Perhaps chief among them is how to identify what an act is.
I think you’re greatly underestimating the degree to which the fuzziness in category boundaries is inherent in reality and in the distance between fundamental reality and human perception, as opposed to being something social that we can address with better word definitions.
I am revising this view. My motivation is that I think we should have a category of actions that we do categorically rule out. Yes, the category will be fuzzy, but a good life requires being the type of person who can draw a hardline at times to say, “This I simply will not do, and no argument or circumstance will make me do it.”
I’m glad you’re acknowledge that it’s a person drawing the lines. It sounds like, at least implicitly, you’re acknowledging that those lines need not, and should not, be in the same place for all people. The lines are not the same for me as they would be for a president, a general, a doctor, a starving orphan, a medieval peasant, or a hunter-gatherer. They also are not the same for a child as they are for an adult, in ways that the child is not yet capable of understanding or predicting. So, then, there must be times and ways for a person to reassess themselves and their lines over the course of their lives. In other words, the “I” and “me” in that paragraph is one that only exists at a moment in time, and has only a quantitative rather than binary identity with the entities before and after that go by the same name. There are choices I’ve made and things I’ve done that Anthony-2008, Anthony-2013, and Anthony-2018 would all have very confidently drawn some very stark lines prohibiting. I see no contradiction in this, because I’m no longer those people. I’ve grown, learned, and changed, and I consider the relevant changes positive.
I think you’re greatly underestimating the degree to which the fuzziness in category boundaries is inherent in reality and in the distance between fundamental reality and human perception, as opposed to being something social that we can address with better word definitions.
I’m glad you’re acknowledge that it’s a person drawing the lines. It sounds like, at least implicitly, you’re acknowledging that those lines need not, and should not, be in the same place for all people. The lines are not the same for me as they would be for a president, a general, a doctor, a starving orphan, a medieval peasant, or a hunter-gatherer. They also are not the same for a child as they are for an adult, in ways that the child is not yet capable of understanding or predicting. So, then, there must be times and ways for a person to reassess themselves and their lines over the course of their lives. In other words, the “I” and “me” in that paragraph is one that only exists at a moment in time, and has only a quantitative rather than binary identity with the entities before and after that go by the same name. There are choices I’ve made and things I’ve done that Anthony-2008, Anthony-2013, and Anthony-2018 would all have very confidently drawn some very stark lines prohibiting. I see no contradiction in this, because I’m no longer those people. I’ve grown, learned, and changed, and I consider the relevant changes positive.