7 ms·

I'm talking about YOU, not what your parents did. YOU personally had no ability to determine in which country you were born in.

TapWaterBandit 6y ago
Well duh, noone who has ever lived has willed themselves into existence. But just because you didn't will yourself into existence, that doesn't then imply that the circumstances of your existence are based on luck. My parents chose to have a kid, where else would I be born except in the country where my mother chose to live? There was 0 luck involved, I wasn't going to randomly pop into existence in Mongolia when my parents decided to have a kid while both living in Australia. If you apply your reasoning to any other area in life you can see how silly it is. If you put in a lot of work/effort into building a car, is the existence of the car the product of "luck"? After all it had no more choice in where it was created than a person.
- jason0597 5y ago
  >If you apply your reasoning to any other area in life you can see how silly it is. If you put in a lot of work/effort into building a car, is the existence of the car the product of "luck"? After all it had no more choice in where it was created than a person. That is a false analogy. We're talking about you being born, not you putting effort into building a car. Why are you switching the argument around to where your parents decided to settle? The whole point is about where you are born, not the area your parents decide to give birth in.
  - TapWaterBandit 5y ago
    If you can't intuitively understand the relevance of where my parents live (more specifically my pregnant mother) to where I am born, then I am not going to be able to make you understand it. You seem to be getting hung up on the fact that when two people decide to create a car they are creating an inanimate object (which they own in totality) and when they create a child they create a person with human rights and that will develop into it's own autonomous individual. But this difference has absolutely 0 relevance to the question of whether or not the circumstances of your birth are the result of luck. Either they both are (which I think you can see is silly) or neither are (which is true but seems to be an idea you are resistant to for some reason). Like I said at the start, this whole "the circumstances of your birth are luck" is a truism (in the philosophical sense) without any real thought put into whether or not it makes any sense. It could be luck in the deterministic sense of "the entire universe is pre-ordained" but if you believe in free will for the individual at all in any area, then the circumstances of one's birth are not luck.
    - po8crg 5y ago
      The circumstances of your birth are luck for you. They are not luck for your parents but you are not your parents. One of the problems here is that there is one position that everything is either the result of my decisions (ie under my control) or it is luck (ie it is not under my control) and another that defines luck much more narrowly. Anything that happens to you as a result of someone else's decision is luck for you, even though it's a controlled decision for them. And you had no control over your conception because you didn't exist at the time. Or, to put this in the simplest possible terms: "other people's free will is your luck".

TapWaterBandit 6y ago

Well duh, noone who has ever lived has willed themselves into existence. But just because you didn't will yourself into existence, that doesn't then imply that the circumstances of your existence are based on luck. My parents chose to have a kid, where else would I be born except in the country where my mother chose to live? There was 0 luck involved, I wasn't going to randomly pop into existence in Mongolia when my parents decided to have a kid while both living in Australia. If you apply your reasoning to any other area in life you can see how silly it is. If you put in a lot of work/effort into building a car, is the existence of the car the product of "luck"? After all it had no more choice in where it was created than a person.

jason0597 5y ago
>If you apply your reasoning to any other area in life you can see how silly it is. If you put in a lot of work/effort into building a car, is the existence of the car the product of "luck"? After all it had no more choice in where it was created than a person. That is a false analogy. We're talking about you being born, not you putting effort into building a car. Why are you switching the argument around to where your parents decided to settle? The whole point is about where you are born, not the area your parents decide to give birth in.
- TapWaterBandit 5y ago
  If you can't intuitively understand the relevance of where my parents live (more specifically my pregnant mother) to where I am born, then I am not going to be able to make you understand it. You seem to be getting hung up on the fact that when two people decide to create a car they are creating an inanimate object (which they own in totality) and when they create a child they create a person with human rights and that will develop into it's own autonomous individual. But this difference has absolutely 0 relevance to the question of whether or not the circumstances of your birth are the result of luck. Either they both are (which I think you can see is silly) or neither are (which is true but seems to be an idea you are resistant to for some reason). Like I said at the start, this whole "the circumstances of your birth are luck" is a truism (in the philosophical sense) without any real thought put into whether or not it makes any sense. It could be luck in the deterministic sense of "the entire universe is pre-ordained" but if you believe in free will for the individual at all in any area, then the circumstances of one's birth are not luck.
  - po8crg 5y ago
    The circumstances of your birth are luck for you. They are not luck for your parents but you are not your parents. One of the problems here is that there is one position that everything is either the result of my decisions (ie under my control) or it is luck (ie it is not under my control) and another that defines luck much more narrowly. Anything that happens to you as a result of someone else's decision is luck for you, even though it's a controlled decision for them. And you had no control over your conception because you didn't exist at the time. Or, to put this in the simplest possible terms: "other people's free will is your luck".