the Garden abounded in stimulating female company, of which he clearly approved."

"Perhaps the most important thing to realize about Epicurus is that he was, in fact, the founder of a quasi-religious sect... Epicurean communes were obliged to take an oath, not only to obey the founder, but also to accept his doctrines. He was known as "The Leader" and flattered as a god... Though Epicureans found sex unprofitable and illusory, they did not on that account ban it, and 'there is no need to assume that the relations between the male and female members of the school were platonic [Rist 11]'. The Leader seems to have enjoyed droit de seigneur with several of his followers' wives and mistresses [Plutarch Moralia 1098B, 1129B].

"Act always, he told his followers, as though Epicurus is watching." [Epicur. ap. Sen. Ep. Mor. 25.5]

Is hunger a state of being, a possession or an emotion/feeling?

“I feel hungry (emotion)” “I am hungry (state)” “I have hunger (possession)”

Just a thought - other languages may distinguish it differently (e.g. Spanish’s “tengo hambre” (I have hunger)), technically English will express it in all those ways, but which is correct?

>An Epicurean would not accept the proposition that "electrochemical stimulation of a certain part of your brain" is the same thing as "eating a good meal". In essence, a pleasure has a distinct cause (and effect) because we are living, biological beings.

I've never seen this written as part of the definition of Epicurean pleasure. This article is how I've usually heard it described.

The question had a false premise, are you really this stupid that you can't read or reason?

That's odd, I've never seen someone say that a guy on death row breathing is immoral or unethical. Want to show me some evidence of that?

A "Yes it is, not it's not" retort does not constitute as answering the question. Again, why do you keep responding if you're not gonna answer the question?

Tell that to the guy on death row.

When the gentrification begins and the people in the neighborhood are too poor to live there, instead of having them move, just give them money so that they can continue to live there.

Choosing between Free Will and Nihilism:

The implicit message in the title is not lost on me, it represents a fundamental problem I continuously run into. Many of the arguments against free will explain why you should not believe in it, ironically enough as if it’s a choice. Perhaps this is just a remark on our language’s limitations, but I think this contradiction connects to a deeper problem. I have yet to determine whether I logically should believe in free will, yet I feel an unbearable need to. Other than the crushing despair I feel upon finding a reasonable argument against free will, I find that I am incapable of living my life without believing it, and I wonder if others feel the same. Choice is a fundamental part of my experience and I believe that this is the reason:

The lack of free will necessitates meaninglessness—our existence serves no purpose, our experience is worthless, our interpretations are figments of the universe’s own imaginings.

Please note that I do not mean to discuss the validity of free will nor it’s moral implications in this post—in fact I think the exercise may be rife with fallacies and biases until we figure out how to fully comprehend or speak of a world without it, something I fearfully hope to move towards with this post.

To further elaborate with examples, my relationship with another person is not the result of our choices, but a result of the past. The future does not depend on whether I choose to keep my values, but on whether the laws of nature determine that I will. In fact, the future may already exist and my experience of my life’s sequence of moments is an accidental and ultimately arbitrary result of matter interacting. In this sense, time lacks any meaning other than the current location of our consciousness—according to the material universe, none of it is changeable, it has all already happened. Deterministic fate seems to offer no meaning, it’s simply what is, was, and will be. Our experience is an accident and our interpretation of it has no consequence on it; in fact, our apparent “interpretation” is just another accidental consequence of it, it doesn’t even come from our experience.

In the “present moment” as I designate it, the post I am making doesn’t mean what I think it does. Rather than starting a discussion or introducing others to my opinions and new information, I am simply experiencing something I was always going to do. Without my agency, this post effectively has the same meaning as something I’ve already done. My experience of this writing won’t affect what is being written—even writing this I find it hard to remove myself from the picture completely. Surely feeling a need to write that last sentence was caused by my conscious experience of these feelings. Yet, then again, here I am describing a cause and effect relationship. My experience didn’t actually have anything to do with writing, I was just experiencing the bit of cognitive dissonance my neurons went through when my body was writing.

To put it more clearly/succinctly, nothing my consciousness “does,” in that it is something that experiences a sequence of feelings and thoughts, can ever affect itself or it’s surroundings. I feel it necessary to note here that I have not (nor have I tried to) disprove either free will or nihilism. As far as I can tell upon rereading this, I don’t see any contradictions or arguments against either side. I think this discussion may have rather lead to a nihilistic definition of identity: we are not the script writers, I neglect to say we are even the actors; rather, we are a captive audience without even hands to applaud or tears to cry. The audience does not have their own opinions, nor are the actors aware of their existence. The actors may believe in free will or not, but the audience simply just watches their reasonings unfold. Even Camus’s Sisyphus is actually just an actor, with his audience just feeling it’s predetermined scorn against fate. Perhaps “my” actor just happened to look at its audience and was influenced to believe that it was one and the same with itself… As far as I can tell, this seems to be a perfectly valid view of the experiential self.

Personally, I much prefer the identity given by free will. Even a restrained free will, influenced by biology and the intricate web of causality, allows much more meaning than existence in a superdeterminate block universe. This utter lack of meaning is the reason that I am more willing to accept an illusion if that is the truth, even though such an act goes against nearly all of my values. Furthermore, I find myself simply incapable of separating my experience from the world’s happenings even in the language I use, though I made an attempt through metaphor.

Its morally permissible to breathe.

"[addressing a young man] I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclination as you will, provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not constrained by one or more of these conditions is impossible; for a man never gets any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not receive harm." (Sayings 51)

Epicurus was bit of a prude...

There are ways to argue against Nozick's machine, especially from an Epicurean viewpoint.

The main one would be that the machine does not in fact produce pleasure. An Epicurean would not accept the proposition that "electrochemical stimulation of a certain part of your brain" is the same thing as "eating a good meal". In essence, a pleasure has a distinct cause (and effect) because we are living, biological beings. There are no good short-cuts to pleasure. Only very very bad ones.

A more funny one is that the experience machine is just a magic trick... and like all magic tricks it's fake. "Beware the man behind the curtain!" winkwinknudgenudge

If you give me an example of one morally objective rule that is universally accepted I'd say you may have a point. Standing by.

Sure, morals are based upon the social contract and self-interest. That's what I basically said.

What alternatives aren't just as bad or worse i regards to the displacement of people? At least with gentrification the displacement is to a good end.

They're very different - two reasons, not exhaustive. First, immigration doesn't force natives to leave in the way gentrification opponents claim gentrification does. It's not the moving in people dislike about gentrification, but being pushed out.

Second, nationalism is legitimate in a way localism isn't. The borders of a part of town are frivolous compared to the borders of nations, both in practical respects and in terms of normal human bonds. Ironically, the opponent of gentrification is the person with the least solidarity - the fortunes of his neighborhood and neighbors improve but all he does is moan "Me, me, me!" Is it any wonder their neighbors are glad to trade the pro-squalor activists in for people who are pro-improvement?

>3. The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone.
>
>4. The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.

For an Epicurean, these statements would be false. Pleasure and pain are experiences of living beings, not abstract Platonic Ideas. The absence of pain is always enjoyed by someone, and the absence of pleasure is always a deprivation on someone.

>2. There is a moral obligation not to produce a child if it can be foreseen that it will be unhappy.

This statement is falsified, for an Epicurean, because such foresight is impossible... especially for a human.

>We can clearly see that even with the grossly unrealistic assumption that the amount of happiness in one’s life quantitatively outweighs the amount of suffering, the ethical choice is weighed in favor of non-procreation.

Epicurus didn't think that procreation was bad because we can't guarantee that the offspring will be happy... but because the raising of children is a painful burden on the parent.

I think of morality as being a complex system emerging from the interplay between the demands of individual self-interest and societal self-interest.

The parts of morality that emerge from individual self-interest are mostly fixed and not very controversial, based on common human desires - I would prefer not to be robbed, raped, or killed, and enough other people share those preferences that we can make moral rules against them and generally enforce them.

The parts of morality that arise from societal self-interest are more highly variarble, since what is good for a given society is very context dependent, and more controversial, since what is good for one part of society may be bad for another. In Aztec culture, human sacrifice was morally permissible, and even required, because it was a way of putting an end to tribal conflicts (the leader of the losing tribe would be executed, but in a way viewed as bringing them great honor, minimizing the chances of relatives seeking vengeance). In the American South, slavery used to be moral acceptable (because their plantation-based economy really benefited from it) whereas it was morally reprehensible in the North (because their industrialized economy required workers with levels of skill and education incompatible with slavery). Even with modern America, you see vast difference in moral views over guns, falling out along geographic lines (in rural areas gun ownership is fine, because guns are useful tools; whereas in urban areas gun ownership is suspect, because there's not much use for them except as weapons used against other people).

Western sanctions and coup attempts didn't exactly help Venezuela either.

I 've recently read your reply. While you could say that, while you do have a point that their are some people among the working-class that are willing participates, that is based on the framework of. Many who are " willingly participating" unfortunately still buys into the notion that they are " temporarily poor millionaire's." and that someday they will be the property owners themselves if they simply work hard and game the system. Which still pretty much based on the framework of Capitalistic Realism with the implication that the only way to have any gain within the current system is to play the game and play by the rules of the current system and embracing the ideological framework. Not Solidarity nor Community action but pure individual property rights. Combined this with the individualistic nature of Capitalism and yes you will get defenders of property.

Usually these individuals hope to gain(weather they know it or not) negative freedom( in which the article discusses) from property ownership in which they see themselves as being someday. Such as autonomy and personal egoist freedom. That's been the framework taught from a young age for many decades, especially with the Protestant Work ethics and other social phenomenon. Capitalism (especially Late Stage Capitalism), supports an individualistic framework where one must become the user of (as the article discussed) arbitrary power( by become a business/property owner) in order to gain " freedom." and independence. At the end though it simply makes you an active participant of said system. The defenders of property are also(which represents the sad state of our education to be frank) either unaware of how Class consciousness is essential to creating the nondominance culture and society that is discussed in the article. How it will help in terms of using the understanding how to develop and maintain an economic and social democracy that takes consideration for everyone and not mainly the property owner class.

The dream of being an entrepreneur is part of that ideological framework that in turn creates these types of people who would defend property. So I suggest not dismiss the influence of many years of ideological manufacturing of the masses and making many be either accepters and/or active participants of the system.

It's a book review, mostly.

"We would say the virtue, courage, and strength of the heroes of Le Chabom causes people to experience the emotion we call “moral elevation.” When we view such moral heroism, we don’t think: “Awesome!” We think: “That is heroic. That is the right thing to do. That is the thing that I should do.”

Whether we refer to our reaction as “awe,” “moral beauty,” or “moral elevation,” Keltner urges us all to pay attention to the good things, the kind things, the generous things that people do for others. If we do so, we will likely be inspired and will do more good things ourselves as did the villagers in Le Chambon when they witnessed the moral courage of Pastor André Trocmé and his wife."

Morality isn't ill-defined or a trap, it's "prosocial" in regards to the society a group wants to see. Conformity bias works both ways, ie people emulate good and bad behaviors of the people(society) around them.

It goes to the effectiveness of "be the change you wish to see."

It's why the Christmas Peace is so inspirational and makes us lamet war, or why the story of the German pilots escorting the British pilot to safety makes us see the humanity in all, or why we value the 'Seaman's Code' to respond calls for help. It's why we are impressed by Tank Man's courage.

Tl;Dr: Leaning into the prosocial behavior begets more prosocial behavior. That holds true no matter which society, because of conformity bias.