Will continental philosophy ever recover from this?

>morality
>on the same spookiness with human nature

Sometimes I wonder if Stirnerfags call things "spooks" simply because they disagree with it.

i remember when this board wasn't overrun with /pol/ retards

>anyone who doesn't agree with my fringe political ideology must belong to some other fringe political ideology

I'd say you're just as bad as /pol/, but at least they don't have an entire branch of philosophy dedicated to rejecting reality in order to make their politics seem sane,.

you've cracked the code.

Shut the fuck up you absolute idiot. He wasn't talking about any political ideology. He's talking about the damn image macros that say absolutely nothing and are laughably trivial.

holy shit lets make a /phi/ board already and get this cancer out of here

What the author of that post intended is irrelevant. The true meaning of the post is based on whatever is pleasing to me personally.

Spook is basically anything that can move or attach your ego to anything that stops you from doing whatever you want.

It's not so much of a denial of human nature as it is a resistance to temptation leading to a slippery slope. The naturalism view of accepting human nature falls into the pitfall of going full determinism, accepting that nothing has value and that volition is impossible.
Everyone will accept that human nature has a role in shaping personalities and how we think, but, often, people just use human nature to deny humanity entirely.

Now you're understanding continental philosophy!

Why?

Philosophy is literature -- and even if it wasn't, it's inextricably entangled with it. Are you going to discuss Dostoevsky without philosophy?

It's really amazing how ignorant Veeky Forums is when it comes to much of contemporary philosophy, analytic or otherwise. I mean, I can't see why anybody would even bother starting a thread about somebody like McDowell or Sellars since it's pretty obvious that only a minority of Veeky Forums has progressed beyond Russell and Wittgenstein. Yes, "On Denoting" and Frege's "On Sense and Reference" were game-changers (not even *those* articles are discussed here, come to think of it), but there's a lot of new and interesting stuff out there. Sure, it's theoretically demanding and it requires both, mathematical maturity and some historical knowledge of past theories, but as in other walks of life, depth and competency can only be attained via hard work, which entails copious amounts of reading, raw thinking, consulting your intuitions about the word and devising logico-mathematical models. That's the way it is and the way progress works. Point being: when buffoonery is the default behaviour, trumping true dialectic, the incentive to engage just isn't there.

*born into a wealthy family*
HOL UP
*attends private university*
SO YOU BE SAYIN
*conforms into whitebread suburbia*
I DIDNT EARN MY FORTUNE

>presumably white person making shrill post that's angry at white people
Yup, it's communism

no op all philosophy is shit.

there are more things in heaven and earth, and they are found in infinite jest. read it.

what makes you so sure?
literally anyone who's studied anything about communism knows that the first argument presented against it is "the tragedy of the commons" which is directly related to human nature.
yeah more or less. I doubt most people who spam stirner's picture have even read his book and or have a proper grasp of what it means.

/thread

You haven't answered the question.
Have Analytic philosophers ever proven anything?

I think it's just plain retardation.

>humans are blank slates
Do people seriously believe this?

That's asking the wrong question. Continental philosophers don't "seriously believe" anything except the virtue of socialism.

Other 'beliefs' are mere tools. You can pretend to believe that humans are blank slates, in order to mock someone who claims that there is such a thing as human nature. If your audience is made up solely of other socialists, this is sufficient. If it isn't, you can claim that you don't actually believe humans are blank slates, but that non-socialists put too much emphasis on human nature. This process continues until you've bullied your opponents out of where you are.

>Autistic analytic steps out of his mechanical hugbox yo try to argue with me
>Remind him that Godel's incompleteness theorems showed it's impossible to know anything

>Degenerate, homosexual continental fag stumbles out of Pulse to present some batshit idea to me
>Hand him one of the copies of the Sokal papers I carry on me for occasions just like this

there is a whole school of academics that believes this. just because you read some pinker, the minion of chumpsky, in some pop-phil-of-mind book, doesn't mean we aren't blank slates. you, as many others that gobble and marinate in the mainstream beliefs of mainstream pop-sci expositors and do not care to think or research for themselves, are just too fucking ignorant of all the alternatives there are concerning this debate.

the views of harris, krauss, hitchens, dawkins, tyson, pinker, etc. fedora-core writers do not represent the views of academia. just take a look at the tone of harris' writing with respect to metaethics:

>Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy ... [but] I am convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics,’ ‘deontology,’ ‘noncognitivism,’ ‘antirealism,’ ‘emotivism,’ etc. directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.

my sides. "Many of my critics"--not one soul of academic philosophy that i know of has paid any attention to his ramblings on the matter. yet he has the arrogance to go on and publish what he thinks will "solve" ethics. needless to say, the book itself is through and through pop-phil; and that's perfectly sufficient for the masses, people that know no better, to buy it--literally and metaphorically.

Autism speaks.

Is it true that practically all continental philosophers are leftists, whereas analytics differ much more politically?

"Well you see that just proves that leftism is correct, because really smart people like continental philosophers are leftists" - every continental philosopher

I don't know about today, but not historically, no.

>Remind him that Godel's incompleteness theorems showed it's impossible to know anything
i know you may be joking, but i think some people actually believe this...

>Remind him that Godel's incompleteness theorems showed it's impossible to know anything
A theorem, something that we are capable of knowing, shows that it's impossible to know anything? So why do you believe the theorem then if they are logically exclusive? Could it be that you are just name-dropping fancy things you know nothing about to appear smart?

>Is it true that practically all continental philosophers are leftists

not really all of them are, though it's probably fair to say most of them are. It's hard to say how Continental and analytic philosophy compares in this regard since the overwhelming majority of the latter aren't really political. But there are big names in Continental philosophy who aren't leftists, like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sloterdijk, etc. Oh and Zizek is a crypto-fascist and US imperial psy-op so I guess he counts as a right winger.

...

>Analytic philosophy
Is there any reason why you are conflating analytic philosophy with the comment section of Youtube and reddit?

Given genetics, how can we be entirely blank? Given twin studies that have looked at personality and IQ of twins adopted at birth, and found a link stronger than that of non-twins randomly selected, how does the blank slate hypothesis hold any ground? Or is something else meant by a blank slate?

Additionally, even given a blank slate, it seems like a kind of pointless measure given the immediate influences one is exposed to in their early years.

Also, pointing out legit logical fallacies if they exist isn't something negative to be discredited, it should be the faulty argumentation by the part using the fallacies that should be discredited.

lol if we're blank slates how do you explain stuff like the urge to copulate, the universal love of certain aesthetic qualities, and the similarity between twins reared separately? It doesn't make any sense.

The belief in cultural determinism is the root cause of like 90% of our problems tbqh

>there is a whole school of academics that believes this.
And they're fucking retarded. Anthropology and sociology are basically 21st century post-Freudian voodoo. The axioms they're built off of are very reminiscent of religious leaps of faith.

Any examples?

blank slate has to do more with epistemology than genetics and something that you are endowed with. it is the claim that we don't know anything at birth. you don't know that the earth is not flat. you can't conceptualise that 1 plus 1 is 2. you don't know that you have an even number of eyes, and so on. the opposition is that, supposedly, you get to know these things only when you begin to interact with the environment, and only if you are keen enough to observe all the reoccurring regularities and patterns within your experience. that's how you learn and that's how you know. the question is: do you really know, a priori and at birth, that the earth is not flat or that 1 plus 1 equals two?

Feminism, which has indirectly lead to the demographic collapse of Europe, is predicated on the notion that the differences between men and women are due to how they're reared, not genetics. Politicians viewing people as indistinguishable labor units has lead to the Hispanitization of America, and the Islamization of France and Belgium. The evidence for systemic racism is based on the faulty assumption that in an equal society blacks should be doing as well as whites. It all leads back to cultural determinism.

>philosophers can't tell difference between gained knowledge and inherent drives

i was referring to contemporary academics of normative and metaethics strictly within the analytic tradition. can't comment on anthropology and sociology. but at any rate, i don't think they are the right kind of academics that argue, or should argue, about these things. but if they do, they better be informed about 20th century normative and metaethics.

This is actually retarded. Everything from our ability to conceptualize to our ability to draw connections relies heavily on our genetics. Different people raised identically behave differently, and this can only be the case if genes affect how we perceive of and interact with our environment.

they can, it's just that the distinction is trivial, unhelpful, explains nothing, and is besides the point. if you think contrary to this, then you are misinterpreting what the blank slate claim is about (you interpret it as something to do with genetics as did)

By his own admission (and it seems true to me) McDowell just rearticulates Kant in the language of analytic philosophy. Which is why he's so awesome. And a good reminder that the best analytic philosophy out there is deeply historically informed. But most analytics wouldn't even know that about McDowell.

Tl;dr the best analytics are continental philosophers who write like analytic philosophers.

...

Mind and World begins with an exposition of a problem in analytic epistemology. Then most of the rest of the book is McDowell proving that Kant (and to a lesser extent also Aristotle and even Hegel) was not only aware of the same problem, but had a deeply satisfying conclusion.

The big lesson is if you read the History of Philosophy you can zoom right past most of the non-questions, or settled questions, that confront today's historically-uninformed crowd of analytics.

i'm starting to think that you're too incompetent to weigh in on the issue. do you even know what epistemology and philosophy of mind is or are you just derping inanely here? nobody is denying what you're saying.

the question is about _knowledge_ (though, if blank slatism is false and it happens that we do know something [whatever it may be, 1 + 1 = 2, etc.] innately, you won't be able to utter it at birth without language of course) not our abilities, though our abilities are of course related to the issue.

your worries are besides the point.

The distinction is actually vital, especially politically. If you believe that certain conditions lead to certain undesirable beliefs and practices, you're likely to exacerbate the problem by focusing on the conditions rather than the inherent drives themselves.

I agree with a lot of what you wrote, the problem being that they're putting a much greater emphasis on culture than what is warranted. Of course raw talent, IQ and the such should be factored in.

The bigger problem as I see it is that they refuse to acknowledge it on the opposite end, say when muslims form enclaves in France and Belgium (the problem here is actually cultural, mostly the mix of middle-eastern muslim cultures). They're basically resisting integration.

Your feminism example was mostly spot on, male to female interactions have A LOT to do with genetics, culture still plays a factor of course.

>The evidence for systematic racism
Well, imo the problem is that there isn't that much evidence to begin with.

Personally though I believe culture accounts for most of those things, problems arise when cultures clash and one culture refuses to accept or properly integrate (accepting the "main values" of the original culture, at the very least). If we were to take in 90000 Syrian children and have them adopted by well-off families, then they'd integrate just fine and become functional members of society. I've seen this first-hand with a lot of my friends, the biggest problem is dumb immigration policies such as the one we see Merkel spearheading atm.

i believe we're talking about two different things at this point, irregardless of what you're saying and whether or not it is true.

Could you two not ruin the thread? Take this loose, tinfoil-hat thinking to /pol/ or any other place you like.

I'm the guy you're responding to here. In what sense are people denying what you just wrote? Surely nobody is arguing that we're born with knowledge of the cosmos etc, rather that it's instilled by our experiences, shaped by culture etc? Of the list of names you mentioned, I can't think of anyone who doesn't agree to that definition of a blank slate.

Though, given any person's different biological makeup, I still wouldn't say that every person would react exactly the same to any given stimuli, which in turn would shape them differently and produce a different person in the end, even given the same circumstances. To me, that's what I thought blank slate was (and how I don't really see it as being valid).

What tinfoil-hat thinking?
Quote me

What's the distinction between our views then? We both agree that there's a symbiotic relationship between genes and society. By "blank slate" we're referring to the anthropological notion that genes are irrelevant to determining the ultimate cause of certain human behavior.

It's not a tin-foil conspiracy. It's undeniable that certain assumptions about the relationship between genes and culture lead to practices like the acceptance of third world migration.

>Surely nobody is arguing that we're born with knowledge of the cosmos etc, rather that it's instilled by our experiences, shaped by culture etc? Of the list of names you mentioned, I can't think of anyone who doesn't agree to that definition of a blank slate.
this is roughly what the issue is about. think of the phrase "blank slate" as a hypothesis, not as a definition. at any rate, fodor, chomsky, mcginn, and pinker come to mind. they argue about many dubious things when it comes to this. but returning to you, you're clearly unaware of the issue, and hence, the alternative views and the arguments for them, because your language ("surely nobody...", constant insistence on genetics, etc.) shows just how invested you are in the view you happen to hold. for what it's worth, i (as does dennett and others) agree with it, but it's not as simple as reading a popular book on the subject.

>Though, given any person's different biological makeup, I still wouldn't say that every person would react exactly the same to any given stimuli, which in turn would shape them differently and produce a different person in the end, even given the same circumstances. To me, that's what I thought blank slate was (and how I don't really see it as being valid).
like i said, this is a different issue, which i just happen to agree on. call it blank slatism #2, if you wish.

If we could magically integrate every migrant into our way of life that would obviously alleviate many of our concerns, but the problem is that there's nothing to integrate them to. Western culture is in a giant, permeating state of ennui. Our culture consists of a Roman-style venality, and self-flagellating apology for colonialism. Fuck, if someone like me could sort-of get the appeal of Islam and its cultural muscularity, imagine someone born to Syrian parents? And by the way, this very same cultural enervation is also the result of cultural determinism: feminism, critical theory, anti-colonialism all deconstructed our cultural beliefs and practices to death.

>Your feminism example was mostly spot on, male to female interactions have A LOT to do with genetics, culture still plays a factor of course.

Feminism is actually the cause of a lot of this. The reason Germany needs those economic migrants in the first place is that its social services dependency ratio is so that the country needs more people to paying into it, people that German women aren't having because it gets in the way of their careers. I don't know if it's true, but I remember reading somewhere that 40% of German women with college degrees don't have children. That's what demographic death looks like.

>By "blank slate" we're referring to the anthropological notion that genes are irrelevant to determining the ultimate cause of certain human behavior.
what the fuck

let me put it this way: the issue is about WHETHER OR NOT, a toddler KNOWS that P for some proposition P AT BIRTH. if blank slateism is false, then the toddler does know that P for some proposition P, even though he has no human language to articulate it. the issue is about innate, a priori knowledge. you might be thinking "well hold on there, if the toddler has no human language to articulate it, doesn't that mean that it settles it?" which, although a good point and as it happens in academic circles, doesn't exactly settle it. otherwise there wouldn't be any talk of fodor's "language of thought" etc.

>40% of German women with college degrees don't have children
That's a good thing though, people are finally coming to their senses and acting and behaving in accordance to the logical conclusion of childbirth ethics where blindfolded and irrational natalism, contra antinatalism, is morally unjustifiable.

Im not talking about a priori knowledge, I'm talking about the influence inherent drives have on our behavior. The notion that we're rational beings making informed decisions based on experience and gained knowledge is laughable.

>because your language ("surely nobody...", constant insistence on genetics, etc.) shows just how invested you are in the view you happen to hold.
How does it show that exactly? Not sure what you mean by invested either, it's just the view I currently hold and that may change tomorrow. The "surely nobody" was due to the fact that I've never heard ANYONE mention such a preposterous idea (as there's no reason to assume it and it hasn't been demonstrated) as being born with ideas. I'll give you one exception though, which is religious people claiming that you're "born with knowledge of God".

In any case, we seem to be in agreement about the view itself then (slatism #2).

Are you advocating for our extinction?

>Fuck, if someone like me could sort-of get the appeal of Islam and its cultural muscularity, imagine someone born to Syrian parents?
If Lebanese count, I know someone born to a Lebanese couple who only associates with Swedes (refuses to associate with foreigners), dislikes Syrians, speaks with a perfect Swedish accent etc etc. He's about as Swedish as you'd get, except he prays 5 times a day and whatnot. Living in Sweden, and having lived in Germany, all these European examples hit close to home and are mostly accurate. Though I gotta level with you, You may (as many Americans do) have a slightly distorted view of the situation.

It's bad, definitely, but the problem mostly has to do with a failure of integration as a result of muslim-heavy areas and not spreading themselves out adequately. Ironically I remember in 7th grade we went to some racist museum, where the "racist" guy who was being showcased was proposing spreading people out as a way to integrate them better, it made perfect sense to me now and it still does. Still baffled by how they could use that as an example of racism. Anyway that's kind of a tangent, the thing is, A LOT of immigrants from the middle east actually have successfully integrated, and that holds even more true in the richer areas. I think this is the reason why a lot of people are for immigration here, because they see and live with these integrated people and believe this to be the majority case.

I grew up in a semi-good area where I got to see both sides, I have a lot of friends with immigrant parents who've integrated just fine, but I've also seen the other side of the coin. Living in better areas doesn't let you see both sides, so I think the politics/media etc is skewed for that reason. So though it definitely can work, an open-borders policy is going full retard.

I hope this came out somewhat coherent, I'm tired.

Antinatalism is solipsistic. The point of preserving culture is to preserve the bond between the people who came before and the people who will come after. By severing that bond (whether by nihilistically destroying your own culture or not allowing that bond to occur by not producing more people) you're insulting the legacy of your ancestors and the people who built what you currently enjoy. It's one of the most selfish acts you could possibly commit.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with selfishness.

The only relevant continental philosophers are those who did not find ethics to be a priority. Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, maybe a few others I'm conveniently forgetting. At least analytics have long shed their positivist history and deal with actual longstanding philosophical problems. What contemporary continental contributes to the philosophy of mind/perception/language/physics/logic or to formal problems in epistemology?

>Im not talking about a priori knowledge
then you're not talking about blank slatism, and i have no idea why you're talking to me at all. start a new thread and keep it there, i guess.

>How does it show that exactly?
it doesn't necessarily show it, but it does suggest a few things like certainty in one's own views, which is inappropriate in circumstances where you're unwittingly ignorant of alternative views. just think of a christian that hasn't read any literature arguing for the contrary: it is very unlikely he'll be able to construct and entertain stimulating arguments opposing his view. that by itself doesn't mean he's wrong, it's just that i, as do many, think that it's desirable that one entertains all the currently available alternatives first, in case one is missing something.

>The "surely nobody" was due to the fact that I've never heard ANYONE mention such a preposterous idea (as there's no reason to assume it and it hasn't been demonstrated) as being born with ideas
anglophone analytic philosophy isn't exactly something that's extremely trendy and popular which in part was the reason behind my initial post

something like LOT e.g.,(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_thought_hypothesis) and the work on it is at the intersection of philosophy of mind, language (and some logic), and cognitive science.

I'm not discounting the possibility of integration at all. I come from an Hispanic family myself and I grew up speaking Spanish, but even as someone who's fairy well-integrated into a culture that's not all that different from the culture I was raised in, I still do feel a camaraderie with Latin American authors that I don't necessarily feel with Shakespeare and Milton. Western culture just has no point of entrance for me. What even is it at this point? Star Wars, tinder, and endless self-criticism? I love the literary tradition, and I love the freedoms, but being an American is treated (by Americans) as just residing within certain borders, that's it. I can't imagine what it's like in Europe, where the anti-colonial self-flagellation seems to be worse than it is here.

My main concern is this: even if 95% of Muslims perfectly integrate into European culture, that 5% will one day end up being millions if demographic trends continue the way they are. Now imagine a number much higher than 5%, as polls suggest it probably is. Now you have entire ghettos where the people aren't just apathetic to Western culture (like Hispanic immigrants are here), but actively hostile to it. This isn't just a problem for non-Muslims, it's a problem for Muslims too, who have to worry about the ensuing backlash their extremist coreligionists caused.

I'm not optimistic.

I've never understood the anger at people who inherit wealth. They may not have earned it, but their ancestor did at some point with the intent that he should provide for his family. Don't you want to provide for your children, and so on?

The people complaining are usually middle class fucks who have it better than 99.99% of people throughout human history, yet still complain that their lives aren't flawless.

>Antinatalism is solipsistic
Is that a statement of fact or a disapproval? Ethical theses have nothing to do with theses of philosophy of mind. Nor is it necessarily so that people who happen to believe that they are the only ones to really exist will refrain from having kids. You can still have kids if you're a solipsist.

>The point of preserving culture is to preserve the bond between the people who came before and the people who will come after
Cultures differ. Some cultures are better than others. How can you assure that for all newborns it will be the case that they will be able to enjoy culture? What if many newborns turn out to enjoy and prefer degrading culture as opposed to a flourishing culture? What if we lived in a society with no culture (just consider the counterfactual), would it still be morally sensible to procreate? What if many contemporary newborns deny or dismiss the idea of producing or contributing to the ongoing culture for the new generations to enjoy?

>you're insulting the legacy of your ancestors and the people who built what you currently enjoy.
For something to be an insult, somebody has to be insulted by it. Dead people are incapable of recognising or responding to, insulting utterances and actions.

>It's one of the most selfish acts you could possibly commit.
Let's see. One gets thrown into this world without any consent whatever and just like that one ought to be grateful for this opportunity?

>that 5% will one day
Nice going there, alarmist. And when will that be? Pointless blathering is the speciality of /pol/, we know, but can you provide some concrete, rooted in reality, calculations?

>Western culture just has no point of entrance for me. What even is it at this point? Star Wars, tinder, and endless self-criticism?
That's popular culture. Do you not know better? Do you need a reminder that culturally interesting and stimulating things are hard to come by and that you probably need to dig a little deeper? You're an idiot if you think that Western culture is whatever you see or hear your friends, Veeky Forums, or tumblr discussing. Like I said before: loose, tin-foil hat conjectures and nothing more. /pol/ just loves to opine (whine, really) on contemporary pop-culture and history (especially war and (geo-)politics-related) but you are so goddamn retarded when it comes to projecting your fragmentary experiences onto the world.

I'm not gonna respond point by point. I'll just say this: I know that the primary reason for wanting to propagate my genes is that it's my inherent biological imperative. The post hoc justification for my belief that I borrowed from Edmund Burke isn't philosophically unsound if you grant me one or two assumptions, but it's only an excuse. Like socializing and having sex, both can be eschewed on rational or analytic grounds, but that doesn't change the fact that their inseparability from inherent needs means that they're still necessary to participate in if one wishes to be a healthy, happy person. This isn't irrational by any means; "it creates stable societies of happy people" is a better rationale for the propagation of a belief than any abstract and hypothetical philosophical argument could ever be.

>One gets thrown into this world without any consent whatever and just like that one ought to be grateful for this opportunity?

Non-existence is inherently inferior to existence.

>Nice going there, alarmist. And when will that be?
>By 2010 an estimated 44 million Muslims were living in Europe (6%), including an estimated 19 million in the EU (3.8%). They are projected to comprise 8% by 2030.
44 million in 2010. Let's, conservatively round that up to 50 million by quarter century That's two and half million muslims. My 5% being "millions" is literally already the case.

>That's popular culture. Do you not know better?
Why am I wasting my time? The distinction between low brow and high brow is irrelevant. A shared cultural upbringing that involves The King James Bible, John Bunyan, Shakespeare, etc. and shared cultural axioms about gender, the social benefit of religious ceremony, and the value of certain cultural beliefs are what i'm talking about. The movie theater is our modern day sepulcher. That's the problem.

>Non-existence is inherently inferior to existence.

Why?

Let me correct that: being born is inherently superior to never having existed, because one has the option of canceling one's existence after the fact through suicide. But offering one that choice is predicated on existing in the first place.

Interesting argument, but what if you happen to experience intense pain, physical or mental, and slaughter a handful of people along the way before you actually decide to an hero (being born into a good family decreases the likelihood, but still)?

If you're asking me if murder is justified, then no. If you're asking me whether the possibility of pain is a good enough reason to refuse to bring someone into existence, then I'd say that given the number of people who've gone through unimaginable pain and still struggled to survive, I think we can assume that for most people the privilege of existing is worth the possible pain it inflicts on them. I know that for me suffering through the pain of a breakup is well worth the cost of loving someone in the first place.

Interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way.

holy shit when did you start posting again?

I'm saying that if you sum all the positives and sum all the negatives and weigh both, the sum of all negatives would outweigh the sum of all positives. You yourself said that you are not an optimist and that you are disappointed with contemporary pop-culture. I'm also suggesting that in circumstances where one "happen to experience intense pain, physical or mental, and slaughter a handful of people along the way before you actually decide to an hero" is morally worse than non-existence.

> given the number of people who've gone through unimaginable pain and still struggled to survive, I think we can assume that for most people the privilege of existing is worth the possible pain it inflicts on them.
I would only assume that anything whatever for most people is such-and-such if, and only if, sociological data implied it. You have to admit that you are arguing from a fragmentary experience and not a global point of view. Given that A = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}, I would never assert that most numbers in A are odd, without actually checking it.

what is the exact difference between analytic and continental philosophy

>I'm saying that if you sum all the positives and sum all the negatives and weigh both, the sum of all negatives would outweigh the sum of all positives.

Seems like something you'd have to, you know, check first.

>the sum of all negatives would outweigh the sum of all positives.
>I would only assume that anything whatever for most people is such-and-such if, and only if, sociological data implied it.
Looks like we're both arguing from a position of personal biases and extrapolating based on some unsubstantiated assumptions. I don't have any data to back my views up, but I don't think that pointing out the existence of the human survival instinct requires tons of evidence. It's as ubiquitous as our love of sex.

>I'm also suggesting that in circumstances where one "happen to experience intense pain, physical or mental, and slaughter a handful of people along the way before you actually decide to an hero" is morally worse than non-existence.

I don't get this point. Are you arguing that that experience is common enough to justify the non-existence of the people who happen to live perfectly happy lives? Or that people whose living situation might lead to their offspring suffering shouldn't have children? We can say post hoc that some people would've been better off not existing for the benefit of humanity as a whole, but there's no way to determine who those people will be ahead of time, and I don't think that Hitler is enough to justify holding an antinatalist position, especially when for every Hitler we get a Milton or a Wagner.

The point about summing the positives and negatives was with respect to my hypothetical scenario (since I knew I had no data to back it) about slaughtering and suicide. Even you yourself acknowledged it as a possibility and not as a real life scenario (though realistic) in your earlier post.

>perfectly happy lives
At the cost of what? Just under how many delusions are they living their lives "happily"? At any rate, I don't know what that means. Happily in the sense of Aristotle, Kant, or Mill or some other conception of happiness?

>Are you arguing that that experience is common enough to justify the non-existence of the people who happen to live perfectly happy lives?
No but I think there's a strong case here. Consider:

the genetically crippled, challenged, and ugly,
physical and sexual abuse,
bullying as a phenomenon and just how long-term of a problem it is for those on the receiving end of it,
the surrounding lowbrow culture,
contracted health diseases,
working your standard 9 hours a day (What would you do if you had half of it to yourself, granted that the reduction of working hours wouldn't affect your salary? Surely, spending more time with your family or your hobbies, would amount to a more happy life overall),
death of your loved ones either by accident or natural causes,
injustice (political corruption etc.)

which brings me back to your remark: "the people who happen to live perfectly happy lives"? Do you even know such people? Just how many do you think are they?

>Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy ... [but] I am convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics,’ ‘deontology,’ ‘noncognitivism,’ ‘antirealism,’ ‘emotivism,’ etc. directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.

Read Ratner's Star by DeLillo and watch analytic philosophy get BTFO

I still don't see how moments of transcendental bliss, or even fleeting happiness aren't worth the suffering of quotidian concerns over work and disease over. Bliss could only exist in relation to despair, and the former without the latter would lead to over-satiation and the sort of depression only the most successful people could suffer from. This is obviously subjective, but the valleys are worth suffering because if we didn't subject ourselves to living life we would've deprived the universe of the peaks of Shakespeare and Wagner.

Also, material progress is a huge part of why I think life is worth living. All of our ancestors worked to create a world that's as comparatively peaceful and pleasant as it is today, and I think it's a noble goal to work towards a world that'll address all of the societal ills you just laid out.

>Oh and Zizek is a crypto-fascist and US imperial psy-op so I guess he counts as a right winger.
haha leebinmeme :3

at first i thought he was shoving a turd into his mouth. why does he look like quentin ?

>What even is it at this point? Star Wars, tinder, and endless self-criticism?
No no, it's not that. It's coming home from a vacation from Cuba, going to the airport toilet and seeing people automatically form a queue instead of trying to get there first. It's the order we have ingrained in our psyches, fairness first. It's seeing people line up in the queue even though you can enter from a separate door right on the left (this happens A LOT here, it's hilarious).

It's what you talk and don't talk about, and in what manner. It's whether you'll resort or not, and what the threshold is (you NEVER resort to it here). It's not striking conversations with strangers on the bus. It's taking a seat next to nobody rather than sitting yourself down next to someone.

All the values, the social norms and so on is what I'd call the culture. I can't speak for the US though to draw a comparison. But going on vacation and then coming back to Sweden, you can definitely feel it and it sort of makes me proud in a weird way, it's always in these moments that I realize how much I love my country and the degree to which we've civilized.