All the people I love the most aren't actually real, only I am – if one seriously believes that, it is going to do a great deal of harm to one's mental health.
Solipsism can ethically justify all kinds of horrors. "Other people only exist in my own mind, so if I murder/torture/etc them, those acts are just figments of my own imagination: there is little ethical difference between murdering someone for real and watching a murder on TV"
If a belief is impossible for a human being to seriously believe while maintaining their health, sanity and humanity, I think that in itself is a good argument that the belief must be false.
Why? Why can't the world be a cruel and indifferent place? Take for example the babies that had to be left behind by hospital staff in one of the Gaza hospitals when it was occupied by the IOF and when the doctors could come back a few weeks later they found the rotting corpses of these babies who had been left to starve, alone and afraid, by the Israeli soldiers.
If you were one of these newborns and somehow con-cious and you had to choose between 'I have been left here to die' and 'Mommy loves me and is coming soon', would you reject the former as obviously false since it's incompatible with health, sanity, and humanity?
I think so easily dismissing the cruelty and insanity of the world is in itself inhumane.
> Why? Why can't the world be a cruel and indifferent place?
Society runs on faith–that the cruelty and insanity of the world, while undeniable, has its limits. Historically (and even for the majority of the global population today), that faith was most often religious, but it also comes in secular versions – everyone from communists to LGBT activists to the New Atheist movement has a faith that history is "on their side", even if they do not believe in any divine assurance of that. A society in which everyone (or even the clear majority) have given up faith and hope, is a society doomed to wither and die, and be replaced by societies which still retain those things (if there be any other societies retaining that faith left to replace it).
The problem with solipsism, is not that it supposes the world is sometimes cruel and insane, but that it destroys one's faith that said cruelty and insanity has any limits. And without that faith, the continued functioning of society becomes impossible.
Does that have any relevance to the tragic case of a newborn abandoned to starve? They can't constitute a society, so concerns of what beliefs are necessary for society to function aren't relevant to them.
> If you were one of these newborns and somehow con-cious and you had to choose between 'I have been left here to die' and 'Mommy loves me and is coming soon', would you reject the former as obviously false since it's incompatible with health, sanity, and humanity?
If believing that "Mommy loves me and is coming soon" gives comfort to a dying child, and eases (however slightly) the pain of their horrific death, then I would want them to believe it–and if I were them, I would want to believe it too. It is better for a dying child to believe comforting falsehoods than painful truths–truth has no value for them, and falsehoods can do them no harm.
All the people I love the most aren't actually real, only I am – if one seriously believes that, it is going to do a great deal of harm to one's mental health.
Solipsism can ethically justify all kinds of horrors. "Other people only exist in my own mind, so if I murder/torture/etc them, those acts are just figments of my own imagination: there is little ethical difference between murdering someone for real and watching a murder on TV"
If a belief is impossible for a human being to seriously believe while maintaining their health, sanity and humanity, I think that in itself is a good argument that the belief must be false.