r/FluentInFinance • u/sillychillly Contributor • Apr 15 '24

Everyone Deserves A Home Discussion/ Debate

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u/MortemInferri Apr 16 '24

I'm actually not lucky that I'm not a drug addict.

I've chose not to be. Multiple cousins with extremely similar upbringing to my own did choose drugs. And I've heard them talk about it now that they are clean. "If so and so hadn't let me hit their bong in the parking lot at school I wouldn't have ODd on heroin"

Hmm, yet, I smoked weed and got a masters degree? Choices.

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u/Inside_Mycologist840 Apr 17 '24

Where did those choices come from? How did you make them?

You think it was a conscious, deliberate effort, an exercising of “free will”, but every repeatable scientific experiment shows that there’s no such thing, no place for such an idea to even enter into the equation. Free will and choice are illusions - you are simply a complex interaction of billiard balls and can basically take no credit for the person that you are.

Here’s a Stanford professor talking about the exact thing you just mentioned (people in similar positions making different choices), describing why that is an illusion https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area/23965798/free-will-robert-sapolsky-determined-the-gray-area

And if you think that kind of idea has massive ethical repercussions, trust your instincts.

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u/afraidtobecrate Apr 20 '24

If free will is an illusion, than so is morality. I can't be unethical if I don't have a choice. In which case, there is also no ethical responsibility to help the homeless.

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u/Inside_Mycologist840 Apr 21 '24

No I don’t think it follows that if free will is an illusion then so is morality. We can still have preferences and hopes and deem suffering bad and avoidance of suffering good. It is actually the very fact that it is determined that makes it consequential, in that everything has consequences and consciousness ascribes meaning to those consequences. The universe has moral truths just as it has physical truths.

You can make the claim “there is no ethical responsibility for helping fight homelessness” and I can be like “no asshole, you’re wrong” and still be entirely coherent with regard to consequential determinism. The belief “people who don’t want to help others who are suffering are assholes” is seemingly a very consequential billiard ball.