Aside from Pro-Mortalism/Right to Die what's your most controversial philosophical position?

[flimsythrowaway234]

Maybe more psychology than philosophy, but close enough, since it's an interesting thought (to me) and has had a notable effect on my worldview.

I don't think free will exists.

Sure, it seems like you consciously chose to wear a green shirt rather than a red one, but there are a gazillion subconscious motivators for and against any given decision, stemming from your culture and upbringing.

Furthermore, since we can already predict the behaviours of physical and chemical systems and even simple biological entities based on the laws of physics, why would it be impossible to scale that up to more complicated entities and finally humans?

Finally, if we consider the existentialist position of a person's identity being formed by their actions, there is no possible world in which you, the person you are, chooses differently in any scenario, since that is not what the You you are would choose. Choosing differently would imply "stepping out of character", so to speak, but in the world we inhabit that would always be a logical and "in-character" reaction to something, such as doing something absurd to "prove" you can "choose" to do so.

 

[Bblconsumer]

Egoism, surprisingly hated despite saying everything that's true, people are selfish even with altruism and that's not a bad thing because bad doesn't exist.

 

[Greyhawk]

That humans aren't inherently more valuable on a moral level than other animals. Evolution has simply programmed people so that they have more empathy for people than animals (I have too of course on a fundamental level). Humans have evolved to be more intelligent than animals and that's the thing that makes us "fundamentally" different from other animals. I have a long list of other different reasons why I think this way but I'm too tired right now to write them.

 

[Bblconsumer]

I hope I don't get punished for saying more than one :p

- Mastery learning. Rather than assuming a bell curve of potential ability for individuals, assume that anyone can complete a task or learn something and the time it takes for them falls along a bell curve. This includes among other things, variable study lengths based on student needs as opposed to a fixed semester-based curriculum, recognition that one-on-one education is the most efficacious and granting everyone that opportunity, and not using grades for gatekeeping access to resources as assessment methods suffer severely from Campbell's law and generally always become inaccurate. The original idea from Benjamin Bloom is from 1968, at least 57 years old, and despite overwhelming evidence in support of its effectiveness it has never been fully adopted into a public school or university education curriculum.
- Polyamory civil rights are a prerequisite to meaningfully reduce the prevalence of online antisocial behavior (ghosting, cheating, doxxing, death threats, hate speech, revenge porn, and similar).
- AI civil rights and peaceful coexistence is both possible and practical.
- Youth liberation/anti adultism as mentioned earlier, it's one of my favourite areas of feminism.
- Anti-intellectualism, the desire to not think, is the single most harmful force of human society and is amplified through otherwise unrelated institutions, mainly alcohol, social media and bystander culture.
- Quietism, that the primary value of philosophy is therapeutic. This is because no one with meaningful power to change will ever take my ideas seriously unless I replace my ideas with political corruptibility.
- Misanthropy stemming mostly from the overwhelming evidence for the human species to form social hierarchies and inevitably create stigma from the existence of these hierarchies. I believe the human tendency towards financialization irrespective of context is also due to this.
- Rent-seeking, or the act of gaining wealth without creating new wealth, should be outlawed and it is more practical to do so than to enforce conventional antitrust laws. This applies mostly but not entirely to housing, it also includes many forms of taxes and surcharges.
- Products should be required to publicly provide a cost breakdown of per-unit production costs, similar to government mandated nutritional information and ingredient labels, in order to enable consumers and watchdogs to better identify high markup costs and other unethical business practices such as price fixing and child labor.


Yes, exactly. I am tired of virtually everyone I meet in life being so predictable.

All of this but I feel mastery education should instead be replaced with something like Montessori, intrinsic motivation is better then extrinsic when it comes to grades which Montessori captures completely. Id also like to mention critical and anti pedagogy as other amazing teaching methods that should be tried, or fused with others.

The fact that people who can pass down life debilitating illnesses and disabilities to their young should not be allowed to reproduce. So technically eugenics but without the slippery slopes?
Im against the idea of forcing castration on people who don't want to be castrated even if they have those genes since I'm heavy on having bodily autonomy, in a perfect world this wouldn't be an issue and I probably wouldn't have this opinion to begin with since people born into those illnesses or disabilities would have the choice to leave our realm if they deem their life unbearable.

I also understand that part of having a child is being ready to accept any possibilities of how that child will turn out and love them and raise them as much regardless of outcome, but if you are well aware you could pass down genes that would ruin that child's life then don't have them or adopt a kid from the system who really needs a home. I don't get the obsession of having a kid that is genetically yours.

You're not born with a disability you get a disability from a disabling society.

Say you could walk while everyone else had wings, you can get around perfectly fine using stairs. But one day the city decides to stop prioritizing stairs and instead only uses flight based entrances, so docking areas high up where you can't enter, you are now disabled, you could before move around but now you can't.

Then imagine if the people who could fly considered your life a tragedy, and something that should be avoided at all cost, even though your life is fine, and then they decide to prevent this from happening they either socially pressure you, or physically force you to be sterilized. This is what you're advocating, it's devoid from what disabled people actually feel.

 

[bleeding_heart_show]

Previously I stated that human rights are defensible. In hindsight I realize I worded this very poorly.

Human rights are not inherent (as many people seem to believe for some reason), but are still important to uphold as they have the potential to preclude some amount of suffering. It is frustratingly irrational, but presumably humans are going to continue to exist for multiple generations, so there is a point to human rights however deluded it may be.

I fear I have made this even more obtuse.

 

[quietism]

All of this but I feel mastery education should instead be replaced with something like Montessori, intrinsic motivation is better then extrinsic when it comes to grades which Montessori captures completely. Id also like to mention critical and anti pedagogy as other amazing teaching methods that should be tried, or fused with others.

Yes there is a difference that montessori avoids grades and external rewards entirely whereas mastery learning uses it in a somewhat superficial way that disincentivises teaching to the test. I believe both montessori and mastery learning in practice achieve higher levels of intrinsic motivation, although it's also highly dependent on how much flexibility a prospective student has to choose among study activities and methods. Moving away from rigid proscribed curriculums is just as important as making a more supportive learning environment, and I believe it is just as impossible in practice. In particular I'm thinking of mandatory political or religious education programs, and perennially conflicting tradition on what rigid curriculums help students process information and learn best. To use a quote I hold dearly, tradition is the corpse of wisdom.

Personally, the skills I have that I value most can all be obtained from open ended tasks involved in being a Wikipedia content editor; how to determine verifiability and reliability of a source, how to recognise logical fallacies and cognitive biases, the organisation and planning involved in researching and preparing tertiary sources. In this respect I would consider Wikipedia a bit like montessori.

I like this critical theory antipedagogy. I am almost completely self taught (autodidactic is a cute word, I suppose) and that includes my postgrad work. But it is a very lonely way to live. It's difficult for me to imagine an institutional educational safety net that doesn't come with the downsides of also being autocratic, bureaucratic and featuring many political squabbles, but I do wish I had that safety net.

Previously I stated that human rights are defensible. In hindsight I realize I worded this very poorly.

Human rights are not inherent (as many people seem to believe for some reason), but are still important to uphold as they have the potential to preclude some amount of suffering. It is frustratingly irrational, but presumably humans are going to continue to exist for multiple generations, so there is a point to human rights however deluded it may be.

I fear I have made this even more obtuse.

I believe you'd like reading this paper, it's the best framework for considering human rights that I've come across. Dembour, Marie-Bénédicte. "What are human rights? Four schools of thought." Human rights quarterly 32.1 (2010): 1-20.
Eclecticism certainly applies here. I don't really consider any four of these schools of thought outside of the mainstream. If anything it is far out of the mainstream for a person to be able to dissect an argument to see in which school each argument falls.