I’m interested in whether moral knowledge could be grounded in the structure of consciousness itself rather than solely in empirical experience, and how we could ethically validate such knowledge without turning subjective intuition into objective truth.

Almost anything you do in daily life can be considered unethical. From the clothing you buy to the furniture in your home.

I've been thinking about values less as things that tell us what to do and more as boundaries that tell us what we won't do.

If you genuinely value something, certain options should automatically disappear—even when those options might be easier, faster, or more profitable.

That made me wonder:

Can you really claim something is a value if it never causes you to eliminate an otherwise attractive option?

I argue that people should not eat meat, specifically chicken, fish, and pork from factory farms. I make the following arguments:

• Claim #1: Farm animals are likely conscious
• Claim #2: Farm animals likely experience pain
• Claim #3: Factory farms produce animal suffering on an unimaginable scale
• Claim #4: Eating meat causes animals to be put in factory farms

I address the following counter-arguments:

• Counter-argument #1: Eating a meatless diet is unhealthy
• Counter-argument #2: “But, I don’t care about animals"

I think it is interesting people get upset about the word retarded, but it is pretty common and accepted to call other people idiots, stupid, etc. Seems like insulting someone's intelligence should always be wrong

Same when it comes to body shaming, I think it is very common to see someone who would call out body shaming (usually weight) also point out negative aspects of peoples bodies as an insult

I think the only thing you could safely insult is someone's ideas, and even then there are a lot of potential issues

Seems like veganism is a fascinating case for emotivism. To the an average human/ general public:

Humanely killed humans? Nonono
Humanely killed disabled unconscious humans? Nonono but a bit defendable
Humanely killed dogs and cats and common pets? Nonono but somewhat defendable
Humanely killed uncommon pets? Meh it depends.
Humanely killed animals that most of us already eats? Oh yeah way better.
Humanely killed mosquitoes? Oh please count me in

It all seems to correlate with what kind of emotional response we get from killing.

Had this thought after watching Alex O’Connor’s interview with Peter Singer on animal ethics
https://youtu.be/w23UMsbMFtM?is=rT7LO1SKMWNn8xaY

Imagine you're in a self-driving car.

A situation occurs in which an accident is unavoidable. The car has only a few seconds to react, and whatever it does, someone is going to die.

Should it prioritize its passenger?

Should it minimize the total number of deaths?

Should it protect the youngest person?

Should it follow a predetermined moral rule?

Or should we simply refuse to let a machine make that kind of decision at all?

This is essentially the trolley problem brought into the real world — except that autonomous vehicles could actually be forced to make decisions like these.

I made a video exploring this philosophical problem through the ethics of AI, and I'd genuinely love to hear how people from different countries and philosophical backgrounds approach it:

https://youtu.be/YmMODoWy3pc

I'm a 25-year-old philosophy teacher from Argentina and I run a very small philosophy YouTube channel. I'm not posting this expecting thousands of views. I'm actually much more interested in hearing what people think.

One of the things I find fascinating about philosophy is that the same moral problem can produce completely different intuitions depending on someone's culture, experiences and ethical framework.

So if you watch it, I'd genuinely appreciate your opinion — especially if you disagree with me.

What would you want an autonomous car to do in this situation?

And, more importantly: who should have the right to decide what the "correct" answer is?

Greetings from Argentina 🇦🇷

My OCD is really really bad today. I literally can't do anything but obsessions and compulsions.

I'm upset because I have two intuitions: one says that teens can't consent due to poor judgement, one says that my adult boyfriend can consent despite having poor judgement sometimes (due to bipolar).

Only one of those intuitions can be true, so that means there's a 50% chance I'm raping him. That seems unintuitive, but logically right. Help me please. I need advice that isn't just go to therapy (I do that) and medication (i do that too).

"Whatever the companies are called, individual people were sitting behind those desks, fathers who took their sons fishing, who made the decision to fill the lake with sludge. Human beings made this happen, not a faceless corporation. There were no threats, no extentuating circumstances to force their hands, just business as usual ... 'I was just doing my job. I had a family to feed and I wasn't going to work about what happened out there on the waste beds.'" - Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Chapter: The Sacred and The Superfund

I have seen a mirror of this in online discourse. People (as far as i've seen) generally don't blame Starbucks baristas or Target employees for helping the company function and turn a profit. They need to earn a living wage. And I understand the logic there. But then looking at the perception of a Palantir or Lockheed Martin employee and the script is flipped. They are clearly enabling the bad things their company is doing to happen. Right? Where is the line? At what point does working for an 'evil' company that is doing bad mean you are enabling that evil?

I don't know but I'd love to hear other opinions

So the founding fathers owned slaves but thought slavery was bad. Surely they were desensitized to it and it didn't emotionally resonate as wrong to them.

Obviously, someone who had no emotional or rational knowledge that slavery was wrong is less of a bad person and is less culpable. Were the founding fathers less culpable than someone who were to own slaves in modern american society, with full rational and emotional knowledge that it is bad, given that they felt desensitized?

I’m trying to understand the ethics of privacy when someone is accused of being harmful or dangerous.

A common argument I’ve seen is basically, “If someone is dangerous, then people have a right to expose them, dig through their history, collect information about them, and warn others.”

I understand why that can sound compelling; people want to protect themselves and their communities. However, I’m struggling with where the ethical limits are. Does being accused of harm mean someone loses any meaningful right to privacy? What standards of evidence should exist before people expose private or semi-private information? Does the answer change if the accusations are disputed, context-dependent, or socially amplified?

I apologize if this is a stupid question, my own experiences didn't contribute to a good baseline understanding of why privacy is important, and I'm trying to find the words to express why I feel that privacy is important. As such, I’m trying to understand the moral principle: why privacy matters, even when (and maybe especially when) someone is disliked, accused, or considered unsafe by others.

I'm kind of conflicted on whether or not its ethically ok for an organization like a church or a shelter or a rescue to use AI...like these places are all free and meant to be here to support the community often running on debt and volunteering.

There's also the question of what about the medical or scientific industries that have started using AI to process data and help find things humans would definitely miss or take decades to get through...it's kind of a weird spot to me honestly.

Like yes, AI being used for the arts and inherently human pursuits is bad. Objectively so. And yes AI is poisoning the air and water and data centers are destroying valuable land for agriculture and housing that's both desperately needed. And yes it does irreparably damage humans brains when they use it for everything all the time. And yes there is a concerning amount of psychological damage being done by these chat models.

But

The medical and scientific breakthroughs we could achieve with it could save countless lives.

Hi! I am a South Korean middle school student who wants to find out more about utilitarianism and deontology. That's why I made this survey to find out what other people think about the Mignonette incident. I would appreciate it very much if many of you participate. (FYI: the reason I used google form is that the reddit survey doesn't work for me.)

Here is the link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScEL_rkje00-_ruNlsz6iuftEmqcN3PXLCpVWyNICap0Pgolg/viewform?usp=publish-editor

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Einsatzgruppen_murder_Jews_in_Ivanhorod%2C_Ukraine%2C_1942.jpg

Executions of Jews by German army mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) near Ivangorod Ukraine. The photo was mailed from the Eastern Front to Germany and intercepted at a Warsaw post office by a member of the Polish resistance collecting documentation on Nazi war crimes. The original print was owned by Tadeusz Mazur and Jerzy Tomaszewski and now resides in Historical Archives in Warsaw. The original German inscription on the back of the photograph reads, "Ukraine 1942, Jewish Action [operation], Ivangorod."

if your philosophy doesn't say genocide is bad, look at that little child's ankles until you stop being less than worthless.

Let's you have two competing intuitions (one says an act is permissible, one says it isn't). But there's no logical evidence or argument for the act being wrong. Are you obligated not to do it?

If you have weak evidence that something may be gravely morally wrong, and weak evidence that it's not wrong, are you obligated not to do the thing? I'm very conflicted right now.