Ignore it, people.

Here comes the 39754 word "explanation" of the 2 person list...

Jean-Paul Sartre?

A Frenchman???

NOOOOOO!!!

(Nice little test, obi. Rather fun :) )

Strangely, whilst I share obi's first No.1 philosopher, Hobbes is halfway down my list. Plato is at the bottom...

Pah, what did he know?

inb4 the tome

100% Rand, which is infuriating because I despise Objectivism with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns. Kant is #2 at 88%, which is 88% as maddening, and the Stoics finish off the top 3 at 82%.

I don't think this test is going to be especially useful in describing me though. I found myself ambivalent with regard to my answers for a sizable number of the questions.

Ned Nellings is the bottom followed by Hobbes and the Cynics rounding out the bottom three.

So, no job and no school obi? Well, school starts for me on September 2 and I *still* am working 70 hours a week instead of the normal 40-45 for the same salaried pay...

100% Thomas Aquinas. I found this a little odd, especially as #2 was John Stuart Mill (72%).

"school starts for me on September 2 and I *still* am working 70 hours a week instead of the normal 40-45 for the same salaried pay..."

You're not going to be able to keep that up, especially at your age. You will have to choose one or the other before too long.

Work promised to get the hours down as they are paying for my school so have a vested interest in my success.

Dear god how long have these threads been going now

Aristotle, followed by Aquinas.

"Here comes the 39754 word "explanation" of the 2 person list..."

HAHAHAHAHA...watch me subvert your expectations maple by farting in your general direction and shutting the fuck up!

"So, no job and no school obi?"

School starts Monday and I've been working all week...the last few weeks, actually...

I make about 100-120 a week for writing reviews of things I've never even tried and articles by using whatever about the subject I might know, what I can look up, and then throwing in some Shakespeare or Austen (for furniture/anything house-related or with a primarily-female readership) or whoever else and generally making the world of Internet writing a cheaper, worse place. :p

But it's work, so hey...

(Also, my shutting up didn't last long. Oh well.)

I fell asleep twice trying to take this test.

100% Epicureans. I have no idea who that is, so I really can't comment.

I asked cause you had been bitching about not finding work and I figured you must have free time on your hands to be active again.

I found out today that the scholarship for getting a near perfect placement score (God those were easy tests) is $5K per year for the entire time I am in school which will cover all my books and fees while my employer pays for my actual tuition. Sweet!

Oh, well that's a good deal. :)

What are you going to do with your degree (a Master's?) when you get it?

And I posted Sunday or so (whenever the Elysium chat was) that I had this new job...which doesn't pay much, but still (lol, they all pay so little because they KNOW they can get someone in Asia or the Middle East or the Indian Subcontinent to type it for $3 an hour or so...hooray for big business and outsourcing, yep, it's the government that's hurting the working class's pay, not big business at all! To be fair, they're well within their rights to screw me over, good for them, but still...well, it's kind of laughable when I literally have to write "I see you've requested mainly Eastern Asian writers for this article and want to pay no more than $4 an hour...WELL, I can assure you, I'll work for just as little money as an Eastern Asian and produce quality work twice as fast!")

And it's just for an insurance firm, to be written in English so there's no reason they needed writers from that area other than the cost.

;)

No, just a Bachelor's. I only have an Associate's (proving you don't need to go to a 4 year school to eventually make six figures). But I have reached a ceiling in software development so I am getting a Bachelor's in Technical Management with a specialization in Business Information Systems so I can shoot for an IT Director ship at an SMB.

John Locke and Ayn Rand. I haven't actually read Atlas Shrugged, but I'm putting her down for political reasons

oh wait its a test, I thought it was just chose your favourite philosophers, time to take the test, lol

100% with Nietzshe (wtf?)
92% with Hobbes (who I actually strongly disagree with)
90% with Hume (who I don't know anything about)
Rand is 7th with 70%

Time to go back and see if I misread a question because I strongly disagree with my results.

Ok, accidentally plugged in one wrong answer, here are my top 4:
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (100%)
Thomas Hobbes (97%)
David Hume (94%)
Ayn Rand (78%)

Still not sure why Nietzsche and Hobbes are showing up so high.

I turned out to be a consummate utilitarian.

gotta be john stuart mill.

we'll see though, taking the test...

Okay it was Jeremy Bentham (100%) lmao. Mill came in 2nd at 78%. Next are Epicureans (76%) and Aquinas (?) at 74%.

I'm bothered by how low Hume is, since I love him so much, but I suppose this was an ethics quiz. Hume I love for espitemology, not so much ethics.


I would like to discuss question #9:

9. INDIVIDUAL & OTHERS Is the self-pleasure or self-preservation of the individual ever in conflict with the same type of interests of others?

a) No, and virtuous living is consistently beneficial to the individual and the community.
b) Yes, and it is wrong to be selfish, one should lean towards benevolence.
c) Yes, and neither the interest of own self nor the interest of the other is more important.
d) Yes, and acting in one's own self-interest is fine.
e) Yes, and acting in one's own self-interest is morally essential.
f) Doesn't matter/Dislike all answer choices


Can I ask anyone who answered D or E, but especially E, how this can possibly be justified? It seems to go against basic moral intuition, not to mention ethical philosophy (this is not to say I am unaware of ethical systems that preach this of course, just want to hear from webdip acolytes).

I answered D...my rationale being the old Train Track thought experiment...

You know, let the train hit 5 people vs. pull the switch and kill 1 to save 5...

Well, for me, it depends who those people are--

If I have no idea about the identity of any of them I'm more likely to save 5 strangers I don't know and kill 1 stranger I don't know (since deaths are unavoidable here, in my view the burden of blame is livable in this instance...it's bad, but a bad that leads to a greater good and since some bad will result either way in my view the first task is to preserve the greatest good from what's a grim outcome either way)...

That being said, if it was a person I was in love with, I wouldn't hesitate--

I'd let the 5 die and never for a second think of killing someone I LOVED to save five I don't know...or even if I knew they were good people, I wouldn't kill the person I loved for them...love is a powerful feeling and it's at once selfless in some respects and more selfish in others...this is a selfish part, I guess--

Even if it meant 5 other good, happy families had to be sad, I just couldn't pull the switch and kill the person I loved for them...

But if it's an anonymous coinflip either way, I'd be more inclined to take the the 5 and kill the 1.

That being said, I think sparing your lover and letting the 5 die "acting in one's own self-interest," "in conflict with the same type of interests of others," and it IS something I'd be "fine" with...in the broadest terms...

I'd feel guilt-ridden I didn't save the 5, but I couldn't kill the person I adored, not even if she implored me to...which is definitely selfish, as it's going against her wishes.

I don't know. I mean I know what you're talking about Obi I just can't see how anyone can consciously or rationally agree that it would ever be okay to kill three people at random to save yourself, or your lover, for instance.

It may be what a major part of you *wants* to do, but morality was never about doing what we want, was it?

I guess for the nihilists it is, lol. But I guess I was taking them out of the morality debate altogether, seeing as how they have none, so far as I'm concerned at least.

That depends.

If morality is objective, and this is a case where moral objectivity reigns, than no.

But I think there are many cases where morality is subjective, and this is one of them--

Is it logically wrong to kill 5/let 5 die to save your the person you love?
In terms of raw numbers, the answer would seem to be yes.
But then comes the question--
Is it wrong "enough" to justify it "to you?"

That is--if people are going to die ANYWAY (that is, there's absolutely no way you can avoid death and thus a minus on the scale of happiness either way) does the size matter more than the localization of that pain in an instance such as this?

After all, if it's "wrong" either way...

How much "more wrong" does it make it to kill 5 vs. 1 when either case is reluctant?

To me, it's not wrong "enough" to eclipse the pain that losing my beloved would cause me, and as such, the pain is great enough and localized enough such that there's not enough of a relativistic more imperative in my view to spare the 5 for the 1 when the two outcomes are so close on the scale and one will cause me more pain than the other.

After all, avoidance of pain (in some form at least) IS an almost-universal principle of morality--

What kind of pain you're avoiding, how and why you're avoiding it differs wildly from Plato to Epicurus to Kant to Mill to Nietzsche to Sartre and so on...

But they can all agree that pain is undesirable in a moral sense in SOME degree.

As such, unless it can be convincingly proven that killing 5 is not merely 4 people "worse" than killing my 1 beloved, but that killing the 5 is a whole MAGNITUDE worse, as it were--that is, "magnitude" in the sense that killing 5 people is many magnitudes worse than, say, robbing a house--I maintain my position.

It's bad either way, but as 5 and 1 are relatively the same in terms of magnitude, and it will cause ME more pain to kill the 1 than the 5, AND I'm the one who has to make the moral choice, AND avoidance of pain is a moral good...

I think it's, if not a "good" choice, than at least a justifiable or understandable moral choice.

I guess what I'm getting at is, how is it possible to justify valuing your own personal experiences of pain and happiness over that of others? In the question I answered C because I do not take other people to be any more or less important than my own person.

I am curious as to how you respond to this.

Even if my own outlook it is possible to justify killing 5 people to save 1, but there has to be a real justification. The one being yourself or your other wouldn't be a real justification because it relies on selfishness.

Whereas if the 5 were planning a nerve gas attack on children, and the one was a billionaire funding malaria research, who, if killed, would be obliged to leave his fortune to his less philanthropic son, and you know all this, then it becomes at least arguable that killing the 5 is right.

But this has nothing to do with you, do you see the difference?

If all I have is "I love the 1 more than the 5" the root of the argument comes from selfishness.

I guess I'm asking how can selfishness be justified, apart, I suppose, from simply saying "I am selfish, there is no necessary justification."

The one being yourself or your lover*

Kant 100%

Lol saying "Kant 100%" is similar to the stranger at the fork in the road who proclaims "I cannot lie, the town is to your left."

I picked (D). I could also pick (C) and be accurately describing my beliefs. I think (D) is just a continuation of (C), one which I find agreeable.

In all honesty though discussions of self-interest get really tedious really quickly outside of material allocation. If we're assuming you want to maximize profit then it's easy to spell out if you're acting for/against your self-interest. Not so much when there's no overarching objective purpose to life against which one's actions can be evaluated for self-interest.

I'm confused how you see C and D as compatible. Either you are of equal moral worth to your neighbor, or of superior worth, or inferior worth. C is the first, D and E the second, B the third.

Or do you not agree?

(D) merely says that acting in your own interest is permissible, not obligatory. That doesn't necessarily require you to believe that one is more important as a rule. If it is "fine" for me to act in my self-interest in conflict resolution, that doesn't mean I will, or am obligated to; it only means that I am not obligated not to. (B) and (E) establish rules for resolving conflicts of self-interest ("it is wrong to be selfish," "acting in ... self-interest is morally essential"); (C) and (D) do not. (D) simply frames (C) in a manner which specifically opposes the notion that acting in self-interest is somehow tainted or morally repugnant, hence my preference for it.

So basically I see only E as the second, B the third, and C and D the first.

But the problem with D is that it does not acknowledge your equality of moral worth with all other people. That doesn't strike you as problematic?

I agree, good point that it is not saying self-interest is necessarily best, but without any further mention of the status of the self against others, it has the ability to be interpreted as a selfish answer, even the chance for which should be seen as unacceptable if you don't believe that, right?