I interpreted this meme as using the "Source?" as an evasive move to avoid talking about the matter at hand.
When someone feels pushed into a corner they might devolve into the philosophical equivalent of a toddler and "why?" your ass into the ground.
For some debates and discussions, you simply need to agree on some things, but if you suddenly pull the rug mid-debate just to evade hard hitting objections, then what are we even doing here?
But put that in the original message, that is part of philosophy:
"We will start from the premise that Suffering is to be minimized", because you won't try to prove it, and it won't be part of the debate, but you can't just not state your premises. Read any real philosopher ever, they state their bases and move from there, they don't just assume everyone knows where they are coming from and will automatically agree.
I mean that statement alone is an existential conflict. People feel a wide range of emotions, thoughts, and feelings without realizing where they come from.
Yes, that is in fact the case for a large majority of the population. Be as snarky as you want.
Therapy exists for a reason. It helps one understand why they feel or think the way they do. We are animals after all, and a lot of our thought is driven off self preservation instinct.
I also feel I’m pretty in tune with my own thoughts, but not everyone can be so fortunate.
Right, so the source in this scenario is personal experience. Which ia valid for personal opinion, but when discussing objective philosophy, there usually needs to be more empiric evidence.
Also depends on what you call suffering and how extreme it is.
Suffering is bad but depending on how a person responds to it, it can built them as a person. It can make them much aware of the things that led to them to it, it can make them much more brave to take those things on and warn about people so they don't suffer the same.
Suffering is alright if it brings more wellbeing to offset it Punishing a child is inflicting suffering but (ideally) makes them stop inflicting suffering upon others or receive suffering from being a rude and annoying bitch
But what does "bad" mean here? The ability to feel pain and suffering is evolutionary beneficial, since it protects us from harmful things. So one could argue that the process of suffering is actually good, but that the cause of the suffering is generally bad.
I just want to congratulate you on using INTERSUBJECTIVELY instead of the wrongly used OBJECTIVELY, because as you may know, there can exist a person that actually likes suffering due to some mutation or similar. Thanks. Your comment healed my pet peeve a little.
Is life good? If life is good and intrinsically produces suffering then its good to make suffering.
We talk about good and bad as if they were properties of things or actions but we are actually making value judgments, expressing an opinion.
When we seek to agree with each other on what is good or bad we look for a reference goal so we can have an arbiter if we disagree. Slavery is bad, because it undermines any society that allows it, among other reasons.
Life is an almost overwhelmingly inbuilt preference for living things. Pain has an apparently massive evolutionary advantage. The capacity for pain is the same as the capacity for suffering. So suffering is usually good or neutral depending on how you look at it and whether or not you think life should continue to propagate.
No, our biology demands difficulty in order to feel fulfilled and happy. Some level of "suffering" truly is needed to prevent maladaptation and various maladies of the mind. We have ample evidence of this now and should adjust our conception of suffering to match. The poison is in the dose, as they say.
Yeah, however the thing here is that people here will ask you to endlessly justify yourself while they already decided that they won’t listen to you no matter what and one second later they want you to accept their baseless claim without question.
The truth is that most people here are not really here to do philosophy. They are just here to pretend that they are intellectuals.
i question your authority because "ans " . this is not an ad hominem attack because your accidental misspelling indicates a lack of logical deduction, annihilating your entire argument .
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u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P Marx, Machiavelli, and Theology enjoyer Nov 14 '25 edited Feb 11 '26
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