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.. Epistemology
Language and thought

.. Art
Fake art

.. Cognition
General Artificial Intelligence
Observing My Experience

.. Computers
Microsoft

.. Epistemology
22 Theories of Consciousness
Consciousness defined
Dialectics and Evolution
Everything contains the seeds of it's own destruction
Free Will
Intentional Stance
Mental Telepathy
Projection
Training vs learning
Validation
We cannot escape stories
What is a Vegetable?
Why Do We Like Pictures?

.. Evolution
Life is Amazing
Swarms
What is a Species?
Why are Tropical Birds So Colorful

.. HUM
A Mind

.. Philosophy
Amateur Philosophy

.. Politics
Silos
Strikes
Unelected Bureaucrats
Who Decides an Election?
Why Are So Many of Our Relationships Adversarial?

.. Society
Adversarial Legislatures
Borders
Cut Energy Use
Emotional Plague
Entropy and Life
Genocide
Getting Old
Improving Democracy
Jesus and the Money Changers
Merry Christmas
Misinformation and disinformation
Moral Hazard
Pay
Privacy
Red flags
Red Rover Red Rover
Religion in Schools
Reusable Bags
Sleeping in a tent
Social Media
We Live in Interesting Times

.. teems
Cars made bicycles possible

... evolution
Philosophy of Plants

...HUM
Culture is Ordinary

Art
AI and Art
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Excellence is a Plateau
Is this picture real?
NonFungible Tokens
Public Art
Tearing Down Statues
Weave
What is Art?
Working With Reality

Cognition
Artificial Intelligence and the Collingridge Dilemma.
Bird Brains
Bounded Rationality
Competence Without Comprehension
Consciousness is More Like Fame Than Television
Developmental Processes
Emergence and Cognition
Gender dysphoria
Genius
GIGO
I Lost My Knife
Illusion
Incomplete Information and Stories
Instinct
Intelligence and Motivation
Is free will an illusion?
Metarepresentations
Natural Law
Necessary Illusions
On Affordances
Pencil and Paper
Post Phenomenology
Reflective Equilibrium
Return of the Law of Forms
Shifting Meanings
Structures of Understanding
Superstition
Taking Things on Faith
The Hard Problem
The I Love You Gesture
The Imagined Order
The Phenomenology of Swim Bladders.
Thinking about medical procedures
Thinking About Risk
Underdetermination and Redundancy
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
What Does Google Know?
What is going on?

Economics
A Country Is Not Like A Company
Alternate ideas lying around waiting for disaster
Blood and Money
Can Capitalism Survive?
Do Our Minds Own Our Bodies?
Everyday Communism
Inflation
Invisible Hand
Job Creators
Job Destroyers
Markets
Money and Value
Money is Different
National Accounts
Necessary Production
Paper Wealth
Post Capitalist Society
Profit Motive Fails
Rentier Capitalism
Social Wealth vs Surplus Value
Spending Money Into Existence
The Metaphysics of Money
The Ontology of Debt
Thinking about Money
Wealth is What Money Buys

Environmentalism
Blowing Up Pipelines

Epistemology
Absolute Knowledge
Equivalence
Exists
I do not know everything
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
Rethinking Knowledge
Rethinking Knowledge
Semiotics and Body Language
The Curious Ineffectiveness of Facts
The Past and the Future.
Uncertainty and Unpredictability
Unpredictability
Verificationism
Whatever happened to The Truth?

Epistmology
Dire Warnings

Evolution
Body Plans
Competition and Cooperation
Dr Malthus would be pleased
Error Correction
Evolution Defended
Evolution is not Religion
Evolution of Cars
Extinction
Forces of Nature
Is Natural Selection Obsolete?
Networks
Omicron
Politics and Evolution
Roles
Temes
The Evolution of Purpose.
The Problem with Natural Selection.
The Source of Bad Behavior
Thinking about Tails
Why Does a Leopard Have Spots?
Wildlife

Freedom
Free Speech in the age of Twitter
Freedom and Badness
Freedom and Morality
Freedom From and Freedom To
Freedom in the Age of Convoys
Laws
Libertarian Coercion

HUM
10 Views of Landscape
Affect and Effect
Dataism
I pay rent.
Listening to Corn
The Reform vs Revolution Paradox
What is Public Schooling For?

Levels of Abstraction
Levels of Abstraction and Minds
What is a newspaper?

Mathematics
As Much As Possible
Zipfs Law

Memetics
Emotional Plague
Memes: Imitated Behavior.
The Problem with Memes
What is a replicator?

Morality
Beyond Rules Based Morality
Freedom and Morality
Moral Realism.
What do we owe animals?

pending
Police

Philosophy
Agency
Being
Maps and Territories
Metaphysics Without Absolutes
Philosophy Buds
Ratchets
Sincerely Held Beliefs
Sorites Paradox
Stereoscopic Vision and The Hard Problem
The Gorilla in the Room of Science
The Purpose of Science
What is Going On?

Politics
If It Walks Like a Duck
Right Wing Freedom
The Sovereign Citizen
Tyranny of the Majority

Programming
Loopsidaisy

Science
Constructed Life
Correlation Wins
Fields
Neurophilosophy
Quack Doctors
The Great Shattering
The Material Space
Thinking about Interconnection
Time
Too Small to See
UFOs
Watching Pigeons
Weirdness in Physics

Society
A Job
A society needs a government.
Antisemitism
Babies and Bathwater
Belly of the Beast
Civilization
Compassion
Conservative
Corruption
Cultural Appropriation
Disinformation
Drag Story Tellers
Family Values
Governance
Governance and Power
Griefers and Misinformation and Disinformation
Homelessness
I Distrust the News
Immigration
Inclusion and Christmas
Indigenous
Its a Free Country
Life Extension
Magic
Moral Decline
Open Society and Falsification
Parents, Children, and Community
Possessions
Prisons
Privacy
Race
Rethinking Rights
Rules in a Knife Fight?
Sex and Gender
Should We Go to Mars?
Social vs Individual Responsibility.
Society and The State
Society evolved
Spheres of Influence
Swimming
The Care and Feeding of Free Speech
The Collingridge Dilemma
The Common Good
The Dual Meaning of Power
The Homeless
The Problem with Hedonism
The Rule of Law.
Thoughts on Justice
To the Moon
Totalitarianism
Trial by jury
Virtue Signalling
Voting
We Live in the Present
What is to be said?
What made freedom a bad word?
Why is there a shortage of nurses?
Work - Productive, Useful, Worthless, and Bad.

UBI
Implications of Very Productive Technology
Modest Proposal
Problems with Universal Basic Income
Tormenting Unlucky People
Why there are oligarchs







The Common Good

Who Benefits?

I like the idea of the common good - we should do that which helps us all and avoid that which harms us all. To paraphrase Tonto from the Lone Ranger - who's this 'us all'?
This is not an easy question.
Democracy is a way of answering the question. With democracy we might naively think that the common good is the will of the majority. One problem with that is that a majority is a fickle thing given to enthusiasms (for whatever reason). It makes little sense for something to be good after one election and then bad after another.

A deeper issue though; the common good has to be seen at the social level of abstraction rather than at the individual level. It is often the case that individual interests can be counter to the common good. This tension can be hard to resolve.
But not always.

Traffic laws provide an easy example. It really doesn't matter how much people want to drive their cars very fast on public roads. That individual interest runs smack up against our common interest in having safe roads to drive on. And the roads are a social construction after all, not something the speeder does. But the speeder is free to build his own track where he can drive as fast as he wants.

This gives a hint about a fairly general way of resolving the tension between the common good and individual desires. Generally, in the social sphere, the common good must prevail but there needs to be accommodation by the social sphere to individual desires and interests too.

Public health measures for the public good are a harder nut to crack that way. Vaccination is a public health measure for the public good. It's proven safe (much safer than the disease it protects against) and is proven to be effective. Many infectious diseases have been overcome by vaccines.

There are people who object to them sincerely - I know a couple. They point to known risks and side effects and say they don't want anything to do with it. In the context, I adjusted my mask and moved a bit farther away - but that was more a comment than an expression of fear.

Then we come to truckers who had to be vaccinated to do their work of hauling stuff across the border to the USA. Recall that at the time Canada was doing pretty well with the pandemic because of vaccinations. The truckers were going back and forth to the States that had a much higher infection rate. The border was closed to those who couldn't prove vaccination - including truckers.

A small group of anti vax truckers formed convoys and blockaded Ottawa and some border points and most truckers were happy to be vaccinated. How were the anti-vaxxers working for the common good? They thought they were defending 'freedom' and resisting the threat of overreaching government.
I think the anti-vaxxers are a thread in a skein of right wing ideas that has a vast distrust of government.
Years ago it was plainly stated - the right wing wanted to starve government so much that it would get to be small enough to be drowned in a bathtub.

Another thread was Maggie Thatcher claiming; there is no such thing as society, there are only families and individuals.
This is barking mad stuff (I think) but if you think that way then I can see that the idea of the common good is a problem.

For me, one of the ways of thinking about the common good comes from the Capabilities Approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. It's a fairly objective measure of whether a society provides individuals with the capabilities to live as fulfilled individuals. It recognizes that it's society that provides the capabilities, but that the society will be sick if it doesn't give individuals the capabilities they need.

Society teaches how to read and write so that individuals have the capabilities to participate in politics and culture and so they can learn from libraries. Society provides healthcare so that individuals don't die from each infection or mishap.

I can think of the common good as a state of affairs where the capabilities of people are high. Of course there are many ways that a society can organize itself to provide those capabilities. We aren't looking for a perfect system. The common good evolves as circumstances change.

What do you think?

Star I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life. I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it. Each week I write a short essay to set the topic. I show a selection of them here.

I've been thinking and reading about philosophy for a long time but I'm mostly self taught. That is I've had the good fortune to read what interests me rather than follow a course of study. That has it's limits of course but advantages. It doesn't cost as much and is fun too.

My interests are things like evolution and cognition and social issues and economics and science in general.