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>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

>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 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".