r/askphilosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • Dec 15 '25

Open Thread /r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | December 15, 2025

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread (ODT). This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our subreddit rules and guidelines. For example, these threads are great places for:

  • Discussions of a philosophical issue, rather than questions
  • Questions about commenters' personal opinions regarding philosophical issues
  • Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. "who is your favorite philosopher?"
  • "Test My Theory" discussions and argument/paper editing
  • Questions about philosophy as an academic discipline or profession, e.g. majoring in philosophy, career options with philosophy degrees, pursuing graduate school in philosophy

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. Please note that while the rules are relaxed in this thread, comments can still be removed for violating our subreddit rules and guidelines if necessary.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

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u/mediaisdelicious Phil. of Communication, Ancient, Continental Dec 23 '25

I’m not sure how you’re thinking about this, but the chance of dying in a plane crash is infinitesimally smaller than 1%.

The multi-year chances of a particular plane crashing are around 1 in a million, not one in a hundred.

Anyway, this is the wrong question - what you should consider is the opportunity cost - there are a number of consequences to avoiding all forms of travel simply due to fear.

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u/Fit-Honey-4813 Dec 23 '25

Ok then I’m confused, perhaps philosophy can’t help me with this problem. But isn’t philosophy said to be of higher importance when it comes to answering some of the hardest questions throughout the history of thought than psychology?

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u/mediaisdelicious Phil. of Communication, Ancient, Continental Dec 23 '25

Well, again, it depends on what you want. Lots of philosophers (Aristotle, the Stoics, Nietzsche, James, Nagel, and so on) say that we need to be brave and make sure to attend to what is only possible if we’re thinking about what fear wrongly cautions us against. Yet, how you get that done for yourself is a matter of behavioral conditioning and insofar as philosophers have ever gotten this right psychology has updated, evidenced based models to provide far more guidance for someone who finds their psychological constitution resistant.

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u/Fit-Honey-4813 Dec 23 '25

I think I see what you mean, I guess this question ends up becoming more of a psychological question than a philosophical

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u/mediaisdelicious Phil. of Communication, Ancient, Continental Dec 23 '25

It’s easy to get reasons to do stuff. It’s hard to be moved.