What is right and what is wrong and how do we know?
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." - William Shakespeare, Act 2, Scene 2, "Hamlet".
Is right and wrong just a matter of thinking something is right (e.g. it is right to save and improve lives) and something is wrong (e.g. theft, fraud, rape, robbery, enslaving, torture and murder are wrong)? Is there any way to know for sure what is right and what is wrong? Different countries have different laws. Even the same country has different laws at different times. How do we decide what should be legal and what should be illegal?
Is right and wrong just a matter of thinking something is right (e.g. it is right to save and improve lives) and something is wrong (e.g. theft, fraud, rape, robbery, enslaving, torture and murder are wrong)? Is there any way to know for sure what is right and what is wrong? Different countries have different laws. Even the same country has different laws at different times. How do we decide what should be legal and what should be illegal?
Comments (404)
Quoting Truth Seeker
For my money, I dont think we decide questions of legality by appealing to some eternal moral law written into the fabric of the universe. Instead, we put together compromises that let us get along with one another while pursuing our different projects. Hence the public conversation about morality which result in law reform and an evolution of what is right and wrong over time.
So it seems that the line between legal and illegal is not discovered, its negotiated. What matters isnt whether a law corresponds to some deep moral truth, but whether it works well enough for the purposes of reducing cruelty, minimising conflict, and keeping social life manageable. So the foundation of most moral systems seems to be preventing harm and promoting wellbeing. We can certainly decide not to do this and see what happens.
Given humans are a social species and getting on with each other has been the source of our strength and success (such as they are) its clear to see how not killing, not stealing, not lying and not assaulting others works to all our advantages. But there are always situations where even these prohibitions may not be useful.
If anybody has any ethical questions, they can just ask me.
Yep, that's an option too.
Veganism prevents harm and promotes the well-being of trillions of sentient organisms. Yet, more than 99% of the humans currently alive (8.24 billion) are not yet vegan. Non-vegans kill 80 billion land organisms and 1 to 3 trillion aquatic organisms per year. Why isn't veganism legally mandatory in all countries?
Because not enough people care about the welfare of animals, and eating meat is deeply embedded in our culture. The moral conversations of many cultures haven't taken this matter seriously as yet.
Youre understanding my point back to front. Across ethical systems, a common theme is the prevention of harm. This does not imply that every possible instance of harm is recognized or codified into the moral principles of a culture. Ethical systems are selective, shaped by historical, social, and practical considerations. Some harms may go unnoticed or be considered acceptable in certain contexts, while others are amplified as morally significant.
We may disagree about what makes a good meal, but we can know edible from poisonous fairly reliably.
Some people may think that torture is justifiable under some circumstances, and others think it is never justified. But anyone who complained that there was not enough torture going on in society, as if torture were itself a good thing, would be a lunatic.
There are no falsehood seekers, only truth seekers.
Our disagreements over good and bad tend to be matters of priority - Is it better to let the robber take your stuff or kill them? We agree that best is to not have your stuff taken and not kill anyone, but...
Although I can't prove anything beyond that, and the discussion is purely philosophical beyond that point, I think that any assertion of morality should not violate this core tenant.
You are right in that ethical systems are selective. That's why non-vegans murder sentient organisms and think they are doing the right thing, even though there are vegan options that avoid the deliberate exploitation and murder of sentient organisms.
How would we work out whose priority matters? Vegans prioritise saving and improving the lives of nonhuman sentient organisms, but non-vegans don't. Are vegans in the right and the non-vegans in the wrong?
How can you know whether morality is objective or subjective? We know things from subjective sensory perceptions, e.g. I see these words on my computer screen.
If plants are conscious does veganism lose some of it's moralistic appeal?
But they don't taste as good. I had an impossible burger once. Never again. But, I would pay twice as much at the store for lab grown meat.
A subjective morality devolves into opinion, which means there is no morality that anyone should reasonably listen to. When you state morality is subjective, its the equivalent to me saying, "Blue is the best color". If that is the case then we cannot reasonably make any enforcement of prevention or allowance of morality. A society which said murder is wrong would be just as reasonably justified as a society which actively encouraged murder and celebrated it. Subjective morality simply does not work as a rational system, and the only reason why anyone holds onto it is because they want to justify doing the things they like, or because there has been no proven objective morality thus far and people just want to hold onto something like "God makes it rain."
The proof does not prove that there is an objective morality, but it does show that IF morality is objective, the tenant of existence is good vs non-existence must be held as a foundational premise.
Fight!
Yes.
I understand what you mean. I have been a vegan for 19 years. I do miss the taste of non-vegan food, but I prefer being a vegan because it saves and improves sentient nonhuman lives.
People have certainly gone to war over priorities, e.g. the United States had a civil war about slavery.
I agree.
Even outside of veganism, people could demand an end to the more odious forms of factory farming. Future generations are going to judge us harshly on this.
I agree.
It's funny when legality and morality are conflated by politicians/political movements. Most judges would scoff at that idea.
Yes (see below).
Legality (institutional) =/= morality (interpersonal).
Quoting Truth Seeker
Probably for the same reason carnivorism isn't "legal mandatory in all countries".
:up: :up:
Quoting Philosophim
Well I agree, more or less, with Thomas Ligotti (Cioran, Buddha et al): "nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone."
Quoting Truth Seeker
Consider this post from a thread An inquiry into moral facts (2021) ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/540198
and further elaboration (2023) ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/857773
What about delusions? For example, people have religious beliefs about going to heaven as they believe they are going to heaven because they have the right faith, e.g. Christianity, and others are going to hell because they have the wrong faith.
Thank you for your reply and the valuable links to the other discussions. I agree that existence hurts all sentient organisms, but it does not hurt any nonsentient organisms, e.g. plants, because pain requires sentience.
Hamlet is pithy on this point, but I prefer Milton's Satan:
[I]A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.[/I]
Note, Satan always relates everything to himself. He begins this first epic speech ostensibly talking about another demon, but then it is all "me mine me me" for most of it. He is almost always speaking in similes relating the rest of reality to himself most often. God, very strikingly for Paradise Lost, never uses any similes. I think it's a brilliant, subtle, linguistic point about elements of the "New Science" and mechanistic philosophy of Milton's day, which makes everything a matter of private valuation.
On the question of different laws holding at different times, if this is meant to suggest skepticism, I would just point out that the same holds for all issues of truth. For most of human history, people held disparate beliefs about the shape of the Earth, how infectious diseases spread, etc. What individuals believed on these issues has tended to be a function of the answers they grew up around. If you're culture thought the Earth was flat , you probably did too. But surely this doesn't give us grounds to believe that there is "no fact of the matter," or that the shape of the Earth varies depending on which cultural context you are currently in.
In practice, this seems to be what many "ethics" end up reducing to.
:up: :up:
Quoting Truth Seeker
No, just thinking something is right doesn't make it right. Same with feeling something is right, which is what our morals are built upon - there is no way to say one person's feelings are right over another's, and just because a majority think of feel something, doesn't make it right either.
As a result, nothing "should" be made legal and illegal. It is just a battle of the preferences.
Quoting Truth Seeker
The worst part for me is the suffering these animals go through - for many it is a living hell. It's disgusting that animal agriculture is still legal.
What is legal and what is right are not the same thing. Laws are a matter of control with the purpose of maintaining social stability. Much of what is called morality is the same thing.
I agree. Different people have different opinions about what is right and what is wrong. Which opinion is actually right and which opinion is actually wrong? How do we know?
Yes, the suffering they go through is truly awful.
I totally agree that the shape of the Earth does not vary, regardless of what people believe about it. Morals and laws are different from physical things like the shape of the Earth. Morals and laws are mental constructs which come from our beliefs, e.g. apostasy and blasphemy are considered wrongs in Islam and are punishable by the death penalty in some Muslim-majority countries, while apostasy from Islam and blasphemy against Islam are not considered wrongs in Western countries and are not punished.
Different how? Are scientific theories not "mental constructs?" What about understandings of history? Now if morals are "mental constructs" what causes them? Presumably, they do not spring from the aether uncaused into our minds fully formed, but have causes that lie outside of us. But this makes them, at least in this respect, like scientific models and theories, no?
Right, behaviors and norms vary. But this is true as relates to all sorts of factual claims. With the advent of germ theory, some parts of the world started to boil their water to sterilize it in order to curb outbreaks of infectious diseases. Other parts didn't, and recommended other procedures to try to fight epidemics. Norms and public policy varied based on what was thought to be best, the same as is going on in your example. In some places, young Earth creationism is taught as the origin of the world. In others, the narrative explains that the world is 4 billion years old and that life slowly evolved on it over billions of years. This is a question of fact, and yet norms about it, what is taught, etc., vary by time, place, and culture in much the same ways that laws and moral beliefs vary.
Heres how I see it - this is from Ziporyns translation of the Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi).
This is how Emerson put it in Self-Reliance.
Anyhow, I believe the correct response here is: "There are more things in heaven and earth... than are dreamt of in your philosophy" - William Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene 5, "Hamlet". :smile:
Different because scientific theories, e.g. the theory of gravity, are about something physical outside one's mind. You can measure the gravity on Earth and measure the gravity on the Moon, etc. You can have delusional beliefs about physical objects, e.g. believing that the Earth is flat, but these beliefs won't change the shape of the Earth. Morals and laws are psychosocial constructs. You can believe that blasphemy is wrong and should be punished by the death penalty. There is no objective measure of right and wrong in the universe, the way we can objectively measure the gravity on Earth and on the Moon.
Our understanding of history is selective because history is written by the winners and reflects their agenda rather than objective truths. For example, the New Testament makes extraordinary claims about someone called Jesus e.g. he was born of a virgin, he is the son of God, he did miracles, he was crucified and was resurrected. Christians believe that the Bible is true, while atheists consider the Bible to be fiction.
Our morals and laws arise out of the dynamic interactions of our genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences.
Your original question was: "Is right and wrong just a matter of thinking something is right (e.g. it is right to save and improve lives) and something is wrong (e.g. theft, fraud, rape, robbery, enslaving, torture and murder are wrong)?"
But here:
aren't you presupposing the answer to this question. It seems to me to get close to: "Facts about morality are different because morality is only in the mind." Or, "moral anti-realism is true because moral anti-realism is true."
There is no objective way to measure pleasure or pain, nor consciousness itself. Are these illusory too? Are the only things that exist that which can be measured (presumably quantified)? Yet if nothing really exists except for that which can be quantified, then it would still seem that the illusion that such things exist must itself truly exist. For surely we experience values, beauty, pleasure, etc. And yet is "illusion" something that can be quantified? If not, then we must reject the idea that morality, beauty, etc. are illusions, and must simply say that most of our experiences aren't even illusory, they are nothing at all.
Ah, well the things you've mentioned morality arising from are "physical things outside the mind," no? So how does something that is not a "physical thing" (e.g., goodness) arise from physical things? There must be some sort of convertability, or else such an arising would not be possible. But if physical things relate to value in this manner, then it seems to me that there is no reason why value should be exclusively "in the mind." What is in the mind "arises" from the "physical" and so the physical seems to somehow contain, at least virtually, values, etc.
The problem with these frequently cited quotes is that they are often treated as a kind of blank check, used to justify all sorts of reckless or extreme views.
Quoting T Clark
I'm not sure I understand those quotes. If they're just saying that we make our choices based on our own conscience then we are bound to admit that that includes Pol Pot and doesn't get us very far in deciding what is right or wrong in society. That said, I also tend to act and not reflect on what is right. I simply follow my disposition and rarely need to think things through. But given that I am situated within a specific culture, society, time, and place, none of my positions are particularly original, intuitive, or brave.
I think we have had this discussion before. Dealing with Pol Pot doesnt involve morality, it involves control. Things like that need to be stopped, not because theyre bad but because they hurt people. Its a societys responsibility to protect its members.
Morality, as I understand it, applies to my judgments of my own behavior. How do I decide how to behave? Heres my favorite quote from Self-Reliance:
Yet if hurting people isn't bad, why ought we try to prevent it?
Even if this responsibility existed, if it isn't good to live up to one's responsibilities (or wrong not to) then I am not sure what this amounts to.
I guess there seems to be two things. Whether it is called such or not, there seems to be a sort of social level morality being invoked, right (i.e., what societies ought or ought not do)? However, at the same time, societies are made up of individuals, and if they do not value this social morality and it has no claim on them then how does it apply?
Yes, I think this is a significant point. How I behave is of less significance than how a society behaves. The law seems to exist because individual morality doesn't help us keep the community safe or protected.
Quoting T Clark
Do you have a way of deciding whether a government is behaving with appropriate judgment or within an appropriate ethical frame? How does your 'individualist' approach impact upon issues like abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, welfare for poor people, etc.
Meat is murder, but it's also rather tasty. Ultimately, I think that's why it's going to continue to be consumed.
I dont see these as moral issues. I see them as policy issues. Do the laws and regulations that address these issues protect and serve the members of society in an appropriate way?
I find that difficult to understand.
Quoting T Clark
Do laws which allow for the provision of abortion not themselves present a moral position? Are they not, in effect, sanctioning what some would regard as murder?
Questions about abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, or welfare aren't merely about administrative effectiveness; they rest on moral judgments about the value of life, autonomy, and justice. Even framing them as policy decisions already reflects a moral stance.
What, despite the vast habitat destruction necessary to install the huge acreages of monoculture sustained with petrochemical based fertilizers and toxic insecticides, weedicides and fungicides necessary to feed the human population with grains, fruits, nuts and vegetables?
This quote is being taken out of context. Hamlet is in conflict with himself/ his thoughts.
It is a wishful thinking because deep down he is morally perturbed.
This (if accurate) is likely the most important post in this thread (in relation to what it is that inspired the OP, at least).
This is not entirely true, Truth Seeker. All life must consume something, and all life must at its end be consumed. If it were not so, life would choke itself. The most organic of gardeners rely on this; my own garden has a pond to encourage frogs that eat the slugs that would otherwise eat my vegetables. Vegans also kill, and 'natural controls of pests are by no means devoid of suffering, commonly involving being eaten from within by nematode worms or the larvae of some insect. Not to mention the mice and squirrels and rabbits that have to be kept from the harvest by some means or other.
The deer in Scotland have no natural predators, and left to themselves would breed until their numbers exceed the capacity of the land to feed them and having destroyed their own environment, would die en mass of starvation. It is a kindness for humans to control the population by acting as the top predator and keeping their numbers limited. there is less suffering in being shot than starving to death.
This is not to defend current livestock practices, or the overconsumption of meat. And particularly at the moment, I agree that one ought not to eat meat in general, given the choice. But certainly one cannot condemn those obligate carnivores, because they do a necessary job. And the scavengers also do another job of tidying up the creatures that die, and we all die, vegans and carnivores alike.
But what I see is our agreement as to the terms of the moral argument. We agree that truth is better than falsehood, that suffering is bad, and so on. And this is the same moral foundation that motivates the punishment of heresy. If one believes one has the truth of how to live, one ought to defend it from being lost, and ignored. The whole reason for human law, and especially punishment, is to persuade people who are inclined to do wrong not to do it, by making it disadvantageous. And again, it seems that we agree that this is what the law should do. But life is complicated and it is not so easy to tease out the consequences of our actions, including our law-making.
There are regions of the world that cannot produce enough non animal food for the human population. Perhaps we should leave such places wild. But perhaps we can find a place there as herders of reindeer, or buffalo, or goats, and form a sustainable way of life. If there is more life, there must be more death and more suffering, but life is good.
Here's a relevant post from 2022 ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/702431
Morality and laws originate in the mind and get written down for others to read. If I didn't have my genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences, I wouldn't be a vegan. I consider veganism to be much more ethical than non-veganism, while non-vegans see nothing wrong with being non-vegans.
Genes, environments, and nutrients are physical things, but experiences are mental things. Without the right genes, environments and nutrients we can't get to having experiences. For example, if my human genes were replaced by the genes for apple trees, I would no longer be conscious because apple trees are not conscious.
You can observe brain activities corresponding to pleasure, pain and even consciousness on functional MRI scans. Pleasure, pain and consciousness are not illusions. However, we can't yet experience the pleasure, pain and consciousness of another sentient being with current technology.
Thank you very much for the link.
Why Vegan Diets Use Less Land
Inefficient Food Chain:
Animals convert plant-based food into meat, dairy, and eggs, but this process involves significant energy loss at each step of the food chain. This means a large amount of land is needed to grow crops for animal feed to produce a relatively small amount of animal products.
Direct Consumption:
A vegan diet avoids this inefficiency by consuming plant-based proteins like legumes, grains, and soy directly.
What is opinion and what is truth? "Veganism is more ethical than non-veganism." Is this statement an opinion or is it the truth?
Thank you for explaining. Veganism is more ethical than non-veganism because it reduces suffering and death by a massive amount. Non-vegans cause suffering and death to 80 billion land organisms and 1 to 3 trillion aquatic organisms per year. Now that I have provided argument and evidence, is it now the truth?
In an ideal universe, all organisms would be made of energy, instead of matter, and live forever without consuming any air, water or food. We don't live in an ideal universe. I am not condemning obligate carnivores or scavengers. Veganism is not perfect, but it causes much less suffering and death than non-veganism. Please see: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan
Dairy cows: Killed at about 46 years old, but could naturally live 1525 years. They live only 20% of their natural lifespan.
Beef cows: Killed at 914 months, though they could live 1525 years. Thats only 5% of their natural lifespan.
Turkeys: Killed at 1226 weeks, but naturally live 1012 years. Thats just 5% of their natural lifespan.
Calves (veal): Killed at 124 weeks, but naturally live around 20 years. Thats 3.1% of their lifespan.
Pigs (for meat): Killed at 5 months, but could live 15 years. Thats 2.7% of their lifespan.
Chickens (egg layers): Killed at 14 months, though they can live 10 years. Thats 2.7%.
Ducks: Killed at 79 weeks, but naturally live 68 years. Thats 2.6%.
Lambs: Killed at 35 months, but naturally live 15 years. Thats 2.2%.
Chickens (male, in egg industry): Killed at just 1 day old, even though they could live 10 years. Thats only 0.03% of their potential lifespan.
Deer overpopulation in Scotland isnt a natural problem its a human-made one. Humans killed their natural predators (wolves, lynxes and bears), cleared forests, and now even manage land to keep deer numbers high for hunting. Shooting them isnt kindness, its perpetuating the harm. Real solutions are restoring ecosystems, rewilding predators, or using non-lethal population control like fertility management.
Indeed, but does it reduce suffering? My local population of wild goats is controlled by fertility management. But all the goats still die eventually of old age. Is it preferable to be killed by a bear or a human? But what I want you to see is how we agree about the moral foundations while we dispute the practicalities. Nobody thinks that falsehood is preferable to truth in principle; nobody thinks that suffering ought to be inflicted for its own sake; there are some who think that life itself is not good because it always involves suffering - they would say that we ought not to reproduce at all. But again the argument proceeds from the same roots - that suffering is bad.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Of course it is human made, humans are an invasive species and there are no natural controls on the population. That is why we need the 'unnatural' control of morality; one might call it 'self restraint'.
And this is as old as the bible. Humanity has eaten of the tree of knowledge, and fallen out of the Natural world into a world of right and wrong. The natural world does whatever comes naturally, but humans make moral choices. Rewilding is a moral choice to withdraw somewhat. One I agree we should do more of. But that is something we would have to convince our fellow men of on the basis that morality is real, and the world as a whole would really be better. One cannot do it on the basis that it is all just opinion or invention, and anyone can have any opinion and none can be right or wrong.
We know these states "correspond" to pleasure or pain because people tell us they do. A huge amount of neuroscience in this general area presupposes that people are accurate reporters of real, private, mental states. If we didn't assume that, did not presuppose it as fact, then all of our "measurable, third person data" would only tell us about how different stimuli cause different responses in different parts of the body, e.g., "do this and people emit this sort of sound wave." This is why some philosophers and neuroscience argue that we [I]should[/I] declare consciousness a sort of unscientific illusion.
Anyhow, if this counts as "observing" inner life, how is goodness not observed? Isn't medical and vetinary science incoherent without the good of the body, health? Isn't most of the field of psychology incoherent with the assumption of a mind and what is good for it? "Psychology" is itself the "discourse of the soul." So too, engineering as a science, architecture, etc., all sorts of arts and sciences, are quite incoherent without a notion of goodness. How can one decide between a good bridge and a bad one, or a good water treatment plant and a bad one, without ends you want to achieve? If a building that falls down is just as good as one that stands, or a treatment that kills patients just as good as one that heals them, these disciplines disappear.
Hence, the good (ends, desirability, choice-worthyness) seems to be everywhere. Further, if it is in the mind, and the mind comes from the physical, then ends, desirability, etc. come from the physical.
I guess that's my point. Your division here seems to beg the question, and I don't think it's actually a wise thing to just assume. IMHO, it's unclear exactly why pleasure should be so different from goodness, one "real" the other illusory for instance.
I think being killed by a bear is worse than being killed by a human because humans can shoot a deer in the brain and kill it with minimal pain, but a bear can't do that. A bear has to claw and bite the deer while the deer is still alive and conscious, which causes more pain to the deer compared to a bullet to the brain. Nonexistence is the only way to prevent all suffering. When we use contraceptives to prevent the existence of a sentient organism, we prevent all suffering, all enjoyment and the eventual death of the sentient organism. Antinatalists argue that humans should stop having babies because that is the only way to prevent more suffering and death.
I think morals and laws matter because they have real consequences for real sentient organisms.
You have raised valid issues. Just because morals and laws are mental constructs, it does not mean that they are not real. I think morals and laws matter because they have real consequences for real sentient organisms. We have no way to directly access the sentience of another organism. You can't know what it is like for me to be me, and I can't know what it is like for you to be you. As we are both humans, I imagine that we have similar pleasures and pains. How can consciousness be an illusion when I am experiencing it right now and you are experiencing it right now?
Right and wrong just a matter of thinking something to be so? Sounds absurd. The prima facie obligation not to bludgeon my neighbor certainly has to be thought out, given the circumstances, but the conditions that make right and wrong ethical in the first place are PRIOR to this thinking out, viz., suffering being bludgeoned causes. Suffering is not thinking. This pretty much covers the true ground of ethics. It is the non ethical entanglements that give rise to indeterminacy in ethics, not the nature of ethics itself. Hamlet was famously caught in such indeterminacy.
Which begs the question: is this foundation discovered in the mere thinking, or is there something timeless and absolute in the presuppositions of an ethical problem? The problem itself is, of course, messy, as the OP notes, but does this make ethics itself reducible to the thinking only, that is, ethics being the kind of thing that is made and conventional only, and not discovered. If ethics is essentially discoverable, then this implies something outside of thought , addressed by thought to determine how to understand it. But if ethics is entirely made in the matrix of language dealing with the world, "made up" if you will, then this is end of there being a true independent ground for ethics, and a radical relativism is all that is left.
The ethical question I have is THE ethical question: What is the ground of ethics? This is the be taken as Kant took up reason (though, not to even come near endorsing his absurd rationalism on this issue). Kant's method of reduction is what I have in mind: First isolate the desideratum from incidentals. Do you think ethics has a reductive residuum that survives the suspension of incidentals (or accidentals, if you prefer)?
I wonder if you could say what this core idea is.
Do good and avoid evil. Wellbeing and harm are, I think, the same thing in other words. I suggest that humans are those that can question their inclinations, motives and actions in this way and it is the ability to ask and consider if something is right action or wrong action is that foundation. This very discussion is the foundation, and the discussion develops with our abilities to act, and knowledge of consequences. If we don't know that burning fossil fuels destabilises the climate, then we think it a great good to warm and power the human world that way. But as we learn about the long term consequences, we come to know better.
The other question that impacts this is "whose harm, and whose wellbeing?" Me, my family, my tribe, my nation, my ethnicity, my species, my planet? The flourishing of the whole of life is a comparatively recent consideration in these debates, and even consideration of the whole of humanity on an equal level is rather recent, to the extent that our traditions and institutions have not fully made the adjustment. And of course the local harm and wellbeing is more apparent, and tends to seem more vital than distant ones in time or space. I cannot see the starving in Africa, or my unborn great great grandchildren so any harm I might be doing them seems less important, and somewhat hypothetical.
I don't see how it could be. If ethics is the study of ends, of what is sought, then it seems clear that some ends are not sought merely as a matter of convention. People do not seek happiness and avoid suffering as a sort of convention. We do not desire food, oxygen, warmth, etc. by convention; and yet these do seem to be chief "goods." That it is, at least ceteris paribus, bad to be blinded, to have one's hand cut off, to suffer brain injury, etc. does not seem to be a matter of convention. Convention itself is only coherent if it springs from a sort of goal-directedness that already presupposes value, else there would be no reason to follow conventions.
As to discoveries, surely some moral insights are discovered. Newton famously drank mercury because he thought it was good for him. Yet today, knowing what we know about the effects of mercury ingestion on the body, we can say that, all else equal, it is bad for people to have mercury slipped into their food and drink. This is knowledge of value that must be discovered though.
But prior to this, there is the discussion of what ethics IS. Actions, granted, do not have to proceed with with perfect clarity on about the ontology of ethical standards since actions are embedded in a culture and its ways thinking and valuing. But philosophically, metaethics is basic: the OP asks about whether ethics is all just in the thinking, and beyond this it is all open, with no intruding standard from outside of the norms of one's society. If the answer to this is in the affirmative, then ethics is lost to nihilism.
To say ethics is the study of ends presupposes the value of an end. This is where the basic philosophical question leads one. One states an end, a purpose to one's actions, and no matter what this is, there is another question latent and ignored: What good is this? But now the issues hangs on this idea of the good, which resists inquiry. Or does it?
"Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil. Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, 1949.
Okay, and it is not that I disagree with Schweitzer, but there is philosophy unsaid in these words, and this is where thought has to go. Reverence for life. but reverence is a way one comports oneself toward a thing, and reverence toward life is too vague to serve as way to say what this is. Of course, I know what he means: human life but what is it about human life that makes it something to be revered? A principle? But philosophy has lots of principles laid out through the centuries, notably, principles of utility and deontological principles like Kant's notion of duty. But they are all question begging as to what it is that makes ethics what it IS. A principle as such has nothing ethical about it, and calling it an ethical principle presupposes and understanding of what ethicality IS. Life cannot be foundational here, because there is nothing in the idea of living, living as such, that makes ethics what it is. How does one define living in thsi context? Breathing, heart beating, liver cleansing blood, and the rest? How does this generate ethical obligation? Or is it the sensate dimension of experience? I mean, what in life makes a person an ethical agency at all?
How can there be? How can ethics be discussed before there are ethics? First the fall into knowledge, and the birth of shame, then the questioning and discussion. It's always the same with philosophy, it wants to start at the beginning but cannot, it always starts in the middle and in a muddle.
Ethics are grounded in the questioning of life, in the second guessing of behaviour, in the thought that things might have been different, and might have been better.
A path is made by walking on it; ethics are made by questioning our actions.
Albert defined good and evil. Veganism is good because it saves and improves lives. Vegans value all sentient lives - not just human lives.
Ive heard no good reason to accept this idea but if you want to provide some evidence please do.
Quoting Constance
I don't know of anything timeless and absolute, do you? Are you thinking morality is like maths or the logical absolutes? I'm not certain they are timeless or absolute and there are philosophers who argue this.
Quoting Constance
I would imagine that suffering and happiness were experienced before language, so theres that.
I would think also that morality comes from our interactions with the world and other creatures, not just language. But given you wrote of relativism is all that is left it sounds like youre not comfortable with it. I think weve had this conversation before.
We can't "know x is right" without recourse to something. We don't have a universal something. *shrug*.
Lets say I think abortion is a bad thing and I would like to promote policy solutions to address that. Here are some suggestions - effective sex education, easily accessible birth control, medical and social support for pregnant women, support for adoption, affordable childcare
Yes, but that "truth" does not entail that "non-veganism" is immoral or necessarily so. Imo, eating either non-industrial or vat-grown/3-d printed meats is no less ethical than a strictly plant-based diet.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Given that the human brain is transparent to itself (i.e. brain-blind (R.S. Bakker)), it cannot perceive how the trick is done and therefore that consciousness is an illusion (i.e. not the entity it seems to be or that one thinks it is).
Also, as Libet's experiments have shown, one is not "experiencing right now" but rather conscious perception occurs up to 550 milliseconds after a stimulus. And what one is conscious of is a simplified representation of the salient features of the perceived object; thus, "consciousness" is only a simplification of a much more complex process that one cannot be conscious of (like e.g. a blindspot that enables sight).
Consider Buddhist no-self, Democitean swirling atoms, Humean bundle theory, Churchlands' eliminativism ... Nørretranders' user-illusion, Hofstadter's strange looping, Metzinger's phenomenal self model, etc: some philosophical cum scientific 'models' of the entity-illusion of consciousness.
I'm not sure if it does. That there are ends that people act for seems obvious. If we were wrong about this, it seems we should be wrong about just about anything and everything. Moreover, there are obviously better or worse means towards different ends. If I want to sail off my island and have at my disposal logs to make a raft or stones, the logs shall work far better for achieving my end.
Right, this is how I would put it: Aside from the question about what is good vis-á-vis any particular end (e.g., winning a race) we can also ask about the choiceworthyness of that end itself. Ends can be ordered to other ends. For instance, we might want to win a race against fleet footed Achilles because if we do then he will agree to release our captured friend. Ends can be ordered to other ends. So, we face the problem of grounding proximate ends and means in some sort of end that is choice-worthy for its own sake, i.e., "an end that is sought for its own sake."
Are there any such ends? Are there many?
A common answer here has been pleasure. Yet it is generally been agreed that simple pleasuresfrom food, sex, drugs, etc.are inferior to the "pleasure" derived from participation in common goods (i.e., the good of being a good husband, a good parent, a good citizen, a good soldier, a good priest, a good artist, etc.) or a sort of intellectual pleasure associated with wisdom, contemplative understanding of the world and one's role in it, or as Hegel says: "being at home in the world." Some people use "pleasure" only for "bodily pleasures," but I think we can speak about different sorts analogously. Sometimes, we seek bodily pleasures so as to accomplish one of the "higher" sorts of pleasures, as when we want to be in a good mood so as to help someone else better. Yet happiness as a sort of overall flourishing, "living a good life" and "being a good person," seems to be sought for its own sake.
Anyhow, that's just a candidate for what is good in itself, and sought for its own sake.
Others deny that there can be anything worth seeking for its own sake. So all judgement about ends relies on an infinite regression of finite ends ordered to other finite ends, which must, in virtue of our being finite creatures, bottom out somewhere, seemingly in irrational impulse. However, these folks still think we can live "better or worse lives," and "learn to deal with this ungroundness." So, even for them, there can still be an ethics and a politics (politics as an art for producing good/virtuous societies)a study of living a better or worse life.
However, I want to suggest that one can have "the best," or an "infinite good" in mind as a goal without knowing such a good. Indeed, if the human mind has an infinite appetite for goodness, as philosophers of all stripes from Platonists to athiests have claimed, then it seems that, on account of our finitude, we can never fully know or be "mentally conformed" to such a good, since it surpasses us. Yet we can be "always ever more open to it." That's sort of the root of Plato's notion. It is the desire for what is "truly good" not merely what "appears good" or "is said to be good by others" that allows us to transcend current beliefs and opinions, to move beyond our own finitude in a self-determining pursuit of the Good. The object is not known at the outset, it is merely desired (that's the whole idea of the "erotic ascent").
Normally, traditions that build on PlatoBoethius, the Golden Age Islamic thinkers, many of the Patristics, the Scholastics, etc.also posit a sort of "knowing by becoming" here. Praxis is essential (e.g., contemplation, ascetic labors, etc.). But within these schools it isn't "knowing the good" that comes first, but knowing what essentially precludes knowing and consistently willing the good, which is being divided against oneself and controlled by one's passions and lower appetites, rather than the rational appetite for goodness or truth as such. Hence, ethics here beings from a sort of "meta" position, from looking at what must be the case for any ethical life regardless of what goodness and justice turn out to be. Indeed, much of what Plato puts out there would seem to hold even if "good" just means "what I myself will prefer." It applies to anyone not embracing full nihilism, in that being ruled over by one's appetites and passions will only lead to good outcomes by accident (and we know from experience that it will often result in disaster).
Which is all to say that ends can be quite unknown and we can still have an ethics.
:fire:
Before, not in the temporal sense, but in the logical presuppositional sense: Ask the question, What is ethics? and you uncover the analytic of ethics, like a geologist opens a rock or a mineral looking for its contents. What is sought is an analytic of ethics, a determination as to what makes an ethical case ethical at all. Prior to the "case" is the condition laid out in the world to which ethic reasoning is a response, something IN the world that ethical issues are "about". This goes to the essence of ethics: value. What is value?
But sentience as such possesses nothing of ethical possibility. And something being alive is equally without an ethical dimension. How do you define good and evil? What does it mean to say something is evil? It can't be because it gives rise to something else, some purpose or use value, because these beg the question about the nature of evil itself. This, I argue, is where the question leads thought. Not to what is called evil, but what evil is itself, its nature, its essential meaning. If one wants to understand ethics, one has to understand what ethics IS.
First, people are born into societies with a standing system of values (reflected in law, religion, manners, and so forth). So from the start, that is one source of certainty.
Once one is old enough to think for one's self, one can revise and edit the received rules. There are limits on how far one can go: Even if you have decided it is OK to steal, most of society thinks it is wrong and if you steal, you may be caught and punished. There are usually core values and rules which you had best abide by, like it or not. There are often quite peripheral rules which can safely be ignored. But sometimes peripheral rules, like fashion, are almost as critical as core rules.
So, if your Home Owners Assn. says that your lawn must be weed free and no longer than 3 inches, then you had better hop to it. Or else!
I don't think WS was arguing for completely subjective morality. I take what he said to mean that we can 'think' our way from one position to another, from an act being bad to that act being good. There are plenty of historical examples of thinking our way from bad to good, good to bad.
Most people make up their minds about what is good and bad based on their society, on very strong influences, and on one's own thinking. There is usually some wiggle room in the morals of the 8 billion + people on earth, but not too much. That's one reason why most of us get along with each other reasonably well most of the time.
What brings major trouble is when a political leader (Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Trump, Ayatollah Khomeini. the Taliban lunatics, the Sudan warlords, etc.) decide to impose a moral scheme at considerable variance from the people's generally practiced moral system. Trump isn't in the same league as Hitler (yet, anyway) but his shredding of USAID, Voice Of America, the Department of Education, the CDC. his nonsensical policy on science and vaccination, and other actions undermines what people thought good, true, and right about government. The consequences will be less health around the world, less health at home, less reliable information around the world, less education, and so on. Not good!
Any act (active action) leads to the violation of the boundaries of another. This is inevitable: A single-celled organism eats something, which leads to the loss of this something; A person simply walking down the street fills the space with himself and others have to go around him; the release of advertising - with the help of special manipulative techniques makes the consumer buy a product.
The question arises - which action is right and which is wrong? To what extent is it permissible to violate someone's boundaries?
Attempts to answer these questions historically led to the creation of the Deontological (correct is what is prescribed) and Utilitarian (correct is the least of two evils) approaches and their combination.
But the most interesting question, in my opinion, arises in the process of implementation by the subject: Why should I act this way and not otherwise?
Deontological approaches often use metaphysical justification (the soul will not get to heaven or the universe will throw in suffering). Utilitarian approaches introduce the concept of values ??(when choosing behavior, you should choose in favor of the most valuable).
And here the existential approach appears, which reformulates the question to: What is the price of my action? Am I ready to bear it as part of myself? And it answers it itself: what is right is what leads to one's own agreement with the consequences of one's own act, as part of one's own being.
I am not measuring morality with veganism. Veganism is an example of a moral position.
Good is saving and improving lives. Evil is deliberate harm and the murder of sentient beings. How do you define good and evil?
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Id like to engage with both parts of what you said.
On veganism:
Youre right that lab-grown or 3D-printed meat could potentially be just as ethical as a plant-based diet, since it wouldnt involve animal suffering. Thats an exciting possibility for the future. But in the present, the overwhelming majority of non-vegan consumption comes from industrial and even small-scale animal farming, both of which involve suffering and killing that veganism avoids. So while non-veganism could be ethical in theory, in practice it mostly isnt.
On consciousness:
I agree that our conscious experience is a simplified, delayed model of reality. Libets experiments and theories like Metzingers self-model do show how much is happening outside of our awareness. But calling consciousness an illusion may go too far. An illusion is still an experience like a rainbow. The rainbow isnt what it seems, but its still real as a phenomenon. Similarly, consciousness may not be what we intuitively think it is, but the fact that we have experiences at all means it isnt unreal.
In short: veganism reduces real suffering today, and consciousness, while not what it seems, is still a real phenomenon of experience.
How would we know which is correct? The deontological approach contradicts the utilitarian approach.
Quoting unenlightened
An excellent point. You've put it much better than I, but that's the basic idea I was trying to get across here:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
"Metaethics" often deals with questions of moral truth, etc., but I think there is a very real question about what sort of things will be needed to "walk any path" regardless of where that path leads. That is, to my mind, the most important sort of "meta" question. A metavirtue here is one which is required for any such questioning, and to abide by what one finds, and I think these can indeed be identified. Plato's notion of the "rule of the rational part of the soul," seems to me to be an excellent candidate for instance. Even if we might want to radically rework the underlying anthropology, the habits described seem necessary for all inquirers.
I don't like any of the approaches. That's how we live.
In the deontological approach, you have to believe in something (but what about non-believers?)
In the utilitarian approach, everyone can have different values, which leads to chaos
In the existential approach, if you are a maniac and act in accordance with your aspirations, things don't work out very well either
Nihilism is also not a solution
What would you suggest for people like me?
I can understand your frustration every ethical system seems to run into problems:
Deontology can feel too rigid or tied to belief.
Utilitarianism can clash when values differ.
Existentialism can be misused to justify harmful actions.
Nihilism leaves us without direction at all.
Thats why Ive found it helpful to think in terms of Compassionism, which is compassion for every sentient being. Instead of relying on rigid rules or endless calculations, the guiding question becomes: Does this choice show compassion, or does it cause harm?
Compassionism doesnt depend on religion, and it works even when peoples values differ because compassion is something we all understand as a sentient being. Its not about being perfect, just about orienting ourselves toward helping rather than harming, moment by moment.
You write compassion for all sentient beings. Ok. Let's define who is sentient and who is not. Here on the forum there are many adherents of the idea that stones also have consciousness. Or again set boundaries - these are sentient, these are insensitive. Then what can this be based on? Just believe you or someone else?
then what is the limit of compassion? Sell a kidney and feed starving children with the proceeds?
Great questions. For me, sentience means the capacity to feel pain and pleasure. That usually includes humans and non-human animals, and possibly conscious aliens from other planets. Stones, as far as we know, dont have any capacity to feel pain or pleasure, so they wouldnt be included. The boundary isnt arbitrary its based on whether there is scientific evidence of consciousness and the ability to have painful and pleasurable experiences.
As for the limits of compassion, I see it less as an all-or-nothing demand and more as a guiding orientation: do what you reasonably can to help, and avoid causing harm where possible. Compassionism isnt about self-destruction its about balance. It includes compassion for self and compassion for others. If I act with compassion within my means, I contribute to less suffering and more well-being in the world.
I hope the stone consciousness supporters will pass by and not look in here :lol:
Quoting Truth Seeker
The balance offers a scale. This is Relativism again. Maybe this is an unsolvable problem.
By the way. There are systems of views (ideologies) in which what is good and what is bad is prescribed in advance, and the choice is practically prescribed to the person (for example, Chu che). You don't need to think about what is good or bad. It has already been written for you. In my opinion, most people in the world don't even think about it; they simply believe in their ideologies (including those that emphasize personal responsibility for one's choices).
Going back to the question: does a person really need to have their own choice, or is it easier to follow a pattern? (For example, if you get on a full bus and there's only one seat available, you'll sit there instead of searching for a better spot if the bus is empty)
On balance and relativism: I think balance isnt the same as anything goes. Relativism says all views are equally valid, but Compassionism does not say that. It is about reducing the suffering of all sentient beings and helping oneself and others flourish. It gives us a clear direction, even if the details vary depending on circumstances.
On your bigger question: I agree that many people just follow ready-made systems. It feels easier, like taking the only open seat on a bus. But I think theres value in choosing consciously instead of outsourcing morality. Even if we borrow ideas from traditions or ideologies, ultimately, its our compassion and responsibility that give them meaning. Following a pattern blindly might be simpler, but it risks causing harm without ever asking whether it could be avoided.
I dont see Compassionism as just my personal template, but as a principle anyone could adopt because its grounded in something universal: the capacity to suffer and the desire to avoid harm.
Of course, people may or may not value compassion as highly as I do but that doesnt make it empty. Its like honesty: not everyone practices it, but most would agree its better than dishonesty when building trust. Compassion works the same way it has value beyond me because suffering and wellbeing are real for everyone who can experience them.
Yes, it is a philosophical obsession of mine, ethics. I think most philosophy is an abstraction, as is science and the pragmatic os dialy living; an abstraction in that all knowledge is categorical, as when one says light is really a spectrum of wavelengths: light, wavelengths, spectrum, etc., these are categorical ideas that subsist in hierarchies of subsumption, and they are abstracted from the whole of the givenness of the world. Derrida wrote The White Mythology, and in it he takes a very close look at Anatole France's Garden of Epicurus, near the end, in a conversation between Polyphilos and Ariste in which the claim is made that metaphysics is like a faded coin that has been tossed about in its wear and tear for years, and barely preserves the original images. This is a metaphor for the way metaphysics came into being: "at first" there was a natural language, long ago, that was clear and right in the way it spoke about the world, a primordial language----God's logos? Is there such a thing? Not as absurd as it sounds, I think, because when analysis attempts to look at language, it is essentially looking at itself, which is impossible since the metalanguage is the same as the object language, and all you will ever get is reflections of the metalanguage, or more strings of metalinguistic thinking; think of logic trying to get to the ground of what logic is. One then is stopped hard in the tracks of inquiry, suddenly, if you will, lest one simply go on reeling off more of the "same" that can never penetrate into the desideratum: the true ground-language that springs into existence with every thought. One can only stand there and observe the threshold of one's acceptance (see Fink's Sixth Meditation if you like) in the act of thinking, and the question of the ground is pushed into metaphysics. Put 'God' aside, for it is nothign but trouble, but metaphysics is there, right at the tip of one's tongue as she speaks, thinks, feels, wonders, and so on.
Anyway, off track a bit, but OTOH, not really: Derrida's idea (as best as I have gotten so far. He WANTS to be puzzling so you don't glide through reading) is to question this metaphor: the assumption is that metaphysics is born out of the wear and tear of language through the ages, a process that corrupts what was once clear and right: a borrowing of the essential meanings originally given, to construct dizzying heights abstract thought, and that process is inherently metaphorical, the making of novel meanings by contextual interchange of language. There was a time when things were much simpler, but once language moved into the extravagant mode of excessive creation, and things were moved from their grounding into where that had no business
Derrida uses this little dialogue if France's to illustrate a point: Once one inquires about the true foundation of language and tries to conceive of something that once was, one comes face to face with the very language that is supposed to be corrupted and out of which the very notion of corruption issues for itself. As I see it, it is like the evolutionary science: If our current horizon of possible conceiving at all issues from an evolved mentality, then any attempt to "look back" and draw up theories about how this mentality evolved is going to meet with its own evolved categories of thought. A kind of scientific Hegelianism: we are currently IN a modality of possiblities that is delimited, and anything that is produced therein cannot exceed its own delimitation.
Which bring me to ethics: To speak at all is to work within such a delimitation, and there is no way out of this....except through Kierkegaard (and his ilk): We actually exist, and this is existence is not simply about how our evolving language possiblities can speak what it is; rather, existence is palpable, real, hic et nunc, and its reality is striking, overwhelming, and this is where ethics finds its ground, this ahistorical real, not in the historicity of the what-can-be-said, which is where philosophy performs its eternal aporetic advance to nihilism. Philosophy is already done, but philosophers mostly just keep wheels spinning. Ethics is about, foundationally, value-in-being, and value lies outside of language, notwithstanding that I am speaking just this.
Isn't this where reward and punishment play a major role? From an early age on we are offered rewards for acting the way an agency prefers -- that agency being anything from parent to a government. And the opposite, of course: punishment of some sort from an early age on. At an early age, punishment installs guilt, a powerful guide and something to avoid by behaving 'correctly' whatever that is.
I like your statement, "What is the price of my action? Am I ready to bear it as part of myself?" This is a critical issue where we decide to deviate from the dominant rules and regs. An example is the decision of a gay boy, man, to announce that he is gay, even though this act of existential truth may bring immediate negative consequences. 75 years ago, being a communist in the United States was that sort of existential issue. (There are always these existential issues -- different times and places, different existential issues.)
Yet all of this remains discursive, merely. Such is philosophy, and the assumption is that this is the best one can do: postulate from a position that is at a distance from reality which is philosophy's impossible desideratum. As long as this scholarly need to publish continues to dominate thinking (and really, what is a philosopher do to if not speak endlessly about what someone said vis a vis someone else?), doors are closed. And philosophy is reduced to entertainment, and in modern anaoytic thought, not even serious entertainment--for what is philosophy without a primordial metaphysics? Nothing. Even Kant, with his absolute ceiling on meaningful thought, is an attempt bring the house down on philosophy by simply drawing a line between representation and something that is not representation, not realizing, and this is an important insight for me, that to draw such a line can only be done if both sides of the line are intelligible (as the early Wittgenstein observed), and so the radically other of this both remains and yet is lost to sense making, for metaphysics will not be dismissed in a wave of spurious rigor, nor can it be reduced to nonsense (contra positivism) because the radicality of the other is IN the phenomenality of what is given.
This is just a glance at something I think intrudes dramatically upon the story of the metaphysics of the good you sketch out above. The good is a term so burdened by such thinking that one forgets Kierkegaard, who said of Hegel that there was in his thinking a failure to acknowledge that one actually exists. Metaphysics can do this, that is, impose, say, some Christian idea about faith and the church and how platonism can provide a model for the world and divinity, and how thinking leads to more rationalizing, and soon, one is burning heretics and believing god to be some kind of embodiment of superlatives. I argue all of this fails to understand religion, ethics and its good and evil.
To really deal with ethics, one must, as Walt Whitman put it, have all schools in abeyance, even the schools that inform inquiry. The good and the bad of ethics stands outside of thought entirely, though philosophy brings thought to realize this. Such is the paradox of metaethics. The prima facie injunction against bludgeoning one's neighbor is grounded in an actuality not bound to the finitude of the totality onto-ethicality. It issues from, if you will, eternity. (Levinas has much to say on this).
Quoting Truth Seeker
I'm sorry, but I see contradictions here.
Here are a couple of articles on vat-grown meat that can reduce animal suffering today:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/08/worlds-largest-lab-grown-steak-unveiled-by-israeli-firm
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/17/health/fda-lab-meat-cells-scn-wellness/index.html
Also, by 'illusion' I do not mean fiction or does not happen. As I wrote ...
Quoting 180 Proof
Please let me know what contradictions you see.
I wonder if it might be more precise to describe values as having a pre-linguistic dimension (in experience, emotion, embodied life), but that they only become social, reflective, and enduring through language. Morality then is social relations with language. Our entire discourse would vanish without language.
Whatever prelinguistic or 'transcendent' origin ethics might have, we cannot demonstrate it, nor can we access it. And, as you say, we are limited to using language. I wonder if it is safe to leave it behind, as it is difficult to see what use this frame has beyond engaging in abstract speculation or intellectual exercises. Unless you add God (which you seek to avoid) which might provide us with a putative foundation or grounding for it all and this also comes with a 'to do' list. (Not that this frame is convincing to me either.)
My question to you is this: how do we talk about ethics as a society? Setting aside the abstruse, speculative material of academia or in a forum like this, what can we say (as per the OP) that is accessible and useful at a societal level about right and wrong?
"At a societal level", in terms of governing (i.e. maintaining order and security of equitable, public goods), I think the public concern is not moral "right and wrong" of personal conduct (e.g. D. Parfit, P. Foot) but politically just and unjust laws/policies/investments/regulations (e.g. J.S. Mill, J. Rawls, M. Nussbaum) deliberative judgments of public reason (informed, of course, by the prevailing 'moral conscience' of the day/historical situation).
What difference does it make?
Here's my take on pre-linguistic / pre-cognitive "moral sensibility" from a 2022 thread Do animals have morality?
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/699762
Perhaps I misunderstood. 'Prior' is the usual jargon. Then prior to what? My claim is that the analysis of X cannot be prior to X, where X is something in the world as experienced, in this case, a reflection in thought on actions and a judgement thereon, aka 'ethics'.
Consider the proposition, "Falsehood is better than truth."
If it were true, then it would be better to believe that truth is better than falsehood.
If it were false, then it would be better to believe that truth is better than falsehood.
'Therefore, 'truth is better than falsehood' is the only tenable moral position on truth.
This is the sort of analysis one might attempt in reflecting on the ethics of communication, like what we is doin' on this 'ere thread. But only after the first falsehood. Getting it wrong is what gives one pause...
Certainly. Existence is good, and it can be measured by actual and potential over time. Morality in human terms is simply an expression of morality that that exists though all existence. At a very basic level, imagine if there were sheep and no wolves. Eventually the sheep would multiply, eat all the grass, then die out. But if there are wolves and sheep, the wolves make sure the sheep don't get out of hand. So instead of sheep alone living 100 years then dying out, you create a cycle that allows sheep and wolves to live for hundreds of years.
And yet non-existence means that if good exists, that would mean the destruction of good. Good by definition is what should exist, so it would never be good to eliminate good, and thus have complete non-existence.
No, I claim. I mean, yes, if language were absent then discourse would be absent, but the core matter of ethics remains hidden in the same way, say, time/space was hidden prior to theoretical "discovery". Language brings physics to light, but prior to this, Einstein's concept was a possibility latent in the potentiality of language and existence. So ethics, prior to the language that made ethical discourse possible, was hidden (lethea) or unmanifested in the world. Concepts like good and evil do not exist prior to language, yet in the revelation of thought, they become manifest, but what is it that is being brought forth? Something that was already there, yet unseen. In this way of thinking, ethical discovery is like scientific discovery. Copernicus was right, but not simply because this language won over Ptolemaic language, but because actualities in the world insisted (though what those actualities ARE is indeterminate). We conceive of prehistoric savagery, when we think about it as we would, say, of starvation and disease in our own time. Part of language's function is to dismiss the actualities of this savagery so we can live comfortably in a savage world. Of course, we all know this--- like not thinking of the slaughter house that produces Mcdonald's hamburgers.
But with ethics, things are much stranger than science can ever be, and much more important: we want to say the sun never revolved around the earth, ever, but the conditions for discussing such things cannot reach into the world where the true foundation for talk about the movements of celestial bodies is made manifest. If this were possible, all science would stop on this matter, for an absolute would have finally been found. But why isnp't this possible? Because science is not about absolutes; it is about contingencies. The scientific method is a future looking construction of the conditionally structured sentence, "If...then...", that is, repeatable results are always grounded in finitude, and there is nothing in reason's logic to apodictically guarantee things will continue in this way (Sartre's notion of radical contingency is about just this: the world's behavior is not logically constrained). But ethics has a completely different ground: Good and Evil, without argument, the strangest thing in all of existence, though this is hard to acknowledge. Take two states of affairs, one ethical/aesthetic (Wittgenstein conflates the two), the other factual only, like the sun rising in the east or facts about the order of numbers; just a plain fact. what is the difference? What makes an ethical state of affairs ethical? Good and Evil, and here, unlike in science, the extralinguistic reference is itself (is such a thing even possible?) qualitatively makes the difference, evidenced by pain and pleasure.
Quoting Tom Storm
The reason why this is so important, I believe, is what you are asking about.
To talk like this, it is assumed that at the societal level, one has to leave talk about the foundation of ethics and get down and dirty, so to speak, in the affairs themselves of conflicting points of view, weighing utility, conceiving consequences and benefits and looking within to one's feelings and thoughts. But consider the above where I pointed out that if science were to reach into the true foundation or ground of some issue, that issue would cease to be an issue, for science would simply stop there. It would be "done". But science cannot be about absolutes because there is nothing in the discovery that cannot be second guessed and this is true because, at its most basic level, it is a language construction and ALL that language produces can be second guessed--this is the nature of contingency itself: One spoken thing has its meaning only in context. One would have to reach out of contextuality itself to posit an absolute, and this is absurd.
But that sprained ankle you have because someone tripped you up hurts terribly, and this hurting is the ground for the standing ethical prohibition not to do this, so all eyes are on the hurting, and pain is not a proposition, an attitude, a feeling about the pain nor a thinking of any kind. It is rather a stand alone "prelinguistic" that is entirely acontextual. Ethics "stops" here, as does ethical nihilism. The importance in everyday affairs? Like asking about the importance of science having a stopping place. Makes quantum indeterminacy look like child's play. Of course, ethics doesn't get that kind of press. Affirming the objectivity of ethics would be like stone tablets from Sinai, but without to commandments, without the irrational dreariness of religion. One would have to follow through on this. I attempt this with my own Essence of Religion paper.
Quoting Constance
So all empirical facts are subjective and relative. One could say with Michel Henry that they are the product of ecstasis, the securing of experience by relation to other experience. Does one need then to ground experience in some ethical substance absolutely immanent to itself to put a stop to this apparent infinite regress? That would be the case if one considered the only choice to be a binary opposing pure self-affecting immanence and alienating , mediating reflection. But there is another option: an ecstasis whose repeating act of self-difference is always original , fecund and productive rather than derivative and secondary to an immanent self-affecting ground.. This ecstasis is already a language prior to the emergence of verbal speech, the social within nature , inseparably nature/culture. Pain, angst, desire, attunement, feeling are the very core of ecstasis as self-displacement and self-transcendence.
I wait until the argument settles. What good is saving lives? Saving a life is one thing--there, you saved me from injury, but there is nothing in the term "saving" that has any ethicality to it. I can save this cup of coffee from being tossed down the drain. And life? what is it about life that makes it part of a moral conversation?
Non-existence, however, includes "good" ...
I don't see any reason to accept this "definition". "Should exist" implies a contradiction from the negation of a state of affairs, yet I cannot think of such an actual/non-abstract negation. A more apt, concrete use for "good" is to indicate that which prevents, reduces or eliminates harm (i.e. suffering or injustice).
Well, I think "complete non-existence" (i.e. nothing-ness) is impossible ... and who said anything about "eliminating" existence? Non-existence is an ideal state of maximal non-suffering in contrast to existence (of sufferers) itself.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Here's my secular/naturalistic, negative consequentialist shorthand:
Good indicates that which prevents, reduces or eliminates harm (i.e. suffering or injustice).
Bad indicates that which fails to prevent, reduce or eliminate harm ...
Evil indicates that which prevents, reduces or eliminates any or all potential(s) for doing or experiencing Good.
If ethics is grounded outside of ethical problem solving and thinking that issues from sources of variability, that is, different cultures, subcultures where ethical problems actually brew into issues, then what could this be? I am arguing that it is not a principle at all, nor does it emerge out of a matrix of problem solving. It is the ground of ethics, what makes ethics possible---what it IS.
Look at the matter apophatically: What is NOT in the ethicality of the prima facie prohibition not apply thumbscrews to my neighbor? It is the incidentals, the entanglements. The facts that my neighbor is a serial killer who perhaps deserves it, that I have some religious convictions that call for it, or that my neighbor knows something that needs to be tortured out of her, and so on. And these entanglement have their underpinnings in more entanglements : facts about upbringing, abiding beliefs and conditions that are part of my culture, and there really is no end to this. These are dismissed because they have no inherent ethicality about them. There is nothing in a promise, a stated duty, an honor driven mission, and so on, that is inherently ethical. They all beg the question: what good is this? Even a clearly contingent sense of good, like calling something a good couch or bad knife, begs this same question: what good is a soft cushion or a well functioning recliner? The term 'good' is like the copula 'is': it is everywhere, saturates stated affairs. 'Is' leads to more inquiry about what it IS that is a response to the question of what something IS. The good/bad lie with mere interest, caring, curiosity, wonder, seeking, desiring, and on and on. See Dewey's Art As Experience for a rather mundane but clear talk about this.
So, this was just to be clear as to what is on the table. The difference? No objective values and torturing my neighbor ha no status at all in the most basic analysis. The opposite of this is that it does have status foundationally. How this plays out is not given; not yet. Perhaps in some future Hegelian frame (think of Slavoj Zizek) of discovery this will become "unhidden," (as Heidegger put it). But what is acknowledged is the gravitas of our existence and our actions and experiences. This is the difference.
Thoughts on actions and judgments: A judgment, as with, Raskolnikov is guilty of murder! But what is there in murder that makes this judgment ethical at all? Murder is "something in the world," as you call it; yet as it stands it is underdetermined for a discussion that the OP begins with Hamlet's "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Really? Putting aside Hamlet's ruse, it is a question of the ground of ethics. Good and bad actions beg just this question: What does it mean for something to be good or bad that is non question begging.
Calling an action good doesn't settle the matte as to what it is for something to be good.
Quoting unenlightened
You mean truth as a logical function in a sentence. Do you think ethics hangs by such a thing?
Right. Plato attributes this open endedness to reason itself, and in a way, G.E. Moore seems to have merely it on this vis-á-vis practical reason with the "Open Question" argument. D.C. Schindler and Robert Wallace's books on Plato are quite good on this point. It is this open endedness that gives reason authority to lead, because it can always bring us beyond our own finitudebeyond current belief and desire.
Well, objection works with the early analytic notion of the "absolute ' which was bound up with their conception of "abstract objects " and the notion that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit." It comes out of a certain view of naturalism where the perspective of consciousness is a sort of barrier to be overcome, the much maligned but often reproduced "view from nowhere." However, such a consideration of the "absolute" has probably had a longer life as a punching bag for continentals than it did as a position that was actually embraced by large numbers of philosophers.
I would think though that to be properly absolute, in the sense the term is normally used outside that context, is not to be "a reality as set over and against (and outside) all appearances," but rather to include all of reality and appearance. Appearances are really appearances, and so they cannot fall outside the absolute. Hegel's Absolute does not exclude any of its "moments" for instance.
It's like how in the Republic Socrates wants to show Glaucon that Justice is both desirable for itself and on account of something else (both relative and intrinsic, and so not "outside" the relative). Likewise, the Good is not on the Divided Line. It cannot simply be the furthest most point on the line, but encompasses the whole, which is also why the philosopher king must descend back down into the cave for the whole, and why Socrates must at this point "break into" his own story from without, to refer us to the historical Socrates (the "saint") who is wholly outside the confines of the dramatic narrative. I forget who said it, but it's a great quote; "at the center of the Republic sits a life, not an argument."
The absolute need not require a view from nowhere, however. Socrates need not step outside his own humanity to know that "all men are mortal." Similarly, the claim that Socrates can only know that he is mortal within a specific language game itself presupposes a specific metaphysics of language and truth. Likewise, to claim that nothing is immutable is to seemingly make an immutable claim. Some things do not seem subject to revision though. One need not step outside history (or language) to point out that it will never be true that "Adolf Hitler was the first President of the United States." Donald Trump will never become the inventor of the telephone. Dogs will not become cats without ceasing to be dogs.
This is relevant as far as grounding the human good in human nature goes. Sometimes, one sees the claim that: there is no such thing as human nature. Prima facie, such a claim cannot be anything but farcical if it is not walked back with so many caveats so as to simply reintroduce the idea of a nature in some modified form. It is clear that man is a certain sort of thing. We do not expect that our children might some day soon spin themselves into cocoons and emerge weeks later with wings, because this is not the sort of thing man does. We know that we will fall if we leap off a precipice, and we understand that we are at no risk of floating away into the sky when we step outdoors. Things possess stable natures; what they are determines how they interact with everything else. Beans do not sprout by being watered in kerosene and being set ablaze, nor can cats live on a diet of rocks. Attempts to wholly remove any notion of human nature invariably get walked back with notions like "facticity," modes of being, etc. (Generally, the original idea of a "nature" is presented as a sort of straw man in these cases).
Hence, when it comes to ethics, a blanket denial of human nature will not do. It is not the case that children benefit as much from healthy, regular meals as from having mercury dumped into their water. While the political theory underlying todays hegemonic ideology, neoliberalism, might sometimes attempt to consider man as an essenceless, abstract, choosing agent, it can never truly commit to this in practice. In terms of actual praxis, no theory can wholly elevate a procedural right over all notions of the human good. We recognize that people need access to certain things to thrive and to become self-governing agents in the first place. One cannot have a republic of infants, or the severely brain damaged.
Quoting Constance
If someone offers you your favorite meal to eat and a rancid, rotting fish, is it difficult to decide which option is better? Or is it hard to choose between being awarded $5,000 and having to stick your hand in a blender?
Well, at least the appearance of goodness seems obvious. Rational, ends-directed thought would be incoherent without it. Denying goodness, as an appearance, seems on par with denying one's own consciousness and reason itself (not that naturalism and empiricism haven't driven some to just this!).
Ethics and politics come in because it is also apparent that what appears good to us is not always what is actually best. The ubiquitous phenomena of regret, sometimes immediate, is enough to ground this conclusion I would think. Ethics and politics then, are there to explore what is truly desirable, and not merely apparently desirable, or what is said to be desirable by others. The "good," on this view is "that towards which all things aim," (Nicomachean Ethics, Book I) when considered from the perspective of ends, and from a higher level it is "being qua desirable."
Just as to say "a man is on the hill," is the same as to say "one man is on the hill," so it is the same to say "a man is on the hill" and "it is true that a man is on the hill" (assuming assertoric force, which is implied in most contexts). "One" and "true" aren't adding anything to being here. The being of "a duck" is that of "one true duck." So too, "good" doesn't add to being, but is being under a certain conceptual (not real) distinction. That's the core of the Doctrine of Transcendental in a nutshell (and how this got mixed into "goodness is something that sits outside the world" is beyond me, since folks like Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas clearly think goodness is absolutely everywhere).
The appetites of a man are not the appetites of a bee or a sheep. There is contextuality here. Likewise, what a man thinks will must fulfill his desires is not equivalent with what will do so. Ethics and politics want to uncover what truly fulfills desire, so that we can "live a good life," "be good people," etc.
It sounds like you're asking what normativity most fundamentally is? And you sound like a structuralist. You're looking for a answer that explains all the disparate pieces, like the two-dimensional people building a theory from watching a spoon pass through their plane. All they see is a dot that turns into a line, and back to a dot. What is it?
I read a book by a structuralist who focused on gnostic myths. The typical myth goes like this:
In heaven, all was silent because nothing is undone in heaven. Then, out of the silence came the first question: what is this?. God turned to the questioner and said: "Silence yourself. There are no unanswered questions in heaven." The questioner understood and complied, but something about this event caused a part of the questioner to fall out of heaven, and this part is known as Sophia. In time, Sophia gave birth to a blind god named Samael. Samael's body is our universe, but everything that happened in Samael took place in blindness. There was murder and violence, but it didn't mean anything. It was like a play with no audience.
Sophia felt sad when she looked at her son, who couldn't see her. So she whispered into his ear and what she said pervaded his body and coalesced in humans. Humans awoke and began to see their world for the first time. They felt guilt and shame. They had become their own audience. And they turned to see beyond their world, to heaven, where all questions are answered.
For a structuralist, a story like this could be about something that is always happening in the present, maybe below the surface.
Quoting Tom Storm
Not so much problematic as illusory. When we stand between two mirrors facing each other, this seems a good exemplar of pure self-repetition. But we tend to miss the way that repetition sneaks in alteration, if not in the objects then in how they strike us. We think what we want from science is pure repeatability as the same, but what we really are looking for is relevance.
The only way to reason to come necessary baseline of an objective good (if it exists) is take the ultimate question of "should there be any existence at all vs nothing" and find what must be the answer. If an objective good exists, logically the answer must be yes. That was the original paper if you want to dive into it again.
Quoting 180 Proof
When faced with a competing possible state of existence, what is good is the one that 'should be'. Without any means to quantify good this of course becomes an impossible comparison in many situations, and it may very well be that several competing states of existence would be just as good as another with this definition and evaluation. The original paper attempt was to see if a base good that could be established and built on from there. In such a way I could actually quantify that some states of existence were better than others, and build that up to see how that also applies to human morality.
Quoting 180 Proof
So what you're saying is the definition of good 'should be' something different? :)
I agree that what 'should be' is a state of existence where the least unnecessary harm and suffering occurs. The difference is the paper I wrote tried to prove it as objectively true, not a subjective assertion. To do that, it requires a base proof of good to build off of, and I believe using the definition of good as 'should be' fits within our general cultural understanding of good, and can be 'proven' by abducto ad absurdum (IF there is an objective morality). As I see no better competing proposal of good which can be defined as necessary within any objective moral system, I don't see a better alternative at this time.
I've argued that my usage is objectively true.
e.g.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/540198
Its true that saving by itself isnt always ethical saving a cup of coffee from being spilt doesnt have moral weight. But when we talk about saving and improving lives, the ethical significance comes from the fact that sentient beings can experience suffering and well-being.
A cup of coffee has no capacity for suffering, but a sentient being does. Thats why saving a life (human and nonhuman) carries moral weight: it preserves the possibility of future experiences, prevents suffering, and maintains the capacity for joy, connection, and flourishing.
So for me:
Good = actions that prevent or reduce suffering and promote well-being for sentient beings.
Evil = deliberate actions that cause unnecessary suffering or destroy the capacity for well-being in sentient beings.
Life matters morally not just because it exists, but because it is the vessel of sentience the ability to feel, to suffer, to love, to flourish. Without life, those possibilities vanish.
Existence is good? I am reminded of Voltaire's Candide, or my favorite, Monty Python's version: Chapter one: I Am Eaten by Sharks. You are going to need some kind of theodicy to make this claim stick. I imagine being eaten alive to be the very opposite of a good existence.
But what would this theodicy be? Forget about God; rather, just allow the world to show itself: the good is as it shows itself, and vivisection by shark's teeth is clearly bad. My view is that ethics is real, more real than anything else (which I am willing go into). But first, what is your view on this?
No, but it is the necessary first step. One cannot even ask the question as to what it is for something to be good, until someone has called something good.
"What is it for something to be doog?" We have no theory; it is not discussed; there is no controversy. If a few people started calling stuff 'doog', we might start to wonder, whether they were talking about something real, like some of us wondered for a short while a long time ago if there was something real or objective about 'groovy'.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15203/in-any-objective-morality-existence-is-inherently-good/p1
The above is the full argument so you can understand where I'm coming from.
Oh, fantastic! I'll have to read it and reply later.
"The Long Spoons".
Six people are chained to a chair that is also chained to the floor and basically unable to move. Or wait, some demon made it so everything is like 5 times longer than it has to be, or something. Anyway everybody has long spoons for some reason and that's all they can use to eat and so if they try to feed themselves, they will fail to lift the food into their mouths, and thus starve. But! If they feed each other, every not only lives but thrives.
So, all that business aside. As the above poster reminds us, we have to pick a side, per se. Is it "right" that humanity lives? Would it be better to for us all to die, by any way possible? Should we all just randomly run to the largest most destructive weapon we can access and kill as many people as possible? No. At least, probably not. Most of society would consider this psychotic, homicidal, and "wrong".
And that's an opinion, perhaps. But it's what we agree upon. So therefore, life is good, and that which facilitates life is good. Anyone who has access to a cliff, or body of water, or even knife who chooses not to end their life, essentially agrees with such and thus this concept remains their established baseline of "good" and "right", contrary to the above post by @LuckyR. Well, not contrary, just, simply put, terms are stipulated and therefore we have a solid, immovable and more or less absolute foundation to work with. Anyone who doesn't agree, would logically not be alive at this point, so, anything from that school of thought or ideological persuasion can effectively be dismissed for all intents and purposes going forward.
Ethical substance? I consider the good and the bad of ethics to be analytic terms, abstractions from an original unity. Plainly put, there is no good or bad "outside" of the manifestness of being punched, flogged, burned, loved, delighted, aesthetically immersed, and so on, that we can talk about. This manifestness IS. I argue that the good and the bad are dimensions of our existence, not platonic forms or substance. Reduction to the essence of reason, for Kant, was a deduction to transcendental purity. This doesn't mean there IS such a thing as pure concepts. "Pure" is just a categorical term. So is "the good" and "the bad'.
The need to stop the regress at a terminal point ? But there is no regress in phenomenality. The question is then, in the reduced phenomenon, what is there that is there? Presence as such is nothing, a reduction to nothing, but this is not one what faces. One always already "cares" in some attunement, but what IS it one cares about? Here the reduction goes to the meaning of one's existence, the value of value, as the early Wittgenstein put it. I think he was saying that value cannot be categorized. I think it can be and should be, for this opens being's possiblities. Heidegger's truth as alethea I would argue, opens metaphysics, allowing meaning, banned by positivists, to flood into realization.
An ecstasis whose repeating act of self-difference is always original: In my thinking, ethics and its metaethics insists on a foundation. I am aware that I just said "substance" was out of play. I would use something like value-in-being. How does it insist? The answer to this question lies outside philosophy. Does suffering insist on redemption (in a nontheological sense of this term, a sense that is underlies and grounds theology)? Yes.
Does this mean a field mouse's suffering is redeemed? Maybe, yes, no... But this is the voice of aporia, the doubt that reduces everything to an apophatic wandering. In phenomenology, I claim, there is a suspension of doubt that contravenes phenomenality. This suspension is the reduction.
There is Kierkegaard's Repetition in your alternative (and I would say Deleuze, but the last time I tried reading Difference and Repetition I had to give it up. I cannot yet get into his mind. One day...). Kierkegaard thought Repetition was about the hic et nunc where religious affirmation had its basis in everyday living. You would have it conceived outside of any religious thinking. Can this be done without violating the phenomenon, the appearing as such? I think it cannot.
This is the best I can do thus far with these ideas.
What is right depends on your alignment, good or evil. Humans have evolved socially and physiologically over the Ages. Human nature is good; by good, I mean humans prefer pleasure over pain. The social laws that everybody is talking about are the result of the social and physiological evolution, which is, of course, biased by human nature.
How do you define good and evil?
I already defined good in my post. Evil is the opposite.
Quoting MoK
Humans do evil things, such as murder other humans and other organisms. If human nature is good, why do they do evil things?
Human nature is not perfectly good. You can find evil people as well, such as sadists, rapists, etc.
Actually your comments don't counter mine. I said "good" is subjective, you're saying a majority have (subjectively) agreed on some common meanings of "good". The two are compatible.
I would struggle to see how we could improve on this. No doubt, we could introduce a lot of speculative, abstruse theoretical material into discussions of ethics, but given that morality is firmly rooted in the experiences of conscious creatures, this seems to me a solid foundation.
I am interested in the ethical commitment to preventing suffering. What justifies this as a foundational principle of morality? How can we show that it is a sound basis, rather than merely a preference, unlike the position of someone who acts without regard for the suffering their actions cause? What makes the reduction of harm morally compelling rather than optional?
"View from Nowhere" is an attempt to slip past the glaringly obvious world of actualities we live in. But nowhere means nowhere IN the potentiality of possiblities that arise with a particular ontotheology, where this term is bound to finitude, like talking about Christian metaphysics and a list of superlatives that belong to God, the whole affair extracted from the familiar and its habits of thought of a particular time and place. "Nowhere" is being itself. "Absolute" is a categorical attempt to speak this, which fails, to put it in Kant's terms, because it is a concept without intuitions, empty. The real question that haunts this inquiry inspired by Hamlet's claim in the OP is, is there really no intuition beyond the (merely) empirical? If you break a leg, does the excruciating pain not deliver an "intuition" that stands up to the vacuity of the locution "view from nowhere"? This question issues from outside the historical matrix that informs language's "games".
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Perhaps you intend it this way: like Kant's noumena, what is it that is NOT noumenal? To say the phenomenon is not noumenal means to draw a line between the two, but how is a line to be drawn if the noumenal is impossible to conceive? It is not that the noumenal is some impossibly distant ground for all things; rather, all things are the ground and metaphysics is discovered IN phenomenality: in the foundational indeterminacy of categorical thinking and the presence of empirical objects. It is all a unity, yet beyond unity.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Unless the question as to human nature goes to language itself. Then all things lose their nature, their essence. Sure, we know that beans do not sprout watered with kerosene, but kerosene: what is this apart from the repeated results of a scientific determination, where repeatable results define what kerosene IS. Light a match to kerosene and it burns, without fail under "normal conditions". But IS kerosene reducible to this IS and others like it that congeal into habits of perceptual anticipation? But then, who cares? The factual dimensions of kerosene are absent of meaning apart from the basic features of language, the logic, irony, metaphor, imagery, pragmatics (especially), and so on, and kerosene can be contextualized and recontextualized into eternity, and when these are put to rest, the residuum is nothing, mere being as such...that is until the value dimension is recognized. Now being as such is "life" as Michel Henry talks about it. Meaning outside conceptual open endedness.
The original idea of a nature as a strawman, referring to something as absurd as a real subject, like a soul, absurd because unobservable.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But it's more about an apriori analysis of the good and bad, Contingently, good knives, bad shoes and anything you can think of finds the judgment of good or bad bound up with certain features and uses, like sharpness or comfort, but these judgments find their ground outside contingency. Consider: nothing were important, then ethics would cease to exist. So what does it mean for something to be important? Not this or that, but importance itself. Answer this, and you have determined the essence of ethicality.
Well, sure, fair enough. Maybe all the actually "good" people who knew the "truth" that humanity would be better off dead either died off on their own or were killed (or otherwise made irrelevant), and we now live in a false global society where human life is evil yet we call it good. Sure. Why not. Makes about as much sense as anything else that goes on in this modern age.
Quoting LuckyR
I'm reminded of a post by a wise user here. He says, sure, words don't exist until we create them and not only define but defend their meaning. Okay, that deeper observation was my part.
Nevertheless, why do we have, in most all societies, the concept of "good" and "evil". Why not "fun" versus "boredom" as the ultimate existential debate and dilemma for all minds intellectually inclined and otherwise? Because, someone, somewhere down the line, decided it so. And was able to defend and proliferate that dynamic throughout the ages, likely through force (or perhaps it was just that interesting and entertaining at the time, who could say). My point is, why don't we have another deeper concept that the majority of people, thinkers and non-thinkers alike, seem to consider as the ultimate "All there is" as far as concepts and human existence? Can you answer that?
Furthermore, if we know for a fact the only being that can process, accept, understand, and act as "good" while knowing what "good" is and of course what the inverse is, if that being were to die, than "good" dies with it. Does it not? Therefore, human life and that which proliferates it must be "good", lest all "good" cease to exist..
Ah, see what I did there. Tricky topic. But go on, I await your reply. :grin:
:cool: I'm a disutilitarian (i.e. negative consequentialist) too.
The moral facts of (1) useless suffering and (2) fear of suffering are both (A) experienced by every human being and (B) known about every human being by every human being.
Such a person is merely inconsistent, hypocritical, irrational or sociopathic neither logical nor mathematical rigor eliminates misapplication of rules or bad habits or trumps ignorance.
Phonesis.
On the first page of this thread I'd addressed these issues in reply to @Truth Seeker's query about "objective vs subjective morality" the following is from a thread An inquiry into moral facts (2021) ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/540198
and further elaborated (2023) ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/857773
:up: :up:
"an Is that entails what one Ought Not to do." is what you noted, which of course logically leaves us with 'what should be' vs 'what should not be'.
I agree that unnecessary suffering 'should not be', my point is that this can only be objectively true if good is objectively what 'should be'. The moral fundamental that 'existence is better than non-existence' is required for us to at any point claim 'X should exist". Because all questions of morality chain down to this fundamental question.
Why should suffering not exist? Because it overall lowers the quality of a living being's life. But why should there be a living being at all? Because its an increased concentration and complexity of existence that produces far outcomes than the material alone. Why should there exist anything at all? Because existence is better than non-existence.
The point of a fundamental is you can get to a point upon which you can build from. It also acts as a floor when working backwards. There comes a point where we have an answer, and there are no more questions. The answer is the reason, the fundamental that logically must be.
Not structuralism. Post structuralism, the denial that language really has any rigorous commonality among those in a language group. No, the idea here goes beyond this discussion. The issue is about the essence of ethics, what is ethics such that were there an absence of this, ethics would cease to exist, like logic vanishing without tautology and contradiction. I am saying that the dominant position that is the denial of objectivity in ethical matters is wrong, and the evidence for this in, if you will, in the fabric of existence: suffering and delight. What ARE these? No less than the explicit manifestation of, say, having your teeth pulled without anesthetic, or being in love. Max Scheler refers to this as non formal value and ethics (arguing against Kant's ethical formalism). But no more than this? This is a hard question. To say what happiness is IN a context of relations, uses and purposes is one things, but then, what about "out" of these contextual indices? This outside is a matter of being outside of language. Suffering lies outside of language, as does the beauty of Ravel's Mother Goose Suite. We do face interpretative contexts everywhere in our entanglements with the world, but these interpretations are what suffering IS.Suffering IS what it is in al its manifestness, and this is acontextual.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
"View from Nowhere" is an attempt to slip past the glaringly obvious world of actualities we live in. But nowhere means nowhere IN the potentiality of possiblities that arise with a particular ontotheology, where this term is bound to finitude, like talking about Christian metaphysics and a list of superlatives that belong to God, the whole affair extracted from the familiar and its habits of thought of a particular time and place. "Nowhere" is being itself. "Absolute" is a categorical attempt to speak this, which fails, to put it in Kant's terms, because it is a concept without intuitions, empty. The real question that haunts this inquiry inspired by Hamlet's claim in the OP is, is there really no intuition beyond the (merely) empirical? If you break a leg, does the excruciating pain not deliver an "intuition" that stands up to the vacuity of the locution "view from nowhere"? This question issues from outside the historical matrix that informs language's "games".
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Perhaps you intend it this way: like Kant's noumena, what is it that is NOT noumenal? To say the phenomenon is not noumenal means to draw a line between the two, but how is a line to be drawn if the noumenal is impossible to conceive? It is not that the noumenal is some impossibly distant ground for all things; rather, all things are the ground and metaphysics is discovered IN phenomenality: in the foundational indeterminacy of categorical thinking and the presence of empirical objects. It is all a unity, yet beyond unity.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Unless the question as to human nature goes to language itself. Then all things lose their nature, their essence. Sure, we know that beans do not sprout watered with kerosene, but kerosene: what is this apart from the repeated results of a scientific determination, where repeatable results define what kerosene IS. Light a match to kerosene and it burns, without fail under "normal conditions". But IS kerosene reducible to this IS and others like it that congeal into habits of perceptual anticipation? But then, who cares? The factual dimensions of kerosene are absent of meaning apart from the basic features of language, the logic, irony, metaphor, imagery, pragmatics (especially), and so on, and kerosene can be contextualized and recontextualized into eternity, and when these are put to rest, the residuum is nothing, mere being as such...that is until the value dimension is recognized. Now being as such is "life" as Michel Henry talks about it. Meaning outside conceptual open endedness.
The original idea of a nature as a strawman, referring to something as absurd as a real subject, like a soul, absurd because unobservable.
Why not structuralism? It's a candidate for answering what ethics is.
Quoting Constance
The ancient Persian answer is that goodness is the direction we're reaching out toward. Evil is what we're pushing away from, so a good person is in motion, or progressing. In this view, it doesn't matter what your present condition is, if you're progressing, you're good. If you're stationary, you're evil.
The ancient Jewish answer is that goodness is clear for all to see in your health and well-being because obviously God is blessing you. A similar outlook is Roman stoicism, which aligns goodness with Nature. It's in a tree's nature to grow toward the light, if it fails to do this, it becomes sick. Sickness and evil are basically the same thing: a failure to abide by your nature. I like the the Roman view because it's efficient.
If you notice, both these views allow flexibility in what actually counts as good. We may discover through experience what really constitutes progress or health. On the other hand, they conflict in whether goodness shows up on the surface, or if it can be hidden. Our present worldview is a fusion of ancient views.
Yes, I think you are closing in. But there does remain the final question: what is there that is bad about suffering? You may, as I do, hold that this is self evident, though this gets lost in our entangled affairs, where competing goods and bads struggle. But the question is now momentous, not mundane: Suffering is now not a convention of the language and culture that talks about it, talk that leads to variability because suffering is inevitably caught up in uses and purposes. Suffering is the bare manifestation of that terrible pain in your ankle, and this, if you can stand it, transcends the finitude that language that would hold it down, keep it familiar, contained in reduction to the ordinary. But suffering is not ordinary, not an institution. It is that original that institutions of ethics have their foundation in.
Her is where the argument has trouble:
Definitions:
Good - what should be
Existence - what is
Morality - a method of evaluating what is good
This puts existence under the critical determinations of ethics, a call for an "ethical ontology" under which all things abide. Now, someone like Mackie (see his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong) will call this "queer"--for what kind of ontology IS this to rule over all existence? Only God has had this impossible place in the world, and God is conceived in ancient terrified mentalities. What is the basis for this assumption of a "God" (notwithstanding the absence of the term in your argument. The Godlike "queerness" holds.
Not that I think Mackie is right. But this above needs to addressed.
I don't see it. Put plainly, when you have an ethical issue, the ground for this takes one away from structure and into the value dimension of the world. The prima facie prohibition against stealing something dear to you is the fact that it is dear, and this dearness is not a structure of anything, Saying what it IS has a structure, but the bare phenomenality has none of this; and yet, if this phenomenality were to be absent, the ethicality would be absent as well. Thus, what it means for something to be ethical defers to the manifestation of what is important, and importance here is a nonformal (non structural) actuality. Ethics has its determinative ground here.
See the issue: ask me what a dog or a cat or an interstellar mass IS, and language is forthcoming; and ask what this explanatory language IS, and more language is forthcoming; and this circularity has no end. But what of the "presence" of what is there? This is "apprehended" IN language, yet stands entirely apart from it. If this were, say, the color yellow, then the paradigmatic status of this as a color may indeed evlove with scientific insight (in its "revolutions"), but whatever newly arises, is going to be within the "structure" of existing existing paradigms. Ethics will work like this as well, evolve in time, BUT: the ground of ethics is not like the color yellow, or any other empirical concept. It is value-being, meaning, simply put, the difference between moonlight being a reflection fo sunlight, and a punch to the kidney. Both facts, but the latter radically different. It is this difference that makes ethical phenomenality what ethics is really all about.
Quoting frank
Yes, I have read. But this puts the uses and purposes that are freighted into ethical issues INTO the essence of ethics. To establish what ethics IS, we do not look to good this and that, for this begs the foundational question: what is the nature of something being good...at all? This is the determinate question amid the prevailing indeterminacy of purposes and uses in which the good is embedded.
I think dearness as a concept only exists relative to its opposite: worthlessness. I've already talked about some of the ethical structures we've inherited: progress, health, and covenant-based. It's clear to me that structure is primary, so I guess we'll agree to disagree here.
Quoting Constance
And yet what you've said here is a manifestation of the structure of human thought: that a signifier implies something signified. You're giving voice to structure. Is it the structure of the mind? Is it the structure of the world? Is it both? You don't have any vantage point from which to answer that. Whereof one cannot speak..
Quoting Constance
You want an answer as to what goodness is beyond the uses the word is put to. That's why you're ending up needing a transcendental basis. I think you're begging the question.
Well, why is it popular? Is everyone just confused and wrong? While possible, I'd wager there's a reason out of the thousands of societies across thousands of years across multiple continents, some never interacting with one another (or even never coming into contact with any other but their own) all managed to organically and independently reach the same conclusion. Something about it is intrinsic that is definable, whether we have succeeded in understanding it or simply fallen short of such a task.
If the ultimate highest Good man can ever understand is subjective, it might as well be used interchangeably with a word like "pleasing" or "enjoyable" or perhaps "socially and biologically advantageous". This way we can accurately say: "without 'good' (meaning any or all of those terms) society would collapse into anarchy and suffering (evil?) would abound, therefore being good is the right thing to do and what is good vs. what is not becomes self-evident."
I reckon it would be short of impossible to pin down an absolute Good outside of theist-oriented beliefs. That much I grant you.
We also associate qualities that society "likes" or yes perhaps even needs and would perish without as "good", of course. Wearing a fur coat outside in Kabul would be "foolish" and perhaps "wrong" in a shallow sense of the word, but it wouldn't be Wrong as in Evil. Just a bit silly. Whereas wearing the same in Amsterdam, depending on the season, would be "smart" and also "good", again in the shallow sense of the word. Of course, in both places, wearing the skin of a priest or holy man as a coat would likely be considered wrong, irrespective of any differences between the two places and peoples.
Point being, if "Good" really is "unknowable" other than by one's personal or social opinion, why do we even use it? Why not again words that most people don't realize they're using "Good" as a proxy for (I.E. "pleasing", "smart", "socially advantageous", etc.)?
Quoting LuckyR
Well, is that any less valid of a place to start? Did you start learning math with advanced calculus or did you start learning what numbers are and that 2 + 2 = 4? The journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step. We can't just reduce what we feel to be less than relevant as "low hanging fruit" without any real reason or rationale. Again, outside of theism, the only likely place one can find Morality outside of what one pleases would naturally have to be tied to biology and sociology: what proliferates healthy societies vs. what doesn't.
As an aside, the two topics are fairly distinct. In the latter, welfare assistance, there are clear and logically proven drawbacks such as dependence, laziness, no incentive to contribute to one's society, possible lack of purpose, possible risk of societal financial collapse or insolvency, etc. There are plenty of valid, rational, and above-all, logical (able to be proven on paper) concerns for both proponents and critics alike. Not so much for the first scenario. Few that come to mind, at least.
I take it you'd agree with this sentence: "There is no Good or Evil, just as there is no Right or Wrong; These are empty words that merely refer to mutually agreed upon social constructs rooted in biological and emotional realities and little else."
Thats a beautifully put reflection. I think youve touched the heart of the matter: suffering is not merely a social construct or a linguistic convention, but a fundamental experience that resists reduction. When we ask, What is bad about suffering? the most honest answer might be that it needs no further justification - it reveals its badness in the very act of being endured.
Language and culture may frame or contextualize suffering, but the raw experience of agony, despair, or anguish is prior to those frames. Thats why so many ethical systems, despite their diversity, converge on minimizing suffering and promoting well-being. They are built on the foundation that suffering is not an arbitrary preference but an undeniable reality, and well-being is its natural counterweight.
In that sense, good and evil are not metaphysical mysteries but responses to the lived fact of suffering and flourishing.
It is the ontology of consequence. Essentially I'm noting that an essential property of existence is that it 'should be'. This is a fundamental. Fundamentals should be proven as necessary, for what exists to be, but themselves need no prior proof or explanation for their being. It is not, "This is what I propose, just trust me," but "The only logical conclusion that can be reached with what we know of existence."
If you're truly interested in the discussion, please check out the argument in addition to the definitions to see why this ends up being a fundamental. As well, it would probably be better if you post there to not distract from this person's post, as well as have easy quoting access to the argument and responses.
Okay, but language stands in binary structures, not aches and pains and pleasures and delights. These latter are not language at all, notwithstanding that they are "said"; it is thus "under erasure, as Derrida put it. Their being said demonstrates their being logically bound to the essence of ethics, that is, it is only in language that recognition of something outside of language is possible. And as much as philosophy can tear such a thing to shreds (philosophy is hell bent on nihilism---and for a very good reason, don't get me wrong. It keeps the road narrow, just as the rigors of science does) it is not nonsense (as Wittgenstein called it early on when he said ethics and aesthetics were transcendental), I claim. It rather issues from the starting point of any inquiry, which is observation: the non linguistic nature of non formalism in value and ethics (Scheler calls it that) is simply "there" .
Quoting frank
Th vantage point lies in the concept of pure phenomenality, which is, in its essence, only "partly" a concept (language loses it grip in discussions like this). There are two camps on Derrida. One is that of John Caputo in his Radical Hermeneutics, The Prayers and Tears of Jacque Derrida, and elsewhere. Caputo tries to shwo that in Derrida there is the crux of religious affirmation. Hard to talk about briefly, or at all really. I find phenomenology opens conversation to the metaphysical openness of our existence, and in this openness is the presence of the world, standing monolithically before our eyes. Heidegger was right, what is there is "of a piece" with the language that speaks what it is; but he was wrong to ignore the...this is where it gets a little weird: ignore the primordiality of the ontology of value-in-being.
I won't go into this here unless you want to. Jean luc Marion lays this issue out in his Givenness and Reduction. Impossible to read unless one follows Husserl and Heidegger closely. I don't follow closely enough, really. Postmodern thinking, or post-postmodern thinking, teeters on the brink. BUT: in its defense, this brink is discovered, not altogether "made" (as Rorty puts it). The world IS the brink.
Quoting frank
I certainly can see why you say this. But consider: kick me hard in the kidney. The question is begged, and is ALWAYS begged in anything language can say about this, for all that can be said lies in the contingency of language. There is nothing sacrosanct in language, for anything can be gainsaid, and so just in the saying there is the refutation. This is why philosophy remains unsettled after millennia--it is an apriori inquiry, meaning its questions rely on what is IN language's meanings, and this is why Heidegger insists on a finitude of dasein's being. But that pain in my kidney cannot be second guessed. Like logic's modus ponens? Stronger. Logic is given to us in language. The pain AS SUCH is not.
If using just "short of impossible" means: functionally impossible, then we're in agreement. As to theisticly originated beliefs, they seem at first glance to be (internally) objective, after all they're written down right there in this physical Book. However, ultimately some human at some point originated the contents of the Book (leaving aside what or who inspired that human). Thus to a third person observer, which is everyone in the current era, the Book's contents are at least partially subjective.
As to your sentence, no I don't agree with it (as written), I'd put it thusly: Good/Evil and Right/Wrong definitely exist, not unlike the existence of money, Germany and Apple Corporation. Similarly, they are, like money very important both theoretically and practically. However, all of the above do not exist objectively, rather inter subjectively.
Good also brings about profit other than money. If you always perform bad in front of others, you likely won't make other friends.
Avoiding pain is a good in itself.
Our gut instincts know what good is because we know what pain is like and unless there's a good reason as to why not, all others will avoid pain.
Our gut instincts know that wasting resources leads to waste pile up and reduction of availability.
Theft is bad unless the person deserves theft. Which is dependant on how they're using their stuff/money. If a country is making false war with other countries, it may be a good thing if that country receives a financial attack. There's some strategy involved with morality.
Most of morality can be deciphered by gut instincts from wise minds. Pain is a no unless deserved. Theft is a no unless deserved. Finding out whether or not someone deserves a bad thing happen to them is dependant on a wise judge who can tell if a person is ultimately bad or ultimately good. If a person is ultimately good, there is no reason something bad should happen to them. Someone is ultimately good when their performance is more good than bad.
Some ultimately bad people are so petty, a perfect judgement would tell that they are forgiven for their bad. The judge also has within it the capacity to forgive if that poor morality is not evil - at least it's not evil - and the person may have an excuse as to why it's morality is poor.
What's right is what's profitable in every sense of the word(money, health, friendship, paradise, etc). What's bad is what's not profitable. What's evil is what's a complete abstraction of what's profitable.
Performing good brings about good in return. Performing bad brings about bad in return. Evil brings about more bad. What's good is up to wise minds to judge using their gut instincts, it can't always be what's not bad to a person--- there is strategy involving a moral power play. At the end of the day, there would be no profit if there wasn't some semblance of good.
Sure, but is it good or evil? Or neither? It's the intellect's job to answer that. You can't go wrong spending a little time with analytic philosophy, especially if your mind has a tendency to take flight like a bird. AP is slow and humble.
Quoting LuckyR
Well, it's also common for anti-realists, even professional analytic philosophers, to assume that the realist must be committed to the idea that "most people's judgements re value must be mostly true, most of the time." But such a view is in fact a development of the "sentimental" anti-realist theories of the Enlightenment that want to ground value in some sort of "common denominator" in sentiment.
Obviously, the vast majority of earlier Western and Eastern thought radically disagrees. They generally argue that man is fundamentally deluded about value. Epicetus claims that most masters are slaves (whereas a slave might be truly free) because the majority suffers from vice and is deluded about value and freedom. The difference between apparent and real goods is so extreme that many who have tried to point this out to people have died grizzly deaths. Socrates was executed. As Plato puts it in the Allegory of the Cave, when the philosopher descends back into the cave to try to guide others out he will likely be beaten. So too, Christ (God himself!) was crucified for his moral and spiritual teachings, and Saint James, Saint Peter, and Saint Paul followed him in execution. Boethius lost everything and died for doing the right thing. Dante ended up writing the Commedia under a sentence of being burnt to death. Nor is the East particularly different in the fundamental theme here, man's inability to determine what is truly desirable.
This also highlights a pretty key difference, which is that the norm in pre-modern philosophy is that the saint or sage is the measure of value, as opposed to the "common sentiment." Buddha, not the masses, knows the truth about suffering, etc.
I'm a little unclear what it would mean for something like Germany to not be objective. Does this mean it is not an objective fact that German surrendered in WWII? Is it not an objective fact that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July, 4th, 1776? Are there objective rules to chess? What about objective truths of arithmetic (which is often considered a "game" like chess)?
If they are "intersubjective" does this mean that if all relevant subjectivity changes, the truth changes too? So if in the far future man's understanding of history becomes radically confused and people come to think that: "Adolf Hitler was the first president of the United States," and all surviving evidence somehow points in this direction, does it become true? I would assert that this is ridiculous. Adolf Hitler cannot "become" the first president of the USA anymore than George Washington can cease to have been its first president, regardless of what man currently thinks. Hence, I'd consider that fact to be "objective" in the sense that it is not dependent on current belief and opinion.
Now, sometimes "objective" gets used more as a synonym for "noumenal," or as "holding in a view from nowhere," but I find this unhelpful. Arguably, on this definition, no potential knowledge is objective, and so it fails to be a useful category (or fails to make a useful distinction). If knowledge is "the intellect's grasp of being," and truth "being qua knowable," then the idea of "mind-independent" truths is a contradiction in terms. Yet it would also seem to be nonsense to say that something "is the case" but that it also is "not true that it is the case."
It does not seem there can be "being qua knowable" with nothing to know anymore then there can be good"being qua desirable"with nothing to desire. However, it seems that there can certainly be mistaken beliefs and opinions about what is true and desirable.
I wonder if this kind of objection is mixing up intersubjectivity with instability. To say truth is intersubjective is not to say that it shifts with our whims, but that it depends on the shared practices that make claims intelligible. Facts about Germanys surrender or the date of a declaration remain fixed because our institutions and habits of checking evidence are stable. If those forms of life were gone, the way we talk about truth would likely be gone too, but that does not make present truths vulnerable. It only means there is no view from nowhere that holds them beyond these kinds of practices.
With histroical facts, intersubjectivity is essentially grounded in agreed methods for checking evidence. With morality, by contrast, the agreement doesn't involve measurement, it seems to be about what we care about and the kind of lives we prefer. And yes, all this may well vary over time and across cultures, but essentially not stealing, lying, or killing is good for the survival of a tribe, so its pretty easy to see the attractions of a code of conduct/morality, at least at a functional level.
I won't deny that some people use "inter-subjective" to mean essentially the same thing as "objective" once meant. This seems to me to be an unwillingness to argue the conflation of "objectivity" with some sort of Kantian "noumenal."
Quoting Tom Storm
How so? Given your description, if our institutions, habits of checking evidence, and systems intelligibility changewhich they doit seems like the facts change, and so it absolutely could cease to be true that Germany surrendered during WWII, no? You say I am confusing inter-subjectivity with instability, but then seem to present an understanding about the truth of past events that makes such truths unstable. That is, current systems and practices become prior to past history.
So if man goes extinct, are there no facts about human history?
This goes back to something I mentioned earlier about a particular metaphysics of language and appearances where "Socrates must 'step outside his humanity' to make the universal pronouncement that 'all men are mortal,'" or where one must "'step outside history, culture, and language, to say anything about what is other or prior to these." This is the most common metaphysical underpinning for historical anti-realism I am aware of. I also think it's somewhat self-refuting since it tends to rely on a metaphysical presumption that truths are bounded by "language games," but then (often dogmatically) absolutizes this particular metaphysics of language and appearances to make this apparently universal claim.
I guess I would just repeat what I've already said about the difficulty of containing reason within "norms and practices" or "paradigms" and their difficulties:
Now of course, we might allow that all human knowledge is always filtered through culture, language, history, etc. (as well as human nature) but this does not requires that there are the ground ofa prior totruth itself. For if there was no truth (no potential for knowledge, no intelligibility) the former couldn't exist in the first place.
This claim can be cashed out in many ways. I will focus on one common way. I will take the claim to be:
X is right = I have a positive attitude towards X.
I think this view of 'right' is incorrect (and the same for 'wrong'). When discussing ethics, that simply does not seem to be what is meant by the terms.
For instance, it makes sense to hold the thought "I think death penalty is right, but is it right?" Under the view above, this would translate to: "I think I have a positive attitude towards the death penalty, but do I have a positive attitude towards it?" This makes ethical reflection seem trivial, when it does not seem to be trivial. So that is a problem for the theory.
It also fails to handle disagreement. If I disagreed with the previous speaker, and said: "No, the death penalty is definitely wrong", it seems like I tried to contradict them. However, this would not be the case if I'm just reporting my own attitude. To illustrate:
A:"I have a positive attitude towards the death penalty!"
B:"No, I have a negative attitude towards the death penalty!"
A and B are not making contradictory propositions. Both can be true simultaneously. But in these exchanges, we are often trying to contradict the other person. So there is something problematic with the subjectivist theory.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Knowing for sure might be difficult for any form of potential knowledge. Can one know for sure that one is not currently living in a simulation? Probably not. Can we still be justified in our beliefs about the external world? I think so.
One should be humble about many ethical beliefs, given that there are often clear uncertainties. Still, one must also take it seriously. Even if it is unfeasible to be absolutely sure, that does not mean we should compromise ethical beliefs, at least not fully.
If someone kicks a dog, even if I cannot be 100% sure that it is wrong, I think I'm justified to take it as such, and prohibit people from abusing their pets. One can be uncertain and serious at the same time.
I agree with you that reducing right and wrong to just my attitude makes ethical reflection seem trivial and misses how we usually use those words. Ethics isnt just about reporting preferences, its about evaluating them and testing them against reasons, evidence, and the lived reality of sentient beings.
I also think youre right that we cant get 100% certainty about morality (any more than we can get certainty about whether were in a simulation). But just like in science, we dont need absolute certainty to act - we need justified beliefs based on the best available evidence.
For me, the clearest anchor is suffering and well-being. If someone kicks a dog, the dog suffers. That suffering isnt a matter of attitude - its a real experience in the world. And since suffering is universally aversive, preventing it gives us a solid grounding for calling something wrong.
So maybe we dont get certainty, but we do get enough clarity to live by: wrong = actions that inflict unnecessary suffering, and right = actions that prevent or reduce suffering and promote well-being. That keeps ethics from collapsing into just my feelings, while still leaving space for humility and reflection.
:up: :up:
Yes, prior, logically prior, meaning if this dimension of our existence were to be removed, then the very concept of ethics becomes meaningless. So here, one has to step out of language andlogic entirely for the logical ground to be what it is. Now, the same canbe said for science, I mean, remove, well, the world, and science vanishes, but science only cares about quantifications and causal connections and works entirely within the structure of thought of its paradigms. It doesn't ask about the nature of scientific observation, say, because it doesn't care since this kindopf thing; it doesn't have to. After all, the color red, say, just sits there. It is nothing without the language that discusses it analytically. The phenomenon itself has no qualities that are not reducible to the categories of language contexts.
But that sprained ankle, not like a color (as such) at all. The very salient feature of its pain is the very essence of the category! This empirical science cannot deal with this, and analytic philosophy simply runs away, because to admit this is ,like admitting an actual absolute. Like admitting divine existence in their eyes.
But are they wrong? After all, this IS the essence of religion: an absolute in the metaethical analysis.
Surely you are right. Have you read Mackie's Inventing Right and Wrong? One of my favorites, because it is SO well wrtten and is meant to be a text book for an analytic class in advanced ethics, which I took years ago (not with Mackie himself, of course). The argument is altogether against an objectivist ethics, calling moral realism too "queer" (the argument form queerness"). It is an intensive analysis of anglo american moral thinking, but his is mostly straw man thinking. Call moral realism a platonic form of the good (FOG as my prof put it) and now you have an absurd ontology, a "substantival" good, as if ethics were "something".
But that is not the claim here. Good and evil, these are just analytic terms that emerge out of what is there in the giveness of the world. Put plainly, ouches and yums actually exist, but they're not things "at hand". They show this "queerness" as Mackie put it, which is no more or less than what it is to experience it. Phenomenology looks directly at this and asks, what IS this? All schools of science and common sense in abeyance. And Mackie is right, there is something IN "ouch!" that is not empirical but "existentially apriori"---Kant's pure reason was on the same track, after all, causality tells one that this cup cannot throw itself off the table, and this cup does exist. Very queer, I would say, this causality. But ethics: this is not the vacuous Kantian form of judgment and thought. Here there is depth of meaning.
Sorry, I'm not going to read all of that. I read through some, and it occurred to me that it was excessive. Existence must possess the ground for good and evil. And it does. But existence qua existence syas nothing about this. OTOH, there IS no existence qua existence; this is just an abstraction from what there, in the givenness of the world. to see this, one has to move toward inclusiveness, that is, including everything that IS, and this means all of what is usually excluded, human subjectivity. This move is difficult for most because it requires a rejection of a naturalistic pov, for naturalism (materialism, physicalism) is reductive of ethics down to a value-free ground of "scientific metaphysics"; that is subjectivity is reduced to a thing, and value, judgment, thought, antidipation, sentiment, choice, reflection, and on and on, these, the very ground of ethics, are altogether lost. This deflationary account of ethics is what survives in analytic thinking. And again, this constitutes a view of existence which has no place for your thesis.
So all said, talk about existence simply needs clarification. Obviously, existence is should be ONLY if existence is inherently ethical, that is, metaethical, which means existence must resolve itself into an ethical conclusion of redemption for "the bad" and consummation for "the Good". Religion, mostly, is exactly what does this. But religion is cranky and silly, even. Ah, it is this, but not in "essence".
You thesis amounts to a world where divinity subsumes existence. Of course, divinity needs unpacking.
It sounds like you're coming close to saying good is pleasure and evil is pain. You could build a moral system from that. The quest to discover what ethics really is would be completed?
I think there are advantages to occasionally looking at the world through an amoral lens. Judgment and understanding stand in opposition. The more you judge something or someone, the less you understand, because once the judgement is made (that was evil!), there's no reason to look further. Understanding requires putting judgment on the shelf. For instance, if you think about the most aggressive, toxic person in your life, consider that angry, aggressive people usually feel weak and afraid. People who try to manipulate others feel like they have no control. People are contradictory. People who are in pain sometimes lash out to cause others pain. Plus causing pain can be a form of self medication because it feels good to stomp downward. It makes you feel powerful, and a dopamine burst is apt to accompany it, producing a feeling of accomplishment. In other words, the question ethics doesn't spend much time on is: why does the abuse exist? Step away from ethics into nihilism, and you can see how so many people are trapped in a web of grief and rage, most born into that web. Instead of lamenting it, see the way this web shapes identities and grand dramas that play out over generations.
Remember the Shakespeare play where everything started off great, everything went well, and then there was a happy ending? There was no such play because it would have put the audience to sleep. The mind seeks out the painful because it's dramatic. The story arc requires pain in order to have something to overcome. Consciousness itself is a story arc. This is Schopenhauer's pessimism.
Yes, as I said -
Quoting Tom Storm
I should have said fragile rather than vulnerable, perhaps. Pragmatically truth serves a purpose which remains stable while a given truth is of use to us. And youre right in 1000 years much of present science may well be understood as factually wrong. But this doesnt mean current scientific understanding isnt useful now.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm not convinced. Do we need an extra truth hovering behind that to explain why knowledge and intelligibility are possible? The fact that human practices generate and sustain standards of intelligibility is all the explanation we really need.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Facts only have meaning in the context of a set of practices, without us around to give them context, theyre basically meaningless.
I dont think this is accurate. People can sell harmful products that cause cancer, become rich, build a personal paradise, mistreat those around them, abuse drugs and still die at a vast age, content and satisfied. Isn't this a fundamental irony of life: moral failings and worldly cruelty dont impact upon happiness? Now some people enjoy myths like gods to provide judgment on such folk in order to restore the balance they believe is missing from the real world.
Quoting Constance
Only on a particularly deflationary view of "science." At any rate, those who embrace such a view, and who stick to a "hard" empiricism and naturalism also often tend towards denying causality. But in such contexts, consciousness itself, reference, intentionality, etc. are every bit as "queer" as "evaluative judgement."
Might I suggest though that this is an unhelpful starting point for framing a metaphysics of goodness, given that camp largely tends to deny goodness, or else to put forth some sort of reductive, mechanistic view of it as reducible to "brain states?" I mean, your earlier point about kerosene (or presumably also one's own beloved, or anything else) being reducible to empirical data seems to already have assumed an answer about ethics. Yet it can hardly be one that it is "good" to affirm.
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, are our current theories wrong now, and just not understood as such? Or are they "true" now and will become false at some point in the future? I assume you have "scientific progress" in mind, but supposing some sort of apocalypse where science reverts towards pre-modern beliefs (i.e., animist spirits as primary causal agents, geocentrism, etc.) would these beliefs "become true again?" Likewise, were geocentrism and the "flatness of Earth" facts when dominant practice, discourse, and belief still led to their affirmation? (And wouldn't "scientific progress" be arbitrary if "truth" did change like this?)
If the answer to these questions is negative, then I would contend that this shows that truth is not posterior to (i.e., dependent upon) practice, language, culture, etc. (although it may be filtered through them).
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, I am not sure about truth "hovering behind" anything, but the notion that truth isn't posterior to practices and beliefs resolves the problems highlighted by the questions above. Was the Earth truly flat when dominant practices and beliefs affirmed it as such? If not, the truth of the Earth's roundness cannot have been dependent upon those practices. Indeed, if the reality (truth) of things just is whatever the dominant practice/culture says they are, how could beliefs ever fail to be "pragmatic" and why would they ever change? We are always omniscient in that case, just so long as we don't disagree.
Quoting Tom Storm
From whence this intelligibility? Does man or his practices generate it ex nihilo?
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, here's your answer for why you need a truth that isn't dependent on man, otherwise you have to affirm this sort of thing. So, did the Earth lack a shape before man and then man brought determinant the shape of the Earth into being by "practicing?" Or did it have a shape when the dinosaurs walked the Earth, but it wasn't true that it had a shape, and it wasn't a fact that it had any particular shape?
Even accepting your claim (which seems extreme), we face the problem of why practices and beliefs should be one way and not any other. Since there are no facts outside of practice and language, it follows that there can be no prior facts that determine practice and language themselves. And, since there are no facts outside of current belief and practice, no facts can explain how or why beliefs and practices change and evolve.
All that aside, it seems a little grandiose to me, the idea that man makes everything what it is through his speech, judgements, etc. That sort of expansive constructivism or linguistic idealism (different varieties of the same thesis I suppose) seem to me to just repeat Genesis 1, only with God cut out and man pasted in God's place. You know: "In the beginning the language community hovered over the formless deep and called forth trees and stars..." And to the extent that there is no true actuality prior to man's practices, he seems to be very much the volanturist God of the Reformers, with wholly inscrutable origins and reason for "creating."
I am quite sympathetic to the problem that, if truth is the intellect's grasp of being, there can hardly be "mind-independent truths," but the solution of making truth dependent on man leads to some bizarre conclusions, especially if man is considered to be contingent.
No, I'm sayign precisely the opposite.
I guess it depends on the nature of the claim, right? As a rule, I dont think things are true in themselves, theyre just not false. Water freezes at 0?°C (32?°F) at standard atmospheric pressure, but if the Earth were to die of heat death, that fact would become irrelevant and effectively vanish. In the meantime, we can safely accept it and it has utility. (Mind you it's a truth that's contingent on practices. Saying water freezes at 0?°C is true within the context of our measurement practices, definitions of temperature, and shared scientific methods. Its not true in itself outside that framework. But I think you find probably this tricksy and limiting? )
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I woudl imagine our ideas change when the ways we talk about and interact with the world change, which is why beliefs shift over time. Were never omniscient; we just get better at describing the world in ways that work for us. Truth, in that sense, isnt about matching reality, its about what proves useful in our ongoing conversations. Humans are meaning-making creatures and are chronically dissatisfied with what we believe. That dissatisfaction drives us to keep revisiting and reshaping our models of reality, but I dont think those models ever truly match reality.
But you write as if this is a vast problem: -
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That frames it in a harsh light. Its not 'whatever' the dominant practice happens to be, as if this were random or irrational. Its generally based on our best efforts and practices and our sense making impulses.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't see why we need outside facts. Practices and beliefs evolve because people try new ways of talking and acting, and some ways work better than others. Change may come from our restlessness and experimentation, not from some external truth. Its all part of our ongoing dialogue with each other and the world.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I dont think its bizarre. This isnt the same as saying 'anything goes'. Our models and approaches always makes sense within the context of culture, language, and conventions, all of which evolve.
(Edited for clarity)
The point is you said this:
Quoting Barkon
I responded with reasoning why this is inaccurate.
Quoting Barkon
No. Gangsters, autocrats, thugs and CEOs may continue unopposed despite everyone being aware of who they are and what they do,
If truth only exists inside the context of human practicesis indeed dependent on themwhat truths could we possibly be missing such that we are not omniscient? Wouldn't our (collective) lack of possession of all truths itself show that all truths aren't actually dependent on us and our practices, for how could they exist without our knowing of them if our practices make them true?
You didn't answer any of the questions directly, but I think they demonstrate the problem here. Did the Earth lack a shape prior to man and his practices? Or did it have a shape but it wasn't true that it had that shape? If man once again began to believe the Earth is flat would it "become flat again?" And if it wasn't round before man decided it was round, in virtue of what did evidence suggesting the Earth was round exist?
Quoting Tom Storm
So, the fact that one cannot raise livestock to live on by mating males to males or sheep to pigs is a result of our "conversations?" But why would such a conversation arise if it wasn't already the case that one cannot mate males to males or sheep to pigs (or their precursor wild ancestors)? Why would people find it "useful" to formulate such truths if they weren't already the case, and why does it seem prima facie ludicrous that it "would be true that sheeps and pigs could produce offspring just in case everyone found it 'useful' to affirm this?" This is the problem with the dependence claim.
More generally, it seems to make 'usefulness' a metaphysical primitive. If there are no facts prior to usefulness, because usefulness is what generates all facts, then in virtue of what are some things deemed useful and not others? Yet surely what seems useful has prior causes, and there are facts about those prior causes. For instance, the reason it never seemed 'useful' to mate boars to wild goats is because it was already true that they cannot produce offspring because they are different species.
Further, what is actually, truly "useful" on this account seems to be "whatever is currently said/believed to be 'useful'" since there does not seem to be any possible facts about usefulness that are external to current belief and practice. But this straightforwardly collapses any appearance/reality distinction.
And since the vast majority of people don't believe this (they don't find it useful to affirm this theory as true), wouldn't it be false according to its own definition (a sort of self-refutation through the appeal to current practice)? Rorty famously said "truth is what our peers let us get away with saying," but his own theory (which is similar) wasn't embraced by his peers, unless his "peers" are not other humans, or fellow philosophers, but just a small parochial clique of philosophers, in which case it doesn't seem to have been "true" even in its own loose terms.
Quoting Tom Storm
If all men died out it would cease to be true that man ever existed? So likewise, if we carry out a successful genocide and people come to forget about it or don't find it "useful" to bring up, it ceases to have ever occured?
Are you saying that if truth only depends on us, then we should already know all truths, but since we dont, truth must exist independently of human practices?
Huh? All Im suggesting is that we interact with our environment and build stories, models and conversations to explain things. What we call truth emerges for a process. This is in constant flux and never reaches capital-T Truth. But many different models will be useful for certain purposes.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Saying the world was flat made sense in the context of what we knew at the time. Now it makes sense to say it is a sphere. Today most of us obviously prefer the latter, and it's more justifiable. But where will we be in 1000 years? Will we still think of the world as a material entity, or might we come to see it as a product of consciousness, rather than a physical object? I note also that there is an emerging community of flat earthers and globe deniers. Is Trump one of these? :wink:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If people forget, it doesnt make events vanish from some independent reality; it just makes them irrelevant in our ongoing conversation. Saying they 'never occurred' I would say is framing this wrongly.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Id say this misunderstands what truth depending on humans means. Its not that anything could be true just because we say it is. Things in the world still constrain what we can do. Our conversations and practices are built around those constraints. We find some statements useful precisely because they help us navigate reality as it seems to behave. Saying that truth depends on humans doesnt deny the existence of a world, physics, or animal copulation, it just means that what we call true comes from the ways we describe and make sense of our world.
Of course, I could be totally wrong about all this. It's my current preferred frame.
I think emotivism can meet the open question challenge. A straightforward response would be to cache it out in terms of degrees of belief. That is to say, one can have a strong, dubious or indifferent attitude towards a moral proposition. In any event, one can be humble (as you yourself advise) and keep an open mind. "I am strongly opposed to the death penalty, but I might be persuaded to change my attitude, or perhaps some future life event could effect such a change."
If you object that this is not what the question is asking, that you want to know whether it is "really" right or wrong, then you are begging the question against the anti-realist.
Quoting GazingGecko
Most moral propositions are more-or-less universalizing. When I say "I oppose the death penalty," I am not just talking about my own value judgment. To hold a moral proposition is to believe that everyone ought to hold it as well. Accordingly, an emotivist will hold concurrent attitudes towards moral agreement (positive) and disagreement (negative).
Quoting Tom Storm
Tom's post is eerily true. No mass revolts on the street against tobacco and cigarette when the surgeon general put the warning on the cigarette.
Thats very well put. I think youre right that suffering is not like the color red, which only becomes red in relation to our perceptual and linguistic frameworks. The sting of pain is not dependent on cultural categories - it is what it is in a way that forces itself upon us prior to analysis.
That doesnt mean it becomes some kind of metaphysical deity, though. It simply means that suffering is an undeniable experiential absolute in our lives, much like gravity is a physical absolute in our environment. We dont need religion to acknowledge it; we only need to pay attention to lived experience.
From there, ethics is built not on arbitrary rules but on responding to this reality: suffering is intrinsically bad to the one who endures it, and well-being is intrinsically good. Ethical systems differ in how they propose to minimize suffering and maximize well-being, but they converge on this foundation because it is pre-linguistic and universal.
In my view, recognizing suffering as fundamental doesnt point us to the divine, but to the very real ground of our shared experiences, such as pain, pleasure, fear, love, hate, grief, sadness, rage, happiness, compassion and so on.
@Constance @Truth Seeker Pain is not the same as suffering. One might say that pain is the alarm system of the body's damage control function. Sometimes the alarm can go off because there is a fault in the system.
Suffering is a response; an attitude one takes to pain or to other experience; a judgement. One can suffer from guilt, from ennui, from despair, as well as from pain.
So the essence of suffering is the negative judgement of the sufferer. Thus the endurance athlete has to learn to withhold that negative judgement and thus overcome the 'pain barrier' that would otherwise limit their performance.
But this means that suffering is totally in the experience of the sufferer, and it makes no sense to say, therefore, that suffering is good, because suffering is constituted by the judgement that it is bad.
I can still say, though, that your suffering is good for me, if I find it amusing or consoling, or gratifying in some way, but it is not the suffering that you feel, but the idea thatI have (of you suffering) that I am gratified by.
https://nursesgroup.co.uk/pain-management-in-nursing
Quoting Tom Storm
Sure, that would seem to be one consequence of the idea that truth only exists (is created by/dependent upon) human practices and language. How could an unspoken, unacknowledged truth exist?
Quoting Tom Storm
Might I suggest that this seems to be conflating two different things? One idea is fallibilism, the idea that we never know everything, or know something exhaustively. To know something exhaustively is, in a sense, to understand all its causes and its entire context, which is arguably to know everything. Nonetheless, this is not normally taken to mean that one must know absolutely everything to know anything at all.
But the other idea is that truth is actually generated by and dependent on "stories and conversations," which are themselves driven by "usefulness" (and so too, apparently any truth about usefulness itself) . It's this latter thesis that I am objecting to. The former has a long pedigree. The latter only seems to show up as a position for Plato to make jokes about and then millennia later as an "ironic" post-modern position.
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, my confusion is that "makes sense in the context of," is not normally taken to be a synonym for "is true." Is the idea that these are the same thing? Perhaps it "made sense" to sacrifice people to make sure the sun didn't disappear in the context of Aztec civilization, but surely it wasn't true that the continued shining of the sun was dependent on cutting victims' hearts out on an alter.
Yet the idea that our conversations and practices and generative of all truths would suggest just this. That "makes sense to" is synonymous with "is true."
Quoting Tom Storm
Ok, did reality truly behave this way before we found it useful to say it is so? Either it did, and there was a truth about these "constraints" that lies prior to, and is, in fact, the true cause of, human practices (i.e., these constraints were actually, really the case, that is, truly the case) or else it was our own sense of "usefulness" that made the constraints truly exist in the first place. Or, did these constraints which shape practice and conversations actually exist, but it wasn't true that they existed (which is an odd thing to say)?
If practices are necessary for truth you cannot posit constraints that lie prior to practices as the cause of those practices without denying the truth of those constraints it would seem. For they only become truly existent when declared so in practice.
And as noted earlier, there are the two other difficulties:
A. If there is no fact about what is truly useful, then "usefulness" is just whatever appears useful. Cutting out the hearts of sacrificial victims once seemed useful, and so apparently it was,.for instance. But since usefulness determines truth, truth is simply determined by appearances.
B. Since such a position isn't popular, it is false on its own terms.
Thats an interesting distinction. I agree that pain and suffering arent identical - pain can be a biological signal, while suffering often involves the added layer of how consciousness registers and appraises the unpleasantness. But that doesnt make suffering reducible to just a judgment.
The endurance athlete shows that mindset can modulate the degree of suffering, but the fact that it takes so much training to endure pain without suffering suggests that suffering is not simply optional. And in cases like torture or sadism, we see why: the deliberate infliction of suffering is universally condemned, precisely because suffering is intrinsically bad for the one who endures it, regardless of whether someone else finds it gratifying.
So therapy and mindfulness can help people manage suffering, but they dont show that suffering is illusory. They show its real enough that both ethics and whole fields of medicine and psychology are devoted to alleviating it.
Absolutely. Such is the way things are, one crisis after the next. I take it that looking through an amoral lens is exactly what necessitates a foundational morality. It is really not an argument anymore, but a kind of seeing (phenomenology is, after all, essentially descriptive): being is thrust into existence 14 or so billion years ago, so to speak, and then simply starts torturing itself. I can't speak for all, but when I let this intuitively settle in my mind, I see it as impossible as contradicting modus ponens.
Quoting Truth Seeker
No, I certainly didn't intend that reduction, especially the 'just'. Pain is real, and judgements are real, and suffering is real. The point I want to emphasise though is that the idea that suffering is not bad is contradictory, and thus that the reduction of suffering gives a necessary and real foundation of morality.
And compare this to my earlier suggestion, in relation to communication:
Quoting unenlightened
To be alive as a human, is to make judgements of oneself and of the world, between edible and poisonous, true and false, friend and foe, and so on. And though one can be mistaken, one cannot actually prefer foes to friends, falsehood to truth, poison to food, or suffering to comfort.
How so?
IDK, terms like "aggressive," "weak," "afraid," "pain," "toxic," "grief," "rage," "powerful," etc. all seem to be value-laden in a way that would make it quite difficult to approach them sans value. Without a particular end in mind, nothing can be labeled "toxic" or "maladaptive."
Wouldn't the very idea that the one can [I]understand[/I] best when suspending all evaluative judgements itself presuppose that the truth of human activity and happiness doesn't need to be understood in terms of values and ends? I'd also question whether such a state of dispassioned reason ever exists (if it is even desirable), and even if it does exist it isn't clear that it is easily achievable without practice. I don't think the problem of "bad judgement" and of one's own propensity for error, or lack of epistemic virtues, is necessarily fixed by simply suspending judgement.
For instance, the question of why abuse and toxic behavior exists is one of the foundational questions of ethics. It is clear that what it apparently good (what people seek) isn't what is truly best, hence the need for a study of ends in the first place. It is analogous to the question of error in epistemology. To be sure, some sorts of modern ethics focuses solely on deducing "rules" and "laws," but they do this precisely because they have assumed that "dispassioned description" is superior to judgement (generally in a desire to ape the sciences). But the problem there is more a lack of judgement than a surplus. The quest for "rules all rational agents should agree to in virtue of rationality," itself presupposes a certain view of rationality and agents that makes error mysterious.
I don't think so. "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone." Compassion comes from suspending judgment long enough to truly see the sinner: to see that it's someone just like you. Jesus was a moral nihilist. The people who can't see that are the ones who need to throw the stone. They lust to see the sinner in pain. These people are locked in a cycle that Jesus encouraged people to find their way out of. The way out is through forgiveness. You do it by the grace of God.
:meh:
Quoting frank
Compassion is value-laden, it comes from judging a person against what is truly good for them. If there is no better or worse way for a person to be then there is nothing to feel pity about and no need for mercy.
Quoting frank
You are conflating a recognition of sin with a desire to personally extract justice, as if the two were inseparable. In fact, forgiveness presupposes judgement that there be anything that is recognized as warranting forgiveness. Forgiveness is not apathy either. The point is proper authority. "Vengeance is mine, I shall repay" ( Deuteronomy 32:35; Romans 12:19).
Quoting frank
If nihilism is true then there is no sin to forgive and if "nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so," then throwing the rock can hardly be bad if one thinks it good.
Obviously. Judgment is the foundation of action. To understand, judgment must be suspended, but the need to act is always there. Judgment and understanding go hand in hand.
Then I'm going to take your disagreements with a bit less value. If you didn't read it, you probably don't understand it.
Quoting Constance
Correct. But it is a reasonable foundation based on the logic of the argument. If you wish to point out why the argument doesn't work, I would be happy to discuss.
Quoting Constance
Then you do not understand the argument. Existence is everything that is, including subjectivity.
Quoting Constance
I'm not sure it does. If existence is everything, including subjective thought, how does my argument not work specifically? If you're not addressing the terms and argument used, then this is a 'straw man' fallacy. In other words you've built up and assumed I am claiming one thing that I am not, then saying its wrong.
Quoting Constance
No, I don't see this either.
One final point, if you can't take the time to read and understand the whole argument, but instead make a snap judgement based on the intro, why would I think you have the capability to be a proper critic of it? Something to consider with other posters going forward.
I apologize for being difficult to understand. No, it is an objective fact that Germany surrendered in WWII. However, all nations, including the nation of Germany (what I specifically spoke of) do not exist objectively. They exist through mutual agreement between very large groups of humans. If those humans no longer agree that a nation exists, it doesn't. Try traveling to the USSR. Similarly, while it is an objective fact that murder is illegal essentially everywhere and is against the moral code of most humans, this fact is an amalgamation of many individual subjective viewpoints of a large group of humans.
Thats beautifully argued. I like how youve shown that some values are not arbitrary but built into what it means to be human. Just as truth is better than falsehood cannot be coherently denied, the same seems true of suffering is bad and reducing it is good.
To exist as humans is indeed to make judgments - about nourishment, danger, truth, comfort, trust and so on. These arent optional preferences, but conditions of survival and flourishing. The contradiction comes when someone tries to deny them while still living within them.
So morality, at its root, doesnt need to be imported from outside - whether from religion or abstract metaphysics. It arises from the unavoidable reality that suffering presses itself upon us as bad, and well-being presses itself upon us as good. Ethical systems differ in details, but they converge here because this is the ground we all stand on.
Yes, thats my position. What we call true is what makes sense or works in a given context. Does truth exist as a separate property outside us by which we can measure other civilization's truths? I don't think so. We just have different models we use to make sense of the world. But that's no small thing.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I dont see what this gets you. To talk about a constraint before us is to say nothing intrinsically meaningful about it. To say that there are things in the world that limit us ( but not always or forever) also says nothing about truth as such. Its just a contingency, a product of our interactions with a world. Not arguing that the world doesn't exist. What we consider true comes from our experiences and the conversations we have, which are always changing.
Or take a blow gun and shoot less than three darts in the general direction of what you think?
The Count is known for his magniloquence. He expresses himself, when he wishes to express himself, wherever he wishes to express himself, exactly as he expresses himself. His wisdom shall not be guided, nay, limited, by a mere questioner. His time is very valuable. You should be lucky to even have a chance to glean wisdom from him.
Don't know how well this will come off:
Everything I say is derivative, of course. I am what I read. I put things together as I see fit, here and there, but the body of thought is Kant through postmodern thinkers like Derrida's essentially apophatic approach, and beyond to Jean Luc Marion, Emanuel Levinaas, Michel Henry who affirm....in the midst of indeterminacy.
Consider: At the most basic level, at the metaethical level where we encounter non formal value-in-ethics (Scheler), ethics insists on a foundation. It is apodictic insisting, like logic insists. But like logic, it can't tell you what it is for logic is in the matrix of understanding that would approach understanding itself, and thus one would have to stand outside logic to really "see" it, but this would require another perspective, a third one, and it, too, would seek aground for its existence, and the same reasoning begins anew. Logic can only show you what it is, and this is done in language, but language is not apodictic, but contingent, I mean, it issues fromt he ages: ages of a generation of signifiers, as Derrida would say (borrowing from Saussure), words (gestures, etc.) that "represent" a world, and all meanings flow through language, ARE language (a tough distinction). So in ordr tp get to the essence of logic, one has to take on the language that casts its existence, and thus, as with all things, logic becomes lost in indeterminacy. I know its structure cannot gainsaid, but I cannot "talk" about this.
Ethics is the same. One can't say what it is apart from its manifestation, so the point of talking about an "essence" of ethics is to get at what is there apart from all the incidental details, nto unlike what Kant did with pure reason: here the question is about the dimension of a given ethical problem that makes its ethicality what it IS, and this is value, non formal value (Scheler's term. See his Formalism in Ethics and Nonformalism in Ethics and Values), what you agree to above. The good and the bad in ethicsare, for this conversation, really just analytic terms, or metaanalytic, for what is IN the manifestation of the world, "meta" because there really is no good or bad, like Platonic forms might be. These are metaphsyical terms, but this is the "good" metaphysics, not the absurdities of ancient religious theology. Metaphysics here is what lies outside of the totality of language because it is not language at all, like being in love or being tortured. The whole world is, essentially, metaphysics, or transcendental. BUT: all that is manifest is given IN this totality, and so finitude and "the infinite" are one.
Long story. I am reading Michel Henry's doctoral thesis, the Manifestation of Essence, and you can see the language I use comes from this. But then divinity: What lies out side of languge is metaphysical, but nothing "lies outside" of language: metaphysical "essences" (definitions, "what something is") lies with language; this is ontology, to "say" what something IS). Being, otoh, is the manifestation, the givenness of the world, and this stands both IN language and out of it. Being is a threshold concept (different philosophers say different things about this), and the aches, pains, terrors, loves, delights, and all that constitutes the Being of an ethical matterare here. This "Other" of the other side is a fascinating concept here. Henry, borrowing as well, holds that Being is utterly seamless, a monolithic "presence," and this has a rather spooky intuition about it, for we have significantly (never altogether; this is impossible) slipped the bonds of language to acknowledge this. We stand in wrold delivered from its compulsory common sense, and ethics IS now something other than the mundane description. That is, the Being of pain and its abhorrent nature, and the Being of joy and its to-be-strived-for and sought out belongs to absolute reality.
This is essentially what religion is. God is just an embodiment of the Other of the good of being in love, of music: aesthetics (recalling Wittgenstein famously said ethics and aesthetics were the same. He was right: these are value terms, and value is essentially bound the this Other. When the analytic smoke clears, divinity is this struggle for the good, away from the bad (remember, there really are no such "things"; these are analytic terms only), only all of this is conceived in metaphysics (what is there, staring back at you in the ordinary world). So now, what is love, the walking six inches off the ground, head over heals for the "face that launched a thousand ships"? Now it is divinity.
I appreciate the depth and range of your reflections. Where I find common ground is in the idea that ethics has to be grounded in something more than language or convention - in something apodictic, as you say. For me, suffering provides that ground. The experience of pain, joy, fear, compassion, etc., is not reducible to definitions or analyses - it is lived and felt.
Thats why I dont think we need to invoke divinity to account for ethics. The otherness you describe, which religion often clothes in the figure of God, can also be understood simply as the givenness of being - the fact that suffering is bad in itself and joy is good in itself. This absolute reality is accessible to all of us, without appeal to metaphysical theology.
So I would put it this way: suffering and well-being are not just contingencies of language, but the shared, universal ground of our moral experience. Whether one interprets that as divine or not, I think we agree it is where ethics takes its root.
Theodicy issues from a deficit in the world. Put God and all that tradition aside. Religion is essentially redemptive and consummatory, reflecting the "open endedness" of metaethics. Put plainly, screaming children in burning cars in the delimitations of its acceptedness for what it is in a society, in a set of identifying interpretations, has a metaphysical residuum in its existence, and this residuum is the ethical: that suffering "should not" exist. This notion is not born out of a principle, but out of the existence of the suffering as such.
So the answer to your question: a determination of any kind at all leads inquiry to being in the world. The reason we don't take God seriously in its traditional anthropomorphic depiction is this simply doesn' turn up in observation. But what DOES turn up is ethics, and ethics is value-in-being played out in the chaos of entangled living. It is discovered in screaming children in burning cars and the like. Metaethics is an indeterminacy of our ethics that trails off, if you will, in the openness of the question: what is the non-contingent good and the bad of our throwness into a world?
I agree with this, almost; there always is a "but": Divinity is an odd word. Has anyone every experienced divinity, divine grace? Or is this an entirely empty concept? One can be knocked out by my strudels and pies, but we don't call this a discovery of divinity in the religious sense of this term. Even if we admit that the 'good' of the strudel has its actuality outside of language's finitude and issue from "the fabric of the world," so to speak, the manifest quality of something being delicious hardly qualifies as having a divine nature.
I qualify food, fun and sex as finite experiences, meaning they really don't have a "calling" beyond what they are. An appetitive desideratum will come, go, but the "divine" desideratum seeks a consummation, as in the intimacy of "I will love you forever!" How does anyone make any sense out of "divine desideratum"?
Christians, some, talk about being reborn, and I usually ignore them jsut because it is embedded in a lot of nonsense talk, so I dismiss them out of hand. But I do not deny that they experience this something that has depth and importance, just that when they talk about it, they wander into Christian dogma. Let's say saints actually DID experience "God's grace," "divinity," but no care is taken in interpreting this (and how could analytic care be taken in ancient thinking?). They speak sincerely, sacrifice, throw themselves into suffering all for ...a descriptive error??
One can only look within the depths of one's subjectivity to see if there is anything to this. I think, as the epistemologists put it, that "there is a presumption in favor" of affirmation, simple because I find a certain corresponding "unknown X" within when I look into myself. (Again, my thinking is borrowed --then qualifiedly adopted-- from others. Here, it is Emanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Meister Eckhart). I also think this buried "sentiment" is in all of us, arguably; it IS what we are. To show this objectively is not possible. It is in "insight" or intuition" where it is found. Words do not argue so much as "lead" to.
Ok. I say you forgive by the grace of God because I don't know any other way to explain it. You can't do it by your own power. I don't believe in God.
I like the way you frame suffering and well-being as the shared ground of our moral experience - I agree that this is where ethics takes root. Where I hesitate is when the language of divinity comes in. To me, that seems like a metaphor that some people use to capture the depth and seriousness of these experiences, but not something that adds explanatory power.
People may well have experiences of awe, transcendence, or radical transformation that they interpret in religious language, but it seems more parsimonious to call these profound human experiences rather than divine ones. The risk, as you noted, is that once divinity is invoked, interpretation tends to drift into dogma.
That said, I dont think the sincerity or transformative depth of those experiences should be dismissed. What matters is how they connect us back to the ethical fact you began with: the reality of suffering and the reality of well-being. For me, that is grounding enough without having to posit an unknown X within us - though I understand why others feel drawn to that language. Your "unknown X" reminds me of what Richard Dawkins called the "God of the gaps".
If that helps to make things clear, let's go for it.
I wouldn't think it fair to call him verbose. My request for a few pointers was based on the fact that we had already been engaged in a lengthy, wordy discussion so I was trying to save him some time.
A scientist denying the primacy of causality in discussing science? I have heard of this. But the "intuition" of causality, is apodictic, and you will not find scientists denying this (mostly because they don't think about this kind of thing). But then again, causality's apodicticity is just as fragile as anything else that is taken up in language, for while the intuition that tells me that this cup cannot not throw itself off the table, but must be caused by something else to move at all, I am still faced with the authority of the language in which this idea is given. What we cll apodictic is not what it IS simply because language has conferred its being upon it; it is not piece of fiction like 'General Motors' (though this is still a question, for though people literally once declared GM to exist, and there it began its existence, the fiction lies in what was "intended" but the actuality of declaring is no fiction at all). I don't know what it IS apart from its appearance, and the appearance as such IS apodictic.
Mechanistic views and brain states: this line of thinking is preanalytical. Take a brain state and ask the basic question: what is a brain, and how is it that acknowledging a brain to be what it is is is somehow not a brain state itself? Now you have gotten to a basic question. Prior to this, just question begging. Take this inquiry down to the wire, and you will find that a brain is discoverable ONLY in a brain state, and its therefore a brain state itself, and this puts the question as to what is PRIOR to brain states such that affirmation is lost in the analytic primordiality of someting being a brain state can be reestablished. Obviously, we drop brains and their states altogether, for this belongs to a second order, a derivative order, of knowledge claims found in empirical science and its theories. Presupposed by this is the foundation of phenomenality. What is prior to brain talk is the essential appearing out of which brain talk has it genesis.
Phenomenality is foundational for ontology and epistemology (which are really the same thing). At this FIRST order of inquiry, we encounter value, not in the contexts of an entangled and derivative world, but in itself. This is the metaethical/ metaaesthetic ground for ethics. It stands outside the spoken idea, yet is irrevocably bound to it for its ontology, that is, for its essence, the saying "what it is". The good is no more or less that the actuality that is the presuppositional (logical) ground for an ethical situation's ethicality: If this value dimension of our existence were absent, ethics would simply vanish.
Yeah, but you first have say what God is before you say you don't believe in it. It is a slippery term.
I could talk about what it means all day. Probably be off topic though, wouldn't it?
Is it?
Well, you could just move forward and say why you don't see this. But then, I gather from your comments you don't want to talk about it if I don't read the entirety of the pages of this other thread. I never do that. I just say what I think and be done with it.
Why, yes. Once you banish the atheist's straw person thinking about god being an old man in a cloud and the like from conversation, and ask about what it is in the world that religion addresses, then you move into a very different thematic content. Who cares, I say, about the way the ancient mind came up with its myths and legends; these are scattered across the world, and are mostly just fiction (though, fictions do exist, and it is hard to find something that is NOT a fiction. Rorty argued that science was essentially a social concept, and social structures of ancient belief were not objectively less true than what science had to say, and he thought this because he held that thre is nothing outside of the believing and its practices and its culture against which an idea can be judged. If it is pragmatically efficacious, then it has status as "truth"; and Rorty may be right, mostly). But what ARE these about essentially? This is the question. And god does endure this scrutiny, if in a qualified and reduced way.
:roll: Typical apologist's strawman.
If God is ethics, as you claim, why are at least 99.9% of all the species that have existed on Earth already extinct? Why do non-vegans cause pain and death to 80 billion sentient land organisms and 3 trillion aquatic organisms per year? Why do humans cause harm and death to other humans? Why do living things have to consume other living things to live? Why didn't the God, who is allegedly ethics, prevent all harm, injustice, and death and make all living things forever happy? I posit that God, if it is real, is the source of all evil.
My point is I don't understand how you conclude this if you read the whole thing. Again, your comment doesn't point to what I argued in the paper, so I'm not sure how you concluded what you did.
Quoting Constance
Sure, I'm not asking you to read all the other replies in that thread, just the full argument. You can understand why making a conclusion about the argument based on the intro alone would be shallow right?
Suggesting you really do think religion is reducible to something like this, whic is, I suppose, just a bunch of imaginative story telling, which it is, of course, in the telling of a religious story; but the same thing might be said of the theory of the four humours, yellow and black biles, blood and phlegm, which was just a fiction, believed for centuries. But because a story is fiction, this doesn't mean psychology as we know it today is a fiction. The question about religion (and its god, gods, whatever) has its ground just as any science does, and this can only be discovered by asking basic questions, putting aside traditional thinking.
Sure, let me lay out the three main objections here:
1. You say the theory doesn't allow that "anything goes," and this is because: [I]"constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop[/I]. Is that a fair characterization?
Now either the italicized statement is true outside current human belief and practice (i.e., it is always true of all practices, regardless of what they currently affirm) or else it is only conditionally true, i.e., it is true just in case current belief and practice affirms this statement.
Here are the two horns of the dilemma. If the statement is always true of all beliefs and practices, then it is true regardless of (or outside the context of) current beliefs and practices. But this contradicts the claim that truth is just what is affirmed by current beliefs and practices.
If we grab the other horn and say that the statement is itself only conditionally true, then it is true just so long as current belief and practice affirms it. This means it can "become" false if belief and practice change such that it is no longer affirmed. Thus, the assertion we are relying on to prevent "anything" goes, turns out to be overturned just in case we all stop believing it, in which case it seems that "anything goes."
2. It is self-refuting. It is not a theory of truth that is currently widely accepted. Hence, if truth just is what is widely accepted vis-á-vis common practices, then the theory is false by its own definition. If we affirm the theory as true, we are forced to affirm that it is false, and so we contradict ourselves. To use Rorty's framing, if truth is "what our peers let us get away with," then Rorty's theory is false because it was harshly criticized from a number of different directions. His peers didn't let him get away with saying this, therefore his theory is false.
It leads to: "if A, then not-A" while asserting A essentially (the same problem with 1).
3. It seems to equivocate on common understandings of truth. It uses the word "truth" but then seems to describe something quite different. That is, it seems to deny that truth as traditionally understood, or anything like it, exists. Arguably then, this is epistemic nihilism that is papered over by the equivocation.
I will allow though that the force of 3 is probably significantly lessened if the second horn of 1 can somehow be overcome, or if we grab the first horn of the dilemma in 1. But if we grab the first horn, we seem to be either contradicting ourselves or defaulting on the claim that truth is always posterior to current practices and beliefs.
Like I said, I am sympathetic to the criticism of the analytic "view-from nowhere," "objectivity approaches truth at the limit" schema that this sort of view emerged to correct. Yet this solution seems to me to have even greater difficulties. More broadly, I think the impetus for such a view stems from failing to reject some of the bad epistemic axioms of empiricism, and from a particular metaphysics of language and the reality/appearance distinction that I would reject, but that's a whole different can of worms.
I suppose a final option is to refuse to grab the dilemma by the horns and to simply be gored by it, allowing that the theory is both true and false, and that it itself implies contradictions, and so this is no worry. But I think that's exactly the sort of thing that is generally meant by "anything goes relativism."
I think these are very good questions, but have nothing to do with God being ethics. What I mean by this is that when one withdraws from incidentals of ethics' problems and issues, and pulls back and asks what God IS, and one wants to get the bottom of it, that is, think philosophically, and put aside dogma of ay shape and kind, as well as religious narratives, fixed theological themes and errors grandfathered into the conversation, one then faces the world as it is. This reduction to the world is not empirical, of course, because religion is not about empirical inquiry, and so empirical science has been suspended as well. Where one finds the in-the-world ground for religion is ethics, and value and aesthetics. God is born out of ethics, which is the struggle to resolve the way the value dimension of our existence runs through our lives. This struggle reaches into metaphysics in the discovery of the question: Is ethical nihilism, the affirmation that this struggle is exhaustively delimited in our finitude, a justifiable claim? God, once the concept is cleansed of nonsense, is a response in the negative. God-as-ethics means really God-as-metaethics. This begins the argument.
As noted above, I think Rorty's view is self-refuting (in multiple ways). It also would seem to make "usefulness" into a sort of volanturist metaphysical primitive (something like Calvinism with man in God's place). Plus, either there is a truth about what is actually useful or there isn't. If there isn't, and what is "useful" is just whatever is currently believed to be useful, I don't see how we avoid slipping into Protagorean relativism. The move to fix this by democratizing truth does not seem to me to fix the essential issue, and it itself seems arbitrary and ad hoc. Why not, "true is just whatever we currently believe to be useful, the community be damned?" Indeed, if a community came to affirm this, wouldn't it be true even under the democratic version of the theory?
But Plato's response to this same theory in the Theaetetus seems to still cut just as well as it did millennia ago. If we can never be wrong (either as a civilization, or as individuals) the philosophers and teachers (and philosophy itself) are the most useless sorts of things. Yet, to allow that we can be wrong about thingswrong about what is truly "useful"seems to presuppose a truth of the matter that is prior, not posterior, to our beliefs about usefulness. And at any rate, the ubiquitous experience of regret seems to show that we can certainly be wrong about what is useful.
Trump is tearing families apart, just as the Civil War tore families apart.
I appreciate the clarification, but it seems to me your reply doesnt really answer the questions I raised. If God is simply another name for the inescapability of ethics or the ground of value, then my challenge about extinction, predation, and mass suffering still stands.
Because if God = metaethics, then this God is not protecting anyone, not reducing harm, not preventing injustice, and not promoting well-being. It seems indistinguishable from saying ethics exists, which is true, but doesnt explain why harm, cruelty, and death dominate so much of life on Earth.
So Im left wondering: does calling the ethical dimension God actually add anything beyond rebranding metaethics? And if so, what work is the word God doing that ethics or value cannot? Also, no dictionary defines the word "God" the way you have defined it. I don't think your definition is correct.
Though there may be blood and guts and grand purposes all around you, you can just sit and stare at the sky if you want to.
:grin: Thanks, I really needed that. It is perfect for this moment in my life.
I learned that from a guy who was stationed in the Pacific during WW2. Glad to honor Wild Bill. :smile:
Yes, fear of death.
Re: curiosity about unexplained changes.
I think this passage assumes a false choice: that any statement about constraints must be either universally fixed or entirely contingent on current beliefs. I think that misunderstands how the world works. Constraints arent absolute facts waiting out there; they emerge through the practices and conceptual frameworks we use to engage with reality. Once we see truth and constraints as part of this ongoing process of structuring the world, the whole dilemma about anything goes disappears.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Doesn't this objection misunderstands what Rorty means by truth? He is not saying that popularity or peer approval automatically makes something true; rather, truth emerges through ongoing practices, dialogue, and testing. Criticism of his ideas does not make them false, this is part of the very process through which we evaluate and refine our beliefs. The Conversation. In this sense, the theory is not self-refuting; it simply describes how truth is negotiated and maintained within human communities. The fact that Rorty often said snide things doesn't mean these should stand for his entire philosophy.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I dont think its really equivocating. I dont think Rorty is trying to trick anyone with the word truth; hes just using it in a different way. He rejects the traditional idea of truth as matching some reality out there (his famous Mirror of Nature idea), but that doesnt make him a nihilist. For him, truth is about what works, what helps us make sense of things, and what guides our practices, so its still meaningful, just in a different way. I find this reasonably compelling.
Anyway, perhaps we should leave it there, since were both committed to different perspectives that seem fixed for now. I may change my view on this in due course. Im not a philosopher and dont really think about these matters outside of this site.
Not quite. The reason pragmatists like Rorty, a post modern language philosopher, hold truth to be pragmatically variable is because language is contingent. Language evolved out of problem solving, and problem solving has a temporal structure, and truth is thus a forward looking event conceived out of the hypothetical deductive method. He is aligned with Heidegger to a degree: what is a chair? It IS the end result what would happen if one approaches the chair, uses the chair in an an "environment of a certain instrumentality where, perhaps there are desks, lecterns, whiteboards, etc. Uses vary, change: this paper weight is now a weapon, now an aesthetic object or a family heirloom. In postmodern thought, there is nothing beyond the context, no "absolute conext" to which all things must conform. Sure, things are constrained and it is not "anything goes" but to talk about some "final vocabulary" to which all things are answerable and which serves as a foundation for truth is simply bad metaphysics. All we know is contextually bound, but again, this doesn't mean things are not grounded in a social matrix of meanings. We have established rules in every facet of our our existence. But yes, it does mean that if I take this can opener and hold the door open with it, it isn't a can opener in the "doing" this. (See Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in this Class?)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Widely accepted...by whom?
Such self refutations are in everything! This is because language is variable, flexible, useful in different situations, not something you find in a truth table in a logic class. You treat truth as if it were an absolute, but this is to understand it purely a logical concept, and not the way truth "works" at all. Of course, our "peers" differ, according to the context. In literature there is use of language where peers actually seek out novel usage with metaphor, irony, imagery, exaggeration, and other literary devices. But science is less malleable in its language use though. consider this science lab: Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions reveals how paradigms have historically yielded suddenly, if stubbornly, to new thinking in the evolvement of its ideas.
Nothing sustains for ever, that is, unless by divine decree, and Rorty and philosophers generally will have no truck with this.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Your final option seems close to right. One needs a Copernican Revolution to overcome the traditional, and frankly disastrous, views of truth. Truth traditionally understood is untenable, for traditionally, the object is conceived apart from the perceptual act, and this is impossible. One would literally have to stand outside of experience to affirm it. Rather, the object is an event; this coffee cup is an event, a temporal object, recalled and anticipated in what it IS.
What does this have to do with ethics? Thoughts about ethics are properly about the world. Are they IN the world, or simply In moods, attitudes, feelings (Mackie)? Rorty is just wrong on ethics, because he is doesn't understand the world. Like most philosophers, he understands arguments better than he understands the world.
I don't thinkg ethics is grounded in pragmatics. Truth is hermeneutical, but there is something, as you say, prior, and this is the essential givenness of the world: appearance in the appearing. Touch a stone, and you stand in the midst of an absolute. This of course, is an issue.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how your post addresses the dilemma I pointed out. I am aware of how these thinkers frame truth. I pointed out why I think it contradicts itself. Your answer seems to be: "everything contradicts itself?" I just don't think that's true. Lots of philosophy avoids refuting itself in this sort of way.
At any rate, isn't the sort of defense you are giving simply absolutizing a particular metaphysics of language and philosophy of science? That is, "there is no absolute context, regardless of the context, practices, or beliefs," (which is, or course, itself an absolute, gnostic claim, and one that seems to contradict itself).
I can think of plenty of philosophers who would contradict some of those claims. So in virtue of what is this sort of take presumably "true" and the others false? Why are the "sociology all the way down," folks right about science, but the traditional realists and hard-nosed physicalists wrong? If truth is just about what is dominant in a culture, it would seem that realism still rules the roost amongst scientists and the general public, so wouldn't that make it "true?"
Quoting Constance
I don't think that's an accurate description. Truth in the Western tradition is "the mind's adequacy to being," or "thought's grasp of being." That's as true across scholasticism as it is for Platonism, and the Indian philosophy I am familiar with is not that different in this regard. The idea that truth requires something like "stepping outside of experience" is largely a modern one, one that I don't even think came into its own until the early analytic period (and honestly, it's more of a caricature if expressed in those stark terms).
That's a theme in post-modern arguments though. The argument often looks something like:
A or B
Not-A
Therefore B
But this doesn't work if the first premise is a false dichotomy. The "mirror of nature" in modern, empiricist thought is not the "microcosm" of someone like Saint Bonaventure. You're not going to see being set over and against thought in Plotinus. Parmenides' "the same is for thinking as for being" holds for a great deal of thought before the modern era.
It's a pet peeve of mine because it seems like early analytic thought (or modern empiricism more broadly) often gets backwards projected onto the whole of Western philosophy, so that "all past thought" can be dismissed, which is a shame.
Well, if you are left wondering now, I think at the end of reading this, wonder will yield to either contempt or more wonder. It really depends on the kind of thinker you are.
Dictionaries give general accounts. They don't analyze. Here we want to go deeper. Religions of the world personify metaphysics, and have for millennia, and this kind of thing is grist for the mill for those who think religion is without meaning--atheists take naive theism and argue for nihilism. But religion and its God is essentially not this facile depiction conceived by overwrought ancient minds.
Protecting, reducing harm, and the like: what is this if not a redemptive concept that delivers us from suffering? See how Christians go on about redemption, but they drag this concept through dogma of theology. Christ the redeemer', and we are all guilty of sin, "original" or otherwise and it is sin we need to be redeemed of, and we have to have faith and God's grace comes to us through the church or through "the blood of Christ" ---and this kind of talk becomes saturated with irresponsible thinking, and by irresponsible I mean without evidential grounding. Such grounding requires observing before believing and what is it that religion is such that it can be observed? It is not an empirical science so it is not about empirical categories. It is apriori. Philosophy is an apriori study of the structure of our existence, and this goes to the presuppositional ground of what is observed in the everyday way. And HERE, I am arguing, one discovers the metaethical foundation of religion. Our existence is inherently meta-redemptive.
Religion is essentially about redemption and consummation. Your "extinction, predation, and mass suffering" is front and center. Now this line of thinking gets a bit weird. It has to be acknowledged that the world is far more alien to common sense that ever imagined IN common sense. I probably can't make things like this sound reasonable in a post. When it is realized that the world is given to us in a perceptual act, then all empirical concepts melt into air, for the perceptual act releases thoughts, feelings, anticipations, memories, resolutions and really, the entirety of what is human, INTO the object, and the object is no longer "objective" in the standard way science thinks. The object is now flooded with subjective content, and this gives all that we ARE, which has been sorely exluded from the scientific metaphysics that is the default disposition of most people these days, an ontological status in the world. Now this cup IS the anticipation prior to encountering, the memory and classifcation of cups, the feelings, the interest, the use value and purpose, the mood, and so on. The cup is now an event!
And what hs this todo with ethics and religion? The suffering you refer to above is released from empirical science and can now stand alone as what it IS, which is not empirical at all. It is decontextualized and can be seen purely, outside o f the interpretative matrix of everydayness. Suffering is no longer the deflated concept idle talk. Take a lighted match and apply it to the palm of your hand. Now you know the nature of the prima facie ethical injunction not to do this (to yourself or others). This is its essence, and this suffering is a stand alone phenomenon, outside of theory, social rules, reason; and this means the prima facie injunction, the "should not", too, stands outside these categorical reductions to the ordinary. If you can stand it, "the world" issues this injunction. And this the essence of God: An injunction to do and not to do bound to eternity (the world, after all, is not a round mass circling the sun, of course. It is Being).
If ethics issues from Being itself, there lies here the question of redemption: Thrown into a life of misery, but what does it mean for this misery to be, as I call it, meta-redeemed? A further inquiry for this.
Thank you for unpacking your view - I see now youre drawing on a phenomenological line of thought where ethics arises directly from Being, not from rules or doctrines.
I think I understand your point that suffering itself is the ethical injunction (do not burn the hand precedes theory, rules, or society). And youre saying this injunction is what you call God. Thats clearer to me now.
Where I still struggle is with the word redemption. You describe existence as meta-redeemed, but for the billions of animals in factory farms, or for children dying of preventable diseases, I dont see how their suffering is redeemed simply because it issues an ethical command. Isnt it just there - brute and tragic - unless someone actually relieves it?
So my lingering question is: if God is this eternal ethical injunction, does God do anything beyond obliging us? Or is it really up to us alone to respond, and the word God is simply a way of naming the ultimacy of the demand?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I say something simple, like, There is a sign post by the road. If anything is free of contradiction in ordinary affairs, I think it would be something like this. And in the situation where sign posts and sides of roads are taken for what they are unproblematically, agreement is enough: I see it, you see it, it's there by the road, and no issues emerge. But let's say I was being metaphorical, and I meant the sign post to be an augur of future events and the road meant to be the road of progressive living events. Or perhaps I was being ironic, referring to some blunder I made about sign posts earlier. The point is, for every meaning we can assign, we can imagine alternative ways the language can be taken, and in being taken differenly, the question of what it IS, has no final context, if you will, as if God were to declare once and for all that sign posts are just "this and only this". This "in and out" of identity undermines any thought of determinacy in what is being said. In the sentence, "There is a sign post by the road," I am now not referring to any actual sign post at all, but it is just the object language to my metalinguistic talk about the variability of language.
I am saying ALL language is like this. If contradictions are the gainsaying of what something IS, then contradictions are always already implicitly in the margins of whatever is said. They too, rise and fall, come and go. This is why nothing is sacrosanct, for the moment it is said,
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Not absolutizing. Rather, Hermeneuticizing. Contradictions are confined to where they turn up.
They are just saying essentially two things: One, whatever is affirmed is spoken, written, gestured or otherwise affirmed in language. So it is a philosophically responsibility to give language analysis for the way meaning is handled. And two, the assumption that the world is received in some kind of mirror of nature of perception is, IF this assumption is grounded in naturalism or physicalism, demonstrably false. Brain's are not mirrors. But if this assumption is grounded in the phenomenon, the simple givenness of the what appears, then the "distance" between the perceiver and the perceived is already closed, and epistemology becomes a very different problem.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
True in science, yes. But this truth is irrelevant in dry cleaning of knitting of bowling. A physicist can give a rigorous analysis using equations and specific language involved of knitting, perhaps, but this would require moving into another framework discussion. They are all right, and they are allowed to be: language never was some truth alignment between things and language that had nothing to do with the way the object is perceived, conceived, structured in the subjective setting that observes, cares, anticipates, assimilates, synthesizes, and on and on. Science works presuppositionally with this more fundamental ground, but it puts aside, say, the subjective temporal structure of the event in which an object's existence is acknowledged. This kind of analysis is presupposed by Einstein's spacetime.
There is no way around it that I can see: One cannot pry loose the object from perception. Such a thing could only occur if the object could be apprehended outside of experience, and this is among the least intelligible things I can think of. The only thing a person has ever witnessed is the phenomenon.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It is not an either/or. Empirical science sits perfectly intact along side phenomenology.
And it doesn't matter when such a thing arose. It is simply there, before inquiry: how does one affirm the existence of something apart from the subjectivity that receives it? It simply asks if sense can be made of such a thing.
:up:
Quoting Truth Seeker
Yes.
Can you expand on this? Wouldnt it be the case that all thoughts are IN the world - whether those about ethics or those about Harry Potter?
Like asking what if Christianity were actually true. Nothing woudl change, one would still do one's laundry, cook dinner, go to work, but the whole thing would be deeply meaningful. Physical death would still be imminent, pending, inexorable. But then, a human being never was a physical thing...was it?
Humans and all the other living things are physical things. We are all made of molecules. Our subjective experiences are produced by the physical activities of our brains.
I'm all for that. I think guilt and condemnation are the central engine of emotion in human life. It's incredibly powerful stuff. If finding a moral foundation helps finding a way into it, good.
(Sorry about the following, which is quite out there....and I am tempted to erase....but then...)
Or those about anything one can think of. But what does it mean to say the thought exists and not what the thought is about? It means it exists in so far as anything exists, not by virtue of its familiar accepted meaning in a shared understanding, but entirely apart from this, not unlike there being two maps, one completely wrong, the other right, but both are still maps, so the greater generality subsumes the two, but here, this generality is existence as such, and so this generality has nothing under which it is subsumed and this makes it an absolute: something that "is" but with no features at all, nothing to negate it, nothing to set it in contrast to.
But this makes the concept 'existence' vacuous, for meaningful concepts are one's that have something beyond them to say what they are, like a definition or an essence. Existence as such has nothing of this. It is nothing: Being as such is the same as nothing at all. But is this where the we are taken? Definitions are conceptual, as in saying what a banker is or a hammer, or anything. When we say existence has no features, we are simpy saying that language in the saying of the word 'existence' has reached something that is not language, and cannot be spoken, and yet is ineluctably affirmed. and this for the very simple, but important reason, that existence as a philosophical term, is outside the totality of what language can say. This is why early Wittgenstein said talk about "the world" was transcendental. Only the ability to defer to something else makes an intelligible meaning possible, and "the world" is stand alone, defers to nothing at all. Definitionless.
But what of this nothing? Take my refrigerator, remove, as a method discovering the "nothing" of being, everything that can be said, and language itself removed, yet the frig remains, but it is no longer a refrigerator at all. In my thinking, this is the discovery of metaphysics and central to a lot of very important philosophy: you find on the one hand that nothing has changed at all, for the presence of the frig is just as it was, only occurrent thought is absent. But this is because it being a refrigerator was not a singularity, but a network of identity that holds it, and everything else, in place. Language is systemic, and no thing stands alone, and ignoring it being a frig does nothing. On the other hand, it has to be affirmed that "that there" is beyond what can be said, merely, for IT is not just the sum total of what can be said; I'm not looking at a bunch of words over there. There is something about its being there as such which language cannot say because the question about it does not refer us to other language, but to something clearly not language at all: its being (or existence, if you like. For now, distinctions here don't matter).
You say, all thoughts are in the world, fiction, ethics, and I add, everything else. When "Harry Potter" is taken up in the general way, he is a fiction, but all fictions exist in the actuality of the thought, imagined or otherwise, the feeling, the anticipation, the presence of these as presence; when this "general way" is suspended, it is no longer Harry Potter, but an actuality, and existent as such, and now the same analysis is encountered. What does it mean for something to exist...at all? One teeters on the brink of nonsense, or an important affirmation, and I think the latter. So here, I'll just be plain: I think the existence of the thought, the frig, or anything else, seen, imagined, felt, and so on, qua existence, is one's existence projected on to "it" in the actual perceptual, cognitive, pragmatic, affective event. Acknowledging the existence of the frig, I am the nothing, which is absolute being, and I refer here to real existence in the strong sense, and when I think of Harry Potter, my existence is the presence of the presence of Potter-the-thought.
Then ethics: The good and the bad are just as invisible as being itself, and by invisible I refer to the above: they're entirely outside of the conceptual grasp that calls it good and bad (yet, again see the above, made manifest by the calling. All concepts bring existence {being} into being; they reveal the world that lies otherwise hidden), yet the living presence is striking, not at all like my frig, and for this I leave the matter up to your own ability to imagine how powerful the good and bad can be. But because we are "observing" the good and the bad not in the general way, the way Harry Potter is conceived as imaginary, but rather the way he is seen existing qua existing, these concepts are relieved of their mundanity, and are acknowledged as such, so that screaming pain in my sprained ankle is now reduced to its "as such" existence and stands outside of the contingencies of language, that is, the ability to bring ideas forth to gainsay what is said about this are suspended. This "as such"ness issues from me, when I encounter this pain. I am the ground of ethics, and the nothingness of my agency is value-in-being of my being as such, manifest in ethics/aesthetics.
This is my (derivative, of course) metaphysics of ethics.
But a thought is not a thing, nor is an anticipation, a memory, a sensory intuition, a pain or pleasure; caring is not a thing. These constitute our existence.
These are negative. What about wonder, happiness, love, hagen dazs, Debussy,
I guess thats fine as far as it goes (and if thats what you mean), but Im not sure what it gives us when we talk about morality. We have no choice but to rely on language, shared values, and agreements. No one can access anything prior to these, this notion of 'prior' seems just as inaccessible as Kants noumena. So how is this formulation of use to us?
In your response, are you able to help me out and express your ideas briefly and simply? Philosophy isnt my area, and complicated language is hard to understand.
I said engine of emotion. For that, you need emotional wounds. That's what morality is all about.
Yes, or more generally speaking, deficit. Emotional wounds are deficits, a lack; something is missing, and guilt over what is not that one desires should be, and condemnation is the same-- a person is deemed not good enough and this moves to resentment, Nietzsche's favorite term as he describes Christian motivation against those who are better endowed in the world. One big inferiority complex, an emotional wound bringing greatness to its knees (says Nietzsche).
But then, while the drive of emotional wounds is essentially negative, they are nothing without a desire toward something. The basic ethical structure is a polarity between one thing and another. You stole my muffin which was delicious and I want it back, and I resent your taking it because it was precious to me and now that precious value is absent and you are the cause. In this polarity, we have, I argue, the Real structure of ethics.
Yep. But isn't satisfaction fleeting? Pain endures, the pain of guilt, the pain of regret, the pain of resentment, the pain of longing for forgiveness.
Once the pain is gone, the mind wanders to find the next problem to solve. Pure, eternal satisfaction is the end of all quests. It's the end of the life of the mind.
Life is pain, satisfaction is death. More Schopenhauer.
(I should say before reading: It is thinking that has its roots in post, post modern thought, particularly the French neo Husserlian philosophers, and by this, consider that post modern thought is generally negative, nihilative. Here the apophatic thinking that annihilates affirmation, is the discovery of a positive ground. It is pretty alien to common sense).
God does things, but this analytic here, on the ground of God, doesn't do anything. I'm not saying there is a God, or that there isn't; I'm just not talking about that.
The eternal ethical injunction is essentially utilitarian, you know, do no harm, do good, b ut of course, there is no prescription as to how to determine what to do. The injunction itself is useless, you might say, because good and bad are entangled in purposes and uses and everythign else. They are just analytic terms pointing out that when one looks closely ethical/aesthetic issues, and one asks basic questions, there is an analytic residuum once the problem's incidental details are put aside, something elusive to inquiry. It takes philosophy to see it. There is no Benthamian arrangements of what is better than what, nor any idea of maximizing happiness: these concepts are hopelessly bound to complexities of our affairs that can't be quantified (though!: the question, is Ravel's Mother Goose Suite aesthetically superior to "vulgar" rock and roll? is a tempting one) or sorted out in ambiguous problem structures.
God is simply a naming of the ultimacy of the demand? Yes. But what is this ultimacy about? The finality of all this is profound, in my thinking, but steps over the line, brings one to face the line, the threshold of the meaningful ground of our existence. Ethics has its ground in the world, but by "the world" we refer not only to value in ethics and aesthetics, but the whole presence-qua-presence of all things--this is what both is and is not language. Tricky. That which is not language, this being happy, or miserable, in some way or other, is clearly not language, and the same can be said of "pure presence" of anything! Consider: I am thinking there is a tree in my living room, and there is no tree there, so I am wrong, but thinking it is there, as I think it, exists undeniably. How can this be acknowldged? If one is IN a particular region of thought and relevance, the terms of what is true of false are one thing according to this region. It could have been talk about the Korean stock market or whether these shoes are suitable for hiking, contexts vary. But pull back from any particular context, to the beholding of the whole of Being, and all falsehoods become something else, being as such, and since there is no context for there to be judgment one way or another, judgment falls away, and there is simply presence. This presence is absolute Being, and there is nothing it is not. What is not true IS, it exists as Being-that-is-not true, after all, my thought about the tree was in reality, a thought, an event; it was not nothing at all, yet there is no identity, no accounting for what it "is".
Presence has no definition, save when we bring it to language and call it presence, and now we have stepped into ontology: the attempt to bring presence to light, and "to light" here means talking about it. In the example above, the lighted match on live skin, in order to move out of any particular "vulgar" (Heidegger gave us this word) language setting, talk found in biology, evolution, anthropology, politics, the law, etc., analysis went after the phenomenon of pain itself, and in this discovered the metaethical ground of ethics, that is, what ethics really IS. Here, I am affirming that everything "really is", as all difference is taken away, for differences are between this being and that being, but difference itself IS spoken, thought, understood; it IS. There are no differences in the radical simplicity of "being there" (contra Heidegger). This pulling back is out of finitude, and into metaphysics proper. And metaphysics is now immanence itself, manifestation itself. Pure givenness of a world.
Now we step over the line: the world IS metaphysics, all of it, from the most insignificant to the overwhelming. Our ethics in the normal affairs we face are now metaethics. This movement is a movement away from all social/cultural institutions, and all that remains is the phenomenon itself, and this is a reduction to the interiority of subjectivity, I argue. A person has her entire life been working within the boundaries of a culture, but culture is a historical construct, and analysis has stepped beyond this, again, vulgarity (vis a vis philosophy, that is). All things lose their identity in this "place" of pure phenomenality where one sees the world as if for the first time. All affairs are decontextualized, and ethics boils down to a movement toward value affirmation.
What is meta-redemption? Suffering is redeemed in undisclosed meta-theodicy. This can only be understood if one makes suffering into a pure phenomenon: the burn of the match on your finger is completely decontextualized. You are Being, not A being, referring to your name, occupation, familial standing, and so on, for all of this is off the table. Your agency qua agency simpliciter is simply "thrown into" suffering as if ex nihilo, and so its features, that of the suffering itself, belong to Being unqualifiedly, and suffering is inherently what should not BE, but generally taken in mundane contexts, this is absorbed into conversation, and few look beyond into this "forgotten" foundational analysis. The "should not" of suffering as such issues from Being itself, and therefore is inherently auto-redemptive.
Thats a good point - experiences like thoughts, pain, anticipation, and caring arent 'things' in the same way molecules or neurons are. But they do seem to be processes or states that depend on things. For example, pain isnt a molecule, but it is a state produced by particular neural firings and pathways. Pain relievers are also molecules that physically intervene to relieve the subjective experience of pain.
So perhaps the relationship is like this:
Physical things (neurons, molecules) provide the substrate.
Subjective experiences are emergent properties of those physical interactions.
Calling experiences not things doesnt necessarily make them non-physical - it may just mean they belong to a different level of description. The same way 'temperature' isnt a molecule but arises from molecular motion.
Im curious how you see it: do you think subjective experiences point to something beyond the physical, or are they just a different way of talking about physical processes?
But I struggle with your claim that suffering is inherently auto-redemptive. From my perspective, suffering simply is. A burn, an illness, a grief - they happen, and they devastate. Calling them auto-redemptive risks sounding like a metaphysical gloss over lived harm.
If suffering is inherently what should not be, as you say, then how is it redeemed simply by being recognized as such? Recognition does not stop the pain, nor prevent the recurrence. Children still die, animals are still slaughtered, injustices still multiply. If the redemption isnt concrete - if it doesnt reduce or relieve suffering - can we honestly call it redemption at all?
It seems to me that redemption requires change in the world, not just reinterpretation of phenomena. Otherwise, arent we just sanctifying the very thing that cries out to be abolished?
Hard for both of us! I don't know if there is a simple way. I've never read anything by these philosophers that could be remotely called simple. But I am thinking about it.....
There certainly IS a causal connection between brain states and states of mind. Only a fool would think otherwise. But here is the rub: In the identity of a state of mind or anything else, there is the perceptual act that is the foundation of its existence. Can one talk about molecular dynamics without talking? If "talking" were entirely unproblematic, then talking would be simply a nonissue. But talking, thinking, explaining, understanding, believing, and the rest are foundational questions presupposed and ignored by science's phyiscalism. Ask a brain scientist how a brain receives its object, and the entire edifice of science collapses. This is because brain talk is not foundational, and what is foundational cannot be simply bypassed. This is experience itself. An object cannot be understood apart from experience. It certainly seems as if that cup is separate from me, but this separation is an event IN the perception of the cup.
Science occurs IN the playing field of experience; experience does not occur in empirical science. There is "nowhere" else. Not idealism, not some "reduction to the mental," but rather a reduction to what is there at the basic level of analysis. This book is not an idea or a mental image. It is a book, over there, next to the candle; but the ontology of the book is a reduction to the most basic descriptive concepts. A brain occurs IN this playing field; what it is outside of this playing field is nonsense. Apodictic nonsense, for again, one cannot even imagine such an outside, and to do so is what can be called bad metaphysics, like talk about God having omnipotence and the like. So the Grand Canyon view is not "all in your head"; it is rather that experience itself is radically other than what it is taken to be generally. The "over there" of a peak, is an "over there" of my perception. They are one: the perception-of-the-peak IS the peak.
Calling subjective experiences emerging properties? For this to be true, there would have to be something that is not an emerging property. How is this to be posited? Where does one go to discover this? There is no where else to go other than other emerging properties. Physicality is only discoverable in emerging properties; again, unless you can explain how something non emerging can be acknowledged: Try it: there is a lighted room in which this green rug sits, and I am made aware of its existence because a certain part of the electromagnetic spectrum reflects off the rug while others are absorbed, and the former traverses the space between my eyes and the rug, into the vitreous humor and to the back of the eye where it encounters rods and comes for color and intensity, and then further processing .....But wait: the moment light leaves the rug, it leaves the rug behind. And when light is translated into mental events, even the light is left behind. And touch and hearing are just as bad. There is absolutely nothing epistemic about causality
No one doubts brains receive ligth waves, and all of the above actually happens. This is never disputed. But it is not philosophy. It is not about ontological foundations.
Well, for some it is like this, for other not. For most, it's in between somewhere. But Schopenhauer never knew how well science and entertainment could ameliorate the human condition. When he wrote, I think he was right. Imagine a world with no antibiotics, no dentistry, festering infections everywhere. Living for most was a filthy mess by our standards.
As to emotional pain, I think you are spot on: the delivery from physical suffering allows interpersonal relations to thrive, and these are now a strong imposition on one's intellect and feelings. We are more neurotic than ever before.
Pure eternal satisfaction the end of the life of the mind? I don't know; is it? If this satisfaction is not acceptable, then it is hardly satisfaction. What is a "pure" satisfaction, anyway? Being in love: Nothing matters but just this, and familiar differences yield to this singularity of being in love. You look at the clock and you are in love. Six inches off the ground, walking on air. Is this the end of life of the mind? Pretty much, IN the episodic moment when your heart soars. Yes. And all questions in abeyance. Is it satisfaction? By definition. Hard to see the complaint. Like complaining about heaven. And then, who says there is nothing to think about, ponder, rise up to? The life of the mind may well be flourishing, but just very happy in everything it does.
See Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith in Fear and Trembling.
I have passages of that memorized. One of my favorites.
But heres what Im struggling with: if everything reduces to the playing field of experience, how do we avoid collapsing into a kind of idealism? You say its not all in the head, but once we deny any perspective outside experience, what secures the distinction between the cup itself and my experience of the cup? Isnt there a risk that ontological foundations become just redescriptions of phenomenology?
Also, Im not sure I fully grasp your critique of emergence. You suggest that calling subjective experience an emergent property is incoherent, because everything we can talk about is an emergent property. But doesnt that simply mean emergence is a relational notion? Temperature emerges from molecules, but molecules emerge from atoms, and so on. If experience emerges from brain states, why isnt that just one more layer in the same explanatory pattern, rather than a category mistake?
In other words, does your view amount to saying: experience is foundational, and any talk of emergence must be subordinated to that? If so, what does that mean for scientific realism? Can we still say that physics tells us something true about the world, or only that it gives us a useful way of describing how experiences hang together?
Observations on the circumstances with evidence, reasoning and logical analysis on the case are some tools we can use in knowing right and wrong.
You are full of surprises Frank. I took you for a cynic, a nihilist.
I'm more a positive nihilist. A sad nihilist is trying, but failing to accept life on its terms.
Okay, but it is a series of simple ideas. Put complexly, Kant asks, How are synthetic apriori judgments possible? The simple version is this is so obvious it is hard to imagine anyone disagreeing. I am sure you're heard pf it: How does anything out there in the world get into perceptual reception?
The answer s obvious, at first. One simply sees the object, sees the receiving physical equipment and draws a line from the former and to and into the latter. Trouble is, once that line lays its first mark, the object is already lost. So consider this to be the first simplicity, that is simple perception. IT is to be taken only as it is. It is not just a challenge to ontological physicalism, but an overturning of this. When you take physicalist thinking out of the context of science's paradigms, and allow this to become the default thinking for philosophy, all is lost. Even thought itself is lost in the reduction.
A vestige of science's physicalism, which kills the soul. Defining the world according to empirical discovery (which usually carries with it a philosophy of foundational physicalism) is such bad thinking. Hard to imagine taking it seriously.
But if you take Kierkegaard seriously, then there is a follow through that brings much of his thought to a greater fruition. Heidegger has a lot of Kierkegaard in his ideas, though he doesn't like to admit it (See Caputo on this in his Radical Hermeneutics). All 20th century phenomenology follows through on K in one way or another in this dialectic between eternity and finitude. Human Existence and Transcednence comes to mind (Jean Wahl) and Levinas' Totality and Infinity. The best I have read of K on this is The Concept of Anxiety where he discisses the notion of original sin, dismisses standard biblical and theological thinking, and brings the discussion into a historical context (from Hegel, who K famously said had forgotten that we exist): original sin is hereditary sin, inherited through the ages as a kind of deep enculturation where God is lost to distraction in culture's institutions and "habits". K thought that just being in this world is sinful. He thought we stand in alienation from God because we are more interested in all the things around us, so it's not Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (Luther inspired, essentially), but distraction and attachment (Meister Eckhart wrote about attachment. I don't recall any specific reference, but it is hard to imagine k wasn't influenced by his sermons which were very much here-and-now theology).
I think I will read Jean Wahl for a couple of days. He started a lot of later Kierkegaardian thinking.
Ok, but I pointed out that Rorty's theory is self-refuting in a quite specific way directly related to the very thing it is trying to explain. I am not sure how this makes such a self-refutation unproblematic.
Quoting Constance
This seems to me like the same thing. It's simply affirming post-modern hermeneutics above all competitors as a sort of default, i.e., absolutizing it, and going from there. It seems to me that this is often done with phenomenology as well. A phenomenology that supports a metaphysics of sheer giveness and difference is affirmed, and alternative phenomenology (e g., Plotinus, the Scholastics from whence modern phenomenology gets its terminology, Hegel, and contemporary Catholic phenomenologists, etc.) are dismissed. Now, I won't claim that something like Hegel's argument that sheer giveness is actually contentless and that it is the higher levels of understanding (Absolute Knowing) that should be affirmed (rather than dismissed as "reification") is air tight against later "post-modern" phenomenology, but neither does it seem like the alternative has a decisive refutation of it. If anything, the issue seems undecidable, and metaphysics (acknowledged or not), aesthetics, and a commitment to certain notions of freedom seem to be driving the choice between the two.
I don't disagree with you about the "mirror of nature," but this seems to be another sort of argument of the form:
A or B
Not-A
Therefore B.
But there are many alternatives to the "mirror of nature" that don't involve Rorty's radical deflation of truth.
Quoting Constance
Again, this just seems to presuppose the idea that truth is itself domain limited, the "hermetically sealed magisterium" (actually, such an idea is very old and was called Latin-Averrosim in the Middle Ages). But if truth is just whatever is popularly affirmed, such a view of truth as isolated by field is itself false.
Obviously, if we assume a view like Rorty's is true, we can justify it as true. Why should we accept it as true when it refutes itself though? Why should we accept it as true when most don't, given what it says about truth?
Quoting Constance
Less than you might think. Its first necessary to understand the radical way in which Heidegger departs from K. You wont find this in Caputos religious hermeneutical reading of Heidegger, since Caputo entirely misses this radical turn of Heideggers ( and Derridas as well. I highly recommend Martin Hagglunds The Radical Evil of Deconstruction: a reply to John Caputo).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think it misses the point to treat postmodern hermeneutics and phenomenology as making arguments designed to refute or dismiss the opposition. Rather, they claim to offer a way of seeing that leaves intact the claims of alternative philosophies. You can keep your preferred metaphysics. What the hermeneuticist and phenomenologist want to know is, can you also adopt their peculiar stance which at the same time honors a realist , physicalist or foundationalist approach, and opens up a dimension not opposed to it but beneath it, running alongside it to enrich its sense? If you cant adopt this stance, this doesnt make your preferred philosophy incorrect. It is perfectly correct and true, as far as it goes and within the bounds it sets for itself.
I'm not convinced that the theory is self-refuting in the way you described. As I wrote earlier:
Doesn't this objection misunderstand what Rorty means by truth? He is not saying that popularity or peer approval automatically makes something true; rather, truth emerges through ongoing practices, dialogue, and testing. Criticism of his ideas does not make them false, this is part of the very process through which we evaluate and refine our beliefs. It's the Conversation. In this sense, the theory is not self-refuting; it simply describes how truth is negotiated and maintained within human communities. The fact that Rorty often said snide things doesn't mean these should stand for his entire philosophy.
Isn't Rorty saying that what is true just means what makes the most sense with the best reasons right now. He doesnt accept the idea of ultimate answers, he just updates his beliefs if or when better reasons come along.
So I don't think the Not-A, therefore B form represents his view view, because hes not deducing B from the failure of A, hes proposing a new way to talk about truth. Thoughts?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Poststructuralists, hermeneuticists, the later Wittgenstein and phenomenologists all recognize that there are certain assumptions in play when we lay out a truth-propositional statement. A central assumption is that the terms dont change their sense as we attempt to build a chain of relations. When we add a predicate to a subject (A=A), we assume the sense of the first A doesnt change in the process of having it refer to the second A. The coherence of logical refutation depends on the continued self -identity of the elements of a proposition as we construct a whole out of the parts.
When you attempt to translate the idea that postmodern thinking doesn't allow that "anything goes because constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop into a truth propositional statement, you miss the essential point that the starting point for this assertion is not a view from nowhere, but the view from whoever is speaking , and the here and now of when they are speaking, what they are speaking about and how what they are speaking about shows up for them. The constraints are always discovered anew , with a new sense, in the actual immediate context of speech and thought. One doesnt convey this in-context thinking as a set of self-identically fixed terms that are then glued together, and then recycled as a refied proof to be indefinitely referred back to as an established empirical truth.
The proof of contextual constraints must be enacted over and over again in different contexts, each time producing a new sense of what it means to be a constraint and a truth. It may be hard to see how this amounts to anything more than making stuff up while ignoring the real world, and it may be equally hard to see how any sort of stable understanding can be achieved such that scientific-technological and ethico-political progress is possible. But seeing movement and transformation of sense within the fixed terms of logic doesnt keep them from doing what they are designed to do and show. Rather, it enriches our understanding of what we are doing when we create logical and empirical identities, categories and truths, and opens up paths of intelligibility unavailable otherwise.
Sorry, I must have missed that.
Quoting Tom Storm
Sure, you can't reduce his theory down to his slogan: "truth is what our peers let us get away with," without losing a bunch. But I'm not sure how the added nuance changes the basic problem of self-refutation. It remains the fact that it isn't a widely embraced theory. It isn't what ongoing practices, dialogue, and testing have led to people tending to affirm, so in what sense is it true according to its own standards?
It seems like the claim should indicate that it is what we [I]ought[/I] to affirm, or what we shall (if we keep to good epistemic and philosophical practices) end up affirming in the future (and indeed, this is how Rorty reads to me). However, such an "ought" claim, or such a prediction, would seem to require the notion that the theory is somehow "really true" in some sense. It "ought" to be affirmed because truth is better than falsity, or that it will end up being affirmed, because practice invariably leads towards its affirmation (presumably because it is truly the case). But these sorts of explanations assume a sort of "added truth dimension" outside the pragmatic.
Anyhow, I think the dilemma mentioned under point 1 is the more serious challenge, and it is relevant here:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If 1 can be dealt with, maybe there is some way to affirm that "constraints" will invariably lead towards the recognition of something like the idea that such a theory of truth ought to be affirmed, or will be affirmed by good practice in the long run. But 1 introduces a sort of self-refutation by contradiction in another register.
Quoting Joshs
It's more that it's hard to see how this answers the 1 or 2. And if the answer is just that "constraint" means something completely equivocal in every instance, that only seems to avoid the contradiction in 1 by making the the very "constraints" being invoked to prevent "anything goes" wholly arbitrary, since what is meant by "constraint" apparently changes in each instance.
Note however that univocal predication doesn't require that things be identical in every instance. When man is predicated of Socrates we need not suppose that all men are exactly the same or that Socrates is exactly at every moment. If all predication were to become equivocal in virtue such change than we essentially slip towards the Many pole of the Problem of the One and the Many and it is impossible to say anything about anything. Whereas, if [i]some[/I] stability and unity is affirmed, that is simply the vehicle for univocal (and analogical) predication, e.g., that in virtue of which Socrates, Achilles, and Leonidas are all "men," such that "if all men are mortal," they are each mortal.
Quoting Joshs
Well, @Constance referred to alternative views as "disastrous," which I took to imply something like a refutation. But you are quite right, the aim normally isn't refutation, but that isn't my objection. My objection was to what seems like question begging and a self-contradiction absolutization, where criticisms are rebuffed by simply assuming the theory is true.
Quoting Joshs
But most metaphysics do not set any boundaries for themselves. They speak to being qua being. So if they are all equally correct in their own domain (which is "everything") how is this not the affirmation of contradiction? More to the point maybe, if everything is "correct in its own context," how does this avoid pointing towards "anything goes?" And if some of these theories are right (their claims are affirmed) then the post-modern metaphysics of language and difference is wrong.
But this gets to point 3. "Truth" and "knowledge" seem to be being used equivocally here.
This criticism suggests that Rortys notion that constraints determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop must either be universally true or only conditionally true. But this seems to me to be a misunderstanding. Rorty doesn't claim it is always true outside the context of human beliefs and practices; the constraints are descriptive of tendencies in those practices, not eternal laws. Nor does the conditional nature of these tendencies mean anything goes. Even if beliefs shift, practices that fail to work or coordinate with the world will disappear, while useful practices will persist. Thus, the statement holds pragmatically without requiring universal or unchanging truth.
Quoting Constance
I can see why you would argue this and I don't think this is an unfamiliar argument hereabouts.
Does this make you a mystic of some stripe? What is the role of philosophy in this space? Is there not a risk of lapsing into endless, unanswerable, abstruse theorizing?
A metaphysics IS a boundary, setting up criteria for correctness, and more importantly, for intelligiblity. A metaphysics speaks to being qua being via a stance on what it means to be. All stances are bounded. Metaphysical stances are equally correct only in being differently correct. That is, the criteria and intelligibility of correctness changes from one metaphysical stance to the next. But we cant choose to inhabit all stances at once , or observe them all from a sideways on or gods eye perspective from nowhere.
Metaphysical stances dont simply contradict each other. They are connected to each other by genealogical historical relations. New stances emerge
from older ones contingently , neither logically nor arbitrarily.
We ourselves inhabit a particular stance, from whose vantage we interpret history. This gives us skin in the game. But our perspective within that stance isnt static, it is temporally extended. This means that "what is at stake" for us refers back to ongoing practices while remaining open to reinterpretation through future performances. The meaning of the stance we all participate in within a community is constantly extended, questioned and reinterpreted by each of us as we use it. So the existence of the partially shared social stance provides constraints on what matters to us and how it matters, what things mean and how they show up for us as intelligible, and prevents an anything goes relativism, but the very use of the stance extends and redefines its basis.
If this is an equivocal use of truth and knowledge, then it also prevents either of these terms from being rooted in an essence.
Quoting Tom Storm
I didn't say he did though. I said the appeal to constraints points outside current beliefs and practices. It seems to me that it has to, because it is prima facie possible that current belief and practice might deny what is being said about constraints. But presumably, constraints don't only restrain "what goes" just in case people currently believe that they do (otherwise, I'm not sure why it isn't "anything goes" so long as we believe that anything goes).
Quoting Tom Storm
What "fails to work" and what is "useful" is defined in terms of current beliefs, desires, and opinions, no? So, if "not anything goes" because only "useful" practices survive, but "useful practices" are just whatever practices just so happen to be affirmed as useful, I am not sure what sort of limit this is supposed to generate. What is (truly) "useful" is itself a function of current beliefs, right?
Not only does this undermine the ability for "usefulness" to function as a sort of constraint on truth, I think it clashes with our intuitions. It seems possible for everyone to be wrong about what is useful. But for it to be possible for everyone to be wrong about what is useful at some time, it cannot be the case that the truth about what is useful is posterior (dependent upon) whatever current practice and belief affirms as useful. There has to be a distinction between reality and appearances/beliefs.
Plus, the statement above still seems like a statement about what is true of all practices regardless of current beliefs. But if no one believed that "constraints" worked in this way, it hardly seems that it could still be "true" that they work this way (for all practice and opinion would deny it is so).
Quoting Tom Storm
With the above in mind, why not?
Quoting Joshs
Yet this is itself a metaphysical position about the nature of intelligibility. If it is affirmed over competing understandings of intelligibility without argument, obviously that would be a sort of question begging. But to merely affirm it "alongside" other understandings without argument would still essentially do the same thing. Just because the position allows contrary positions to be "equally correct" doesn't mean it isn't contradicting them, for the opposing positions might themselves deny that both understandings are "equally correct" (because they deny this understanding of the grounding of intelligibility). Even the Protagorean relativist who asserts that "whatever anyone believes is true (for that person)" ends up making a claim that has implications for truth tout court.
Plus, it would seem to me that this particular metaphysical position should want to assert itself as "more correct" than others. Otherwise, wouldn't it fall victim to the criticism in the Theaetetus that, if it is impossible to be wrong, the sophist (as a profession, not a derogatory term) is the most useless sort of person, since teaching never improves our grasp of the truth?
(Note, that if the rebuttal is that we cannot each individually always be correct, because intelligibility is constructed communally, or in language games, or something to that effect, this would once again be another claim about the metaphysics of intelligiblity/truth/language. And I think the same dilemma appears. Either it has to be asserted over the contrary theory, or else the self-refuting relativism remains).
Quoting Joshs
I'm sorry, I don't think I followed this part. Why would this be so?
Quoting Joshs
Isn't this an assertion that contradicts (rebuts) some prior understandings of knowledge, intelligibility, and truth?
This seems to assume that for constraints to matter, they must exist independently of the practices they describe. Doesn't this misunderstand the pragmatist framework? Constraints function within practices, influencing which behaviors and methods tend to succeed or fail over time. Temporary denial or disagreement doesnt undermine them, practices that fail to work or coordinate with reality naturally fall away, regardless of belief. Constraints dont need to extend beyond human practices to be meaningful, and the worry that this leads to anything goes coudl be said to misunderstand how tendencies operate in a pragmatic context.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Doesn't this misunderstand usefulness in a pragmatist sense? Usefulness isnt defined by current belief or opinion, its about whether a practice reliably produces results and coordinates action in the world. An error or a disagreement doesnt invalidate the capacity for effective practices to persist. Even if no one explicitly believes a constraint will operate, it manifests through the success or failure of practices in practice. Pragmatic constraints are more like tendencies, not absolute laws and they operate probabilistically. The possibility of error doesnt imply anything goes, because practices that consistently fail are naturally filtered out over time. But perhaps our difference is ultimately in how are framing this. And I am certainly no expert in the subject.
No, no. There is only the idea that an agency replete with all that extraordinary sound and fury of what we are doesn't really signify nothing. Look at it like this: that line of perceptual access to the world I mentioned is a line that dominates in general thinking, implicitly, the analytic of what it is know the world, and it localizes our subjectivity, confines it like an object is confined to its space. But while we allow talk about causal sequences to rule relations between objects, when the matter turns to epistemic relations, it is a categorical error because causal sequences don't produce the "aboutness" of things when we talk about them. I think this is a revelation, but only if you stare at it long enough to drive you out of complacency, a complacency that is almost what you could call hard wired into common sense.
Keeping in mind that we are talking about ethics: Once it is realized that this radical separation between objects and perception is a categorical error, there is a need for a new category such that this "aboutness" can actually be about something. Otherwise, the object remains hopelessly "distant" and by this term I don't mean physically distant, for this just affirms what is shown to fail; it is rather the distance that undoes the essential unity of the perceptual event. The way to restore unity is to drop distance. It is a useful term for handling physical affairs in the world, but complete wrong for discussing the ground presupposed by these affairs, for this ground has to be inclusive of the subjectivity that is doing the handling, and this is us, looking, understanding, anticipating, caring, desiring, affirming, and so on.
And now the gates of subjectivity are wide open, and these firmly marginalized features of the self, you know, the sound and the fury, flood into ontology. The entire conceptual apparatus that figures into the modern default thinking of a science's metaphysics called physicalism now is conceived in its "primordial unity" with, well, the magnificence of being human. The world is now magnificent. Odd to say, perhaps, but keep in mind the cost of modernity, the age of scientific reason: a repressive concept.
You are looking for simplicity (as am I, really), and the above I don't think is some jargony talk about phenomenology. To me, it is a momentous move: the world out there is, at a more basic level of analysis, not "out there" at all; it is immanent. The stone over there is in its "overthereness" right "here" because the perceptual act is "right here", and "I" am omnipresent in this world. The book IS the affirmation, the play against what is not a book, the "what the book will do", the idea of its continuity in the structure of its temporality: a subjective/objective unity, if you will.
So ethics. But first, what do you think? Because ethics is going to be about this extraordinary unity.
Well, I am not a reflective type. I just intuit and act my way through life, and I almost always know what to do.
Quoting Constance
I'm not sure what this gives us. So experience is immanent, present within, inseparable from our experience of consciousness. And?
Perhaps I am the opposite of you. I bypass metaphysics in almost all things because I dont see it as useful to my way of being. Whether there are implicit metaphysical assumptions built into my perspectives doesnt matter (we all have those); the point is, I dont deliberate. Except on a site like this, or in the occasional philosophical conversation with others.
Perhaps part of the problem for me is that I have never had a pressing need to seek an alternative method, since I have been content and have been 'rewarded' by my approach. I seems to me that philosophy often emerges from dissatisfaction.
I see morality as entirely social - a code of conduct - a way we manage power and relations - and, consequently, as a construct of cultural and linguistic practices. Attempting to get underneath this, as you suggest, would seem impossible and (for me) pointless. Where does it lead? But that doesnt mean Im not interested in this perspective, nor does it mean Im not open to changing my mind. I'm not hostile to differnt approaches and quite enjoy reading them. If I can follow people's syntax.
Your work seems based on phenomenology, which I find a very interesting strand of thinking. Many of the things I have read about it seem intuitively compatible with my views. But Im not deep enough into it to follow it down the rabbit hole. If I found philosophy easier to read, I might have a different perspective. As it is, I find it difficult and hard to follow. It can take me a week to understand a paragraph of Heidegger, and that might still be a misreading.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Your point is relevant to certain readings of pragmatism, wherein usefulness is measured in terms of conformity between a belief and how things are. But this is not how use functions for writers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger. They agree with you that we can only know whether a way of thinking is useful, does what we want it to, satisfies our goals, allows for clarity of understanding, corresponds to how things are, because we already bring to the situation a pre-understanding providing the criteria of usefulness. Their interest is in investigating where this pre-understanding comes from and how it changes.
That is, whether things turn out the way we plan, the world is always useful in that both our successes and failures, our validations and invalidations take place against the backdrop of a world which is fundamentally intelligible and familiar to us. They argue that this pre-understanding is not itself a belief that we measure against the way things are. Rather, it is already the way things are. That is to say, it is the overarching totality of relevance within which things can appear to us as correct or incorrect on the basis of particular criteria. It is not a question of a conformity between this overarching schema and some reality outside of it. The schema directly expresses a real world in a way that is as real as it gets, via patterns of pragmatic use.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
A human, a dog, a snake and a fish all inhabit their own behavioral niches. What if one thinks of these as akin to metaphysical positions? Leaving aside the evolutionary issues of long-term survival of lineages, does it make sense to say that the behavior niche the dog enacts , and the way its world is perceptually salient to it, is more correct than that of the fish? Each has their own functional norms of correctness (the behavioral criteria for the satisfaction of needs), so each species norms of correctness are equally adequate expressions of their mode of functioning. And what about the human? We set up cultural niches including sciences and technologies, and political and philosophical organizations. What would it mean to say that these knowledge niches are more correct than that of other species?
We know that our ability to represent stretches of time far into the past and future allows us to use language concepts in ways that other species cant, but in what way is this better than what animals can do? In what way does this make us higher animals? We could claim that we are capable of a complexity of social organization unavailable to other species, but what makes that better in a biological sense? Or we could argue that metaphysical positions can be ordered on the basis of complexity. We could add that a historical trajectory results in a kind of progress in social stability due to improvements in anticipatory understanding or some such. But making this claim would not require that we deem earlier stages of cultural evolution and their accompanying metaphysics as less correct, merely less advanced in the complexity of the niches they produce, but heading in the right direction. Key to claiming the superiority for one mode of thinking over others is that it include within itself the other modes of thinking in a kind of dialectical totalization ala Hegel
Such an assumption is problematic for writers like Deleuze, Foucault , Derrida and Heidegger. They argue that whatever criteria of progress we use, whether complexity, stability-survival, rationality, moral goodness or conformity to the way things are, such criteria are subject to continual changes in meaning. And yet one can discern an underlying criterion of progress for these writers that appears to maintain its stability of meaning throughout cultural shifts. They acknowledge the necessity of periods of stable cultural norms, but take delight in their deconstruction. One could say that betterment for them is tied to the most accelerative cycling between stability and radical change we can manage. Does this mean they consider their philosophies to be better than those of previous eras based on the criterion of accelerative self-transformation?
In a certain sense yes, but it is not as though they would then claim that the Medieval scholastic period was better than the Greek era, the Enlightenment was better than the Scholastic period , the Modern period was even better than the Enlightenment, and postmodernism is better than all previous ways of thinking. Instead, they would argue that each metaphysical era exposes the limitations of what came before it, limitations that could only become apparent within a changed perspective. But the limitations attached to each era are unique to those periods. The ethical task of the postmodernists is defined by their relation to the limitations they expose in the thinking of their time. Every metaphysic holds within itself its own dangers, including postmodernism. Foucault wrote:
Sorry for the late reply. I have had a lot to do. I'm also sorry for the length and I hope the content is reasonably fair.
Quoting SophistiCat
I think this is a stronger version of anti-realism than I originally targeted. However, I'm not sure what you exactly mean.
First though, what kind of emotivism is it you have in mind? Talking in terms of "beliefs" and "moral propositions" suggests you take moral language to be truth-apt. Emotivists typically deny that. Are you some other sort of non-cognitivist?
Also, I think your response comes at the open-question-challenge from a direction that, while more sophisticated, misses my main concerns. Sure, one can have different degrees of attitudes towards moral propositions. The point I'm pressing with the question, "I believe the death penalty is wrong, but is it wrong?" is that crude subjectivism struggles with the semantic data. I don't think your re-interpretation of the question in theory-laden terms really fixes that problem.
A further problem is that it undermines deliberation. It seems like I'm asking myself a substantial question when I question my belief in such a manner. With the crude subjectivist reading, it would trivialize that deliberation.
I doubt that your current appeal to psychological prediction of possible change in attitude helps. Suppose I know a dystopian state will brainwash me into having a positive attitude towards the death penalty tomorrow. Your re-interpretation makes "I think the death penalty is wrong, but is it wrong?" map neatly onto that prediction, yielding an obvious "no" because I know my attitude will change tomorrow. But even in that scenario, the question appears more substantive than a trivial "no." So it seems like your re-interpretation struggles to capture what that original sentence means.
Quoting SophistiCat
I'm not assuming that the question is about what is "really" right or wrong. I'm pointing to semantic and linguistic evidence that disfavors subjectivist and emotivist readings. I don't think that is question-begging. What did you have in mind?
Quoting SophistiCat
Sure, you can give an account for how emotivists could want to press the convergence of attitudes, saying something like: "Everyone, disfavor the death penalty!" That helps explain morally inspired conflict.
My problem with your response to disagreement is that it does not appear to solve the issue I have in mind. In genuine disagreements we aim at contradiction. Crude subjectivism predicts we shouldn't experience the exchange as a contradiction given what it says that "right" and "wrong" means, yet linguistically we do.
Compare with a truth-apt domain:
A: "The Earth is flat!"
B: "No, the Earth is not flat!"
B is negating A's declarative statement. Both can't be true.
Moral claims appear to frequently function the same way:
C: "Abortion is wrong!"
D: "No, abortion is not wrong!"
D seems to be negating C's apparent declarative statement. Once again, both can't be true.
Here are my attempted translations inspired by your comment:
E: "Boo to abortion! Everyone, disfavor abortion!"
F: "Yay for abortion! Everyone, favor abortion!"
or (another attempt):
G: "I have a positive attitude towards abortion. Everyone should have a positive attitude towards abortion."
H: "I have a negative attitude towards abortion. Everyone should have a negative attitude towards abortion."
There is no literal contradiction between E & F or between G & H, where as there seems to be between C & D. That gap is semantic evidence against crude subjectivism (and some non-cognitivist flavors). So I believe my original objections stand (for now). Still, even if one patches these points, I have further concerns.
Have I misunderstood you?
Vegans say that veganism is right and non-veganism is wrong. Non-vegans say non-veganism is right and veganism is wrong. They can't both be right. How do we decide whether veganism is right or wrong?
It sounds like both of the vegans and non-vegans are confused with the issue. It is not matter of right or wrong. It is matter of one's own preference and suitability for their taste and health conditions.
Just a couple things about Rorty. One is, on the matter of hermeneutics, the reason why he thought Hedegger was among the three most important philosophers of the 20th century is because of his commitment to finitude and hermeneutics and the strong presence of pragmatism in his concept of ready to hand. Plainly put, the concept of hermeneutics is itself hermeneutically positioned, not absolutely.You could call it an equiprimoridal pragmatism in which the idea of something being absolute is just nonsense. Language defers to other language, period; and truth is a pragmatic function (qualifiedly contra Heidegger's truth as alethea, which I don't think Rorty gives much thought to) grounded in the forward looking structure of dealing with things. There is no way out of this because there is no "out" (I have been meaning to read Gadamer for more depth on this) outside of the when and why and how you mean something and how this acknowledged by others. It is not closed because all that is within one's potentiality of possibilities is open: truth is made, not discovered, however, what is made is discovered IN a general context of a culture's existence, and this sits firmly in place, like a scientific paradigm is, as Kuhn tells us, a fixity until anomaly intrudes inexorably. Nothing like "anything goes" for Rorty or Heidegger, or the physicist. Culture has historical paradigms, as does the physicist.
The other is, following Dewey, Rorty is a naturalist, though a pragmatist first. He follows this naturalism down to its core. There was a standing argument he had with Hilary Putnam regarding whether or not Putman actually beheld his wife when she was present, with Rorty insisting that one could never exceed the delimitations of a brain and its physical systems. It is an uncompromising physicalism such that one no more "knows" the existence of another than a dented car fender knows the offending guard rail. I mean, if one is going to be a thoroughgoing naturalist, one has to accept this, right? Make the physicist to look closely at the implications of a scientific ontology, and this is what you get.
No, it assumes that, for constraints to constrain, the truth of their reality cannot be dependent on [I]current[/I] belief and practice affirming that they truly exist. Presumably, current belief and practice might not affirm this, and yet you seem to be claiming that what you say about "constraints" will be true regardless of what current practice affirms throughout this post.
Consider:
P1. Truth just is whatever is affirmed by current belief and practice.
P2. It is possible that current belief and practice might not affirm the truth or existence of constraints in the way that has been specified.
C: Therefore, it is possible for it to be untrue that constraints exist and function in this way.
But if it was untrue that constraints function in this way, how exactly would they be constraining?
It seems like you need additional premises like:
A. What I assert about constraints is true of all practices regardless of what they themselves affirm.
Quoting Tom Storm
Is this statement you've made always true of practices, or is it only true just in case this claim is affirmed by current belief and practice?
Either it is always true, in which case truth isn't just what current belief and practice affirms, or else it might cease to be true if current belief and practice don't affirm it.
I think there is an issue of equivocation here. It would be one thing to advance this theory as a description of how beliefs emerge. This sort of descriptive work is arguably what Wittgenstein limits himself to. Objections could be made here, but they are less obvious. But the claim that truth itself just is a function of belief and practice is a gnostic metaphysical claim. Rorty, for instance, doesn't limit himself to description in his comments on Wittgenstein, but thinks Wittgenstein's work supports a positive gnostic metaphysical claim about truth.
Now, if we say truth just is what practice affirms, then what you say about constraints simply cannot be true unless practice happens to affirm it. That's a consequence of the positive metaphysical claim about what truth essentially is. So too for questions as to the shape of the Earth. If truth itself is simply a function of practice (dependent upon it) then prior to the existence of man and his practices it follows that the Earth had no shape, or that it "had a shape" but that "it wasn't true that it had a shape." The absurdity of the latter shows how "truth" is simply being equivocated on here. It would be more straightforward to say: "there is no truth, but here is this other thing we tend towards, call it 'pragmatic affirmation.'"
Quoting Tom Storm
The same issue turns up here. Is what you're saying always true of all practices, regardless of what those practices themselves affirm?
Note that "success" and "failure" require an end that is sought by which they can be judged as such (presumably one judged "useful."). All action reliably results in some consequences. For us to be wrong about what constitutes failure or success, or wrong about what is useful, presupposes that what is "truly useful" isn't simply what is believed to be useful. But if that's the case, I think it is obvious that "what is truly useful," cannot be "whatever current practice has come to affirm as useful."
So how exactly is the supposed to respond to the charge of self-refutation (and the ancillary issue of affirming contradictions)?
If the idea is that self-refutation and contradiction are avoided because what is meant by terms like: truth, correctness, constraints, etc. is always changing, and so always equivocal, then it doesn't seem that it can be saying anything at all. Every point in the discourse would be guilty of the fallacy of equivocation.
Quoting Joshs
In virtue of what is this "better?"
Quoting Joshs
Well, it seems there was a time during which life did not exist, just as there was a time during which we each individually did not exist. During that time period, it seems that the Earth did exist. Is it not possible for the Earth to have existed or to have a determinant shape, etc. prior to the advent of life and its schemas? No doubt, the empiricist-analytic view of a "view from nowhere" is flawed, but it doesn't seem to me to follow that, if that view is flawed, then truth and intelligibility are dependent upon man and his practices (or life and its practices).
It does not follow, for instance, that because the view from nowhere is flawed, and because one needs language to say "the Earth was round before life existed on it," and a mind to know this, that Earth could have no shape prior to the "schemas" etc. that allow for this to be known [i]by us[/I].
Additional premises are needed for this, so too for claims that intelligibility is "created" by metaphysics. Intelligibility is arguably a prerequisite for understanding, not a product of understanding. But even if intelligibility is a product of understanding and will (pragmatic striving), I can think of no reason to think that it is a product of [I]our[/I] act of understanding and willing (either individually or collectively) nor a product of the understanding and willing of life on Earth more generally.
Earlier notions of truth and intelligibility avoided the problem of the empiricist view because they did not posit a "mind-independent being" since knowledge and understanding were themselves simply thought's grasp of being, and truth being qua knowable (which obviously make no sense outside the context of thought and knowing). The divine was the anchor of intelligibility. Modernity lopped off the divine and was left with an incoherent notion of truth. Yet it's not clear to me that elevating man (or life generally, or a sort of panpsychic will, or primordial will-to-power) into the place of God resolves the problem. We are contingent, and what you end up with is intelligibility springing from sheer potency, which is ultimately arbitrary.
A sort of Euthyphro dilemma seems to hold here. Is what is willed (pragmatically striven for) willed [I]because[/I] it is good, or is it good because it is what is willed? If it's the former, then what is striven for must already be intelligible as desirable (good) prior to the act of willing. If it's the latter, we have a sort of inchoate voluntarism where the direction of the will (the pragmatic drive) is ultimately arbitrary in that it is grounded in no prior intelligibility, and is itself contingent. A pragmatism that is not oriented towards some end is not so much pragmatism, as a sort of sheer willing that generates its own end.
This is difficult, have you read Kant? Not because it is such a complex argument (though it is this when you read it), but because one needs personally to make a phenomenologically qualified Kantian Copernican Revolution. You see out there, in the field, the sun descending into the horizon: this is not going to be gainsaid at all with Kant. His transcendental idealism does not tell you that you are not really seeing a sunset, but only that this sunset is a representation. You're seeing a representation OF.....then Kant rather loses it. Now take the Kantian idea that space and time are only intuitions of the structure of experience and allow that nothing in the familiarity and habits of behavior and culture changes when you start talking about things being representations. Nothing. The world remains the world as it was prior to that annoying class you took on Kant. What Kant did was divide "the world" into appearances and reality, but the evidential ground for doing this must lie in the representation, otherwise it would be entirely impossible to think like this, and thus the move to posit the apriori necessity of pure reason can be found to be grounded in phenomenality. And hence, where is the need to argue for some impossible transcendental reality when the evidence for this lies here in phenomenality? So what is "pure" about phenomenality?
Givenness, The pure being there. The "otherness" of Kant's impossible reality (noumena) is immanent, IN the fabric of phenomenality, so to speak. Givenness is simply what appears, and now all eyes are on the appearing of the appearance. The deep mystery of noumena is now the mystery of appearance and philosophy is bound to a purely descriptive account of what this is. And metaphysics is now a threshold concept, where we give analysis to such enigmatic terms like being as such, vis a vis beingS, and epistemic "distance" and phenomenological space and time, and so on. Just like Kant, the world remains the world as we encounter it, but it is not "idea" or representation of anything. It IS what is.
This can be maddening to understand. An object is what it is, but at the level of ontology, it is a threshold event. The substantival view of the world at this level is absent. In place of this view there is openness, a standing on the brink of an unmade future, hence, freedom is found in the descriptive phenomenolgy. The problem of ethics: the value dimension of our existence is allowed to BE what it is, not reduced to a derivative of something else. This is the merit of phenomenology, the true positivism, as Husserl said, for the physicalist's material substrate is at least as bad as Kant's noumena: impossible to speak of and a hindrance to philosophical discovery. There is nothing "verifiable of falsifiable" about this concept. The phenomenon is verifiability itself!
Quoting Truth Seeker
If you mean to say that emerging properties issue forth from the emerging properties, and really, there is no underlying finality from which all things emerge, that itself not an emerging anything, then we would be aligned, but the question as to this underlying finality would remain open. All we build upon in a category of knowledge can be said to be derivative within this category, and the category itself
intra-derivative in a system of thinking in general; consider the way Thomas Kuhn thinks of science and its paradigmatic evolvement. Truth as paradigmatic truth. All, you could say, equi-derivative. How does emergence occur? How about metaphorically? Meaning, discovery of a new paradigm that causes a revolution in science, is a borrowing from language from existing paradigms, a construct giving emergence to a new construct. For the ontological ground has to be where meanings come from that give forth possiblities, and these possibilities are already IN the established language, but again, borrowed from their paradigms to create a new paradigm. See how quantum physics reaches into standard physics to conceive of the quantum anomaly , and grounds it concept of indeterminacy out of this determinacy.
Useful? Clearly. But do emerging concepts reach "beyond" anything, or is it rather that any "beyond" is simply a metaphorical extension into alien contexts?
Youre trying to run all these concepts through a propositional logic wringer, which, as I said before, presupposes that the terms we are comparing do not alter their sense in the very act of comparison. Without its dependence on the fixity of its terms, logic cant produce its laws, and youre clinging to these laws as the ground for your attempt to refute certain philosophical approaches as self-contradictory. If you start from a ground of identiy and then explain difference as emerging from or dependent on identity, then you will always be able to use propositional logic to refute philosophies which claim to ground identity in difference.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Forcing intricately and intimately flowing experience into the artificial straitjacket of reified conceptual schemes takes us out of our intimate engagement with others. This is because the fact that experience is constantly on the move doesnt mean that we cannot approach it in terms of familiar, recognizable patterns and regularities. But the patterns must be permeable , open to variation without crumbling. The unethical is closely tied to treating morality in terms of laws, essences, facts or real foundations that flatten and thus do violence to the contextually unfolding way that situations present us with ethical issues. The more fluid, open and permeable to change our thinking is, the more we do justice to the real.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Here we can make use of the work of agential realists like Joseph Rouse and Karen Barad, as well as Deleuze. So far I have been talking about the way the world appears to us as a result of how we interact with it, and that the contingently changing nature of this interaction precludes notions of the way things really are independent of our participation in the world ( even the notion of subject -independence is itself dependent on perspective). They argue that , indepdenent of human involvement, things in the world dont pre-exist their interactions. Just as human culture achieves a relative normative stability without needing to rely on notions of fixedly real things, so the world outside our involvement with it interacts with itself via configurative patterns which produce a relative stability for periods of time which gives it characteristics which we are tempered to interpret in abstractively fixed ways.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The will doesnt begin inside and then point outward toward a world; it is neither inside nor outside but in-between the two. We find ourselves willing in that we find ourselves moved, affected, motivated by the way things appear to us. This isnt a stimulus-response model. We anticipate forward into new experience based on previous experience, and this anticipatory stance sets up constraints on how things emerge as what they are for us. But what emerges as the things we encounter always involves a dimension of surprise and novelty alongside recognizability.
The things we encounter strike us as funny, sad, boring, undesirable. Our own thoughts come to us in this same way. We dont will to think what we think, we find ourselves already thrown into the thoughts. To want something is to sap we oneself wanting it. The desire arrives to one from an ourside, not from an inside.
So where do good and bad, better and worse come in here? We find ourselves desiring and striving, which simply means that we find ourselves aiming. toward the fulfillment of what was anticipated. Emotional cries are crises of meaning and relevance. To anticipate into the next moment and be rewarded with an experience which is unfamiliar and incoherent is a kind of loss of self, and we call this loss of self , this being plunged into the emotional darkness of chaos and confusion, the bad. We dont choose the good over the bad so much as find ourselves in situations of relative intelligiblity or incoherence and label the finding after the fact as what we willed.
Thank you for this rich reply. I see more clearly now how youre situating Kants noumenon inside the fabric of phenomenality itself - turning the supposed otherness of reality-in-itself into what you call givenness. That does help explain why phenomenology insists that we dont need to posit some unreachable metaphysical substrate; the phenomenon is already the site of verification.
But heres where I still feel some tension. If noumena are reinterpreted as the mystery of appearance, are we actually dissolving the distinction between appearance and reality, or are we simply redescribing it in a way that keeps philosophy within the field of what is given? In other words: does phenomenology abolish the metaphysical question, or only defer it?
Your remarks on emergence were also illuminating. I like the idea that all is equi-derivative, and that paradigm shifts in science are themselves a kind of metaphorical emergence. Still, Im left wondering: if all emergence is intra-paradigmatic and metaphorical, doesnt that undermine the very notion of an independent reality that science aims to describe? Physics then becomes not so much about what the world is but about how our descriptions evolve. That seems coherent, but it sounds close to a kind of conceptual idealism.
So maybe my question back to you is: do you think phenomenology, in the end, commits us to giving up on scientific realism as a metaphysical claim? Or is there still room in your view to say that physics, while mediated by paradigms, does latch onto structures of the world that exist whether or not we describe them?
I'm not sure what you're talking about. My baseline view is Neoplatonic, not physicalist, although I think one ontology is as good as another.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
P1 - Saying truth just is whatever is affirmed by current belief and practice makes it sound like anything people believe is true. Rather, truth is tied to beliefs that work, are successful, or are coherent within practice.
Even if current belief or practice doesnt recognize a constraint, it can still push back in practice. For example, ignoring a physical limitation like gravity will have consequences, and those consequences will shape future practices. The truth of the constraint is not independent of us; it is defined by how it operates within our ongoing interactions with the world.
Doesn't your argument assume that constraints must exist independently of our beliefs and practices to truly constrain? But this isnt necessary. Constraints exist and function because our practices enact them so their reality is tied to their effects in practice. If practices change, the constraints may change too.
But maybe it would help me if you gave me an example of a constraint which tells us something about the nature of reality. I'm not denying the existance of an external world but we only know it through human practices. Isn't what we call truth a measure of what works in the context of our experience?
So your argument asserts that success and failure require an independently defined standard, and that we can only be wrong about what is useful if there is some notion of true usefulness existing outside of practice. That right?
But doesn't this assume a metaphysical standard of usefulness that a pragmatist wouldn't recognise? In reality, actions always produce consequences, and success is judged relative to the goals and expectations of the community. There's no call for a separate idea of what is truly useful. What current practice affirms as useful is what matters, because usefulness is determined by how practices function and coordinate behaviour. The claim that what is truly useful cannot be whatever current practice affirms is imposing an external measure that pragmatism wouldn't recognize.
Some plant and fruit lovers might say to you that how could you kill the plants pulling them out from the field, cut and boil or fry them, and eat them? You are killing the innocent living plants. Same with the corns and fruits. They were alive and had souls. But you took them from the fields, cut them and boiled them, and ate them killing them in most cruel manner. The panpsychic folks believe the whole universe itself has consciousness and souls. Even rocks and trees have mind. What would you say to them?
And again you touch upon the pulse of this problem. What is the nature of the divide in our existence? If one is committed to the final authority of pure manifestness--just what is there in the whole of the givenness of being-in-the-world, then we have to observe boundaries, and try to bring these into ontology, that is, explaining what these ARE. And this manifestness is phenomenological singularity, just as logic was for Kant's deduction to pure reason. When he talked about a thing and its analytic possiblities, he was committed the logicality of the whole which subsumed science, ethics, art, (which I haven't read much of, I mean his third Critique) "the world", only Kant was a rationalist and only interested in a logical formalism, essentially skipping the world's palpable existence with dismissive terms like 'sensible intuitions' and 'matter' and 'first stimulus'. With Kant, we have one recourse for everything he says: it is all representation, even "the work Critique of Pure Reason" has this representational ontology; there are no "pure forms" for this is just an analytic term for transcendence. Again, the turn toward phenomenology qualifiedly drops this representation and allows the world to be what it IS with no compromised status. The feel of the keys as I type ARE the noumenality Kant put out of touch, as it were.
So the distinction between appearance and reality occurs within this essential manifestness, and so now, what is the nature otf the division in, not just our existence, but in being as such? Your question has its answer here: Ontology requires language. This is paramount, for thinking has to deal with the thinking that articulates the problem in the first place, and of course, there is Kant again with analysis of thought qua thought, but Kant was essentially dealing with an abstraction. Here we take the entirety of being-in-the-world (the familiar sound of this, of course, comes from Heidegger), and we realize that logic and the principle of sufficient reason (from Liebniz, as I read Heidegger Ground of Reason) have a deeper ground, which is ontology; the "laying out in words" is going to be IN the nature of the most basic analysis of being.
Language is what gives Being difference, and language is a LOT more than just mere signifiers in predications of everydayness, as Kant showed us. Language structures, "brings being to" (Heidegger) existence, and a thing being a thing is not so much a discovery as it is a making (though this making is IN the unity of Being, and so a line is not going to be drawn so easily at this level of analysis. Kant tried to draw a line between noumena and phenomena, but really it is a line drawn UPON noumena, delimiting noumena, which is nonsense), or better, it is a making IN a discovery (alethea, unhiddenness, more Heidegger) for being is a unity, 'making' is a term issuing forth in this unity and has its ground, its essential manifestness, in the unity where all distinctions fall away, and so the apparent paradox: distinction within being, aka, no distinctions, it's a kind of nothingness to the understanding (See Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety). So the foundational ontology has no divisions--being as pure manifestation IS ITSELF an ontological concept. You see: this is Kant's noumena IN the fabric of phenomena. Only conceptually will one discover anything, and yet this "discovery" is grounded IN the groundlessness of being which "stands as its own presupposition" or is manifestness itself, and terms like this arising nowithstanding the division inherent in the language conceives them.
The objection comes fast on the heels of all this talk. There is no purity in manifestness, because the concept is haunted by the contingency of the language that speaks it, and the historicity which engendered this language. And this is right. To speak of a foundational unity called Being is terrible question begging, and this objection it perfectly right: being, that is being-as-such, is vacuous. That is until the matter of ethics and aesthetics come into play. Early on, I claimed that ethics is really metaethics in the ontology of ethics, the asking "what IS ethics?"
The division sought for at the outset is this separation: the ontological necessity of articulating so something can even "come up" at all against the fullness of being there. In the everydayness of being, we discover/make a world of beingS. There were no cats or dogs prior to the language that brought them into existence. There was "something" but then, imagine what a cat or a dog IS TO a cat or a dog. There is no articulation there; there are sniffs and aversions, but these are not sniffs and aversions at all TO a dog. There is no language to articulate being into beingS. Language makes the world come into manifestness, yet it is also what provides for the analytic of the revelation of what is not language, and it does this apophatically. As I read Derrida, (I am struggling a bit through Derrida's Metaphysics of Violence, which is a critique of Levinas' Totality and Infinity, along wiht other things, like White Mythology. He is thick with interplay, but he does grow on you, and his thought becomes less enigmatic the more you read), it becomes apparent that being and manifestness, which I have been trying to make out as the "ground of all grounds" is a kind of "wholly other" in discovery, and the wholly other made manifest IS value, or metavalue, the value of value, the second order of analytic language that stands apart from
the first, in which the transcendental essence of value is made apparent.
This is square one. Metaethics refers us to the world, the tout autre, of manifestness itself, and this manifestness is NOT vacuous at all. It is non formal value (Scheler arguing against Kant); it is importance as such (Von Hildebrandt); the "value of value" that early Witgenstein told us was nonsense because it is nonsense to speak it (..thereby one must be silent), because, plainly put, the pain in my ankle is not language, not a vacuous concept like primordial being as such, but note, this "as such" never was value-free. Such talk is like a Kantian abstraction. The wholeness of manifestation is inherently OF what we call by the analytic terms, good and bad.
That is a lot to take in. My current fascination is Michel Henry and Jean Luc Marion. Still working on this philosophy and will be for some time. As I mentioned to Tom Storm, the point of all this is to restore the sound and the fury of our existence to ontology, that is, to basic analytic of the world that philosophy has so stupidly ignored in anglo american thinking.
On your comment re. emergence......
Thats a fair question, and it touches on deep debates about consciousness and moral status. If plants or even rocks had experiences - if they could feel pleasure, pain, or suffering - then harming them would indeed raise moral concerns. But thats precisely the point: sentience, not mere aliveness, is what makes the moral difference.
Plants grow, respond to stimuli, and even have complex signaling systems, but there is no credible evidence that they have subjective experiences. There is no what its like to be a carrot or a corn stalk. By contrast, cows, pigs, chickens, lambs, octopuses, and lobsters clearly display behaviors indicating pain, fear, and pleasure. Thats why I draw the moral line at sentience: its the capacity for suffering and well-being that generates ethical duties.
If panpsychism is true and everything has some primitive form of consciousness, then were faced with a spectrum: perhaps electrons or rocks experience in some attenuated sense. But even then, there is a morally relevant distinction between a rock that (hypothetically) has a flicker of proto-consciousness and a pig screaming in agony while being slaughtered. Degrees of sentience would matter.
So my view would be: we should avoid unnecessary harm wherever it occurs, but we must prioritize preventing the most intense and obvious suffering. And right now, that means reducing and eliminating the killing of sentient organisms when we can live well on plant-based foods.
Thank you for taking the time to unpack all of that - its a lot to absorb, but I think I follow the thread. If I understand you, youre saying that Kants noumena dont need to be treated as some unreachable beyond, but rather are already immanent within phenomenality itself - the givenness of the world. The cup, the keys, the pain in my ankle: these are not mere appearances pointing to something hidden, but the very ground of what Kant misplaced on the noumenal side.
That makes sense of why you think phenomenology drops representation and allows the world simply to be what it is. But then I wonder: doesnt this risk dissolving the distinction between appearance and reality entirely? If noumenality is internal to phenomena, then havent we just collapsed reality-in-itself into the structures of givenness, making it conceptually impossible to say what, if anything, could be other than appearance?
I also found your point about language important - that ontology requires articulation, and that language both makes the world manifest and at the same time gestures apophatically beyond itself. Still, Im left with a tension: if language constitutes beings, do we have any grounds left for scientific realism? In other words, can we still say physics describes how the world is, or is it only another language-game, a historically contingent way of structuring manifestness?
And finally, on the ethical dimension: I appreciate your insistence that value is not vacuous, that pain and joy are not abstractions but intrinsic to the manifestness of being. But if value is as foundational as you suggest, does that mean ethics is not derivative of ontology, but co-constitutive with it? That strikes me as both powerful and problematic - powerful because it restores seriousness to ethics, problematic because it blurs the line between descriptive ontology and normative claims.
Would you say phenomenology ultimately abolishes the metaphysical question, or only reframes it as a question of how manifestness discloses itself in experience, language, and value?
Just read what I wrote. Should read "thereof" not "thereby".Quoting Truth Seeker
Is there a collapse in the openness of being? If God were to appear before me in all her splendor, and then to you in the same way, we could then talk about it, but to do so would take the current vocabulary as a basis for novel descriptions. The "otherness" of God would require articulation, and, unless God said otherwise, this articulation would be finite, historical, which is just fine, because this language never was a dogma of possibilities. Possibilities are wide open. This pen is what it is until recontextualized in a non pen environment, then the pen's essence becomes other than the pen and its familiarity. This other in this current analysis is "wholly other" and this is possible because the language of beingS is itself entirely open. This emerges as the foundation of indeterminacy that is our existence.
If I were to try an say what the is IS for everything, and this were some closed concept, utterly noncontingent, then THAT would collapse upon itself. But here, the definition defers to this Other, and the only closededness found is in the good and bad, which is terms are of course contingent. These are not God's commandments. But as wholly other, they are closed only in their manifestness.
That helps me understand why you resist the charge of collapsing appearance and reality. Youre not erasing the difference but relocating it: the difference shows up within manifestness itself, in the shifting horizons of description and re-description. The danger, youre suggesting, only comes if we try to freeze being into a final, closed definition.
Still, I wonder whether this move really preserves the otherness that Kant had in mind. If all otherness is mediated by our historically contingent vocabularies, does the idea of the wholly other end up being just another name for the openness of language? In that case, are we still talking about reality-in-itself, or have we turned it into a way of describing indeterminacy within phenomenality?
And on your last point about good and bad: I find it intriguing that you see them as closed only in their manifestness. Do you mean that values, unlike objects, resist infinite re-contextualization, that they present themselves with an authority that cant be deferred in the same way? If so, is that where phenomenology keeps the ethical from collapsing into pure relativism?
I think talk about language games is deflationary. Hermeneutics is better.
I would no more go to an empirical scientist for insights into the nature of our being in the world than I would go to a geologist for violin lessons. Science is an abstraction from the original unity of phenomenality, a unity discovered only when subjectivity is allowed into ontology; and physics, the final word on empirical sciences, has nothing to do with this. All knowledge is hermeneutical, even the concept of phenomenology, but here, there is the jumping off place as language makes that extraordinary move to question itself! And in doing this, discovers its own agency, not in Descartes' cogito (our own personal Yahweh) but in the value dimension of our existence.
Consider: it was long held, and still is by some, that our essence lies with reason, you know, man is a rational animal, but reason is not at all indicative of agency. One can imagine thought without agency, hovering about, disembodied. It needs no egoic center, an AI that talks with perfect logicality, but really no one is at home, so to speak. No "soul" perhaps, if you can stand the way this term is burdened with religious connotation. I prefer Heidegger's dasein, but Heidegger doesn't understand metaethics; at any rate, his dasein is the closest thing to philosophical exposition of the human soul one will find anywhere. But value: try to conceive of value without agency. Impossible. Impossible to imagine suffering disembodied, out there being what it is but belonging to no one. Suffering insists on agency. If there is suffering, there must be someone suffering, and this includes animals. What kind of agency is this? Not Kantian Transcendental Unity of Apperception, which is an impossiblity grounded in an abstraction. Rather, it takes an agency that is commensurate with the givenness of the value dimension, which is in the manifestness of the suffering; that is, and this is where we encounter transcendence.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Framing and reframing: This is the historical evolvement, but in philosophy, there is the attempt to determine truth, and truth will have to be framed within a framework of existing possiblities. Ontology's biq question is: is there a framework of thought which gives light to a ground outside of framework as such? Here, such disclosure is built into phenomenality here and now.
Coconstitutve? Sticky. Phenomenology is essentially descriptive. I bring up agency to discuss the evidential basis for affirming our dasein IS a, if you will, soul, that we actually exist (as Kierkegaard put it) and by soul I refer to transcendence in immanence. Think of the way Kant's deduction gives us agency, but this transcendental agency is pure structure, pure form, and as a ground of agency just fails altogether because, well, this is just not what we ARE for it is dismissive of our actuality. Our essence lies with caring, with things mattering, being important, and momentous question of who and what we are is, What does it mean for something to be important, momentous? And of course, it is the radical end of this that leaps into the thought: What that terrible violence the world does to us all about? Why is that lighted match on your living flesh so seriously important? What is importance about, not contingently important, as with one thing being important for another, as in, This document is important for national security, and the like; but "importance as such", an analytic term, let's not forget, not to invoke some platonic form of importance, a mere reification of an analytic term. the phenomenological method brings this question to light with striking clarity: a firm dismissal of all that is not right there, in your midst as a "pure phenomenon": pain is its OWN importance,
But I wandered a bit. Coconstitution is one of the most elusive ideas. Plainly put, my cat IS a moral agency because he participates in the value dimension of existence, not because he belongs to the kingdom of ends as Kant thought, and certainly not because he can think about ontology. The essence of ethics is caring and its objective counterpart, the actual joys cared in and about, and caring has a veritable infinite range from mild amusement, dull interest, boredom to the heights of horror and bliss. Because my cat can't think ontolologically, it can't rise to a greater understanding of its existence into profound discovery. That word 'profound' needs further attention.
But the point would be that in the phenomenological disclosure, affectivity and the language that conceives it are one. This takes disclosure to be very important, bringing ethics to its teleology, which is tied to agency.
It sounds like you are projecting your own personal value or psychological state onto the nature and the eco system unduly and with some emotional twist. The nature works as it has done for billions of years. It operates under the system called "survival for fittest". Lions always used to go and hunt for deers, striped horses and wild boars. If you say, hey Lion why are you eating the innocent animals killing them causing them pain? And if you say to them, hey you are cruel, bad and morally evil to do that. Why not go and eat some vegetables? Then it would be your emotional twist and personal moral value projected to the nature for your own personal feel good points.
Lions must eat what they are designed to eat by nature. No one can dictate what they should eat.
Same goes for human. Human race is not designed to eat rocks and soils, just because someone tells them it is morally wrong to eat meat, fruits or vegetables because they may suffer pain, and they might have minds and consciousness.
The bottom line is that it is not matter of morality - right and wrong. It is more matter of the system works, and what is best and ideal for the nature. If it is healthy - keep them fit and keep them survive for best longevity, and tasty for the folks, then that is what they will eat.
I think its important to distinguish between what happens in nature and what humans choose to do. Lions must eat other animals because they have no alternative. Humans, by contrast, have alternatives. We can thrive on plant-based diets, which are now supported by mainstream nutrition science, and in doing so, we can drastically reduce the suffering and death we cause.
Appealing to nature as a moral guide is tricky. Nature also contains parasites that eat their hosts alive, viruses that wipe out populations, and countless brutal struggles. If survival of the fittest were our moral compass, then any act of domination or exploitation (e.g. murder, torture, rape, robbery, slavery, colonization, child abuse, assault, theft, etc.) could be excused as just natural. But human ethics has always involved questioning our impulses and asking whether we can do better than natures cruelties. You used the word 'designed' for humans and lions. Humans and lions are not designed. They evolved. Evolution is a blind process, it has no foresight, plan or conscience.
So Id say the real issue isnt whether killing happens in the wild - it obviously does - but whether we, with our capacity for reflection and choice, should perpetuate unnecessary killing when alternatives exist. Lions cant choose beans over gazelles. We can. Thats where morality comes in. Lions murder other lions, and they have no police or legal system to punish the murderers, but we do. Humans are not lions, and lions are not humans. We have the capacity for moral reasoning - lions don't.
Veganism is far more than a diet. It's an ethical stance that avoids preventable harm to sentient organisms. Fruits and vegetables don't suffer pain because they are not sentient. Humans, lions, zebras, deer, chickens, cows, lambs, goats, pigs, octopuses, squids, dogs, cats, rabbits, ducks, lobsters, crabs, fish, etc., suffer because they are sentient. Please see:
https://www.carnismdebunked.com
https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan
https://veganuary.com
But Im still wrestling with the issue of co-constitution. If, as you say, pain is its OWN importance, then ethics is not something layered on top of ontology but already woven into it. Yet doesnt that blur the line between description and normativity? Saying pain is its own importance feels stronger than pain shows up as something important to us. Do you mean to suggest that importance is ontologically basic, that value is part of the very fabric of reality?
And on your point about agency: I find it intriguing that you see even your cat as a moral agent because it participates in the value-dimension of existence, even without conceptual reflection. That seems to broaden agency far beyond the Kantian framework. But does that mean every sentient creature participates in ethics simply by virtue of suffering and caring? If so, wouldnt ethics then lose its distinctively human dimension of reflection and responsibility?
Finally, on scientific realism: if physics is just another hermeneutical abstraction from phenomenality, does it still tell us something true about the world, or is it simply a historically contingent interpretation that works until paradigms shift? Im wondering whether, in your view, science still latches onto structures of reality or whether its authority is entirely instrumental.
I am impressed that you press on with understanding and abiding interest.
This notion of the wholly other is an enigma that is hard for me to bring to clarity mostly because I haven't read enough Derrida, and to talk meaningfully about what this philosopher said presupposes a lot. In order to grasp this idea, one hs to see clerly that something very unusual happens when language questions its own nature, asks, What am I? (interesting note: without what I would call substantive agency, the subject so systematically marginalized by philosophy, then the "Who am I?" question reduces to language inquiring about language. This actually works, I would say, ONLY if the substantive life of value engagement is absent from the equation. This, of course, is like talking about something entirely other than a human being. An abstraction). When this question is asked, it is seen how impossible the question really is because the question applies to the asking itself and is not going to be addressed with more language; or rather it IS and it IS NOT. This is the wonderland of deconstruction. It is language under erasure. Wittgenstein put the Tractatus "under erasure" in the book's closing thought.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Yes. There is nothing that is not in the fabric of reality; even error is an actuality, but not AS error, but simply as an existent. On blurring the line: The "taking AS" is basic to hermeneutics. Heidegger talk about this as a feature of the temporal structure of dasein (which I think of as the soul, without any primordial agency. I argue Heidegger didn't understand ethics, hence his notorious refusal to properly condemn the Nazis after the war), but simply put, when I take this cup and talk about it in some way, I am taking that-there AS a cup. It is in the "taking as" where errors can occur, taking the cup AS the wrong thing, a bowl, perhaps. Language IS a taking up the world AS something, and the issue of coconstitution centers on a couple of hard topics. One is, taking up the world AS trees, pianos, cups and saucers, etc., one is taking up itself as it is embedded IN this original object. The analytic of the object cannot be absent of this feature, and so the "blur" arises when normativity is given to us in complex entanglements out of which principles are made, and the descriptive analytic of the essence of normativity, which brings one to the same discussion of metaethics. I say, one shouldn't assault one's neighbor, but why not? Because it hurts, brings pain into the world. Again, absent this pain, ethical normativity simply vanishes, but the normativity is not reducible to this foundation; it is conceived always in prima facie entanglements, otherwise, the obligation issues exclusively from the primoridality of pain qua pain, and the "principle" that issues forth from this lies with a pure manifestness which is a-propositional. Pain is NOT an idea, a principle, but lies absolutely outside of the contingencies that such things are subject to. I always want to emphasize: good and bad are analytic terms. They are a "taking as" of the value-residuum discovered in the analysis in which ethicality itself is examined. Talk of the "absolute" of manifestation is also a taking as. There is nothing in these ideas that is not this, and to go beyond this is just bad metaphysics, metaphysics without a ground, the kind of thing found in a Kantian paralogism. BUT, and this is the "but" that is the issue at hand: the delimitations of the finitude of language come to a fateful threshold where thought encounters existence and realizes that there is radical and impossible difference that is not accountable in the play of words and meanings. Impossible because possibility is defined in terms of intelligibility (this is where Derrida takes metaphysics. See, e.g., The Metaphysics of Violence, which is about Levinas).
So whenever this impossible division is made a theme of discussion, everything is under erasure because it doesn't "make sense". Co constitution doesn't make sense as one side of the "co" construction lies outside intelligibility.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Agency is only as it is evidenced to be. Kant handily dismisses the subject, the "I am" based on the failure of hteir being an object. If there were an object, a self, there to be observed, like a toaster, then the self would be an empirical concept, and a representation only; but this "I am" is simply not there. But ethics is a very different ground from logic. Kant can imagine thought without substantive agency (agency reduced to the formal structure of judgment easily) easily.
more on this....
On the wholly other: I appreciate how you bring Derrida into the discussion, especially the way language can turn back on itself and fall under erasure. I think I see what you mean: that when language asks what am I? it exposes both its indispensability and its limits, and that this tension is where the notion of the wholly other arises. Still, I find myself asking: does this really preserve alterity, or does it risk reducing otherness to the play of language itself? If all otherness is mediated through our historical vocabularies, can the wholly other ever really exceed them?
On co-constitution: your insistence that pain is not an idea struck me. I take you to mean that normativity doesnt float free as some principle, but that it arises directly out of the manifestness of suffering itself. Thats a powerful point, but it does blur the line between ontology and normativity. If pain is already its own importance, then ethical obligation seems built into the structure of being. Do you think that means ethics is not derivative at all, but intrinsic - part of the very fabric of reality?
And regarding agency: I see now that youre trying to resist both Kants formal reduction and a purely human-centered notion of agency. If even my cat evidences agency in its participation in the value-dimension, then ethics extends beyond reflection into affectivity itself. Thats an intriguing move, but I wonder: if all sentient creatures are agents in this sense, does ethics lose its distinctively human task of reflection and responsibility, or does reflection simply become one way of deepening what is already basic to existence?
When asked their opinion on an ethical question, non-cognitivists do not literally say "boo!" or "hurray!" do they? In any event, whatever language they choose to express their attitudes, they do have such attitudes - pro or con or noncommittal, same as the rest of us. And when they are called to act, their actions are motivated by their moral attitudes, same as the rest of us. To be sure, non-cognitivists maintain that moral utterances are not, technically, propositions, but so what? If all you are saying is that theirs is a tortured semantics, I would tend to agree with you, but at the same time, I don't find this issue to be interesting or important enough to argue.
Quoting GazingGecko
You keep referring to "crude subjectivism" - what is that, and who propounds it? And why do you think that it does not adequately address the open question challenge?
Any moral question worth asking is, by that very framing, not a trivial question to answer, even for a subjectivist (perhaps especially for a subjectivist). Introspection in such matters is not as easy as reading a number off a gauge. Nor does one need to be satisfied by the first subjective impression.
Quoting GazingGecko
Brainwashing is not a good counterexample. A brainwashed subject is a morally impaired subject.
Quoting GazingGecko
I am not sure what point you are making here, if it is not just the truth-aptness point - is it? Yes, if moral utterances are not propositions, then, trivially, they cannot be contradictory in the logical sense. But is this really important? They are opposite, contrasting, or what have you - for all intents and purposes, other than logical formalism, it comes to the same thing, doesn't it?
If I have this right, it's: "I am not contradicting myself because I am equiovcating." I am not sure if that's much better though. If someone wants to advance a theory that radically changes notions of truth, then it seems like a commitment to basic logical consistency would be valuable for convincing the skeptic. No doubt, if one is allowed to contradict oneself and equivocate, one can justify anything at all.
Quoting Tom Storm
Sure, so how can your community ever be wrong about what is useful? It seems to me it can only be wrong just in case it happens to decide it has been wrong later. You're collapsing any distinction between appearances and reality here. That's the very thing I've been trying to point out.
"Not anything goes because only the useful goes," but also "what is useful is what the community judges to be useful." It would follow that "putting lead in drinking water is useful just so long as the community thinks it is useful." When it decides this wasn't useful, it ceases to be. We can hardly appeal to any other standard or facts about human biology and lead that hold outside of what is currently deemed "useful." But this seems absurd. More to the point, "pragmatism" that isn't ordered to an end isn't even "pragmatism." It's an abuse of the term. "Sheer voluntarism" would be the appropriate label when what is sought is wholly indeterminate outside the act of seeking (willing) itself.
I would note that other historicist, constructivist theories, such as those inspired by Hegel, do not face this difficulty because they leave themselves grounds for the assertion that practice will be attracted to certain affirmations in the long run (whether or not this is overly "providential" is another question). However, I can see no grounds for such a position if truth (and so presumably reality) is itself just a dependent function of community affirmation, except by preformative contradiction or equivocation.
And this is besides the problem of self-refutation. It's still unclear to me how what Rorty says about truth can be true when the community rejects it.
Well, you're talking like Heidegger. And he struggles with finitude, even referring to Meister Eckhart )once only?), and Buddhism, in the Spiegel interview. Near death he asked for Carl Rahner, a Heideggerian Jesuit priest (true. moving away from Aquinas seems to be an accepted move in Catholic theology), and insisted he had never left the church. Rahner was, well, if you say so...
But, exceed? There are no divisions, so there is no exceeding, not in this "ontological monism" I've been talking about (which I think is right). Consider what we are dealing with that begins this strange and radical inquiry: the phenomenological reduction, or, epoche, of Husserl. You can read this and it's pretty accessible, in his Ideas I, where he attempts to clear the phenomenon of the bulk of thought that would otherwise claim a thing for itself.
Anyway, take a look at how Derrida talks about Levinas' "other" which is intimated in the actual face of suffering, what he calls a trial of theology and mysticism,
neither as a dogma, nor as a religion, nor as a morality. In the last analysis it never bases its authority on Hebraic theses or texts. It seeks to be understood from within a recourse to experience itself...the other itself as what is most irreducibly other within it: Others. ...a recourse the reaches the point at which an exceeded philosophy cannot be brought into question. Truthfully, messianic eschatology is never mentioned literally: it is a question ofdesignating a space or a hollow within naked experience...not an opening among others.It is opening itself, the opening of opening, that which can be enclosed witin no category or totality.
Messianic eschatology is going to be a serious analytic step beyond mere theology, just as is found inKierkegaard who does have Christianity solidly behind his thinking, yet brings this into an analytical domain of what Derrida refers to as naked experience above. Why does Levinas use these burdened religious terms that come straight from traditional metaphysics to talk about a phenomenological analysis of experience? It is because these terms preserve the religious meaning of the analysis, much like Kierkegaard did with original sin in his Concept of Anxiety, centering on dogmatic assumptions of Luther and others so as to make sense of "hereditary sin" in the, to borrow a Heideggerian term, "thrownness" of our existence. To me, this thrownness has a singular reductive telos, which is to the metavalue discovered in ethics and aesthetics.
So in answer to your question regarding this "wholly other," the objective ground for this is the radical indeterminacy of language, and hence, of our existence, and for this you have to, well, read yourself INTO it, as all things are always already "read into" in the meaningful encounter, and by this I refer to the totality of taking the world AS what language CAN SAY (can=possiblities) things are. In hermeneutical thinking, analysis always begins with assumptions, which have their meanings in their own analysis, and I think it safe to say that this is something like the heart of deconstruction. I have read deconstructionist thinking chasing meanings around like a child asking annoying questions about everything you say. This objective ground has an existential counterpart and if you ask someone like Levinas what this is, he might refer your to Meister Eckhart or pseudo Dionysius the Areopogite. But Levinasian hermeneutics would have you, not chasing your own tail or biting it like an ouroboros, but constructing language that brings the world into existence. When we spek here of existence, we are talking about the world that appears before us; there is nothing else to talk about. You are Truth Seeker, but what is truth? Certainly, we yield to Leibniz' principle of sufficient reason that talks about grounding a proposition in well delineated reasoning, but, and this comes straight from Heidegger, this is not where philosophy seeks to go, not the true ground. He writes,
[i]The understanding [29] of being ('AOyoc; in a quite broad sense)b that guides and illuminates in advance all comportment toward beings is neither a grasping of
bein as such, nor is it a conceptual comprehending of what is thus grasped
(/..6yoc; in its narrowest sense = "ontological" concept). We therefore call
this understanding of being that has not yet been brought to a concept
a pre-ontological understanding, or ontological in the broader sense.[/i]
Preontological refers to what is there, right when philosophy opens its eyes upon the world to ask What IS it? and what we get is an already made world, a language, a culture, and these are constructed historically, and so before a philosopher even opens her mouth, there is this vast endowment in place that, if you will, opens it for her (going, fascinatingly, to agency again. Really, this is where Heidegger, Rorty and others do not see in the "essence of agency", that is, the "what it is" of agency as such. What is missed is the value dimension of existence and its insistence on an agent of experience that is commensurate with the pure manifestness of value, which is illustrated by putting your hand in boiling water. IT really does come down this "ground")
Essential for understanding is hermeneutics, the idea that we construct meanings, and these meanings are OPEN. See how this so conctrasts with something like positivism that is so committed to clarity (Rorty's problem is this absurd commitment to rigidity while he at the same time insist a radical openness of truth, inspired by Heidegger), language is open. See how Heidegger begins his Origin of the Work of Art:
[u]What art is can be gathered from a comparative examination of actual art works.
But how are we to be certain that we are indeed basing such an examination on art
works if we do not know beforehand what art is? And the nature of art can no more be
arrived at by a derivation from higher concepts than by a collection of characteristics
of actual art works. For such a derivation, too, already has in view the characteristics
that must suffice to establish that what we take in advance to be an art work is one in
fact. But selecting works from among given objects, and deriving concepts from principles, are equally impossible here, and where these procedures are practiced they are a
self-deception. Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect.
To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of
thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a
circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles in
this circle.[/u]
This little passage should make clear the way he thinks in philosophy. One does not go into an analysis knowing the answer. The answer emerges in the play of thought. Heidegger here sounds like a child in a candy shop, as if he cannot wait to see where language will lead in this process of "disclosure" of what lies "hidden" in the potentiality of possibilities of the totality of meanings, ALL of which are open: open to each other (think metaphor, irony, literary devices and where these have their most potent application, poetry! The crucible where novel meanings come into existence) and open to Being.
Herein lies the ground for meaningful metaphysics, I would argue. There is no empirical object in ontology, but the openness of its being an object IS the object. This is hard to accept, of course, in standard and familiar ways of relating to the world. The object is an event! And an event is not a dogmatic closure, but "free", if you will, and everything is like this. This freedom of the object (and the subject that conceives it) is metaphysics. So when you read someone like Levinas or Jean Luc Marion and you find yourself in a jungle of the strangest concatenations thought one can imagine, it is due to the foundational indeterminacy of our existence taken up AS these dissertations, and here language can gather in a convergence of thought's possibilities to make/discover what it is,
To get a very good look at this, see his Being and Time section 64 and onward in Division 2. Time is the phenomenologist's bottom line.
Quoting Truth Seeker
We are committed to one thing, which is a descriptive phenomenology, and this does not solve all problems. It opens problems and shows problems in an entirely different way. Deepens what is already basic to existence, yes, I would agree with this; as well as imposes upon our ordinary ethical thinking regarding animal rights, after all, if the measure of moral agency is this non-formal value-as-such, then cats and canaries are moral agents, meaning we cannot treat them as objects, we have to yield to them as we yield to other people, but not in all the subtle ways. We are a culture that is just coming to realize this, and it is caught up in an unwieldly equation of hamburgers and slaughter houses.
Still, Im struck by the cost of this move. If alterity is always mediated by hermeneutical openness, then the wholly other seems inseparable from the historical contingency of our vocabularies. Is that really sufficient to preserve what Levinas meant by alterity in the ethical sense - the face of the other as a demand that resists assimilation? Or is phenomenology reinterpreting that demand as simply another manifestation of openness?
On agency, I appreciate your willingness to extend moral significance beyond the human - that if cats and canaries participate in value-as-such, then they are owed moral regard as agents of a kind. That resonates with contemporary debates about animal ethics, though your grounding in phenomenality is very different from utilitarian or rights-based accounts. I suppose my question here is: if all sentient beings are moral agents in this descriptive sense, what still distinguishes human responsibility? Is reflection just a matter of deepening what is already basic, or does it introduce something normatively unique that goes beyond affectivity?
Finally, I notice you say phenomenology doesnt solve problems but reframes them. Do you see that as a strength - a way of keeping thought open to the world as event - or as a limitation compared to traditions that do aim for closure in metaphysical answers?
Well Id assume this is mostly about the framing. Wouldnt we say instead that, rather than being about right or wrong, communities develop methods, approaches, and beliefs that work for a time and then no longer work, or no longer meet needs? And society is never in complete agreement, just as many Americans who embrace Trumpism are off set by others who see a fascist dictatorship emerging. The developing conversation and the consequences will settle on a position.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
No. Pragmatism doesnt say that usefulness is whatever people happen to believe at a given moment. Usefulness is tested by consequences, by how well beliefs help us manage experience, predict outcomes, and solve problems over time. A belief that lead in drinking water is useful will eventually clash with the consequences of lead poisoning. It will fail to guide successful action, and that failure is precisely what drives the community to revise its judgment. Wouldn't you say that the collapse of superstitions, smoking, and other harmful practices has followed such a process?
This is leaving out the metaphysical part of the thesis, the idea that there is no such thing as truth outside of practice. I don't agree that "it was not true that smoking causes lung diseases back when no one agreed that it did" and that it then became true once current practice began to affirm that it is so. Rather, I'd maintain that it was true from the very beginning that smoking causes lung disease, and that current practice came to affirm this truth because it was already true.
Now, if it was true that smoking still caused lung disease back when no one thought it did (back when no human practice affirmed this truth) it can hardly be the case that things are true only in virtue of what human practice affirms.
Quoting Tom Storm
How are "success" and "works" defined here? Isn't it just what current practice and sentiment affirms? Or is there a fact about what actually promotes human flourishing outside of current practice and sentiment?
As I said -
Quoting Tom Storm
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, this will depend on the pragmatist, I would imagine. But the idea that we don't have access to a truth outside ourselves is certainly something Rorty would say; at least if you include his particular brand of neo-pragmatism.
But what are we talking about here? We seem to be going around in circles, which may well be my fault, since I dont recall exactly what we were discussing. Im not a pragmatist; I just see the merit in some of their arguments.
Drilling down into this: Yes, smoking caused lung disease even before we knew it did. But as far as I know, from a pragmatist point of view, it wasnt true for us in any practical sense until people investigated it and evidence demonstrated it. Pragmatism sees truth as something that helps us act successfully in the world, not as a fixed fact that exists completely independently of human understanding.
Right, some versions of pragmatism are merely pragmatic. I was speaking only to the metaphysical thesis.
So Peirce, a realist (metaphysically and morally), has no such issue because truth as: "the opinion fated to be agreed upon [eventually] by all who investigate [faithfully]," doesn't run into the same sorts of problems.
Hold on a bit. I am reading Derrida's On the Name to give a better response to your question. Not helping, frankly. This particular series of odd writings is meant to demonstrate the bloated nature of language that is used so casually, telling us that our meanings are actually opaquely diffuse. At any rate, I try to follow Heidegger in the quote above where he calls the riddle of the art object a "feast for thought." Ontology requires one to stand in the openness of thought-in-the-world (by all means, put the book down and observe the world without the intrusion of knowledge assumptions) reach into meanings and try to deal with this threshold experience of meeting the world on the world's terms, that is, givenness, and this takes a constructive effort to play through down to the impossible simplicity of Being (following Henry, Marion, et al). Being is not an augmentative concept, like science is: science grows, weeding out failed paradigms, adding new ones. Phenomenlogical monism does not seek growth, but simplicity (and if one argues that science seeks the same, then I would say this is ONLY because science and phenomenology are part of a singular endeavor in the first place. Science just hasn't come to realize that any responsible conception of "the world" at the most basic level of inquiry is absurd without the contribution of the perception that "makes" the object what it is. When it does, it will look to phenomenology. There is no choice in this, really). Derrida "discovers" this impossible simplicity in the "trace".
On preserving alterity, it takes something of a revelation to understand this. The object palpably in front of you has to be reduced to its essence, not as the color yellow or a paper clip, where you pick it out of other things, discover differences and the name has its essence in this; but Being as such, which, like the way I have been treating good and bad, very difficult to discern. Take that burning flesh: yes, clearly it hurts, but what is BAD about this? See, this turns is out terribly indeterminate, and it is a struggle to talk about it, because there is no object, no "thereness"; the pain is clear as a bell, but the bad of the pain is...utterly elusive . One literally has to go after it to discover it, for it is cloaked in religion and science, and these do not take up the good and the bad thematically, ignore it completely. Religion takes on the gravitas, but is analytically irresponsible; science loses the whole matte to physicalism which is devoid of phenomologial actuality. Good and bad are lost in a sea of these region's "taking as" hegemonies that altogether exclude the question for a proper ground of what it means for something to hurt so bad, or delight so good. It takes the reduction to "see" it, the impossible "alterity" of it. The question of the wholly other is essentially a question of non formalist value, the living actuality of the pain of the burn. You question as to preserving the radical alterity of the wholly other is not going to find satisfaction until eyes are turned to this, and this pain, or this joy of requited love has to be delivered from the play of thought that would keep it hidden, as with talk about evolution and the way pain and pleasure are conducive to reproduction and survival, which is, of course, true, as I read about it. But begging the question about the nature of what is there.
We live in two worlds, within one. Making the move from the familiar to the phenomenological world brings all things into a new interpretative light, so novel in its nature, you probably have to be a little crazy to see it, crazy enough, at least, that you can experience the world fairly free of preconceptions, which means seeing a tree and also acknowledging that the Being of the tree remains a mystery IN the mundane acknowledging it to be a tree. This mystery is, I suspect, what you are looking for. I would like to paste here the entire section called Care as the Being of Dasein from Being and Time where Heidegger e3ssentially says when one becomes self conscious (essentially IN the reductive move to clear experience from knowledge assumptions, habit), in the act of reviewing what one IS, and exercising one's freedom to choose and create one's self (dasein), one stands apart from the historical totality, and enters into a structural unease, an anxiety, as to what one IS, for the tranquilizing effects of going along with everything with everyone else is suspended and one is left hanging, facing an unmade future, and here we find responsibility, alienation, a "calling" for a resoluteness in deciding to become something/someone. This is about as mystical as Heidegger gets. For Henry et al, this uncanniness becomes a very different matter. Henry is a Husserlian, and takes the idea of pure consciousness very seriously.
Quoting Truth Seeker
What distinguishes human responsibility. But all responsibility belongs to us, not animals. Responsibility is a concept, and cats don't think. So this limits agency for cats, young children and madmen, whose capacity for thought is nonexistent, undeveloped, or compromised, respectively. Phenomenology, I argue, informs us that there is an absolute ground for responsibility, and it is argued that this makes our ethics important in the way old testament commandments did, but, of course, without any specific commandments. Again, how does one "see" this? Derrida's is a dissection of language showing how what is said is no one thing, but reverberates throughout all of language, but this keeps within a deconstructive analytic . The REAL move is existential. Phenomenology is a method, not simply a thesis.: you take what is before you and strip it of obvious meanings that otherwise would possess it in the spontaneous everydayness. What remains is the phenomenon, but what is stripped away remains implicilty IN the constitution of what is before you. It "always already" is IN it, and your job now is to exorcise this pervasive implicit world of habituated reality (which, I thknk I mentioned once, Kierkegaard calls inherited sin. Heidegger thougth Kierkegaard was just a "religious writer" but when you read Being and Time the themes laid out by K are clearly there).
Quoting Truth Seeker
A strength! Why, it provides a feast for thought! There is a kind of closure, but it takes the discussion into the matter of religion. What is the essence of religion? I argue it is two fold, the meta-consummatory and the meta-redemptive. Talk about metaethics as I have been and a ground is laid, but from here on, we are in metaphysics, and the ground is a metaground. This is a challenging affair to go into. Only if you are interested. It rests with the insight that metaphysics is now released from "groundlessness" that is the default assumption of ontology, and we can now speak with measured confidence about this ground, this metaground. Religion is to be regarded as a "science" of phenomenological inquiry.
I think I understand your point that the wholly other is not something that stands beyond phenomenality, but is disclosed in the radical indeterminacy of language and in the givenness of value itself. Your example of pain was helpful: the badness of the burn isnt an idea but an elusive alterity that resists reduction, and only shows itself when we perform the reduction. That gives me a sense of how phenomenology preserves otherness without positing a Kantian noumenon.
At the same time, Im still left wondering: if all alterity is revealed within phenomenality, isnt there a risk that the wholly other becomes just another way of talking about indeterminacy and openness, rather than something irreducibly beyond? Levinas wanted the face of the other to resist assimilation; does phenomenology, as you frame it, secure that resistance, or does it reinterpret it as another disclosure of givenness?
On responsibility, your clarification helps. Animals and children participate in the value-dimension, but responsibility as such belongs to us, since it requires reflection and concepts. That makes sense, but Im curious whether this creates a two-tier picture: all sentient beings are moral participants, but only humans are moral agents in the full sense. Is that the distinction youd want to defend?
And lastly, I can see why you describe phenomenologys refusal of closure as a strength rather than a weakness - it keeps philosophy alive, a feast for thought. But when you gesture toward meta-consummatory and meta-redemptive grounds, you seem to be moving back toward something like metaphysics or even theology. How do you see phenomenology avoiding the pitfalls of bad metaphysics at that point? Does this metaground remain descriptive, or does it inevitably take us into prescriptive, religious territory?
It is fine to not find it interesting. One can be more interested in revisionism than what the actual concepts are. Such projects can be both useful and interesting.
Still, I was responding to @Truth Seeker's first question:
Quoting Truth Seeker
That question is about what "right" and "wrong" are and to answer that it is important to understand what they mean. Semantics is important in that regard. If one uses a different meaning, one is answering a different question. Dismissing semantics abandons that project.
Quoting SophistiCat
Roughly: x is right = I have a positive attitude towards x. And similar translations for other evaluative terms.
I use the term crude subjectivism to separate my critiques from more complicated variants of relativism and subjectivism. I think that is useful for the sake of revealing issues with certain anti-realist positions that share the same relevant features as crude subjectivism without distractions. It is "crude" in that it is the rudimentary form of a family of views.
It is frequently advanced in ethics classes, on forums, and informal metaethical discussions. It becomes even more frequent if one include its sibling, crude cultural relativism, which suffers from the same kind of issues. I take it as quite obvious that many hold these kinds of views in our times. It is quite a natural reading to take as the implied view in @Truth Seeker's first question. So I think it is worth critiquing.
Historical examples are always more sophisticated. Philosophers tend to go beyond the rudimentary. In either case, I think Edvard Westermarck gives an account for moral concepts that is close to crude subjectivism. There is a similar strand in a part of Thomas Hobbes. Some passages of David Hume also invite this reading, but I think he avoids fitting that mold on the whole. I'm not really sure where to put Hume metaethically, to be honest.
Quoting SophistiCat
Because if the crude subjectivist theory is correct about our moral concepts, the meaning of the sentence (O) "I think abortion is wrong, but is it wrong?" would translate to (T) "I think I have a negative attitude towards abortion, but do I have a negative attitude towards abortion?" which makes that kind of reflection seem trivial, like "I think I'm hungry, but am I hungry?" Checking one's attitudes seems to be quite straight forward most of the time. But reading (O), it does not sound like such trivial reflection. So as a metaethical theory, we have evidence against crude subjectivism.
Quoting SophistiCat
That is a fine point well put. I think the plausibility depends on how one cashes out "attitude" but you are right that introspection is not always clear on most such views. After watching a challenging film, I might genuinely question what attitude I have towards the film while I'm driving home from the cinema.
I still think it is difficult to capture the meaning of these questions for subjectivists. Even an incredibly self-aware person that attends to their attitudes could ask those kinds of questions in a way that sounds coherent and substantial.
Quoting SophistiCat
I don't really see why it is not a good counter-example. What do you mean by a "morally impaired" subject? That is not clear to me. Otherwise, it risks seeming like an ad hoc fix.
In either case, here is a new version that illustrates where I think both crude subjectivism, even with your suggested fixes, don't seem to capture the meaning.
The Dying Omnivore. Adam is sitting on his porch, reflecting. Adam is a deeply self-aware person that is well-attuned to his attitudes. Tomorrow, Adam has chosen to die due to inoperable cancer. Still, he is clear-headed. In that moment on the porch, Adam asks himself, "I believe and will always believe that buying animal products is right, but is it right?" and then continues, "I'm certain I have a positive attitude towards buying animal products and that I will always have that positive attitude towards it, but is it right?"
If crude subjectivism, even with the added dimension of degrees of belief, is correct about the meaning of "right" and "wrong," it appears like the two questions by Adam should sound like trivial, settled re-asks akin to "It is snowing today, but is it snowing today?" One would probably suspect that the person was confused if they asked such a question. But Adam's questions sound coherent and substantive rather than obviously confused and trivial. So crude subjectivism probably gives the wrong account for the meaning of "right" and "wrong."
Quoting SophistiCat
I agree that it would be a trivial point if emotivism is assumed as the correct account of morality. Of course there would be no contradiction. However, I have not assumed emotivism, because the correctness of emotivism is part of what is in dispute when we are figuring out what "right" and "wrong" is.
My point here was that moral discourse behaves like propositions, while emotivism predicts they would not. Since emotivism goes against the linguistic data, it does probably not capture what "right" and "wrong" means.
Tell you what. I have some reading to do. I'll get back to you soon when I am free of this.
My apology for butting in from the side and diverging from the thread, but reading your comments on vegans and non-vegans, I am curious as to your views on abortion?
Of course, but the point I was trying to make was that the question of cognitivism vs non-cognitivism is an analytical question that does not really get at the substance of the OP's query. It hinges on philosophical positions on truth, properties, beliefs vs attitudes, etc. With the right combination of such positions, one can be a cognitivist subjectivist (or perhaps even a non-cognitivist objectivist).
I take a relaxed, commonsensical attitude towards truth, which inclines me towards ethical cognitivism, but not in any robust sense that an objectivist might wish for.
Quoting GazingGecko
It is worth putting "x is right" in some context, because this is a common source of misunderstanding. The subjectivist position is that when someone says "x is right," what they mean is "I have a positive attitude towards x." The statement is indexed to the speaker and reports on their mental state, in contrast to syntactically similar sentences, which report on something in the common domain ("the cat is on the mat") or expresses common knowledge. Understood in this way, even this "crude" position puts to rest easy charges of logical inconsistency. If A says "x is right" and B says "x is wrong," there is a controversy, but not a (logical) contradiction.
Still, this statement of crude subjectivism leaves something out. Emotivists or expressivists accept other, uncontroversially non-propositional functions of moral statements, such as exhortation or signalling. (As an aside, such uses of moral statements might be counted in favor of moral non-cognitivism. However, moral statements are far from unique in this regard. Natural language is rich and quirky, and there are plenty of instances of seemingly assertive expressions that can function as something other than assertions.)
Quoting GazingGecko
The only reason I can see for why this might seem like a serious challenge for subjectivism is if one has an objectivist presupposition at the back of their mind. Absent such presupposition, what could a question such as "I think abortion is wrong, but is it wrong?" mean? I believe it would be reasonable for anyone, subjectivist or not, to interpret it in ways that I have suggested: reflection, self-doubt, open-mindedness. The subjectivist goes further in stating that that is all there is to it. There is no objective truthmaker against which to evaluate the answer.
"I think I'm hungry, but am I hungry?" would be more like "I think it would be wrong to push that little girl into traffic, but is it wrong?" No one in their right mind would ask such a question. The questions that are actually being asked are not so easy to answer.
Quoting GazingGecko
In your thought experiment, a person is brainwashed to have certain moral attitudes (and they know about that in advance, but this is not important to my point). This is not a fair counterexample, because a person's moral agency is suppressed or compromised, so that they can no longer be considered to be the same moral agent at a different time. If that is not clear, I am not sure what else I can say.
As an aside, edge cases and pathologies are not very illuminating in philosophy, and I wish analytical philosophers would abuse them less. If they are good for anything, it is to counter simple and rigid frameworks, which are brittle by their own nature. But subjectivist metaethics is not like that, I would think. Nothing is simple or rigid where human psychology is involved.
Quoting GazingGecko
Well, simultaneous assumptions of certitude and doubt would not sit well in any context, so perhaps your framing here is flawed. But I guess that is not what you wanted to highlight with this example, but rather the practical near-impossibility of changing one's mind. In that respect, this is a better thought experiment than the brainwashing one, since (morbid premise aside) it does not push into the pathology territory. Still, I don't think that this is much of an argument against subjectivism. We are asking a hypothetical question, and hypothetical questions invite counterfactuals, where some things are held fixed and others are left open. So, the question is not "will Adam ever change his mind?" but "would Adam change his mind?" Here we would want to hold fixed Adam's moral character, but the particular circumstance of his fatal illness seems to be irrelevant.
Quoting GazingGecko
No, that is not what I am saying. What is trivial is that according to non-cognitivism, moral statements do not have truth values, so, of course, sentences expressing moral sentiments cannot be logically contradictory, since they cannot be formalized into logical propositions. But that doesn't mean that they cannot be understood as contradictory (conflicting, antithetical, etc.) in an informal sense.
Quoting GazingGecko
I think you are making too much of this. First of all, if moral statements did not behave like truth-apt statements, the question of cognitivism vs non-cognitivism would not arise in the first place. The non-cognitivists' position is to bite that bullet. You are not telling them anything they don't already know.
Second, morally flavored statements are commonplace. Who is to say that they must fit into the same linguistic mold as non-moral statements, rather than form a distinct class?
Any decision on what is good and what is evil (what is right and what is wrong) is made based on whatever is politically expedient. There is no Law of Nature that provides a basis on which a determination about good or evil could be made. It is, therefore, determined simply by Rules of Man. Examples of the political determination between good and evil are abundant. A salient example is the Second World War:
All five of these statements are quite valid, actually patently true[/I], but in clear contradiction to each other, giving evidence of my original statement. So, after about 3% of the world population perished due to a single war - the war after 'the war to end all wars' - no determination can yet be made on what is good and what is evil. p123 [i]How I Understand Things. The Logic of Existence
:fire:
But Christopher Hitchens is a pop philosopher. What, I wonder, do you find interesting about what he has to say about God?
But you say this apart from understanding what a law of nature is. I can call, say, gravity a "law" of nature, yet there is an analytic of gravity in physics that won't quit. So much for it being a law. All such laws bear the same scrutiny, their presuppositional ground being altogether ignored. Further, what is there about moral good and evil that would even suggest nature would provide an account as to what they are? There is nothing "natural" about this, nothing natural, yet unmistakable in its being in the comparison between states of affairs in the usual sense, facts of the world, and the moral problematic. What makes being thrown into one of Stalin's gulags a moral issue in its very possibility? This is the question. This ground of morality is not a fiction or an interpretation of "what to do" in a moral entanglement. It is PRIOR to the "rules of man" as you call it.
My sincere apology, I should have stated, categorically, what I mean with a Law of Nature. It is actually not that difficult:
Law (of nature):= If the sum of mass, energy, and information is conserved over space-time for (more than one) pairs of interacting components; all the interactions that exist between these components can be described by a unique, specific law, a law of nature. The collection of all these laws then comprise the Laws of Nature. [i]How I Understand Things. The Logic of Existence[/I]
You are quite correct that nature does not provide an answer to what is morally good or evil. That is all determined by political expedience. And that, is exactly my point!
Would that be a law that abides independently of the act that conceives it?
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
Political experience, or what includes this but is more inclusive and basic, social experience, determines the historical possibility for morality to appear as it does. Our ethics is derivative, and as it is taken up in novel ways, it establishes precedent for future legal narratives. But talk about the dynamics of moral evolvement doe snot address the issue of the nature of morality; it merely says ideas come and go, ignoring the question of ground, what makes something moral AT ALL.
It is the law that describes the act; if it is a law of nature, it describes exactly that - a law of nature, describing an act of nature. If it is a Rule of Man, it is determined by the politics we conduct amongst ourselves. The conception (that which conceives it) is determined by evolution. Or emergence, if you prefer this word.
Quoting Constance
It is the politics we play, the Rules of Man that we contemplate, decide upon, accept, ignore, change, circumvent, ... that determine what is moral; for who, and when.
By the way - this provides a fundamental solution to the Demarcation Problem. How I Understand Things. The Logic of Understanding
But if something is called a law of nature, it is generally assumed that the law issues from observation of natural events, making physics the rigorous expression of what nature is and does. The assumption here is that observation yields the natural world in the first place such that it can serve as a ground for things observed, but this assumption doesn't ask the more basic question regarding how observation can do this. The question then is, how can observation be "about" its object given that aboutness is an epistemic requirement? What is there in an observation that makes the basic connection for this?
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
But is the nature of ethics itself simply a matter of rules? In science, there are rules, principles, but the "aboutness" of these rules has its content in the essential givenness of a world, the regularities of appearance and behavior, and when we look to what this is, we find essential content in the hardness of a rock or mineral or the spectral analysis of a star's light and the like. Are you saying that ethics has nothing of this essential content that constitutes its "aboutness"? Nothing that grounds ethics apart from rule making?
Is the logic of understanding: not clear on this, for accepting, ignoring, and the rest apply to reasoned arguments about the natural world as well as ethics. One does not stand before the rigors of science as if one were only to receive and obey; rather, one stands amidst standards of acceptance that are in play.
Please consider: :"The only thing we have is a perception of things, albeit physical, abstract or imaginary things. Through perception, we gain information, glean knowledge, construct abstract things and conjure imaginary things - even play politics."
If you want to speak of aboutness or giveness, you should provide a concise description of your perception of the meaning of these words. (The aboutness of aboutness :nerd: )
Quoting Constance
I am not assuming anything, I have given you, precisely, my perception of a "Law of Nature". If you do not agree with my definition you are welcome to give me your definition. Then we can discuss these definitions and perhaps glean some knowledge.
Quoting Constance
Yes, the Rules of Man.
Quoting Constance
Yes, that is what I am saying. "The Laws of Nature have no morality, no honour nor any legal standing." Also, "Any decision on what is good and what is evil is made based on whatever is politically expedient ... It is therefore, determined simply by Rules of Man."
All my quotes from: How I Understand Things. The Logic of Existence
Please tell me, by whom or by what authority can a decision be made that something is good and something else is evil? A scientist, a politician, perhaps a religious leader ... perhaps a philosopher?
One can ignore the conditions of observation as conditions, as constitutive conditions, and empirical science routinely does this, and the claim here is certainly not that science gets it all wrong because it does not responsibly look at this constitutive ground; it simply means that science is not interested in philosophy. Philosophy attempts to understand matters at the most basic level of assumptions and questions, and it cannot ignore this. As to aboutness: calling this on my desk a pen is to claim a relation between the utterance, the thought, the apprehension here, and "that over there". This relation is the perceptual act and the analysis of this act is what I would call an analysis of simple and essential epistemic distance, and again, science and everyday affairs assumes this to be without issue, and aboutness never becones a theme of discussion. But make the move to understand this relation explicitly, and serious issues emerge instantly.
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
Well, this "law of nature" is an assumption, as is whatever I say is the case. I think a law of nature is first a law, and a law is a rational generality, more or less rigorously conceived. There are no laws in that tree over there, if the standard of naturalism is used to understand it. "Laws of nature" is a loose way to refer to things in the world, and we all talk this way in casual familiarity; more accurately, laws are what we contribute to the event of acknowledging the tree, the planet, star, or what have you.
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
I don't doubt that there are such rules, but I do say that demarcation problem is not going to be resolved by demarcating a difference in the laws of nature and ethics. Nature's content is reduced to natural laws, while ethics' content is reducible to ethical laws, loosely speaking. Or do I miss your meaning here?
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
By definition the laws of nature have no morality, for what is moral is not a phenomenon found in nature. Of course, calling these natural laws at all presents a question, for per the above, there are no laws IN nature, unless, that is, nature and reason can be conceived as a unity, which is my view. The interesting question arises: if nature's "laws" are the work of the way we take up nature and deal with it, what is it that morality deals with such that its laws have meaning at all? Certainly not clouds and planetary systems, but good and evil: what are these as such?
Of course, take a flame and hold it under your hand for a moment. Now you know the prima facie injunction against doing this to yourself or anyone else.
"... conditions, observations, constitutive, empirical, responsible, understanding, assuming, aboutness (a new one for me), relation, perceptual, analytical, thoughtful, apprehensive, simple, essential, explicit, emerging, definitive, phenomenal, conceived, interesting, reasonable, ..."
Now,
Quoting Constance
Please answer my question, a simple question: who or by what authority can such a decision be made?
then we could continue this conversation.
It's a fair question. My answer would be that various intersubjective communities have their leaders who make those calls, and community members agree and follow. It might be a politician, a judge, a rabbi, the Pope, a cult leader, a teacher, or even the 'high priest' at a university philosophy department.
But I am personally not aware of a single binding decision made by anyone that something is good or evil. Both of those categories, to me, are poetic notions I generally avoid. I tend to think more in terms of beneficial or harmful deeds. But again, these are contingent categories for the most part. Although if someone asked me whether blowing up the world was beneficial or harmful, I would probably answer the former. That said, I can certainly see an argument that wiping out all life on Earth might be one way to end suffering forever. Beneficial perhaps.
... which takes us back, exactly, to my statement: the decision is made, in general, by what is politically expedient. Thus:
"There is no Law of Nature that provides a basis on which a determination about good or evil could be made. It is, therefore, determined simply by Rules of Man." How I Understand Things. The Logic of Existence
I came to this position when I was in my teens.
But of course this is just a perspective. There are theists who would argue differently.
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
I think this is probably largely correct, although I would say that most positions on morality are related to tribal survival. A tribe/society that allows widespread theft, killing, and violence will collapse. Although, so far, America hasnt done so I guess we could see morality as a code of conduct, and yes, expediency is one frame to use to explain it. :wink:
The only thing we have is perception ...
Quoting Tom Storm
South Africa is also hanging on ... by a thin thread.
Thank you for your comment and feedback.
Christopher Hitchens may not have been a professional philosopher, but I dont think that diminishes the depth or value of his insights. What I find interesting about what he says about God is not technical philosophy but moral and existential clarity.
He challenges the assumption that belief in God automatically makes a person moral, and he exposes the moral contradictions in many religious doctrines - especially those that sanctify cruelty, fear, or submission. He asks uncomfortable but necessary questions: If God is good, why does he permit suffering? If morality depends on divine command, does that make genocide or slavery good if commanded by God?
Hitchens also reminds us that we can find meaning, awe, and compassion without invoking the supernatural. He combined reason, moral passion, and literary brilliance - showing that intellectual honesty and empathy can coexist.
So, while he wasnt a technical philosopher, he was a moral and cultural critic who made philosophy accessible and urgent - which, to me, is just as important.
Errr, yes, those terms are common in philosophy. I did hazard to think that they would be okay....in a philosophy club.
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
Philosophy certainly is a conversation that breaks away from normal language, the everydayness of familiar talk, but then, so is physics. You seem to think there is nothing to say that common sense can't handle, but the very nature of taking matters down to the wire, so to speak, where the most basci assumptions are brought to light, requires precisely this thematic withdrawal from easy thinking. It really does depend on the reader, the inquirer: how much do you care about these issues? How much thinking are you willing to go through?
Simply put (and I apologize for thinking in paragraphs and not simple sentences): you want to know where the authority lies to make right moral judgments, and there are those who try to give answers to this, MIll, Bentham, Kant come to mind, but really, it is a historically recurring issue. But questions like this BEG other questions. (You know what this is, right? Not to be condescending, but you did explicitly declare a distrust of concepts, and this one is front and center. To beg the question is to assume something that hasn't been made clear as to its justification in whatever is being talked about.) So before I can even make sense of "by what authority" I have to understand what is being talked about. Ethics. So what IS ethics? You see this point? I am not at all saying that ethical thinking and its social and political contexts is free of the indeterminacies of decision making, but rather, I am saying such discussion rests more on inquiry into the nature of ethics itself, and I am further saying that once one looks more closely at this ground of ethics, there IS a discoverable foundation that does stand as an authority. It is just not the kind of authority that resolves complicated practical matters. Rather, it grounds ethics, in the way that logic grounds the reason found in everyday talk. You and I may argue, say, about politics, but this openness of the issues does not deny the very firm ground in the reasonable talk itself--conditional phrases, conjunctions and negations, and so on. Here, I am saying there is also a firm ground for ethicality itself that is not offended by this openness.
So I agree with your thinking that "the rules of man" are inescapably arbitrary, but I counter that this is not a penetrating analysis as it does not even touch upon the the essential issue, which is about the nature of ethics itself. The OP asks what ethics IS. This is where my response goes. Its nature, its essence.
Yes, and I agree with a lot he says, but it is a lot of references to science and a failed theodicy, and a position like this is simply part of a denial-fest that post modern thinking ushers in. Atheism is just as bad as theism when the conversation is reduced to this level of understanding. His is an empirical discussion, and his common sense is riddled with superficial denials, and again, I agree, but it simply bears none of the signs of serious philosophical thought. His is a popular remedy for bad thinking, filled with derogation and pithy phrasing, the kind of thing that circulates lazily through idle minds that crave cynicism. It fails utterly to look closely at the idea of God.
Take meaning, awe, and compassion without without the supernatural: well, what IS the "natural"? God is certainly not a natural concept; it is a moral concept, and so, what is ethics? Where is the boundary between the natural and the supernatural? What happens when we ask the most basic questions? Compassion refers to the self, a comportment (a way of regarding) the world that issues from our own constitution: what happens when this constitution is allowed to be free of the "science" that keeps it contained in a localized domain of "subjectivity"? Ask what an object IS, and can it be shown that one actually observes a world that stands apart from t he asking itself?
I mean, the questions that brings philosophy into its own depths are profound, literally. OTOH, I probably should give Hitchens his due, given that the great religious narrative really does need to yield to philosophy, for philosophy is the conscience of religion, keeping the question (that piety of thought!) that undoes unjustified belief alive. The religious narrative has to go; but the greatness cannot be argued away. It is IN the fabric of our existence.
Im an atheist and I mostly enjoyed him, but I wouldnt say Hitchens was deep or insightful, he simply recycled the usual secular free thought ideas that had been offered since Ingersoll and before. All of the Hitch's thinking consisted of familiar atheist talking points Id already encountered when reading Madalyn OHair decades before he took them up.
The morality argument is a particularly creaky and venerable position. But many have overlooked that since Christians cannot agree on what is morally good or not ( on issues like capital punishment, stem cell research, abortion, homosexuality, trans rights, gun ownership, war, welfare reform, taxation, feminism, etc, etc) one can hardly argue that they have an objective grounding for morality. What they appear to have are multiple and contradictory interpretations of guesswork and speculations regarding which version of god may be real and what it thinks.
My apologies, I do try not to be condescending, contentious and obstinate, but apparently I am (just had a conversation with my friend to this effect). The problem I have is that I am not a philosopher (merely an engineer) and English is not my mother tongue (where I grew up the standing joke was that English is only spoken in self defence). The point I am trying to make is that words should be used carefully and concisely. Also, one must always ensure, especially during a debate (and when giving an instruction to a subordinate in a running steel plant) that both parties have the same understanding of the meaning of words used.
Consider:
"Attempting to define or study any ambiguous notion by describing it in terms of other ambiguous words; is inevitably doomed to ambiguity. Adding more and more ambiguous words to this effort will never change this result."
Now to the question contemplated in this thread: "What is right and what is wrong and how do we know? Apparently (to my understanding) the question contemplated in the philosophical study of ethics.
My answer to this question is that it is determined by politics.
"Politics:= A process used by humans to propose, contemplate, and implement Rules of Man in order to test their conformance to the Laws of Nature that best describe the purpose of any and all companies."
"Rules (of Man):= The time-variant interactions between systems, capable of abstraction, these systems use to create rules for themselves. The collection of all these rules then comprise the Rules of Man."
If I understand your answer correctly, it is ethics that provide a determination on what is right and what is wrong. Which, in my understanding, only transpose (I checked the meaning of this word with Prof. Google and it seems okey) the question from 'what is right and what is wrong' to 'what is ethical and what is not'.
Quoting Constance
Please share this [i]firm ground[/I] with me, so that I may gain understanding.
You ask what is natural versus supernatural. Id say that distinction loses meaning if God cannot be coherently defined or empirically differentiated from nature. Once the supernatural ceases to have observable consequences, were left only with human moral experience - which is precisely where Hitchens situates his inquiry: in compassion, honesty, and the freedom to question.
If God is a moral concept, then its worth must be judged by the moral outcomes it inspires. A concept that sanctifies fear, tribalism, or subservience fails on its own moral grounds. The greatness you mention may indeed be woven into the fabric of human existence - but perhaps what we call God is simply our evolving attempt to articulate that greatness in moral and existential terms. When the old metaphors harden into dogma, philosophy reopens the question.
So Id say: philosophy doesnt replace Hitchenss critique - it completes it.
But no, he isn't, well, no more than George Carlin "examines" this. All you say here is exactly why I call him a pop philosopher. God comes into a culture bound up in assumptions, but essentially, most of what is in this concept is a fiction, a narrative taken up to contend with the overwhelming conditions of our existence, and this narrative is constructed out of a totality of a world we are "thrown" into, a totality that is finite, grounded in the historicity of language and culture. When Hitchens "analyzes" popular "churchy" ideas about God, he does so still within the analytical framework of those very ideas, still outside the essential questions, which are much harder to discover; in fact, the philosophy that leads to discovery actually discovers the openness of the world and its foundational indeterminacy, which is not a denial or a doubt or a derision, but a penetration.
But I will say again that my standards are pretty out there. In a word, Hitchens is just a bore. NOT that he is flat out wrong, but that he encourages a "cynical nihilism" which is the ability to gainsay at one's leisure sans the gravitas of what only deeper analysis can yield, and is therefore what I would call a casual nihilism, a reduction to idle talk about things that are the very antithesis of this mentality. God is, beneath the ready to hand dismissals, a profound concept, and this goes to a metaethical analysis of our existence, and this takes us into a very alien world: the at first presuppositionally acknowledged world in argument, then the intuitively acknowledged world of phenomenality: the phenomenality of this book, that tree, and then, this suffering, that delight. As Kierkegaard once put it, one has to realize that one actually exists, but we live in a culture that treats the human existence as derivative.
What you asked about the consummatory and redemptive modalities of religion (of God) earlier, you ask a question that is far, far flung from ordinary thought. One has to spend some serious time with Husserl's Ideas I and the famous, or infamous, phenomenological reduction.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Take the term "supernatural" off the table, for it is just as steeped in a connotative opacity as God is, as religion is, as the soul is. So much comes to us in assumptions that make their way invisibly into common thinking, and by the time one can raise a question, the question itself conceived out of that which the question is about, and this becomes and exercise in circular thinking, and so it is the question that needs to be restructured to be more "about" the world, rather than about mere postulations and assumptions that have "gone without saying" for so long.
God as an anthropomorphism makes for the best kind of strawman thinking for atheists, because it ascribes to God thought, intention, desire, and so on. One conceives ot God the creator, then handily tears this concept to shreds based on the moral culpability of God. It is an entire faqbrication, and, to add, it matters not at all that most believe in God the creator, any more than it matters to physics what people believe: it is a study independent of what is popular, grounded evidentially. Can you imagine what physics would look like if it spent its time simply telling everyone how bad popular conceptions are? This is why I say someone like Hitchens has not even begun to make the move into serious thought.
"Observable consequences" simply begs perhaps the most pivotal question of all: What IS an observation? I will give this to you.
Quoting Truth Seeker
If the moral outcome is inspired by concept constructed out of a fiction, then the outcome is going to be a fiction as well. Not sure why those fears and tribalism and ancient thinking enters into it. Again, one must think like a scientist: what is there, before you, in the horizon of analytic possibilities? All assumptions that are extrinsic to this are suspended. A geologist studying rocks and monerals found in a geologic setting is not a cultural anthropologist wondering about people and their motivations and beliefs and the idiosyncrasies of their religions. She has nothing but the given of the regional ontology of a particular science.
Philosophy is a science that deals with foundational determinacies and their indeterminate boundaries. God is a concept historically conceived at this boundary. One therefore has to look at the nature of where thought meets the world, and it is not thought that will prevail in this enterprise, not the logos, but the pathos, and not being and its beingS, but value-in-being.
You call God a fiction born of thrownness into finitude. Very well, but fictions that shape moral life still have measurable effects. Whether God is a phenomenological boundary-concept or an anthropomorphic myth, the question remains: What does belief in this fiction do to sentient beings? Does it cultivate compassion, or sanctify domination? That is not a superficial question; it is an existential one.
You say philosophy should proceed like a scientist suspending cultural assumptions. Yet even the phenomenological reduction cannot suspend the ethical field in which human beings suffer and act. Value-in-being, as you put it, is not discovered in neutral contemplation but in encounter - the face of the Other, to borrow from Levinas, not the mineral horizon of a geologist.
When Hitchens challenges doctrines that justify eternal punishment or servitude, he is performing a kind of moral reduction: bracketing divine authority to see what remains of goodness once the threats are removed. That is philosophy doing its most basic work - clarifying the conditions of value and responsibility.
So yes, we can follow Husserl into the indeterminacy of consciousness, or Heidegger into the openness of Being; but we must also follow the child burned at the stake, or the slave whipped in Gods name, into the concreteness of suffering. Otherwise, pathos becomes an aesthetic posture rather than an ethical response.
If the greatness woven into existence means anything, perhaps it is precisely this - that consciousness is capable of compassion even without metaphysical guarantees. That, too, is philosophy, and it is not nihilism.
Yes, shared meanings is always desirable, but then, if all meanings were shared, then there would be nothing to debate about, for debate insists of something that is not shared. I am afraid my thinking on this matter really is not going to be easily shared with you, and this is because the ideas here presented are most alien to common sense. Thinking about ethics and its ground takes one to thinking about metaphysics, and responsible thought here is hard to come by because most metaphysics is so badly conceived. The language, as you say, has to be carefully considered, but as far as concision, well, explanations have a lot of work to do.
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
But ambiguity is pervasive. If every word lacked ambiguity, you would be in logic, not the world, and even logic belongs to the language that speaks it.
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
Okay. Ethics is about what is right and wrong in ethical situations. But we use these terms in situations that are not at all ethical, referring to good pens, bad couches, and we can call this contingent rights and wrongs, goods and bads: A sharp knife is a good knife only if the context of its application finds sharpness a virtue. A sharp knife used in Macbeth would be not be good. All language is like this, context dependent and ambiguity issues from the variable nature of meanings in alternative situations. Ethical rights and wrongs, goods and bads, are the same, contingent, relative to the way values come into play, as you said, but if it is true that ALL language is contingent, that is, it depends on the context to determine whether an action is right or wrong, depends on how a culture defines right and wrong, then how is it possible to ground ethics absolutely, as I claim?
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
The firm ground must be something that is not articulated in the language of what is said; rather, it lies outside of this, so what lies outside language? Obviously, I cannot tell you. But I can tell you how to discover it for yourself, in fact, I already did: That lighted match you are holding under your hand and the pain it brings into existence is the essence of the ethical principle that tells us that one is prime facie prohibited from actions that make this happen, and this pain is itself what ethics is all about. No pain, no prohibition.
And this prohibition stands entirely outside of the language that declares it. It is not a paradox, but only an honest account of the way ethics can be understood. So when Stalin does his worst, what is being said here does not speak to the ethical entanglements of his time and the complications that are created by these. This is all very messy. But it does say that the meaning of our ethical issues has the gravitas of stone tablets written by God, only without the divine anthropomorphism.
Really? Meanings are mostly ambiguous. Thus, if we cannot agree to a meaning then any debate that follows must start with this disagreement else there would be no utility in the debate.
You try to explain a notion to me by giving examples of your understanding: a pen, a couch and a knife; to which you assign human notions: good, bad, virtue. These things (inanimate I understand to be called) does not have human notions: they may have utility for humans, they may be aesthetically pleasing (to a human), they may be used to conduct good or evil acts (again, by humans); but by themselves they cannot be good or evil, only inanimate.
Quoting Constance
I do not find anything [i]ethical[/I] in this example. Perhaps a test for cognitive ability (a litmus test for stupidity) or perhaps a test to see if the nerves in one's hand is still functional. As for "the ethical principle ..." I put it to you that this is absurd - it is exactly this [i]principle[/I] that has been flaunted by: Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Truman, Mussolini, Tojo, Kai-shek ... in order to claim that their decisions were [i]ethical[/I].
Please consider the following:
All five of these statements are quite valid, actually patently true, but in clear contradiction to each other, giving evidence of my original statement. So, after about 3% of the world population perished due to a single war - the war after 'the war to end all wars' - no determination can yet be made on what is good and what is evil. [i]How I Understand Things. The Logic of Existence[/I]
Please, can you give me a salient example where a decision has been made on good or evil that is not based on political expediency.
This is where our views will part, not entirely, but significantly. You are not at ease with an archimedean point, but what would this even be? Metaphysics. Philosophy is essentially metaphysics, and ontology is where metaphysics occurs, though thee is a serious and fascinating dynamic of wht this is about. When I refer to idle talk, I am lifting directly from Heidegger---what can I say, you read enough of this kind of thing, and it becomes your own. This really is the intent of changing the philosopshical narrative: philosophy is VERY personal. Heidegger realizes that what IS, is through and in us first. Nothing comes to us outside of us, the human dasein. It has never been the case, nor can it be, that the world can be affirmed outside of what has been standardly called subjectivity. It is literally impossible to conceive of such a thing, which is why German idealism and its evolved phenomenology is the only genuine and sustainable pov. Idle talk is a technical term, referring to any and all thoughtful regions. He writes, " Idle talk is not used here in a disparaging sense. Terminologically, it means a positive phenomenon which constitutes the mode of being of understanding and interpretation of everyday dasein....It is language...cut off from the primary andn primordially genuine relations of being in the world." You can find in in section 35 of the first division of Being and Time, and the discussion here is of course intimately tied to everything else, so one has to read at least the entire section. The idea here is that idle talk is not idle at all, it can be very active and meaningful, but it is without ontological intention, without a "primordial understanding". You can argue about what Heidegger is referring to, and its boundaries, but for me, I draw the line differently from Heidegger, whose dasein is an historical finitude, and any idea of an archimedean point is going to be "equiprimoridal" only. In other words, he doesn't include an absolute consciousness in his ontology, and religion is "ontotheological" (perhaps think of Hegel without the metaphysics of Geist) and this is simply not where my thoughts settle, so Hitchens, I claim, stands outside of a "genuine" ontology, and this ontology is discovered in the analytic of dasein's ethical nature (which Heidegger gives no attention to that I have found). My comments about Hitchens and idle talk refer specifically to the failure of his critical perspective to make the vital move into real foundational philosophy.
Case in point: you refer to his handling of how concepts shape lived reality, but the discussion never touches upon what this lived reality IS, and so he remains within mundane conversation humanity is having with itself, so to speak, which is fine! if one doesn't want to think philosophically, or with philosophical depth. My only complaint on this would be that he simply encourages popular nihilism as a growing default of post modern culture.
Quoting Truth Seeker
The thesis that we can have compassion without metaphysics, with the metaethical analysis I stand by, is familiar, and I agree that any attempt to impose a scripture based religious metaphysical ontology upon the world will likely end in dystopian tragedy. When you ask about what a belief will DO, this is a question of pragmatics, of utility, and I am not addressing this, and again, no more than a scientist asks such questions (putting aside the Oppenheimer dilemma). Not superficial in the consequences, but superficial in the analysis, and the latter is all I have in mind.
Quoting Truth Seeker
And Levinas (and Sartre, as well) is motivated by the war and its moral violations, but to talk about actions, philosophically, there has to first be a pursuit of being, and the this is supposed to make for a foundation for providing and evidential ground for talk about right and wrong actions. To me, Levinas is right, but the more basic question, one that I don't see turning up in Totality and Infinity, is about value as such. I find this in Scheler, in Von Hildebrandt, specifically, but in Levinas I believe it is assumed, but this is why I abide by Michel Henry and his Ontological Monism from his Essence of Manifestation, and this is an absorbing analysis that plays out Husserl's reduction to its very end, for this idea must be understood with a clarity that is hard to rise to, and it cannot be acknowledged unless serious time is spent. One has to be obsessed, I think. It is this, and I know I've said this before: One has never, nor can one ever, observe a world apart from dasein, or consciousness, if you like. It is a blatant absurdity, and so the question of what reality IS, must be about dasein, and this brings in an ontological status of our everyday lives that IS in equiprimordiality with everything else. This is the foundational monism, and there are no divisions in Being. The feelings, intuitions, doubts, anticipations, worries and fears, and on and on; the entire body of what we ARE is now in the foreground of "what IS". One has to pull away entirely from naturalistic thinking which wants to call all that one actually experiences derivative. It is exactly the opposite of this: The physical world is derived from the phenomenological givenness; it IS phenomenological givenness first, then "taken as" a physical world and all of its regional ontologies of science, practical matters, narrative incidentals, etc.
And so now, what is the most salient feature of what was formerly called subjectivity and now is the most privileged horizon of Reals? The value dimension of our existence.
Suspending cultural assumptions, incidentals of the particular way a culture creates its institutions, is just an analytic attempt to discover what is there that is NOT an institution. I hold that is such a thing.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Well, every analysis that ever was is reductive, including looking for my shoes to go out. All else is absent but the shoes. It is an apophatic approach: not here, not there...Sartre builds a philosophy on this: Where is Pierre? I look all over the cafe, but he is NOT there and this NOT is my nothingness tha t is at the heart of my subjectivity; hence human freedom and hence accountability for those who aided the Germans during occupation. But I do want to emphasize that I don't think Hitchens is all wrong. I jist don't think he is thinking at the level of real philosophy which is more than just a critical view of popular beliefs. It is a foundational analysis of our existence (and hence of all things).
Quoting Truth Seeker
I completely agree. But I want to know, what is ethics? It's essence, what makes something ethical at all? I am not interested in how badly this has been handled by people who are not very careful in their thinking, not unless the matter comes up in some conversation. Rather, I want to know what it is to the think very carefully about the nature of ethics, so these other entanglements can be conceived more deeply.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Honestly, I really don't care if a person can be compassionate without metaphysics. I pursue what is there to understand what is there. Is there such a person? Of course, multitudes, but this has no bearing at all on the objective metaphysical analytic.
Please explain.
Quoting Truth Seeker
:up: :up:
Quoting Truth Seeker
:fire:
Clearly, "God" infantilizes adults (e.g. Kierkegaard's teleological suspension of the ethical aka "holy ends justify any means").
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
Consider: decisions risking their own lives to hide runaway slaves from a posse of slavers or to hide Jews / homosexuals from gangs of Nazis ... or families of murder victims opposing the
executions of their murderers ...
That about the knife, etc. was only to illustrate that there are two kinds of good and bad, the ethical and the contingent. Martin Buber wrote his I and Thou which is about this, when we treat each other as things, its instead of human agencies, roughly put. So I look at other people and think about their utility, their proper place and identity and how far they deviate, and when these standards are in place, the actual person is lost, yielding to categories of assessment found in everyday problem solving. The ethical is lost. But where lies the ethical? There is something in our agency that answers this question and my interests lie in trying to discover what this is. I am "called" a teacher, a spouse, a tax payer, and so on, but among these my ethical nature doesn't turn up. I only get more functions and analyses. AS a teacher, I am obliged in this way and that, and there are pending obligations and prohibitions, and so on, but these simply make me into a thing, an "it" as Buber put it. My agency, my existence, is reduced to some objective way of defining me. But objects have no ethical status. Ethical goods and bads refer specifically to what is essential to something being present in order for a issue to be ethical, some X, such that if X is missing, there can be no ethics, like thinking without logic. No logic, no thinking.
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
You don't find anything ethical because you are not looking at the question of an ethical foundation. Rather, you are looking only at the way ethics turns up in ethical problems. I am not addressing the issue of what to do, and where certain actions are wrong while others right This kind of inquiry leads only to a whirlwind of conflicting justifications. Take Truman's decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, and ask, what is it that makes this at ALL important? You can talk about the waste of lives, and torturous ordeal with nuclear toxicity, and the depth of the horror, etc., but this still begs the essential question: Why are these at all "bad"? It seems obvious, but then this is philosophy, where such questions are actually asked rather than simply assumed to be well in hand. Philosophy is about the MOST basic questions, or it is about nothing at all. So the question is, what IS the "bad" and I think we all agree that we are then called to consider the pain, misery, suffering, and whatever words you can assign to it, but there is one more move of discovery" what makes misery bad?
If you are like most, you will find little interest in a question like this. It is a metaethical question that most cannot understand because its assumption is so perfectly clear, but because of this, the significance of the question goes unnoticed, and it is arguable the most important question there is in our existence, for if the ground of ethics does not lie in the way ethics is simply played out in our affairs, in promises, obligations, responsibilities, accountability, guilt, innocence, and the like, then it has to be found outside of these institutions in something more basic, and the word we have for this is value. What does it mean to value something? To care for it? For it to matter or be important? You do see this: if no one cared, valued the consequences of dropping the bomb, the the ethicality of Truman's decision would simply vanish. Caring and its value IS the foundational analytic of ethics. But what IS this?
The aftermath of Hiroshima has its ethical determination measured out in the collective suffering created, and what is collective is only as meaningful as the singularity, the individual, and this has no meaning apart from the actuality of sufferin itself: the pain of burned flesh pealing off, the endless vomiting, the loss of limb, of loved ones, and on and on: these are ground of what makes something ethical , and these stand above analysis, above language's ability to "speak" as it does so well with principles and narratives. These are the foundation of ethics, the metaethical foundation of our existence.
Why is this so important? A very difficult question. One has to first affirm that it is properly reasoned thesis. If not, then say why. But then the inference, which is not that easy to see: if ethics has its ground outside of language, the what IS this "outside"? In religion, God stands outside. God is really an anthropomorphic concept that is put in place through ancient narratives that has two functions: to redeem and to consummate our existence absolutely, in eternity, if you will. But what is eternity? What is redemption and consummation? These depend on how interested you are. Moving forward with a question like this requires conviction. It would help reading Heidegger's Being and Time, section 64 of the second division, and beyond....but then, that would be a bit much...so if you are interested....
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
You can see that the philosophical question of the nature of ethics moves to issues that are presupposed by politics.
God is obviously not an empirical concept. Of course, there are images of God, but these carry no weight. They are what I call bad metaphysics: in order for an image to be representative OF something else, this latter has to show up somehow, so if all one has is an image with no referent, it is like a metaphor with that which is metaphorized entirely absent, leaving it dangling, a borrowed feature that has no counterpart in an intended actuality. There are those who try to defend physicalism this way, arguing that while physicality itself cannot be witnessed, descriptive talk about physical things has a metaphorical application, meaning that that over there in its appearance possesses some of the descriptive content of the appearance. The argument here says such an ascription would that require the actual thing features are being ascribed be witnessed itself; otherwise, all you end up with is a quality abstracted with no where to go, so to speak. Plainly put, if I say someone's daughter was a lamb while in my care, well, there has to be an actual person to receive the metaphor, otherwise, it simply makes no sense.
Really, I care nothing at all for the way people actually believe. Ideas have to make prima facie sense at least to be considered. The point being that if one thinks God is just some composite of things found in ancient thinking, then philosophy doesn't waste its time with it. God might as well be the Easter bunny. I take the concept seriously because God is a term that belongs to religion, and religion, once divested of its metaphors, that is, all the descriptive vocabulary, possesses something that survives this "reductive" move, and this is metaphysics and ethics, or metaethics. Religion is essentially metaethics.
To argue this out requires enough interest to pursue it. That would be up to you.
Quoting Pieter R van Wyk
It is exactly this foundation, this firm ground, that you claim exists, that I am looking for.
I do not deny the validity of the question posed by this thread: What is right and what is wrong and how do we know? You do not refute nor negate my answer, but keep on insisting that the question is the fundamental question of the study of ethics. If it could help I will stipulate: this question is the very fundamental question of the study of ethics. My argument is that, even after thousands of years of study, this study of ethics have not found an answer to this question - by proposing an answer that is apparently outside the ambit of the study of ethics - therefore, apparently, not to be considered.
Let's consider the right or wrong of the decision of dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, as a salient example. My argument is that there are absolutely nothing ethical (right or wrong) about this decision. It was made purely on political and economic considerations. The horrible deaths and suffering of the citizens of Hiroshima versus the deaths and suffering of a million more US soldiers and the salient possibility of bankrupting the US economy.
Quoting 180 Proof
Any person or group of persons can make the decision to disagree with current politics and try to change it or somehow to circumvent the politics that they do not agree with:
Anyone can presume some chimerical 'foundation' or 'firm ground' on which this question can be contemplated, then call it ethics. We humans have conducted politics for as long as philosophy has been studied; we still have wars, and poverty, and a growing unbalance between ourselves and our environment. Perhaps it could benefit us to relook our very foundation ... to confirm this assumed firm ground on which we have build our civilisation. Consider:
"Philosophy:= The study of questions without answers. Trying to give an exact meaning of an ambiguous notion in terms of other ambiguous words - at its very best merely an interesting conversation." [i]How I Understand Things. The Logic of Existence[/I]
We all live under some political dispensation that we sometimes agree with and sometimes not. We can endeavour to change this dispensation but we cannot take it away - it is exactly this dispensation that props up our very civilisation. That gave us some scope to even discuss the very question of what is right and what is wrong.
Infallable!
If infallibility is self-declared, then I, too, am infallible - and I say youre wrong. Now what?
Ask then, what is it for something to be moral? This takes the matter to moral actualities, and strong examples are the most poignant, so, a question: Does the prima facie moral prohibition on torturing others sustain in the case where utility favors torture? Of course, one has to look at the case itself, the manner of torture, the consequences and the nature of the outcome, the precedents for this kind of thing, the culpability of the tortured, and so on, but this very important discussion presupposes a philosophical issue that never really shows up here, which is the question of the nature of what is at stake. This is what you might call an armchair question, fit for philosophy only in the "leisure time" apart from pressing issues. What makes something moral? Not whether an action IS moral or not, but what it is, and for this we go into the issue of torturing, ask what is THERE that warrants the term's application. The term applies IFF there is value at stake. The issue of value takes one to an analysis, and an analysis is a reduction, a putting aside of of incidentals, the merely factual or merely states of affairs, and so what is a "mere" fact? Moonlight is reflected sunlight; this pen is smaller than a typical watermelon. One can see why the term 'mere' is used here, for facts as such carry no significance. They are not even trivial, for the menig of a fact lies entirely in the context of it use, and so the critical question emerges, set side by side, a moral proposition and a merely factual proposition both possess factual content, and when this content is removed the factual proposition vanishes, but the moral proposition does not. This residual survivor is the, in this case, the ethical bad: torture is painful and pain is bad.
Pain is, of course, a fact when it exists, but its facticity is exceeded by its existence, which simply means something that hurts is not a proposition in so far as there is hurting, not exhausted by the potentiality of propositional possibilities. As Rorty once put it, there are no propositions over there in those bushes. Of course, he was a qualified naturalist (a pragmatist, like Dewey, whose basic thinking is pragmatics, but who also affirmed the natural sciences to be, well, the only wheel that rolls. I do not buy this at all, but here his comment is useful).
Now, your question about God being a moral concept has some ground. Language possibilities constitute a finite totality of meanings (beingS? That is one way to speak of this) and the pain of being tortured stands apart from this, outside of this, and therefore outside of finitude itself, after all, finitude is determined by the determinateness of this very totality. The long account of this is very long indeed, and cannot be brought to light here. The short version is this: morality deals with that dimension of our existence where our pains and blisses are, and everything contained therein, and the language that speaks of this is finite, and this finitude of language is finitude itself, and what there is that is not language, the pains and blisses, belongs to eternity, if you can stand the term, which simply means it is NOT language. Pain is not language, exceeds the finitude of language's imposition of meanings and delimitations. It is, as John Mackie put it (in order to deny it), in the fabric of the world, issuing from Being as such, or from "the world" in the way early Wittgenstein meant this term in his Tractatus, as well as value, ethics, aesthetics. Pain, and this dimension of our existence, is transcendental, there before us, yet outside of categorical possiblities.
Thus, God is a term the essence of which is found here, in this radical indeterminacy of our value-existence. All things belongs to this indeterminacy, as well as to the conceptual determinacy brings understanding to its threshold, but ethics is sui generis because value is ontologically sui generis vis a vis all other analytics of Being. What is important in this absurdly brief account is that metaethics rests with metavalue. Our ethics is a metaethics at this level of inquiry. This is the ground for religion and its God, the real reason why people had to come up with all of those narratives about Jesus, Zeus, Odin, and the rest: they were "thrown into" moral indeterminacies that by their own nature reach out to remedy, to a meta-redemption and a meta-consummation, which is just what we are talking about when we say a person should or should do something in a given moral case, but the matter being contained within the finitude of language.
Where you pursue the whatness of Being, Im drawn to the ought that emerges within Being: the affective and ethical textures through which existence discloses itself. When a child is burned or a slave is whipped, what matters first is not that Being manifests itself in suffering, but that suffering calls us to respond. This call is not derivative of ontology; it is equiprimordial with it.
Thats why I invoked Hitchens - not as a metaphysician, but as an ethical phenomenologist avant la lettre. His critique may lack ontological precision, but it exposes the pathic structure of moral life: how conceptual fictions (like God or sin) can channel either empathy or cruelty. The moment consciousness awakens to that relation, philosophy is already in motion.
So when you ask, What is ethics?, I would answer: ethics is the self-manifestation of Being as concern for the Other. It is not an add-on to ontology, nor a sociological derivative, but the dimension in which Being feels its own vulnerability. Perhaps thats where our projects intersect - your ontological monism and my existential compassionism are two ways of naming the same intimacy between consciousness and value.
Well, Pieter, I cannot help but notice that your response makes no reference at all to the things I said. Errr, curious.
Errr, do you have an answer to the question (What is right and what is wrong and how do we know)?
I have read, carefully, all the things you said and did not found your answer. If your answer is: it is the study of ethics; my follow up question was: what is the foundation, the firm ground, of ethics, that you claim exists? A question you have not answered, yet.
I understand your point, but then you did point out that some decisions are political defiant and others are political not-defiant. Which then begs the question: By who or by what authority can a decision be made that such a decision is ethical or not? Would that be Laozi, Kongzi, Epicurus, Aristotle, Epictetus, Spinoza, Philippa Foot or et al?
I agree with this priority of the ought of moral responsibility, but I find a disagreement in the analytic priority, meaning that one's ability to empathize with another's suffering presupposes the "whatness" of the one that is actually suffering as well as the one empathizing.. Those affective and ethical textures are of the self, and they can only come into play in a relation if one's self's moral constitution is fit to do so. When I mistreat another, I mistreat an another self, and the way for an understanding of this to come to light leads inward. There is a very thoughtful discussion on this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQUdSpPv5Zw&t=68s. If this doesn't show up as a link (I really don't know how to do this), then it is on youtube at: Heidegger on the Question of Being and the Origin of Language. With Ivo De Gennaro
It is a discussion to the ground of ethics (though it doesn't talk like this) in the primordialilty of our existence. The German haltung, this notion of first "holding" oneself in the world is argued by Gennero explaining Heidegger foundational thought, and in this holding, this sustaining one's own existence, is PRIOR to mitsein, being with others. It begins with a short paper by Barnett Newman, the abstract expressionist of th 1940's, called The First Man Was an Artist, and it presents the idea that before we were an ethical being, we first were crying out to the world, "holding" fast to our own existence. Of course, the objection would be that actually, to speak in a historical/evolutionary way, they came into being together: we were never isolated, even in the most rudimentary settings of our existence, from each other, and the crises that overwhelmed us were inherently communicatively received, that is, it was a WE that received this world and the receiving was a social phenomenon. On the other hand, this haltung: for Heidgger, the very content of our existence is shared, which he calls "the they", and this shows dasein to be structurally public, but note this fascinating distinction: while all I know and can bring forth belongs to a shared existence, the totality of language and culture, the crucible, if you will, is where actualities manifest is in the singularity of one's dasein. This is why thinking about ethics as a first philosophy must begin with dasein, with the self, for this is the only actuality there is, and again, this is really the only the "place" there IS. Talk about others is talk about other "selves". See e.g., Edith Stein in her Problem of Empathy, (which is a littel tedious, but she does go into detail about the self's primacy).
Where I was pressing the ought as equiprimordial with Being, I didnt mean that ethics could float free of ontology. Rather, I wanted to resist the tendency - especially in some readings of Heidegger - to treat the moral call as a secondary derivative of Daseins self-understanding. The cry of the wounded child doesnt wait for us to complete an ontological analysis before it claims us. The affective disclosure of suffering and the ontological disclosure of being are simultaneous moments of one event - what Levinas might call the face of the Other breaking through ontology.
So perhaps the priority I meant was phenomenological, not logical: in lived experience, the ethical summons arrives first, even if conceptually we can only make sense of it against the backdrop of selfhood and worldhood. The holding of oneself in Being and the being claimed by anothers vulnerability may be two aspects of the same existential structure - the self as simultaneously sustaining and exposed.
Your point about the crucible of Dasein as the only actuality there is resonates deeply. Yet what strikes me is that this actuality - this singular locus of disclosure - is always already permeated by others. Even our most solitary holding is linguistically and affectively mediated. In that sense, the first cry of the artist or the infant is both self-affirming and world-summoning. It is a reaching outward that presupposes no prior metaphysics of self or society, only the raw openness of existence calling to itself through others.
Perhaps ethics, then, begins not after ontology but as its trembling edge - where Being feels its own finitude and vulnerability through us.
"Ethical phenomenologist avant la lettre" is not clear to me. The father of phenomenology is Husserl, but the grandfather is Kant. Prior to this is I assume what you are referring to; or am I mistaken? But what could this be? And ontology, you know, this term is very explicitly defined in Heidegger's thought, and this carries through to the present discussions. What I have read of Hitchens, it seems he keeps his statements about ontology confined to the "ontic" matters of general affairs, which is found in his references to biology, physics, and naturalism, and this amounts to an ontology of physicalism or materialism, and this is the kind of thing that has not yet crossed over into a phenomenological ontology. Am I wrong about this?
God and sin as conceptual fictions: this is, of course, by my thinking, right, and certainly these keep alive a great many other fictions that you, Hitchens and I would like to see disappear from culture, as with the traditional beliefs in heaven and hell, or that we are sinners in the hands of an angry God, or that belief that Jesus is God on earth is the only way to salvation, and so many other things grounded in ancient dogma that have such a stubborn hold on popular thinking.
My thinking is that philosophy IS metaphysics, and it is kept in the dark mostly because of the modernist movement away from foundational issues. Ask a scientific naturalist, which we all are in the general dealings with the world, about such issues and you will get a blank stare. For thousands of years conversation would be spontaneously forthcoming as the metaphysical threshold was filled with narrative, but now, these "grand narratives" are falling away, and the residuum is the "nothing" of epistemological, ontological and ethical nihilism. Critical attacks on these narratives has been essential, and part of a necessary progress, but what is not understood is that metaphysics is IN the physics, not beyond it, but is IT ITSELF. The word that comes to mind is sublation which is famously used by Hegel to describe the essence of dialectics: the at once overcoming and preserving of the ordinary, such that what is the language that creates the p[ossiblities for more more penetrating analysis is also the language IN WHICH the these possibilities are realized. I prefer to think f this in terms of the metaphor and irony: how are new meanings produced out of an existing delimited language that cannot speak of anything beyond the horizon of its meanings? The question goes, of course, to our own elaborative and elucidative language taken for granted. What used to be standard is now greatly overcome, augmented and displaced, and the nature of this overcoming lies with the openness of language itself: any and all language devices stand never by themselves, but in collective diffusion of their collective meanings. (The paradox of Derrida: the word 'collective' is itself an emerging "trace" which cannot be pinned in any way: the trance speaks of the trace and this occurs within the trace. Language, in this radical hermeneutics [Caputo, see his Radical Hermeneutics a terrific pov on this], I try to argue, describe, is utterly transcendental, it stands outside yet within; outside in that it is an "index" to this reality imposition because through language we are torn from mundanity. The question!, any question, the question as such, is freedom itself, and once it is exercised, language opens, and ultimately it opens to Being, and such is the analytic ground of our existence, that profound indeterminacy discovered only in the determinateness of the metaphorical and ironic possiblities of the totality in which we all find ourselves.
This thinking is a bit out there, I know. But then, you do take things in with understanding. Impressive.
By that phrase, I didnt mean to credit Hitchens with inventing phenomenology before Husserl, but to suggest that - without a phenomenological vocabulary - he was already doing something akin to ethical phenomenology: describing the pathic structure of moral experience as it shows itself. His critique of the God-concept exposes how the affective dynamics of guilt, obedience, and awe shape lived consciousness. In that sense, he was tracing the phenomenology of moral emotions, not their ontology. Of course, he stayed at the ontic level, as you rightly note - within a naturalistic frame - but even there he revealed how language and power constitute the moral field. I saw in that an unthematized phenomenological insight: the givenness of moral experience before metaphysics.
I completely agree that this doesnt yet cross into Heideggers ontological project, where Being itself is what gives the horizon of moral and cognitive sense. But perhaps thats where Hitchenss critique is instructive by contrast: his limitation to the ontic makes visible the need for a deeper account of why such moral structures appear at all. In other words, his lack of ontology points us back toward ontology.
Your reflections on metaphysics as the inner life of physics resonate strongly with me. The modern impulse to banish metaphysics misunderstands that physics already presupposes a metaphysical grammar: measurement, causality, time, identity. What Hegel calls sublation - the overcoming that preserves - captures precisely the movement I see in philosophy today: a self-surpassing language that still carries its inheritance. The physicist who speaks of fields, vacua, or information is already enmeshed in a metaphoric web that opens onto Being, whether acknowledged or not. In that sense, I share your view that metaphysics isnt something beyond the empirical but the intelligible depth of the empirical itself.
And yes, Derridas trace completes that thought: every act of meaning both posits and defers, revealing an openness that no closure can finally master. The very question, as you beautifully put it, is freedom - not the possession of answers, but the trembling of language at the edge of its own horizon. Philosophy lives in that interval where language interrogates itself.
So perhaps where we converge is here: the ethical and the ontological are not two regions but two inflections of the same opening. The cry of the suffering child and the concept of Being are both ways the real addresses itself to us. Hitchens hears the cry and answers in moral outrage; Heidegger hears the silence of Being and answers in thought. Both responses, in their different registers, attest to the same fact: existence calls, and we must respond - whether with compassion, with questioning, or with both.
What of Levinas' meontological notion of 'ethics as first philosophy' (from Totality and Infinity)?
Where I diverge slightly is in emphasis. Levinass meontology can sound like a complete rupture - an absolute outside to Being. I read it, rather, as the self-transcendence of Being itself, its capacity to exceed its own totalization through the ethical relation. In other words, the ethical call is not alien to ontology but its deepest disclosure: Being showing itself as vulnerable and relational. The firstness of ethics is not chronological or hierarchical but modal: the primordial tone of existence as care, exposure, and obligation.
If we hold these together - Heideggers ontological disclosure and Levinass ethical interruption - we glimpse a fuller picture: ontology opens the space for encounter; ethics keeps that space from closing into self-sufficiency. They are indeed two inflections of one openness - the event of meaning itself oscillating between comprehension and compassion.
Thats the sense in which I see Compassionism (my own evolving framework) as both ontological and ethical: Being is never a neutral substrate; it is always already an appeal to alleviate suffering. The beyond-Being that Levinas names as meontology is, for me, the pulse of compassion within Being - the refusal of indifference that makes the universe intelligible at all.
:fire:
Yes, thanks for this insightful formulation.
Does this include non-human animals? Forgive me a few quesions as I find this difficult to follow - and I am unclear how ethics can arise in this way. Doesn't a capacity to describe ethics presuppose an account of what is?
What you have written also sounds highly abstract and metaphorical. How can one demonstrate that ethics is the deepest disclosure of Being?
Yes, I do intend the scope of the ethical call to include non-human animals, and indeed all sentient life. Levinas himself remained primarily anthropocentric - his face of the Other presupposes language and mutual address - but if we take the face not literally but as the phenomenon of vulnerability, then any being capable of suffering already presents that summons. The cry of a wounded animal, even without words, calls us to responsibility in precisely the sense Levinas describes: it demands a response before reflection or ontology. In that sense, ethics extends wherever suffering discloses itself. I am a vegan because I care about all sentient beings.
As for how ethics can arise in this way: I dont mean that ethics emerges as a factual property within Being, but that in the event of encounter - when anothers vulnerability impinges on me - Being shows one of its fundamental modes: relational exposure. Ontology tells us what is; ethics tells us how being is with being. The claim that ethics is the deepest disclosure of Being is not empirical but phenomenological: it describes what experience reveals when we attend to its affective depth. We discover that to exist is already to be implicated in others existence. Ethics, then, is not an optional layer placed on top of ontology but the felt recognition that Being is never solitary substance but shared finitude.
To put it less abstractly: when we encounter pain - human or non-human - we do not first deduce an ethical rule; we are already moved. That movement of concern is the disclosure of Beings relational core. Demonstration, in the logical sense, is replaced here by revelation through encounter: what Levinas calls the saying prior to the said. The ethical moment is not inferred from what-is but given with what-is; its how Being manifests its own openness.
Thanks for the clarification.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Certainly, this seems true in the cultures I know. But what about cultures that appear deaf to the suffering of tribes not their own, those who cheerfully kill children? That too seems an authentic expression of human behaviour across millennia. Is it possible to determine which is the more natural relational core: the urge to conquer, maim, and vanquish, or the call for empathy? Ive always assumed that with humans, it could go either way.
My claim that the movement of concern discloses Beings relational core isnt an empirical generalization about what humans always do; its a phenomenological statement about what moral experience means when it occurs. The fact that many ignore or suppress this responsiveness doesnt make it less primordial - it only shows that consciousness can close itself against its own depth. The possibility of cruelty presupposes the capacity for empathy, just as lying presupposes language. One can negate compassion only because one already stands within the sphere where the others vulnerability matters.
Culturally and biologically, both impulses - aggression and care - have evolutionary roots. But phenomenologically, only care reveals relation as relation: the recognition that the others being concerns mine. Violence objectifies and thereby conceals that relation; compassion exposes it. In that sense, cruelty is not another core but a rupture, a refusal of disclosure. It flattens the encounter back into ontology without ethics.
So when I say compassion is the more natural relational core, I dont mean it is the statistically dominant behaviour, but that it reveals the more fundamental truth of coexistence. Empathy is what allows coexistence to appear as such; conquest denies that appearance. The ethical call is fragile, easily drowned by fear, ideology, or tribal conditioning - but its fragility is part of its meaning: Beings openness is not enforced, only offered.
In this light, Compassionism isnt the claim that humans are compassionate, but that compassion names the deepest possibility of what it means to be. The conqueror and the caregiver are both human, but only the latter manifests what humanity is capable of when it fully hears its own ontological vocation.
I often think this is like an Ouroboros....without atrocity we wouldn't discover self-sacrifice and healing. Can it be that both are necessary? (Personally I don't think so but it scans superficially).
I'm going to ask some tougher questions and I'm not intending to sound rude. :pray:
Quoting Truth Seeker
But how do you demonstrate this? Isn't this just a statement of your belief rather than an evidence based claim?
Quoting Truth Seeker
But that only holds if you've already decided that compassion is better than conquest. That sounds more like a statement rooted in a nominal Christian value system. So how can you actually demonstrate that compassion is better? What makes it superior, philosophically or practically?
To me, you can reach your conclusion if you begin with the axiom that human wellbeing should be our goal and build from there. But thats a choice you have to consciously make. I dont think its self-evident.
Youre right that compassion is the more natural relational core cannot be demonstrated in the same way one demonstrates an empirical law. It isnt an evidential claim about frequency or dominance, but a phenomenological and pragmatic one about coherence. When we look at the range of human possibilities - cruelty, indifference, care - which mode most fully realizes the structure of relation itself? Only compassion recognizes the other as subject rather than instrument. Violence treats the other as object, thereby erasing relation. That erasure may succeed in practice, but conceptually its parasitic: to negate relation, it must first presuppose it.
As for better, I dont mean better by inherited theology but by existential intelligibility. Compassion is better not because a God commands it, but because it sustains the very conditions under which meaning, community, and dialogue can exist. I am not a Christian. Please see: https://www.evilbible.com and https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com if you want to know why I am not a Christian. The moment we decide that conquest is equally valid, we undermine the shared world that makes any valuation - including the valuation of conquest - possible. Compassion, in that sense, is self-validating: it preserves the possibility of coexistence that all discourse presupposes. I am a vegan because of my compassion for all sentient beings. To say better at all implies that flourishing, not annihilation, carries weight. If we reject that, then we dont just abandon compassion; we forfeit the basis for any normative distinction whatsoever. The nihilist and the sadist can live consistently only if they cease to ask why anything matters.
So I see Compassionism not as an ungrounded belief but as the minimal metaphysical condition for an intelligible world: if meaning is possible, some form of care must already be operative. The Ouroboros image you mention captures this beautifully - yes, suffering and healing seem entwined, but the loop only closes through response, not indifference. Without compassion, the circle breaks into chaos.
True ... and yet, yinyang-like, "compassion" presupposes "chaos" (just as every ceasefire presupposes a war), no?
But Id add a nuance. While compassion depends on suffering to manifest, it doesnt depend on it to exist in principle. Even in a perfectly harmonious world - if such a thing could be - the relational openness that makes compassion possible would still be the same ontological structure, only without wounds to heal. What we call chaos is the circumstance that reveals compassion, not the ground that creates it.
The yin-yang metaphor is apt if we take it dynamically: each side generates and limits the other. Chaos exposes finitude; compassion answers it. The two are rhythmically entangled, but not equal in aim. Chaos describes what is; compassion describes what can restore relation. In that sense, compassion is not the mirror of chaos but its transformation - the movement through which Being reclaims coherence from fragmentation.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Food for thought. Ive generally held that my response to life is more of an aesthetic, emotivist one. I avoid systems and diligent rationality. The problem with this is that you mostly remove yourself from the discourse. What I have is how I feel about things; intuition and hardly a robust basis with which to convince others.
Despite this I find myself arguing with other members who seem to think they have an objective basis for their beliefs. Do you see yourself as a moral realist of a sort?
As for your question - whether Im a moral realist - the answer depends on what kind of realism we mean. Im not a metaphysical realist in the sense that goodness or compassion exist as freestanding entities somewhere in the universe. But Im also not a pure subjectivist. My position is what might be called phenomenological or relational realism: values are not out there independent of minds, yet they are not arbitrary projections either. They arise in the space between beings, as the disclosure of what sustains or destroys relation.
In that sense, compassion isnt an invented rule but an encountered reality - the felt structure of coexistence itself. When I harm another, I dont merely break a social convention; I diminish the field of meaning that connects us. The realness of ethics lies in that experiential invariance: wherever sentient beings coexist, the possibilities of care and harm appear as objectively distinct modalities of relation.
So yes, I would say Im a moral realist of a weak, experiential sort: ethics is not a cosmic property but a condition of intelligibility. We discover it the way we discover gravity - by noticing what happens when we ignore it.
Your aesthetic approach, far from being opposed to this, may actually be its most authentic expression. Feeling and intuition are the first phenomenology; reason arrives later to articulate what we already know.
:fire:
This conception of [I]compassion[/I] reminds me even more of Buber ([I]dialogic[/I] I-Thou) than Levinas ([I]infinition[/I] of the Other) and almost naturalistic instead of just existential (e.g. in ethics I think it's [I]reasonable[/I] to trust "intuitions" (pre-cognitive biases) only to the degree they align with concrete circumstances).
I see compassion as the living current that flows between these poles. It begins as Levinasian exposure - an encounter with the Others vulnerability that unsettles me - but it deepens, Buber-like, into a dialogical relation where both exist through the relation itself. Compassion is not self-sacrifice or self-assertion but the space between, the field of recognition that allows I and Thou to co-arise.
As for the naturalistic aspect, yes - I mean that quite literally. Compassion is not a supernatural virtue but a biological and phenomenological constant: an evolved mode of attunement that makes coexistence possible. Our neural and hormonal architectures, our mirror systems and attachment circuits, are the physiological correlates of what Buber calls the dialogical principle. The ethical, in this sense, is the felt continuity of life with life.
So perhaps my position could be described as dialogical naturalism: compassion as the empirical face of a metaphysical truth - the truth that relation precedes substance. Whether we speak the language of Levinas, Buber, or biology, the insight is the same: to exist is already to be with.
:fire: Again, well said, TS; our respective positions seem quite convergent. As an ecstatic naturalist (à la Spinoza's natura naturans sub specie durationis in metaphysic (e.g. Carlo Rovelli's RQM in physics)), for me ... 'relation is substance'.
Quoting Truth Seeker
I see the attraction of this, but aren't there some presuppositions at work?
Some hypotheticals.
If you harm someone, the field of meaning that connects us may also be affected and enlarged, though perhaps not in the way you are advocating. Why do you privilege one and not the other? What makes it less intrinsically useful or 'better' to be loved as opposed to feared?
Not to mention that giving people what they want or crave may be harmful, even if the granting of it is experienced as positive. In this relational approach, how do we determine when our behaviour towards others is good, since the reaction, even an enhanced relationship with the other, may not provide the correct answer?
It may also frequently be the case that doing good for others, caring for them (as in parenting and making choices for children or aging parents), is experienced as mistrust or as a violation of personal autonomy. So, caring does not necessarily lead to a harmonious connection or a positive interactions and may be viewed as 'evil' by the person being cared for.
Quoting Truth Seeker
So I remain skeptical that we discover it this way since gravity is predictable and behaviour is not.
If I may, there's an ambiguity in "realism" that needs sorting. There are varieties of moral realism which suppose that moral facts are much the same as physical facts, found lying about the place. That's hard to support. Other varieties just point out that there are true moral sentences. The problem is with the notion of realism, not the ethics.
Like e.g. suffering / vulnerable beings ...
Where I would add a small inflection is here: if relation is substance, then the quality of relation - its affective tone - matters metaphysically. The moment we feel compassion, were not adding sentiment to a neutral network; were glimpsing the networks self-recognition. The ethical isnt an overlay upon the physical - its the physical come to consciousness of its own interdependence.
So perhaps ecstatic naturalism describes the ontology, and compassion names its pathos: nature not only is relation but feels itself through sentient beings. When we care, the cosmos cares through us.
Youre right that harm, conflict, or even cruelty can enlarge the field of meaning in certain ways. Tragedy, trauma, and loss often deepen awareness and generate profound transformations of self and culture. But I would distinguish between enlarging meaning and affirming value. Violence may broaden the narrative field, but it does so through negation - by showing what breaks when relation collapses. Compassion, by contrast, reveals what holds the field together. Both are revelatory; one is diagnostic, the other sustaining.
To your question: Why privilege one over the other? - because only compassion can make coexistence coherent. Fear, domination, and cruelty can organize relations, yes, but only parasitically; they depend on the very trust and vulnerability they exploit. To be loved or feared are not symmetrical options, because fear corrodes the dialogical reciprocity on which understanding depends. In that sense, compassion isnt just nicer - its structurally necessary for communication itself to remain possible.
Youre also right that care can wound - that good intentions may be felt as intrusion. For me this is not a counterexample but part of the texture of compassion. Genuine care includes respect for autonomy and an awareness of its own fallibility. It isnt perpetual agreement but sustained responsiveness: the effort to repair when our help harms, to keep the conversation open. The ethical relation is asymptotic rather than static - its the ongoing calibration of good within complexity.
As for the gravity analogy, I take your point. Moral life is not predictable in the way physical law is; what I mean is that the consequences of ignoring compassion are as consistent as the consequences of ignoring gravity. We may not fall at a calculable rate, but civilizations and relationships collapse all the same. Over time, indifference erodes meaning as reliably as gravity pulls objects down.
So yes - behaviour is less predictable than matter, but the pattern of what sustains or destroys meaning is remarkably invariant. We might say compassion is to coexistence what gravity is to structure: the invisible coherence that keeps the whole from flying apart.
My own position sits closer to what some call experiential realism or intersubjective realism. Moral truths arent things but relations that hold across conscious beings. When I say it is wrong to cause unnecessary suffering, Im not pointing to a property out in the world; Im describing a stable pattern in the space of coexistence - a regularity in the way awareness relates to awareness. In that sense, moral statements can be true or false because they correspond to the real dynamics of sentient life, not to floating moral particles.
This is why I keep returning to compassion. It isnt a fact waiting to be measured, nor a mere sentiment; its the experiential disclosure of what sustains the relational field in which meaning, language, and value are even possible. If that field werent real, nothing else we call real - not science, not logic, not dialogue - could function, because all depend on trust, recognition, and shared intelligibility.
So yes, I accept your distinction: realism about ethics needs rethinking. But rather than abandoning the word, Id redefine it. Moral realism, for me, means this: that value is as intrinsic to the fabric of relation as curvature is to space-time. We dont find moral facts lying about; we find ourselves already entangled in moral space.
Yes, in science, our language aims for mind-to-world fit: we adjust our beliefs to mirror what is. In ethics, the movement reverses - world-to-mind fit - we attempt to bring what is into alignment with what ought to be. But whats fascinating is that this reversal isnt arbitrary; it rests on a prior recognition that what is includes beings capable of suffering and flourishing. The ought is already latent in the is, waiting to be actualized through choice.
In my view, this makes ethics not the negation of science but its completion. Science describes relations of fact; ethics transforms those relations through care. When I say it is wrong to cause unnecessary suffering, Im not merely proposing a new state of affairs - Im acknowledging a tension between the real and the realizable. Ethical language, in that sense, is a kind of creative realism: speech that doesnt just reflect reality but helps it remember what it can become.
So perhaps the two directions of fit meet halfway: science refines our understanding of interdependence, and ethics tells us how to live that interdependence responsibly. Both, in their own registers, are ways of aligning ourselves with reality - one by describing its order, the other by deepening its compassion.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Compliment would be better.
I don't think you're giving your 100% correct ideas about this the credibility they deserve: legality absolutely is a negotiation at every level. When something is argued in court, it's always a process of mediation (because you can always just accept the demands to surrender if it's you vs. the state). Even when there's an attempt to make a set of laws seem more absolute, like what was perhaps going on in the Old Testament, the various groups and societies still had to adjust their administration and make changes to them later on. In modern life, seeing how a criminal charge quickly changes in nature during the legal process is a demonstration of this.