this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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Philosophy
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Is anyone else in here a solopsist or is it just me?
It's a dangerous belief from an ethical standpoint. You could use it to justify horrible acts against others without any proof about their sentience.
we do this anyway though?
And that makes it OK?
i'm saying if we regularly do worse to creatures that we know are just as conscious as us...then it's obvious nobody would stop for a second to consider non-human/artificial life
I disagree. You are assuming that everyone who harms someone else does not care whether they are conscious or not, but there are certainly people who reconsider their actions when given the opportunity to reflect about their victim's life. It's called empathy.
Not if one were to consider other people parts of themselves.
I mean, that's easy to disprove because I can tell you plenty of things you don't know about me.
Are you suggesting you know everything about your body? Before school were you aware of genetics for example? If humans knew all the details of their bodies disease would cease to be an issue.
Please explain how my comment implied that in any way.
EDIT: So if I'm understanding you right, you're saying that you believe (even if only for the sake of argument) that other people are a "part of you" in such a way that you can't know things about them that they already know about themselves.
If so, I don't think that really changes the ethical problem. So what if you believe that you'd only be harming "yourself"? You still can't prove this, and so acting on that belief to do harm to others without guilt would be unjustified.
Assuming you're somehow not intentionally strawmanning my position: I surprisingly wasn't arguing for harming anything. I was arguing that solipsism isn't inherently bad.
There is a continuity counterargument to be made at that point: the closer people are to you, the more they know...until you know the most (not all) and people closest to you know things you dont know about yourself.
Who knows?! 😁