Those two words and their relationship with "consent" and "freedom" fascinate me. I've sort of ruminated about it in the back of my mind for a while, but haven't sorted a lot out.

It would be nice for two people to be able to make any agreement they like between each other without restrictions. "I'll do this for me and you give me that in return". If there aren't restrictions on what sort of agreement two private people make, in some sense, that can be maximum freedom.

But then exploitation and coercion come into the mix. "If you don't sign this contract, I will kill you" is a clear example of an agreement not being free. "If you don't sign this employment contract, you won't be able to afford to buy food" is still fairly clear, but a little further removed. "If you don't sign this employment contract, you'll be able to get food, but the food you can afford will be heavily processed and laden with oils and processed sugars, and you could suffer poor health in the future" is getting into a lot of grey area.

We talk a lot about minimum wage workers being exploited. It's true that most of them (almost all of them?) hate their jobs. It's also true that life necessarily requires sacrifices. I don't have a good framework for thinking about what point something becomes exploitative or unethical.

It comes up in personal relationships as well. "If you don't have sex with me, I will kill myself" is clearly abusive and manipulative. "If you don't have sex with me, I will break up with you" is slightly more removed. "If you don't quit using heroin, I will break up with you" is a little grey.

At what point is someone being coerced in a relationship vs two people acknowledging sacrifices they have to make to stay together? I don't have a good framework for thinking about this.

Further things to think about: at what point of mental illness can a person no longer ethically enter into an agreement? What about a normal person who suffers from the usual human psychological biases? At what point is it exploitative to use psychological biases when negotiating with someone? This can go all the way from the benign (ending a price in ".99") to the damaging (designing casino games with flashing lights and buzzers, etc.)

I don't expect someone to be able to give me a pat answer to this. If you think you can give me a 1-line "Exploitation is ...", I think you're probably missing something. But I am curious how other people think about these things, and what examples or what books you've found that have been helpful to you sorting things out.

I read some things about the philosophy and I'd really like to go deeper into it, but the book is so hard for me to read! I can't make sense of much of what I'm reading, maybe it's the vocabulary I'm not sure... Is there a more accessible book about absurdism?

I enjoy reading and in many books I see references to philosophers: Sartre, Schopenhauer, Marx, Thomas of Aquino, Socrates and so on. I recognise their names, and often know the "main points" of their philosophy, but I still feel like I'm missing a lot of references.

What can I do to learn more about philosophy in general and famous philosopher's most known arguments in particular? I suspect reading their books without any pre-knowledge would be fruitless, or at least very boring. Is there a good recommended reading list where I can learn the basics of philosophy from the ground up?

For example, 500 people working long hours in dangerous conditions for terrible pay, but they make it possible for 5000 others to live in a utopian society. What about 50 workers and 50,000 benefactors? I think everyone can agree that it's wrong for there to be less benefactors than workers, but what about 50/50? What if it's 500 blue skinned people and a million red skinned?

I usually find myself internally preferring the species level ethical decisions, but I've never been brave enough to admit to it out loud because I know it makes me sound like a socio/psychopath.

After seeing some interest in philosophical discussion threads in this group last night, here's one for all of you.

Ever since I watched the movie Arrival and saw this quote, I've had this set of questions about humans and how our minds and our perception of reality is influenced by language. I'm going to throw some of those questions out below as a discussion starter and see where we end up. Sorry they're a bit general, feel free to restate any of them to be more specific or more interesting to you.

How does language limit us? Is our inability to really understand and explain concepts such as quantum reality, existence past an event horizon, or a scenario without spacetime (e.g. prior to the big bang) a product of the limitations of language or is it a fundamental limitation of humanity? Can language evolve to be able to capture such concepts? If language does evolve, how will it affect our perception of reality?

I've been consuming the darkness that is wartime histories from the past three or four centuries and I feel like I've encountered a lot of people who had what they believed to be justifiable reasons to launch wars against other powers. There are people who thought they had divine right to a particular position of power and so would launch a war to assert that god-given right. There are people who believed in a citizen's right to have some (any) say in how their tax money gets used in government and so would fight wars over that. People would fight wars to, as John Cleese once said, "Keep China British." Many wars are started to save the honor of a country/nation. Some are started in what is claimed to be self-defense and later turns out to have been a political play instigated to end what has been a political thorn in their sides.

In all this time, I've struggled to really justify many of these wars, but some of that comes with the knowledge of what other wars have cost in terms of human carnage and suffering. For some societies in some periods, the military is one of the few vehicles to social mobility (and I think tend to think social mobility is grease that keeps a society functioning). Often these conflicts come down to one man's penis and the inability to swallow their pride to find a workable solution unless at the end of a bayonet. These conflicts also come with the winning powers taking the opportunity to rid themselves of political threats and exacting new harms on the defeated powers (which comes back around again the next time people see each other in a conflict).

So help keep me from embracing a totally pacifistic approach to war. When is a war justifiable? When it is not only morally acceptable but a moral imperative to go to war? Please point to examples throughout history where these situations have happened, if you can (though if you're prepared to admit that there has been no justifiable war that you're aware of, I suppose that's fine if bitter).

link to the source Tweet

Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union:

• waiting years to receive a car you ordered, to find that it's of poor workmanship and quality
• promises of colonizing the solar system while you toil in drudgery day in, day out
• living five adults to a two room apartment - being told you are constructing utopia while the system crumbles around you
• 'totally not illegal taxi' taxis by private citizens moonlighting to make ends meet - everything slaved to the needs of the military-industrial complex
• mandatory workplace political education - productivity largely falsified to satisfy appearance of sponsoring elites
• deviation from mainstream narrative carries heavy social and political consequences - networked computers exist but they're really bad
• Henry Kissinger visits sometimes for some reason
• elite power struggles result in massive collateral damage, sometimes purges - failures are bizarrely upheld as triumphs
• otherwise extremely intelligent people just turning the crank because it's the only way to get ahead
• the plight of the working class is discussed mainly by people who do no work
• the United States as a whole is depicted as evil by default
• the currency most people are talking about is fake and worthless
• the economy is centrally planned, using opaque algorithms not fully understood by their users

I always thought that meritocracy seemed like such a loosely defined idea that people still always defended and in this article I just wrote I hoped to tear it apart. It is a core idea of our zeitgeist but it is so weak philosophically. https://diogenesoftoronto.wordpress.com/2018/06/13/against-meritocracy/

Let’s imagine two women: Millie and Bonnie.

Millie has a body-wasting disease. Her body is slowly breaking down, organ by organ. The only organ which is untouched is her brain. However, the body that supports that brain is deteriorating, and she is near to dying.

Bonnie is a healthy person who suffers an unfortunate accident. She takes a sharp blow to her head which damages her brain, killing her instantly, but leaving her body intact and healthy.

Due to the magic of non-existent futuristic medical technologies, doctors transplant Millie’s brain into Bonnie’s body.

Who is the resulting person? Who is walking around? Is it Millie because it’s her mind, or is it Bonnie because it’s her body? Or is it someone else?

For legal purposes, we identify a person by their physical attributes: fingerprints, retinal patterns, dental history, face. According to that methodology, this person is Bonnie, because she has Bonnie’s physical attributes. If she used Bonnie’s passport, she would be able to travel because her face and fingerprints match the photo and fingerprints in the passport. She would be accepted as Bonnie.

However, this person does not have any of Bonnie’s knowledge or memories. She remembers Millie’s life and friends and education. If we asked her to sit an academic exam about a topic that Bonnie learned, she would fail, but she would pass an exam about a topic that Millie learned; she is therefore entitled to use Millie’s academic qualifications as her own. Her encephalograph would show Millie’s brain patterns. She would recognise Millie’s family and friends.

If Millie and Bonnie each committed a crime before the transplant, should the post-transplant person be held responsible for either crime, or both, or neither? If she was in court, a witness would identify her as Bonnie, who was at the scene of one of the crimes. However, she would not remember committing Bonnie’s crime, but would remember Millie’s crime. Can she be held responsible for a crime she doesn’t remember committing (that brain is now dead)? Can she be held responsible for a crime noone saw her commit (that body is now dead)?

So… who is she? Is she Millie or Bonnie, or is is she some new composite person: Minnie?

Partly inspired by a couple of science fiction works:

• 'I Will Fear No Evil', by Robert A Heinlein

• The Star Trek DS9 episode 'Dax', by Peter Allan Fields and D.C. Fontana

Based on a post I saw asking for a ~philosophy group, it seems like there are at least a few people looking for some discussion like this. Does anyone want to talk about some concept that's been on their mind for a while?

If you do, go ahead and throw it down in the comments. It'd be great if we could get a couple of nice discussions going!

Obviously this assumes you agree that humans have a soul, but even if no one agrees on what the soul is – if you agree that people have them at all, then when did they start having them within the historical context of human evolution?

There are a few ways this question could be approached depending on which frame of reference you choose to use, so I'm curious to know which frames you guys find useful and most relevant.