> Pretend you’re a disembodied soul and can end up absolutely anywhere in the world, and in any body. Now what if you’re the one with a debilitating disease, or you’re the parent to the child with one, and you’re too poor to access this service.

Then you're in the same situation that you would be in if the service had never been created. The presumption that no lives should be improved unless all lives are improved strikes me as vapid. Ridding the world of opportunity is not a good solution to the problem of opportunity hoarding.

> If determinism is true, then if S can do A, S does A. (premise)

This does not follow. As I understand it, the definition of hard determinism says "If determinism is true, then if S does A, S did so because of the interaction of physical laws on the prior state of the universe."

This renders Premise 5 ("So if determinism is true, then we believe only the truth. (from 1, 4)") nonsensical, because, from the reformulated #3: "If determinism is true, then we believe what the interaction of physical laws on the prior state of the universe result in us believing."

Therefore "I believe I have free will. (empirical premise)" is meaningless, as while the state of the universe creates that belief, there is no mechanism that allows belief to influence the past state of the universe.

So I'm not sure I understand where this is supposed to lead.

This article starts out shaky for me, and never really finds its footing. Consider the following passages:

> On one level, we can ask whether human life is valuable in the sense of having inviolable moral status: life is worth living always and unconditionally.

and,

> One may believe that terminally ill patients ought to stay alive and yet maintain – without inconsistency – that their life is not worth living for them.

An obligation to life, whether one understands that as lives ought not be taken by others for any reason, that everyone alive has an affirmative duty to maintain their lives regardless of their circumstances or both, has nothing to do with whether a life is worth living. It's trivially easy to have an obligation to some task that is broadly, or even unanimously, understood as valueless.

If the claim that...

> If your character and intellect are irreparably corrupt, you should hasten to exit life no matter what other goods, including bodily health, you may happen to enjoy. The reason is not that you do not deserve to live, from the legal or moral point of view, but that such living is bad for you – whether you are aware of it or not.

...is to be evaluated, any idea of life having some "inviolable moral status" must be moot. Not in the sense that it's potentially wrong, but in that is irrelevant. Because whether one believes that this status renders "life is worth living always and unconditionally" or simply that it must always be lived worthwhile or not, then what is the point of examining whether it is in fact, worthwhile, if the answer to the question cannot or need not be acted upon?

If a philosopher concludes that someone's isn't worth living because it blatantly betrays their station in society and the Universe at large, what next? If the person disagrees, the philosopher is free to decree that they pity the person all the more for being somehow "not aware of their misery". But what good does that do? (Although there are some definitions of meaning that posit understanding the self to be better than others plays a role.) If the person agrees, and seeks to end their life, life's inviolable moral status prevents them for having a socially-sanctioned means of doing so. (And should they do so anyway, and the philosopher's involvement is learned of, they will likely have a lawsuit on their hands.) Because of this it's understood that should the person simply tell the philosopher to "get bent," the philosopher has no recourse. So the invocation of life's infinite value due to its "inviolable moral status," and further discussion of same, is a digression that adds nothing to the piece.

Devoting those portions of the article to laying out (and perhaps making the case for) how Mr. Machek believes "the ancient philosophers" would have defined a given person's "station in society and the Universe at large" (and/or how Mr. Machek believes modern people should define them) would have been more useful. Those criteria must relate to the individual in question (or their circumstances), or the second half of the title: "For the ancients, it depends" is inaccurate.

I think this would have been especially useful in the sense that a human has a station in "the Universe at large," given how debatable a point that is. As far as many people are concerned, any given, or even all, human life is absolutely irrelevant in the Universe at large. If the argument here is that this viewpoint is fundamentally unsound to the point that it can render one's life not worth living for holding it, direct support for that, even in brief would have enhanced the article.

I think that this is scaled too large. There are plenty of more personal situations that one can use to attempt to make the same point, because the basic premise is dirt simple: Does it make sense to inform someone of a situation that is likely to cause them fear, stress, sorrow or whatever intense emotion you care to name, when they have no agency over the situation, and once the occurrence is complete, whether they knew in advance is basically moot?

In the end, this comes across as a variation on a Trolley Problem, where there isn't really a "correct" answer, so the point is to better understand one's own thought process. I suspect a more down-to-Earth scenario would make this useful for that.

Okay, I'll bite. Why put "views" into scare quotes? If views is not the correct term, put your cards on the table... how should J. K. Rowling's thought processes be characterized or described?

> Individuals who saw Bill Cosby’s comedy in the 1980s are infinitely more likely to recognize his talent despite his actions because they did not experience his comedy with a predefined bias of him being a predator. Likewise, people who experienced his comedy after his actions became public are absolutely more likely to perceive the comedy in a different light.

I don't really find this to be true. I've met more than a few people who experienced Mr. Cosby's work prior to the allegations being leveled who then became convinced that said work lacked merit or talent.

It's possible that what is at work here is the idea that solidarity with the targets of injustice means having an active unwillingness to ascribe any positive attitudes to those perceived as unjust.

And, interestingly, perhaps vice versa as well. I told an acquaintance that I had no interest in reading any of the Harry Potter books, and was thanked for supporting people in the trans community. To be clear, I don't care for that brand of young adult fiction, and didn't even when I was in the target demographic. (I "noped" out on the Narnia books the moment I realized that all of the protagonists were children, even though I was in junior high school myself at the time.) But the perception was that I had a problem with J. K. Rowling's public stances, rather than her actual writing.

The author lays out two lines of thought when discussing their Scenario Two:

> Second, if I have propinquity towards the victim or am sympathetic to their cause, I would abandon listening to the artist altogether. In that case, one can argue that we cannot separate art from the artist.

The first is that purchasing an offender's art directly contributes to their material well-being, and the second is that interacting with an offender's art is a way of excusing their actions, and is thus a problem for their targets.

But I also think that many people operate under a third line of reasoning, and that is that art produced by people who have committed serious offenses is objectively bad art; in other words, one judges the quality of the art by the reputation of the artist.

I first encountered this in a discussion of the paintings of Adolf Hitler. I quickly found myself in the minority, due to my perception that while his work didn't reach the levels of The Old Masters or anything, the man had considerably more talent than I, and I appreciated his work on that level. Nearly all of the other people present concluded that the work was utter garbage. Similarly, I've heard people say that Bill Cosby was not a good stand-up comedian or actor, but that he's somehow tricked or bullied people into having a long career in the entertainment industry. This strikes me as a dubious argument, but I've learned the futility of contesting it.

I think this idea that good art also requires good moral standing, while it may be a raging logical fallacy, is common enough (at least in the United States) that its absence was somewhat conspicuous for me.

I think that the essay is too ambitious. I admire that ambition, especially given that English is not the author's first language, but there is an attempt to pack too much into this, and so, despite its length, it tends to rely on superficial assertions of facts. This results in an interesting contradiction; despite the main thrust of the essay being how many people hold their worldviews uncritically when they should engaged in deeper examination and reflection, the essay itself is uncritical of the myriad assertions it makes, and comes across as cherry-picking from the lengthy history of philosophy and psychology those select quotes that support the points being made, and dismissing all else.

This essay also indulges in the common trope of treating the whole of homo sapiens as if it were some sort of singular hive-mind, rather than a vast collection of individuals who see one another in different lights depending on their own worldviews. In other words, the author routinely refers to "we" to mean humanity writ large, rather than speaking of those people who fit the specific description. Because clearly, the "we" who "are stubbornly refusing to embrace our 'irrational side' and waiting for things to make rational sense" is not the whole of humanity, given the number of people the author quotes in support of their viewpoint.

And there is little point in positing some unenumerated percentage of humanity must go along with some random Substack essay in order to conclude that "we" are now right-thinking and properly cognizant of all of the factors that drive "us." Especially when there seems to be no allowance made for different cultures or circumstances.

RadioLab covered this topic back in the day, and they have a pretty good description of the research: https://radiolab.org/episodes/104010-one-good-deed-deserves-another

(Edited, because I suck at early-morning typing.)