ask a question

recent responses

all topics

info

⚲

Freedom

A famous brazilian stand-up comedian has made a joke in which he said that ugly women should be thankfull if they were raped, after all, the rapists would be doing them a favor - since they are ugly, rape is an opportunity for them to have sex. Many people have considered this joke to be rape apology, while many others have considered it to be an exercise in freedom of speech. My question is not about whether the joke is funny or not (well... It isn't), but wether this comedian should be in some way punished for telling it in public. What do you philosophers think? Are there limits to humour?

I don't think he or she should be punished. In most countries there is no law against saying idiotic things and that seems right me.
Freedom
Physics

Do the developments in quantum mechanics (i.e. the best we can do on a very micro level is give probability distributions), really have anything to say about free will? It might mean that determinism isn't true (although there could be a weaker "probabilistic determinism" that gives the likelihood of different possible events), but introducing chance into the equation isn't helpful to free will either.

Also agreed. Here is an argument that determinism doesn’t undermine, butenhances, free will. (1) Our actions are caused by our propositional attitudes,such as desire, hope, acceptance and belief. (2) The more deterministic the relationship between out attitudesand our actions, the more freedom of will we possess. (4) The more control we have over our own attitudes the morefreedom of will we possess. (5) Our control overown attitudes consists in the influence of some of our attitudes over others.E.g. We want to smoke. We also want not to smoke (These are called first-orderdesires) And we want not to want tosmoke and we do not want to want to smoke. (These are called second-orderdesires) We have freedom of the will toextent that our desire not to want to smoke wins out. (From ‘Freedom of theWill and the Concept of a Person’, Harry Frankfurt, The Journal of Philosophy,1971). (6) The more deterministic the relationship between oursecond-order desires and our first-order...