BluesF

Sure - state funded, in fact.

I think that's a misunderstanding of how ADHD, and in fact mental illness in general, works. Perhaps for some people removing the distraction will work, but more often in my experience another will just fit in its place. The phone is not the problem, it is a symptom.

Hmmm ... well, if I was going to hire, say, a chemist to work in a research lab, I need some way to identify if my candidates have the required skills/knowledge/etc. Now one way to quickly ascertain that is to see if they have a chemistry degree (or master's, PhD, whatever is necessary for the particular role). Possibly practical experience could be enough, also - I know people who have worked up through corporate labs without degrees.

However if someone comes and says "trust me, I've read a lot of papers and watched YouTube videos"... sure, they might know what they need, but how am I going to check? The point of a degree isn't necessarily just to legitimise that knowledge, it's also a stamp that says a trusted entity has confirmed you have those skills and knowledge. I'm not saying it's perfect, but there is a purpose to the whole institution.

Who would want other nicotine options without cigarettes or vaping? No one is starting out with nicorette.

Animals understanding of "morality" is extremely different to what we as humans understand as moral, and I'd argue that you can't actually ask them what they think is right or wrong, so you can't really know if their behaviour is based on morality or... well, anything else.

Regardless, semantics aside my primary question was how you arrive at the position that "gaining from someone else's loss is wrong" is an objective position to take... because I think that is just something you think is wrong.

So, regardless of the reasons behind it, it seems clear that we don't all know what is right - or certainly we don't agree - so where exactly does an objective morality fit into the picture?

So there exists an asbolute moral truth, but we have no way to determine what it is? I'm sure we can agree that morals don't have a physical form, so in what way does it "exist"?

Of course the Nazis weren't right by our standards, and of course they were/are by their own. But by what universal standard can we judge their morality against ours? How can we know that what we think is right is the objective morality?

Saying "it just is" really just means "I think so", and it there's as much reasonable backing for you to say it "just is" wrong to be a nazi as there is for someone to say it "just is" wrong to be gay.

Objectively it's morally wrong to gain from someone's loss. So... winning anything? Schadenfreude? A profitable short position? Picking a penny up from the ground?

Anyway, the specifics aside... how do you arrive at the conclusion that it is objectively wrong to gain from someone else's loss?

I agree with all of that, but I don't see how that deals with the problem that we don't even have consensus on a morality that we are all supposed to "know" by ourselves because it is objective and somehow contained within us. Why is there such disagreement on what is moral if we should all know what's right?

Moral "progress" only happens because of our collective judgement of what is right changing over time.

Ok so who's deciding which people are evil and which aren't? There are plenty of wrong things (according to me, today) that have been consensus among some for hundreds or even thousands of years. Adults marrying children. Slavery. Execution of homosexuals.

Or consider that vegan/vegetarians would say that slaughtering animals is wrong, and that they know that in the same "innate" way that you're describing... and yet the majority disagree with them. So who's right? Where can we get this objectivity? If it's just our "gut" then I'm sorry but there is not a single morality, there are 7 billion separate objective moralities.