Philosophy

L’égalité est-elle nécessairement juste ? (Translated to English) Is equality necessarily just? Taken from this nice list of 1996-2025 Philo Bac prompts To begin, we will consider equality to be that two identical inputs receive two identical outputs. Now, whether this equality is just, depends heavily on your definition of just: does justice mean that punishment is allocated mostly in proportion to the damage done, or that punishment is allocated mostly according to the actions taken. In the latter case, equality necessitates justice, but in the former case it does not. Let us consider two people driving down the road in heavy rain, making them unable to see clearly what is in front of them. Suppose that a farmer’s cow wanders on to the road in front of the first car, and is struck, and killed. In the latter definition, the just judgement would be to not punish the driver, as given the same information as the second driver they made the same judgement. This, however, leads to an issue when we consider the farmer’s perspective. Surely for the farmer, it matters little whether the driver did or did not intend to kill their cow, the core issue is that they had a cow and that cow is now dead as a result of the actions that the driver took. So, from the farmer’s perspective, this is not just. This is the core conflict: ...

Chercher à être heureux, est-ce une quête égoïste ? (Translated to English) Is searching for happiness a self-centred quest? Taken from the happiness section of the 1996-2025 Philo Bac Prompts The self-centeredness of happiness depends on its specific form. Namely, there are two main types of happiness: pleasure and fulfilment. Pleasure is happiness in its most primitive form, while fulfilment is a more abstract, less direct form of happiness, less common in creatures outside of humans. Things that cause pleasure vary little from person to person and are much more clear and consistent in their causality, while fulfilment is dependent mainly on the innards of one’s own mind. One does not imply the other: a rich man can feel unfulfilled with his life despite being able to fill every material desire, while on the other hand a poor man can be at peace. They are not mutually exclusive, but they tend to be inversely correlated, as too much pleasure can make one unmotivated to seek fulfilment. These definitions may lead one to believe that fulfilment is the more self-centred mode of happiness since it’s less dependent on the state of the outside world than pleasure, however often pleasure is zero-sum in nature. If I eat this piece of cake, you cannot also eat this piece of cake. In addition, fulfilment is very often dependent on helping others, while pleasure, being much more scalable, can also be automated with much greater effectiveness while cutting out others. Thus, we can say that lasting happiness requires others, while temporary happiness does not. Leading us to rephrase the above as: ...

A-t-on besoin d’artistes ? (Translated to English) Do we need artists? Taken from the art notion section of the 1996-2025 Philo Bac prompts One might say that they are not necessary, because they don’t directly contribute to creating more food and water and all of the other bare essentials for life. Ask a starving man if he needs artists and he would say no, he needs more farmers. This is, however, quite a reductionist perspective on the human experience. One could make the same argument with respect to an accountant, or a scientist, or a software engineer. In fact, much of the advancement in our world has come because of these folks, who interface with these abstractions over our basic necessities. The inventor of the tractor may not have handed us wheat directly, but they have no doubt allowed for the production of much more food than any individual farmer in history. What is the value provided by an artist, though? I would argue that art serves much the same purpose that education does; namely, shaping one’s mind to think in a different way. The opportunity cost of an artist is that their time and effort could have been dedicated to the preexisting fields of work, to directly help others in the present. Thus, the question of whether art is necessary reduces to the question of: ...

Hey guys! I saw a post a few days ago on X about how the French write these big philosophy essays when they graduate, and I was like “Wow, that must be scary”, and then I thought “Hey, there’s no way the French are all smarter than me, why can’t I do that”, and so, I have decided that I will practice writing French-style dissertations. A big thing about these dissertations is that it’s not just talking about a theme, it’s responding to a question. According to Claude and Assistance Scolaire Personnalisee1, there’s a few different parts to a dissertation, namely: ...

Hello! Quick throwaway post here. I was reading Normative Uncertainty by William MacAskill(Effective Altruism man) when I was flashbanged by the math. After some chatting with claude, apparently this is what makes analytic philosophy notable, as opposed to continental philosophy which is focused on society, culture, etc. What they don’t learn about apparently is analysis, which unlike logic, deals with continuous things.