The domain of moral philosophy has always interested me like no other, because of its immediate influence on lifestyle and everyday choices. Do you keep a promise, even if it's inconvenient? Do you give money to beggars or tell them to earn it themselves? If you could help someone by breaking the law, would you do it? The answers to these questions depend heavily on what you deem to be right and wrong, on the rights and obligations you believe people ought to have. Here I will describe a moral theory stated in terms of a conservation law.
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Before jumping in, one important remark. I believe that philosophy is the formalization of intuition,... (read 2143 more words →)
Thank you for your kind words! Unfortunately, Asymptote doesn't really have much of a community development platform, but I'll be trying to make smoothmanifold part of the official project in some way or another. Right now the development is so fast that the README is actually out of date... gotta fix that. So far, though, my talents seem less to help others and more to serve as a pleasurable pastime :)
I'm also glad that another person discovered Asymptote and liked it --- it's a language that I cannot stop to admire for the graphical functionality, ease of image creation (pdf's, jpeg's, svg's, etc., all with the same interface), and at the same time amazing programming potential (you can redefine any builtin function, for example, and Asymptote will carry on with your definition)
Of course, "conditional love" is considered a vague term for a reason. We can try to wrap it in a logically strict definition, but it will never quite capture the entirety of the concept. However, with your particular example I might actually disagree. A person's income is not really a quality, rather a consequence of internal factors such as persistence, intelligence, etc., as well as external factors such as luck. In the situation where Bob loses his job and can no longer find a new one, we may assume that he was just lucky to get it in the first place. In other words, Alice has been mistaking Bob for BOB while... (read more)
In my mind, conditional love always had to do with acceptance. If you love someone unconditionally, you love them for who they are, you admire their existing qualities. By contrast, loving someone conditionally means that you will love them on condition that they acquire some additional qualities. This is why it is considered to be toxic --- conditional love is not really about the person being 'loved', rather about an image of what that person could become.
We can quantify this concept in quite a neat way. Say that for any kind of love, there is a certain image of the loved person (Bob) in the head of the loving person (Alice), that... (read more)
Hello everyone! My name is Roman Maksimovich, I am an immigrant from Russia, currently finishing high school in Serbia. My primary specialization is mathematics, and back in middle school I have had enough education in abstract mathematics (from calculus to category theory and topology) to call myself a mathematician.
My other strong interests include computer science and programming (specifically functional programming, theoretical CS, AI, and systems programming s.a. Linux) as well as languages (specifically Asian languages like Japanese).
I ended up here after reading HP:MOR, which I consider to be an all-time masterpiece. The Sequences are very good too, although not that gripping. Rationality is a very important principle in my life, and so... (read more)
I agree with that, it basically states that there cannot be rights that contradict each other, i.e. you having the right to live, and me having the right to take your life. As for my formulation, perhaps it's a product of the culture I was raised in, but if one member of society claims to have some extra rights compared to others, I would expect them to justify these extra rights by taking on an obligation.
I suppose you mention basic human rights as examples of rights that are not balanced out by obligations. This is also perfectly... (read more)