Prejudice, actions, and consequences

Prejudice: Unreasoned opinion.
Fraud: Something intended to deceive.

If you bring prejudice to a rational discussion, and fail to announce it as such, you are committing intellectual fraud; doing both yourself and anyone whom you might be speaking to a great disservice.

The absolute truth is that which conforms completely with reality. In most cases, for most things, it is not up to you to make a decision about some thing or event. Reality will make the decision for you (metaphysical justice). It is up to you as a sentient entity to judge the facts of nature against the possible actions you might take in order to determine the consequent outcomes.

For example: if you jump off a cliff, you do not get to decide whether or not you die. This is already decided in advance by the height of the cliff and the structure of the ground below it.

For example: if you decide to behave unethically, you do not get to decide what the consequences of that behaviour will be. These have already been decided, and nature does not care that you were ignorant of your own psychology when these consequences ensue.

For example: if you decide that you do not need any savings, you do not get to decide what the consequences will be. Reality has decided these matters for you, they were never up to you. You had only the opportunity to correctly anticipate the consequences of your actions, and you failed to take that opportunity.

Actions have consequences. Causes have effects. You choose only the action, not the consequence.
To act upon prejudice (commonly called: "just my opinion") is to choose actions without having reasoned in any manner or form as to their consequences.

Again, you choose only the action, not the consequence, and you pay in your own blood for those actions which have bad consequences.

So, choose wisely.

 

It's a valid point, and one that needs clarifying:

Prejudice, from præjudicium, latin for "before judgement", where judgment refers to consideration of the facts of a matter; As distinct from the various forms of ignorance, which are simply the case of not being aware of the facts; In turn, distinct from willful ignorance which tends to be a subspecies of prejudice.

Prejudice necessarily presupposes ignorance, but prejudice is where the person has not attempted to research the facts of a matter but rather presents his or her position fraudulently as though it were the result of this research.

Prejudice may also take the form in which there exists a field or topic where there is little or no information, and therefore everyone is necessarily ignorant of the facts, but still disseminate opinions anyway. These are called rumours; a special subclass of prejudice.

On the topic of rumours, these should not be confused with reasoned speculation, which is the process by which one comes up with partial or possible conclusions based on currently available data.

So to recap:
Prejudice has the character that it is not backed by a set of logically consistent arguments reasoned from either first principles or obvious empirical facts, and also the character that it is disseminated by people who are ignorant of the facts, and also the character that it is fraudulently used in place of a reasoned argument with the intent to deceive the other or promote the ego or other interests of the first.

Whereas: Reasoned argument and reasoned speculation have the character that they are backed by reason and rationale (sets of consistent logical ideas based either from empirical facts or from first principles), and also the character that they accurately predict future events in reality, and are therefore useful and constitute a valid category of knowledge.

 

Irrationality and prejudice again have different characters.

To be irrational is to not (or to be not able to) acknowledge and consider the facts of reality in relation to your surroundings, whilst still needing to make decisions. That is: irrationality is some degree of disconnect between the reality of a situation and the decisions made.

This said, prejudice can take the form of some irrationality. For example: irrational fears are a form of prejudice.

Humans and animals alike, to the degree they possess intelligence, evaluate their surroundings as best they can, and formulate the appropriate actions which at least appear to be in the service of the preservation of their own life, or the achievement of their biologically set or otherwise chosen goals.

Generally we would say that someone who is entirely irrational has a mental incapacity. That is: they are a medical retard.

Whereas prejudice is, again, the holding of beliefs without evidence or reason to back those beliefs, and is almost always held for some special reason of its own.

Without getting into too much of a tangent, it suffices to say that people tend to absorb prejudice as part of a group or culture through a relatively complex psychological process. The reason for holding the prejudice is usually long in the past of the person spouting it, and has primarily to do with ego defense and the false-self.

But again, the cause of prejudice is very much beside the point. My aim in starting the thread was to help people properly identify it as a category of fraudulent thought so that it might be put to the side to let real debates proceed.

 

As far as you are concerned life itself is predetermined. You did not ask to be born, and yet you are here. You did not ask to have the drive to survive and continue your life, and yet you have it. And you did not ask to be driven to reproduce, and yet it drives the majority of your actions.

So for you, and for me, and for those reading this, life is a given, predetermined constant.

As to the capacity you have to make decisions, I take a more or less compatibilist position in the free-will vs determinist debate.

That is: I do not question your capacity to make decisions about your actions, but this capacity to act, in itself, relies on the deterministic nature of reality -- I.e: that your actions will have some predetermined consequences, whether desired or undesired -- and in turn, your decision making capacities are fed by the deterministic nature of reality -- that is: given the same input in continuous repeats of your life, you would make the same decisions about the same subjects, leading to the same actions.

As to whether or not hypothetical true free will actually exists: I don't particularly care. It seems at least to me that it does, because I am continuously required to make decisions about my future, and these decisions rely on the deterministic / causal nature of reality, and since the outcome of this debate will not affect the facts of my own experience and my own existence, I do not particularly care what that outcome is.