/lit/ - Literature

>>9512279
The reason i didn't respond to your first paragraph is that i largely agreed with it.
>I'm saying for agency to exist AT ALL then there would need to be some supernatural aspect of reality
I don't see how a supernatural aspect is necessary for decisive agency to exist (by decisive agency, I mean to exist as an individual who makes one choice rather than another)
Why do you suppose we have to invoke the supernatural to explain that living creatures, when faced with a multitude of possible actions, will act in accordance with which ever course is categorized by the most impulsive weight?
I choose the steak over the apple because my brain has been coded to believe that fat and salt are a rare commodity, thus the steak is greater impulsive weight in the decision making process.
Now suppose i am to pick between going home from the party, and taking advantage of an inebriated girl. I would wager that beside the sexual impulse, this consideration is guided entirely not by basal instinct but by principle (which we might agree is rooted in basal instinct, of the sort developed by social animals, especially humans). Does an understanding of, an empathy of, her terror the next day not put impulsive weight on the decision to go home instead? Do you suppose empathy can not be explained by physical laws? Now what about my disgust of the thought of statutory rape (the consideration of how others will perceive me, and how i will perceive myself)? Can these not be engendered by biological principles emergent of physical laws?
Species which organize themselves in groups would do well to avoid internal conflict. Thus emerge the impulsive weight of empathizing.
we may agree that there is no real "picking between the two," that instead it is clear that man is a machine. But to say that this machine can be guided by basal instinct but not principles which emerge from these instincts through evolution seems to me an ignorance of the most basic concepts of the field of evolutionary ethics.

I think we may agree that we can't blame, in a material universe, the man for choosing rape, because he only did so only because he lacked certain principles. But the act of punishing or shaming is itself a way to engender these principles if not in the man then in those around us (recall my revulsion to being perceived/ perceiving myself as a rapist)

>>9474830
underrated post

>>7218131
>tendentiously equated value with desire
name one value which is not to be desired