What is the good?
There has been a lot of recent debate on here about meta-ethics and I think a lot of the controversy has to do with different views on what constitutes the "good". Indeed there has been innumerable differing opinions in the past on this very topic.
In any case, my purpose here is not to give an account of all these positions but to offer my own and extend the opportunity for others to share their perspectives on this.
Humans are value-machines. It's true, we literally create value. Like Hume said, minds have a tendency to project properties onto objects that are not actually there objectively. Whatever is valuable is thus perceived to be valuable; value is, therefore, a mind-dependent property in the same way the color blue is a mind-dependent property that only seems to adhere to the object it is associated with.
Indeed it is hard to see how value could possibly exist outside of minds. What is value, if not what determines what is good and bad, and what determines good and bad, if not our own judgements of things?
And the fact is that morality, as it is usually conceived, deals with the relationship between things that can feel. Telling someone that the color green is morally good would come across as absurd - there is nothing about the color green that makes it morally good. Claiming that morality ought to be founded around the color green is therefore a bastardization of the very concept of morality.
But perhaps the color green has helped us immeasurably by dictating when automobiles can begin to accelerate in an intersection. However, this does not make the color green moral - it merely makes it an instrument for furthering our own goals, such as not getting into accidents. So when someone says that we ought to use the color green in our society because green in good, they are really saying that we have certain goals in mind that the color green satisfies.
Regardless, we have seemingly moral intuitions that are not self-interested. We might get involved in a risky situation, not because we want to be a hero, but because we feel compelled to do so. We care for whoever is in danger and would feel guilt for not getting involved. All of this should be fairly obvious.
Yet we can deconstruct these intuitions to show their inherent social and evolutionary history. We can see how the intuition to help a family member over a neighbor evolved from close-quarter kinship. And it is at this critical point that we face a disillusionment - although we feel compelled to help our family before our neighbors, we have a hard time finding a current reason to do so. As soon as the veil is lifted, our values begin to slip away.
My claim, though, is that we cannot let these intuitions slip, at least not all of them or all the way. And so we find a justification for these intuitions, by appeal to the most basic value experience: pleasure and pain. It is undeniable that pleasure and pain is good and bad for me, so why shouldn't it be good and bad for other people? Thus, in addition to these basic experiences, we utilize the virtue of empathy to understand the circumstances of another person. And although these themselves are a product of society and evolution, we nevertheless can't help but be swayed by them. They are undeniable, and thus a perfect candidate for fulfilling the open-ended question.
But this triad is not to be compared to other, more arbitrary, intuitions, in virtue of their universality]. We can thus eliminate or refine other intuitions by appealing to these fundamental, "foundational" intuitions. It is because of their universality that these intuitions have remained intact, and it is because other intuitions are not universal (rather, dependent) that they are apt to be altered or rejected. Our intuitions are extremely contradictory and utilizing universal intuitions allows us to make sense of things better.
And so this triad - pleasure, pain, and empathy - results in a wide variety of other virtues that we uphold, even if we originally had not held them because of this triad. If we can find a way to integrate these other beliefs with this triad, then they can stay. Thus, we have concepts like equality, liberty, and property because they have passed this coherence test, while other concepts like tribalism, domination, and inequality have not passed and so thus are rejected.
From this, a system of value can be set up. Consequentialists get a lot of flak for having systems that go against our intuitions - yet it is precisely these intuitions that I have already rejected as being second-order and unsubstantial in comparison to the triad. It is because of this that any constraint imposed upon morality that conflicts with this triad is an attempt to superimpose particularity on universality, when the reason we have these universal beliefs is because they are indeed universal and thus form the background for these particular beliefs.
And as soon as we have a system of universals set up, we can dispense with any appeals to these second-order intuitions. It may be hard, or perhaps even impossible to. We may feel that it is wrong to kill a person just because - but this contradicts this universal triad that we already have in place.
In any case, my purpose here is not to give an account of all these positions but to offer my own and extend the opportunity for others to share their perspectives on this.
Humans are value-machines. It's true, we literally create value. Like Hume said, minds have a tendency to project properties onto objects that are not actually there objectively. Whatever is valuable is thus perceived to be valuable; value is, therefore, a mind-dependent property in the same way the color blue is a mind-dependent property that only seems to adhere to the object it is associated with.
Indeed it is hard to see how value could possibly exist outside of minds. What is value, if not what determines what is good and bad, and what determines good and bad, if not our own judgements of things?
And the fact is that morality, as it is usually conceived, deals with the relationship between things that can feel. Telling someone that the color green is morally good would come across as absurd - there is nothing about the color green that makes it morally good. Claiming that morality ought to be founded around the color green is therefore a bastardization of the very concept of morality.
But perhaps the color green has helped us immeasurably by dictating when automobiles can begin to accelerate in an intersection. However, this does not make the color green moral - it merely makes it an instrument for furthering our own goals, such as not getting into accidents. So when someone says that we ought to use the color green in our society because green in good, they are really saying that we have certain goals in mind that the color green satisfies.
Regardless, we have seemingly moral intuitions that are not self-interested. We might get involved in a risky situation, not because we want to be a hero, but because we feel compelled to do so. We care for whoever is in danger and would feel guilt for not getting involved. All of this should be fairly obvious.
Yet we can deconstruct these intuitions to show their inherent social and evolutionary history. We can see how the intuition to help a family member over a neighbor evolved from close-quarter kinship. And it is at this critical point that we face a disillusionment - although we feel compelled to help our family before our neighbors, we have a hard time finding a current reason to do so. As soon as the veil is lifted, our values begin to slip away.
My claim, though, is that we cannot let these intuitions slip, at least not all of them or all the way. And so we find a justification for these intuitions, by appeal to the most basic value experience: pleasure and pain. It is undeniable that pleasure and pain is good and bad for me, so why shouldn't it be good and bad for other people? Thus, in addition to these basic experiences, we utilize the virtue of empathy to understand the circumstances of another person. And although these themselves are a product of society and evolution, we nevertheless can't help but be swayed by them. They are undeniable, and thus a perfect candidate for fulfilling the open-ended question.
But this triad is not to be compared to other, more arbitrary, intuitions, in virtue of their universality]. We can thus eliminate or refine other intuitions by appealing to these fundamental, "foundational" intuitions. It is because of their universality that these intuitions have remained intact, and it is because other intuitions are not universal (rather, dependent) that they are apt to be altered or rejected. Our intuitions are extremely contradictory and utilizing universal intuitions allows us to make sense of things better.
And so this triad - pleasure, pain, and empathy - results in a wide variety of other virtues that we uphold, even if we originally had not held them because of this triad. If we can find a way to integrate these other beliefs with this triad, then they can stay. Thus, we have concepts like equality, liberty, and property because they have passed this coherence test, while other concepts like tribalism, domination, and inequality have not passed and so thus are rejected.
From this, a system of value can be set up. Consequentialists get a lot of flak for having systems that go against our intuitions - yet it is precisely these intuitions that I have already rejected as being second-order and unsubstantial in comparison to the triad. It is because of this that any constraint imposed upon morality that conflicts with this triad is an attempt to superimpose particularity on universality, when the reason we have these universal beliefs is because they are indeed universal and thus form the background for these particular beliefs.
And as soon as we have a system of universals set up, we can dispense with any appeals to these second-order intuitions. It may be hard, or perhaps even impossible to. We may feel that it is wrong to kill a person just because - but this contradicts this universal triad that we already have in place.
Comments (127)
There is a 'triad' in traditional Buddhism, namely that of craving, hatred and stupidity, which are the 'three poisons' that drive the wheel of samsara. So pleasure is an aspect of craving, and pain is an aspect of hatred. But the third element is indifference or stupidity, so it doesn't map completely against your schema.
The 'three poisions' are represented iconographically as the pig, snake, and chicken, forever chasing each other in a circle, in the centre of the wheel of life:
In Buddhist ethical theory, by the practice of sila-samadhi- prajñ? (morality, concentration and wisdom), craving is transformed into renunciation, hatred into empathy, and stupidity into wisdom, so as to realise the 'true good' of liberation.
You start off well enough, but you go increasingly off the rails during the course of that post. The biggest problem is with your belief that there are universal moral "intuitions." There aren't. Although there are certainly moral intuitions that are far more common than others.
There seems to be a jump here. It's clear that pleasure is pleasurable and pain is painful but what makes that good or bad for me? Would you say this presupposes goodness equates with what's pleasurable? And there are issues here -- what's pleasurable isn't always good and what's good isn't always pleasurable. Arguably I'd be having something in mind about the good when I make that statement but it's no different than adding value judgements on top of other value judgements (e.g. something pleasurable is something good. and something painful is something bad). Also, feelings are complex and can be parsed in more fine-grained ways than just simply pleasure and pain. I'd say there are many kinds of feelings that can be considered pleasurable (e.g. feelings felt while reading an engaging book, making love, laughing with friends) but they are distinct from each other and distinct from the sense of good and bad.
I do like this idea of innate, universal intuitions being the guiding force for an ethical theory. But I think there are moral intuitions distinct from our pleasure/pain judgements.
Well put. The "good" is never going to be found so simply in personal feelings. Otherwise chocolate and beer would be the highest good. :)
Quoting aporiap
It makes sense that we are biologically evolved to value the world in ways that work. And pleasure, pain and empathy are all biologically evolved "intuitions" in that regard.
But the example of chocolate and sugar illustrates the fact that moral judgements have to be complex. What's good in the short-term as instant gratification of an impulse may be very bad as a long-term habit.
And humans bring on this particular moral dilemma for themselves. It is because we are smart enough to refine food that we can produce all the sugar and alcohol we like. The "intuitive" responses we might have due to a lengthy evolutionary history become mal-adaptive after we have removed the constraints on our ability to satisfy our urges.
If we were thinking morally, we would have to identify then what is actually "the good" that nature had in mind originally, and how we can then re-introduce the constraints so as to arrive back at that "better" balance.
So as you say, what is pleasurable ain't always reliably good. And it becomes a cruel kind of empathy to share your sugar and alcohol with your children or pets.
But we can - by taking this naturalistic approach - start to see how "the good" was defined for us through historical evolutionary forces. Pleasure, pain and empathy all existed as intuitive evaluations of something. And that something is mostly the obvious thing of meeting the goals of life - ie: to grow, to reproduce, to flourish.
Here's the naturalistic fallacy again..And what is balance? Survival? Why is that most paramount? It's simply a self-fulfilling argument. Clearly, you are trying to make us like animals who simply "do" without self-awareness.. Once self-awareness becomes involved, we no longer "have" to do anything, whether that be re-introducing restraint or moving towards a "better" balance... These all become hypothetical imperatives.. prescriptions for this or that lifestyle, but none of them are justified in and of themselves, only suggestions for living this or that lifestyle.. But if that is the case it is not ethical simply a lifestyle choice.
You remain confused about this. It is Darth who is advancing the naturalistic fallacy here in suggesting that pleasure, pain and empathy are natural properties the good (and bad).
Of course Moore wanted to argue for some ineffable notion of the good. And so he was wrongly focused on a particular kind of metaphysical notion of what even "is". His argument was against qualia - pleasure, pain and empathy regarded as objects of experience.
My naturalism is physicalist (with its semiotic twist) and so it has quite a different metaphysical basis.
For me, what "is" is material. And what "ought" is thus some empirical observation about the necessities of material self-organisation. I am not a closet dualist like Darth and so the "ought" part only needs to have the ontological status of historical inevitability.
I don't claim a transcendentally absolute existence for "the good". Therefore I don't have to justify a strong distinction between is and ought. They become merely the same system observed over different spatiotemporal scales.
In the short-term, everything is what it is, even if it is disorganised and chaotic. In the long-term, what that everything is, is then what it "ought" to be in the sense that by definition it must have struck on the fruitful balance that enables its own long-term persistence.
So do you see the difference yet?
If you presume a metaphysics based on substantial existence with external causes (like a world of material action ruled by some transcendent principle), then is~ought is automatically a naturalistic fallacy. It simply restates the assumption that the rightful cause of a material action - its finality - comes from "outside" the world. By ontic definition, it doesn't come immanently from within.
But my metaphysics is a process ontology based on immanent causality. Finality must arise within the system - to the degree that any final cause exists. That is why I keep pointing you at the laws of thermodynamics. That is what finality looks like in the real material world to the best of our scientific knowledge.
And so now - by definition - there is no problem with ought arising as the historical inevitability that is immanent self-organisation. It can't be a natural fallacy as the oughtness is built in, not hived off as some mysterious further transcendental principle - the desires of a creating god or the abstract objects of a Platonic realm.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Unfortunately you give humans too much credit for self aware insight.
No one would get morbidly obese or a hopeless alcoholic if they could freely make well-informed choices. Most folk in fact struggle to help themselves - fight their evolved urges. And then our societies build in those bad choices for some reason - selling sugar by the bag, alcohol on every street corner.
So that is why we need morality that works. We have a real problem in being natural creatures in a world where we have got good at removing natural constraints.
And you are not going to fix that problem with a faulty philosophical model of morality.
You try so hard to do somersaults around the naturalistic fallacy but you commit it quite squarely here:
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
This to me amounts to a naturalistic fallacy. You are taking empirical observation of what "is" and saying this is what we "should" be aiming for. Why? It indeed is what the system might be aiming for, but that is purely descriptive and thus not even in the realm of ethics only what is going on. Does this provide an impetus for ethical action? No? Others have brought this up to you in other threads and yet you have no answer. It is simply hypothetical imperatives. As long as you admit it as not being ethical but rather simply judging what YOUR interpretation of the results of are.. then fine.. You interpret the system/process to be "X" in the long term, and thus that has been our projected aim..So you made a prediction from a model of what we have been doing, but no imperative other than suggestions for this or that. No one has to survive for this or that reason.. no one has to reduce entropy for this or that reason... no one has to....
Quoting apokrisis
I guess to clarify what I was trying to say is that humans are not fixed instinctually to follow any balance. This is unlike other animals who naturally find a balance because they more or less go by instinct which becomes a default way for the organism to continue living. Humans do not "need" to find a balance because we are not necessarily fixed. We can choose a number of options including suicide. There is no need for balance seeking we have no reason to want to balance (whatever that is). Again, that would be a naturalistic fallacy. Just because we generally continue to survive does not mean we have to.. Just because the aim of the universe is entropy does not mean we have to slow our local entropy.
Your hidden assumptions are that this and that ethical guidelines are good and thus we must follow that... and thus you are being that pesky Platonist you resent.
Your ethical assumptions.. "Me like survival...survival good.." "I learn good ways for survival...this one-issue policy to stop global warming" "we follow that..everyone good".. "me ethical prophet intuiting what is good" "me Tarzan :)"
Or rather I am saying there is what is. And it has its reasons. And that frames our choices. We can either go with nature's flow or - for some reason - decide to swim against its tide.
So the difference consists in actually knowing the purposes of nature and thus being able to make some conscious choice.
Although why you would want to live your life in a way that is naturally dysfunctional is a mystery to me.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is simply to ignore the science to the contrary.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Isn't this rather specieist if not racist? Or maybe you think it's witty?
I think "purpose" is the wrong word to use here. It suggests intention, which nature doesn't have (unless you count us wanting things as nature having intentions, or unless you're arguing for panpsychism).
So you're not using "ought" in a normative sense but in a predictive sense, akin to "the ball ought to fall if you drop it"? If so, I wonder if considering this as relevant to the notion of "good" is a case of equivocation.
Natural philosophy is about taking finality seriously, but in ways that are suitably deflationary.
So finality is seen in nested hierarchical fashion as {propensities {functions {purposes}}}. Or to use systems jargon, {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}.
Things with brains thus can have purposes, conscious intentions, teleological plans. But at the other end of the spectrum, even the physico-chemical realm has propensities or teleomatic tendencies.
And no, this leads not to pan-psychism but to pan-semiosis. It is a claim about a material world organised by the "immateriality" of a system of signs.
So a better phrasing of your claim would be: "the difference consists in actually knowing the propensities of nature and thus being able to make some conscious choice"?
I'm just not sure how understanding natural propensities relates to normative rules of behaviour. Surely the former is only relevant if it helps us determine how best to achieve some desired end? It certainly can't tell us which desired ends are good, can it?
If the most general propensity of nature is to entopify, then we can consciously consider our moral precepts in that light.
If your notion of "the good" has to be then modified to get passed its traditional transcendent presumptions, or even completely abandoned as a useful term, then great.
I don't really see how. It's a natural propensity for a ball on a hill to roll down it. I don't think that tells us anything about moral behaviour. So how does knowing that an isolated system's entropy never decreases tell us something about moral behaviour?
I think it's less a case of modifying the notion of the good but a case of dismissing it and then reappropriating the word "good". Which means that this new notion has nothing relevant to do with the old notion. It's like if I was to reappropriate the word "God" and use it as a title to refer to some monarch but think that I'm saying something about theism.
This is a problem. If intention is not something natural then it must transcend nature. This makes the good, as the thing which is intended, into some sort of transcendent object, the objective. That's what Plato found "the good" is an ideal which transcends the intelligible world. However, the difficult part is that "the good" as the objective, has real causal influence within the natural world, and the understanding of this manifested in the concept of free will.
I think you're reading too much into it. When I say that nature doesn't have intentions I'm not saying that human intention is non-natural. I'm just saying, for example, that evolution (or entropy) isn't an intentional activity that the world-at-large engages in. It's just something that happens given the laws of physics.
Well dung is good for dung beetles and rose growers, affection is good for humans.
The good can't be found anywhere else. It's just that people aren't so simple that they don't have conflicting goals/feelings.
They aren't? Well that's my life's work down the pan then!
Except that it doesn't. Quite apart from encouraging potentiallty damaging co-dependency even to the point of deviancy (sado-masochism, for example) reciprocity is not a desirable feature in most relationships. A teacher doesn't wish to be taught by his pupils, a parent doesn't seek discipline from offspring, a policeman doesn't wish to be arrested, a soldier certainly does not expect to be killed. It's clear that for most acts of public service then 'do as you would be done by' is a wholly inadequate explanation of motivation for what is in many cases decidedly 'unnatural' behaviour.
Not always!
And once again I have to explain to you how I am a moral anti-realist. There is no "Good", there are only goods spread out across a population and abstracted as a "Good" in virtue of the basic triad.
Quoting aporiap
I have to disagree with this here. What is pleasurable isn't always good, indeed - but only because it conflicts with other people's interests. The pleasure a rapist feels is good for himself, but should not be seen as good in the ethical way. I should have put it in the OP: the triad recognizes pain and suffering as more important than pleasure: indeed it is the case that when you feel compassion for someone, it is because they are suffering. You don't care for someone if they're happy - they are self-sufficient.
And so ethics involves the systematic distribution of care across a population.
Furthermore, to say that there are goods that aren't pleasurable is incoherent. Apo said he recognized pleasure as a mug of beer - but this is a shallow misrepresentation of what pleasure is. There certainly are higher-order, long-term eudaimonic pleasures, that are not just the carnal satisfaction of some brute desire, but what at least seems to be a much more complex goal pursuit - i.e. when Heidegger showed how humans are the only animals on Earth that lead their lives.
Quoting apokrisis
So like I said, the only thing that makes chocolate and sugar a long-time bad habit is that it will diminish the welfare of the individual. That is invariably what ethics is about: person welfare. Any other conception leads the train off the rails.
What could be more question begging than saying the material world acts a certain way because it is the law?
So the relating is the relating which promotes growth or flourishing?
The advantage of it being a basic precept is that it can then be developed in more particular fashion. So are your examples all revealing further natural features?
What I would pick out is that they go to the naturalness of developed hierarchies. The balancing of the twin imperatives of competition and cooperation has to be achieved by one becoming dominant in scale, the other submissive, in an organised society.
S+M is a twisted play on that hierarchical social relation. Perhaps it is actually immoral or unnatural when taken to a damaging extreme.
Teaching is naturally organised in hierarchical fashion. One has the wisdom to impart, the other has the need to learn. Same with parents and kids. Or police and crooks.
As to soldiers, I think it is the generals that don't expect to be killed. But soldiers certainly expect the other side to fight.
That's a reasonable generalisation, but it's a bit vague. Dung beetles don't promote the growth or flourishing of dung. I seem to recollect a species of squid that finds a crack somewhere to lay it's eggs and is then consumed by it's children. Presumably that's good for squid in general, but the mother doesn't flourish. But that's ok, proximity has the same ambiguity; Mercury is close to the sun and Q is close to W on my keyboard.
I'd guess that flourishing is another relational term. It is associated with eco-philosophy in my mind, which I suppose fits fairly well with your systems approach. Diversity, stability, resilience, flexibility, I can't really remember the details, but the ecosystem rather than the species, let alone the individual, is the POV that has a significant relation of flourishing or not in relation to a world, according to such views.
Well it would be quite odd to think of entropy as an intentional act. It seems like the opposite of intentional to me, what happens when intention doesn't intervene. But I wouldn't say the same thing necessarily for evolution. I understand trial and error as intentional activity, and doesn't evolution seem to be a form of trial and error? The reason why trial and error is intentional, is because there has to be some sort of motivation for success, behind the trial. Do you not think that it is likely that there is some similar sort of intention behind the trials of other living organisms?
So what's the thing with the intention? What's the thing with a motivation? God? Mother Nature? Unless you're arguing for some Higher Power or, again, panpsychism, it doesn't make sense to suggest that there's intention or motivation or purpose in these non-human (or other intelligent being) events.
So, no, it's not a case of trial and error. It's just that things which are less able to survive and reproduce don't, and those more able to survive and reproduce do. That's pretty much a truism.
It's not that it acts a certain way because it is the law. It's just that it acts a certain way. It's not a matter of intention or purpose or any other conscious drive. A ball on hill will roll down it. Opposite charges attract. And so on.
I'm just stating the reality as I've observed it. So the point in suggesting that there is intention, motivation, or purpose, in these non-human, yet living events, is just to provide an accurate description of what is the case, according to my observations. Whether these observations might lead someone to believe in panpsychism, or a Higher Power, is another thing.
The point though, is that the op is concerned with "the good", and the good is associated with intention. "The good" refers to what is intended, in general, so to determine 'the good" means that we need to determine what intention is, in general. This implies that we need to analyze all instances of intention, to see what they have in common. If you and I can't agree whether something is or is not an instance of intention, how could we ever agree on "the good"?
Yep. Ecological thinking is systems science central. It is synonymous really.
And I think that seeing motivation and purpose and intention in these (non-human) natural events is as mistaken as seeing Divine intervention in an unexpected medical recovery or ghostly activity in a creaky old house.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We probably couldn't ever agree.
You're smart enough to know how weak that is.
You object to my imputing intention or purpose to a physically simple level of being. And yet you happily use the notion of "lawful" without apparent definitional discomfort. Then when challenged on this, you change tack to say, well, things "just act in certain ways" - when the point of even invoking laws is that things are found to act in fundamentally general ways.
So the normal language of physicalism is far more question-begging than the jargon of systems science.
Why would it give discomfort? I'm smart enough to know that the term "law" when used in the context of physics means something very different to the term "law" when used in the context of legislation. A physical law is just a (proposed) description of how things have behaved (and presumably will continue to behave).
Quoting apokrisis
I don't really understand this. I wasn't changing tack. I was just clarifying that I wasn't suggesting that the physical laws are some separate thing that the material world subsequently "obeys" (which is what it seemed you thought I meant).
What question-begging language?
My argument is that all regularity is the product of constraints. So for entropification to "keep happening" there has to be a global prevailing state of constraint.
Now you are picking up on the connotation that intentionality must go with having a choice. You can intend to do one thing and not another. And of course, the Universe in general - in making entropification its general rule or intention - seems to lack this choice-making. It doesn't permit alternatives. And yet that the Universe is organised the way it is must be some kind of choice.
We can imagine that it might have different rules. But then by the same token, if it was in fact free to explore all possible options, we would also it expect to arrive at the optimal choice, the optimal balance, simply by natural selection. Whatever works best - in terms of "being a cosmos" - would be what would have to triumph in the long run.
So given a naturalistic point of view, the Universe is intentional in having made a rather definite choice during its early developmental history. This is what works.
It is not of course a conscious choice. But then consciousness is one of those words we bandy about without any naturalistic definition and so isn't of much help in talking about the natural world.
There are a number of different ways in which "good" is used, related but not the same. Here, the thing which has worked, in the past, is called good, because it produces success. The way I was just using "good" refers to something wanted, intended or desired, this is called the good. The difference is that the way you use it refers to a past thing, while I used it to refer to a future thing.
So, I would suggest is that an important part of what constitutes 'the good' is the human ability to recognize what is good. Goodness exists on different levels, including that of comfort and safety but in the case of human life, humans are able to recognise and pursue greater goods, like artistic expression and other forms of culture. But when humans reach a certain developmental level, they're able to perceive kinds of goods which their forbears could not. This enables them to discover some idea of real or ultimate purpose, which has formed the basis of the various cultures.
But I think unless human life has an overall sense of purpose then ultimately all goods are social or civic. There is nothing which is intrinsically good, knowledge of which is redemptive. That is the element which is provided by the various religions and spiritual cultures. Traditional ethical philosophies are founded on those intuitions of such higher truths (i.e. vedic, Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, and so on.)
Physicalism will identify those kinds of systems with civic and social goods - it will explain them as forms of adaption and socialisation, which exist in order to provide social equity, distribution of power, and so on. So ultimately, what is good in naturalistic or physical systems, is limited to the useful, the well-adapted, those things which serve survival, which is the only real good.
So why do inanimate things now "behave". Why do you find yourself continually using psychological terms to describe what you appear to believe are non-psychological causes? When do we get down to your bare naked description of physical causality in such a way we are explaining and not just "describing by psychic analogies we believe to be fundamentally wrong/fundamentally question-begging"?
Yet you are committing the "naturalistic fallacy" in claiming that because pleasure is what is, then pleasure is an ought.
Quoting darthbarracuda
As I keep saying.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Or a sarcastic one.
Quoting darthbarracuda
And so you continue to agree with what you claim to disagree with.
Ethics is about the flourishing of the social group. It is about caring about others in ways that creates reciprocal benefits. And that is a tricky balancing act because - as game theory can spell out mathematically - the "right balance" has to involve the possibility of selfishness too.
We can care about the suffering of others, but then reality has to come into play - rational principles like proximity which you so strenuously want to deny.
It makes more sense for me to care about my immediate family, my immediate community, than to worry about the fate of those so distant as not to have any reciprocal consequences. My starving or sick child has to matter more than some random starving or sick child in Syria or Somalia. So I might give a little money to the Red Cross, but would sell my house to save my child.
So on the one hand, you accept that ethics is about enlightened self-interest - the mutuality and reciprocality that is the definition of social organisation. But on the other, you transmute these rational goods - the secrets of successful organisation - into transcendent goods.
You talk dualistically about biologically-evolved feelings, such as pleasure, pain and empathy, as if they were Platonic abstracta. You treat the qualia as things in themselves - ineffable properties of sentience - rather than biological signals with pragmatic meaning. And in doing this, you ignore all the spatiotemporal complexity of the real world in which social organisation must operate to instead impose a scaleless notion of suffering that floats Platonically above the world we have to describe.
You just ignore proximity arguments, or any kind of complexity really. And you claim to be a moral anti-realist and yet you claim transcendental reality for suffering. Are you starting to see how it doesn't add up?
"Behave" isn't a psychological term, so I don't understand this.
Not sure where you get your definitions from. :)
Quoting apokrisis
But is entropification a real regularity, or is it just a function of the way that human beings interpret the properties of a given object. In other words, to express the existence of an object as energy, is to describe the existence of that object in a very particular way,as the capacity to do work. Are you sure that it's not this particular way of looking at the object, as something which can do work, subject to the constraints of the human laws of physics, which supports the notion of entropification, rather than any natural constraints or regularities? If you describe an object according to what it can do for you, but you don't happen to understand all of the many different things which it can really do for you, then your description is inaccurate. That might be the case in describing the universe as energy.
Quoting Wayfarer
This seems to be essential to evolution, moral and social evolution at least. How would you describe this principle of innovation? How do we, as human beings come across new goods? I can see how we might determine a new good as better than an old good, according to some criteria of judgement, increased success, and things like that, but how do we come across these better goods in the first place? What motivates us to seek higher goods?
Quoting Wayfarer
How would this "ideal or ultimate purpose" be defined? If it is good that human beings continually seek higher goods, in order to find new goods better than the old goods of their forebears, wouldn't the notion of an ideal, or ultimate good, kind of put an end to the seeking of higher goods, by capping it with a highest good? Is there really an ideal, or ultimate good?
So you are denying that the primary definition is about intentional action within a social context context?
The fact that you complain when I use psychological-sounding concepts, then use them yourself without even admitting that is what you are doing, shows you really aren't willing to think this through.
Get back to me when you can account for physical events without talking about the forces that particles feel, or the laws they obey. Demonstrate that there is a fully un-psychological language available to us.
That is the subject of the whole field of ethical philosophy. Suffice to say that 'pleasure = good, pain = bad' is insufficient in my view, because it's reductionist. But then again, so is neo-Darwinism.
@Michael - have a look at this essay on the 'concept of laws'.
I wouldn't get too hung up on what entropy "actually is". Like the notions of force or energy before it, the more we can construct a useful system of measuring reality, the further away from any concrete notion of reality we are going to get. In modelling, our analytic signs of reality replace the reality we thought we believed in - our synthetic intuitions due to psychological "direct experience".
So you either go with Kant and Peirce here, or you don't. And entropy thinking is way of conceiving of reality that is demonstrably more general or abstracted, less particular and concrete, than what it replaces. In the end, we only know that it pragmatically works.
Aristotle mostly reported what like-minded people regarded as virtues, looked at how we govern ourselves using the virtues, rolled 'em up into eudaimonia, and then explained how to educate ourselves to achieve such ways.
The virtue theory still seems the most attractive to me. It accepts the individualism of our moral quest, and balances it against what people think and what the polis, society as a whole, will benefit from.
I agree with apo's eco-outlook but from a different base altogether. I think naturalism as a basis for ethics is a metaphor/analogy which has a sort of virtue theory lurking in it; that naturalism in itself implies nothing in the way of the good, because nature did not originally have anything in mind.
I can't be doing with rules, whether Kant's super-logical principle, or consequentialism/utilitarianism (as I've said before, we don't know the consequences till we've acted, so I think again we're smuggling in virtues/vices in disguise).
And I can't be doing with gods...and...
Well, that's me.
No, I'm not, because pleasure is inherently valuable to whoever is experiencing it. Like I said in the OP, humans are value machines. They create value.
Quoting apokrisis
Sarcasm is not wanted, sorry. It's useless.
Quoting apokrisis
But we must make sure that we focus on the constituents of the social group, not the social group as an object itself.
Quoting apokrisis
Because they aren't supported by the triad I just presented. They are particular and when universalized become arbitrary.
Quoting apokrisis
No, it is not enlightened self-interest. I don't help people because they will help me. I help people because that's what they need. The "Platinum Rule" - i.e. do not harm others and do not manipulate others. Self-interest has no play here, only in practicality.
Quoting apokrisis
And in doing this you ignore that pleasure, pain, and empathy are immediately accessible - you reduce them away and pretend they don't exist.
That is a very unfortunate analogy. Humans are not machines, and besides, which machines 'create value'?
But then if you don't accept that our biology and sociology expresses natural principles, then that seems to leave you with only the options that either whatever we do (biologically and socially) is thus arbitrary - it lacks any rational support - or that this support must come from some other (transcendent) source.
So we are back to creating gods, Platonic goods, or whatever.
If you want to reject my naturalism, you have to be able to point to the alternative basis you would then embrace. Otherwise that rejection is simply in bad faith.
Note that my naturalism is explicit in spelling out the role of individual spontaneity and creativity. It is part of the dynamic that there is a fostering of individual competition within the globally co-operative social context.
A society wants to produce the right kind of people. And automatons aren't that useful it turns out.
I don't get what you're trying to say here. I casually remarked at the beginning that the word "intention" is misleading giving that it implies conscious decision, and so you clarified that you didn't mean it in this sense but in the sense of "propensity" and so I then addressed your clarified meaning and questioned how this relates to morality. I didn't push you on the primary meaning of "intention" implying conscious decision. So why can't you afford me the same understanding and accept that I didn't mean the word "behaviour" in a sense that implied conscious decision?
The main point I was making is that just as a ball's propensity to roll down a hill can't tell us what's good for the ball, why would our propensity with respect to entropy tell us what's good for us?
I had already explained that in posts at the start of the thread and then re-explained it to you - and you continue to talk past that. To repeat once more....
The alternative is, we reach a stage where the transcendent is discovered or realised. So it is not 'a creation' any more than the law of identity is 'a creation'; when the mind evolves to the point where it can understand symbolic abstraction then it can recognise such things as the law of identity. But the basis of that didn't come into existence through evolution - what came into existence was the capacity to recognise it.
For you the 'final cause' appears to be 'dissipation' - things exist only to dissipate energy, or return to a state of maximum entropy. From my perspective, that seems like nihilism. Perhaps you might explain where I'm misunderstanding this?
Well, I think there is a problem here, because "good" is qualitative, and we cannot measure any quality unless we know what it actually is that we are measuring. Otherwise, it's like comparing apples and oranges. We could attempt to measure the sweetness, or the bitterness of each, and compare them but unless we have clearly defined parameters as to what constitutes "sweet", and what constitutes "bitter", our comparisons would be pointless. And, if we established some guidelines, such as X measurement equals sweet, how is this an objective determination as to what is actually sweet? This would be an arbitrary designation. So, with respect to "entropy", how do you propose that we measure this if we do not know what it actually is?
That's the naturalistic fallacy. Just because pleasure is what a machine creates as its value, doesn't mean that pleasure is transcendentally good.
Of course, you are now using language more like my own - a mechanistic naturalism - and so that reveals the fallacy of the naturalistic fallacy. It is a view of nature which presumes transcendent causes and so there is always something floating off into the distance as "not part of the material system".
Just switch from talking about pleasure as qualia and start talking about it as a biological sign - a semiotic mechanism - and you will have arrived at my kind of pan-semiotic naturalism.
Quoting darthbarracuda
No. We must focus on both by focusing on the mutuality of their relationship.
In systems theory, parts construct the whole and the whole shapes its (re)constructing parts. So the focus is on the primary dynamic that drives the self-organisation.
Sorry, but it is a fundmentally complex model of causality. And one has to focus on the irreduciably triadic nature of that holism.
Quoting darthbarracuda
So there is no payback at all?Quoting darthbarracuda
This sounds rather disengaged from life. But how do you define harm and manipulation? Are you going to recognise grades and distinctions? Or as usual, are you treating them as qualitative absolutes?
If we are standing in a queue, and I am behind you with the need to get to the front, are you going to "harm" me by not stepping aside? Are you going to "manipulate" me by keeping your back firmly turned and ignoring my plight?
So sure, normal society puts bounds on individuals and their needs for the collective good. And that defines things like harm or manipulation in grounded practical fashion. You know what to do in that regard by becoming a properly engaged member of that society.
But again we are back to your kind of unplaced and scaleless view of morality where there is none of the relativity that comes from relating. The "good" congeals into a mentalistic and immutable substance. It is not the kind of adaptive dynamical principle that lies at the heart of my naturalism.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I say they don't "exist" in the way you presume they exist - as dualistic substance.
Instead they are part of a dynamical system of sign and interpretance. There is stability in the development of a hierarchy of interpretive habits, and yet still plasticity in a capacity for novelty and experiment within that system of established constraints.
So in this process view, you get both persistence due to habits, and adaptivity due to spontaneity, co-existing in the same world.
In your actually reductionist view of ontology, you can never get these to complementary aspects of being in the same room. In reducing reality to material being, you create the eternal mystery of the mentalistic.
For example, you have to introduce the homuncular self that experience its experiences. Pleasure, pain and empathy now become qualia - substantial "mental" properties. And you even start appealing to "me" as a fellow homunculus doing the same thing.
It's a familar way of reducing reality - to matter and mind. But we all know that it doesn't work out in the end. Dualism is good for a while, but in the long-run, it is a philosophical blind alley.
Not necessarily, because as I pointed out in my post, to some, that there is an ideal, or absolute purpose, is an incoherent idea. So for these individuals, the field of ethical philosophy deals with something other than determining this ideal, or absolute good, the field of ethical philosophy deals with determining relative goods.
Well, that's not going to be an empirical discovery, is it? And I've argued why it is not a rational discovery either.
Quoting Wayfarer
Dissipation might be final cause. But dissipative structure is then its formal cause. To achieve dissipation, there must be negentropic organisation that gets you there.
Hence this is why the Cosmos has its laws and other kinds of structure. Regulation has to emerge to make dis-ordering even a concrete possibility.
So it is not exactly nihilism to say that social organisation is necessary as dissipative structure. We have to be organised because there's a job we are expected to do.
That's why I don't defend a notion of the "good". This thread shows that folk can't in fact define it except in terms of other more measurable things.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We know what it is instrumentally or operationally, like all good physicalist concepts.
What is matter, energy, time or space? In the end, we can only pop these terms into our equations as placemarkers for types of observations we know how to make.
And the reason why entropy (or information) has come to the fore is that it is our most universal way of measuring anything.
Entropy can be defined both in terms of material degrees of freedom and message uncertainty. The information theoretic approach has unified the physical and mental because there is just one unit that can measure reality quantumly either in terms of "what exists" or in terms of "what we can say".
Nowadays, we talk about matter, energy, time and space in fundamentally thermal terms. Hot = curved = dense = fast. Cold = flat = empty = slow. So cosmology is understood in terms of entropy and dissipative structure.
Likewise biology and neuroscience are becoming branches of thermodynamics. They now base themselves openly on dissipative principles.
So it is simply the case that our best model of reality is becoming so generic that it is losing all the particularity that might make it feel more intuitive. Complete abstraction might work, but it can't really be pictured.
I know you don't like that idea - you continue to believe that it is instead a symptom of explanations going wrong. However it is why scientists in the end are right to get exasperated and tell you to shut up and calculate. Abstraction that works is the best we get.
Of course, that is how the Platonic Good arose as a notion. It was an early attempt to cash in on the success of mathematical strength abstraction.
However - unlike entropy - it wasn't defined in terms of a real world measurement. That is why we have Darth proposing his system of wholly subjective and personal measurement.
The notion of the Good does feel right in some way, but folk can only offer hazy objective definitions in terms of flourishing or such like. We can see the Good has something to do with adaptive resilience and healthy growth - real world facts that we could measure using rulers and clocks. We could time how long a system persists when prodded or disturbed. We can measure how much bigger it is getting or how far its extends its relational reach.
So it is not impossible to define the Good in scientifically objective or measurable fashion. And indeed complexity theorists use entropic notions like free energy and mutual information to do just that when talking about societies or brains these days.
The quantum vacuum is hardly nothing. It might be cold, flat and extremely featureless, but it is still a sizzle of quantum fluctuations spread out in a three dimensional vastness of cosmic proportions. It is an eternal something.
The problem is that unlike non-feeling/thinking things, humans (at the least) have subjective "what it's like" minds. The fact is, when we are born, we are subjected to harms and suffering. This is felt on an individual level despite the fact that we are shaped and shape alike our social group. In fact, the social group dynamic does nothing to mitigate individual feelings of pain and harmful phenomena. That is what your system ignores- the individual "what it's like" experience of actually feeling the pain or harm.
You're the one accusing me of the naturalistic fallacy?
And I already explained how I am an anti-realist, so I don't think there is any transcendental value actually out there, just as I don't think there is any transcendental value to money.
We can always ask "so what?" to any normative claim. And we can do the same with pleasure, pain, and compassion. Yet I suspect that anyone who actually says "so what?" to these three things is being extremely disingenuous. You just can't get your arm cut off and shrug it off as a scratch. Our choices depend on an evaluation of the consequences - pleasure and pain. And so any sort of error theory can technically be right, but for all intensive purposes we end up acting as if morals actually do exist because we are forced to. Call it the persecution of ethics, perhaps. I like to just call it consistency - regardless of the objectivity of morals, we have moral beliefs and thus must act upon them in a consistent manner.
Quoting apokrisis
But this would require me to systematically ignore the important bits: feeling, downgrading it to some signal and nothing more. Whatever our beliefs in qualia are, you cannot deny that it at least seems as though there is qualia. The manifest image of qualia, something that isn't just plucked away as soon as we realize it is a sign or just a oozy chemical reaction in the brain, if that even makes sense. I continue to fail to see how the ontological status of pleasure and pain actually affects anything, since we already have a phenomenal experience of pleasure and pain that is as intimate as is possible.
Quoting apokrisis
Sorry, but I see no reason to place emphasis on an abstract object that cannot feel, unless it somehow benefits those who can feel. Doing otherwise reminds me of nationalism - you are proud of the country, not of the people that make up the country. But what does it matter if you support the country as an entity in itself, for itself? It's silly.
Quoting apokrisis
Why would there need to be? We have to find a balance between rational self-indulgence and ethical altruism. If the pain someone else feels would cause us more pain to eliminate, then we aren't committed to helping them. It's equality. The reciprocal relationship here is the distribution of values.
Quoting apokrisis
Being that I am a consequentialist (or a virtue ethicist cum utilitarian, I'm tinkering with that lately), doing vs allowing is just another one of those arbitrary constraints that works well in the legal sense but not in the moral sense, especially once we get rid of any idea of a Just World.
So I define harm as anything, whatever that may be, that results in feeling bad. A discomfort that cannot be redeemed.
And manipulation would be anything that goes against the interests of the person. It is libertarian in the moral sense - the good for one person cannot be equivocated as the good for another person, but only compared by what the consequences are to other people. We shouldn't just assume that what we feel is good is what others will feel is good, or that any bad we inflict on others will be redeemed somehow - that's where the Golden Rule falls short.
Consequentialism gets unrelenting flak for apparently asking too much of us - yet since when did self-interest have any role in equality? Equality recognizes the similarity between one person and another, and the prioritization of one person, such as ourselves, over another person is inherently unequal.
In any case, I'm a prioritarian and contingent-sufficientarian. We must prioritize the recognition of those who are worse-off within a certain degree: as soon as we get them to this level, then they are "on their own". As soon as we get everyone to this level, we then make another level, continuing refining the equality of experience between people.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, let's say I give up my position and go behind you. Are you now obligated to give up your spot to me?
There are some pains and pleasures that are so innocuous and irrelevant that they don't warrant us to consider them. They are, from a consequentialist perspective, inconsequential. Things like paper cuts and bruises, the negative experiences that nevertheless do not manage to break a person's spirit, or their mood. The negative experiences that do break a person's spirit, I would call "terminal experiences", because they remind us of death or a threat to our very existence, and are usually quite painful.
However, in everyday life we often do give up our spots for those who really need it. A man with a broken finger really ought to give up his spot in line for another man suffering from a heart attack. There's priority in effect here.
Quoting apokrisis
Of course the good is going to be mentalistic and immutable - most of our phenomenal concepts are static. That's the whole goal of process philosophy, to show how our mental concepts of staticity cannot correlate to the rest of the world.
But that is beside the point. It's a red herring to claim that our own moral concepts don't even match reality when I have already said that there is nothing like our moral concepts in the objective world. It is an isolated phenomenon in an isolated environment of persons. To apply morality to the entire universe is to equivocate cosmic habit with morality, which is just plain wrong.
Quoting apokrisis
It's a good thing we're not doing metaphysics, then. We're doing (meta-)ethics. It already presumes an un-removable manifest image of man, one of Selves, Qualia, and Free Will. I'm not sure how you get around the fact that pain, no matter what it actually is, hurts, and that pleasure feels good, and that it seems like we have Selves. Indeed the realization that we may not have a Self or any Qualia threatens nihilism, or a dissolution of all value whatsoever. And so any sort of metaphysics of ethics is going to have to work within these parameters unless they want to risk removing themselves from the ethical discourse entirely.
Yes exactly.. I just brought this point up in my previous post.. he has a glaring oversight in the actual feeling of the individual. He is so caught up in the calculation that he cannot see how things are actually felt.
Life is inherently stressful for the individual. It contains undeniable harms and in unknown quantities. To what extent we need to exist in order to maintain our own existence and that of the group is beyond me. Somehow people feel compelled to say that the upkeep, maintenance of one's individual life and that of the group needs to be carried out. How this is without a circular argument, I do not know. Apo would say it is the group that just "wants" it because it helps survival, but that is still question begging, an thus not justification. Instrumentality is the burden of existence bearing down on us as time moves forward- forcing us to upkeep, maintain, entertain, seek goals with no end and thus leading to the stress of simply living and being that is entailed in this. The absurdity is the self-awareness of this. The flow is the feeling of being lost in an action and thus an almost opposite end of the phenomological spectrum as the absurdity of ennui. Flow is probably more natural in one sense as we are not as out of place.. But the self-reflecting brain can see the situation as a whole and lead back to instrumentality and the absurd. We know we exist to exist to exist.
You are ignoring the fact that an introspective level of awareness is based on the semiotic mechanism of grammatic speech. Self-consciousness is a socialised habit and not a genetic endowment.
And so all the problems of personal experience can only find their logic and their repair within that ontic framework - as positive psychology, for instance, realises.
Now we are biological selves too. That is part of the deal. And that is why we also try to solve our "mental problems" using drugs or other treatments aimed at our biological capacity to feel.
So I hardly deny anything, I take it all into account. And from there, the answers flow systematically.
Pain and suffering can be more biological or more social in origin. If you have a broken leg, take these pain-killers. If you have a broken heart, find a new partner.
You can't hope to fix anything if you don't have a clear view of how it works.
And if you are a pessimist or antinatalist, your problem is your relationship with society in general. You don't fit it, and it doesn't fit you. One of you is going to have to change. And in my systems view, in fact both sides have to be capable of mutual change as each side is the other's reflection.
It is just that the majority view, the wider social scale, is most naturally going to represent "the good" - at least historically, in terms of what has worked in the past that led up to the present.
New ideas can come along. They do all the time. And at an increasing rate because we live in a society that now encourages a degree of change that I would say is - ecologically - over-exuberant.
But a high degree of mutation does mean a lot of failed experiments. There are masses of social casualities - which is fine in social ecosystems like high tech start-ups where vast flows of capital underwrite youthful resilience. People can crash and immediately get up again. But socially, the other side of the coin is that we also wind up with a permanent underclass subsisting on minimal capital investment.
It is not that hard to understand our current culture in terms of natural imperatives, is it? And from there, start arguing for changes that would improve the general lot.
Two things- We can feel harm without language, and even if we need language to feel introspective harm, how is this even addressing my point in the fact that we FEEL HARM!!!
Quoting apokrisis
The fact that we NEED positive psychology means that we must somehow work to achieve it..more stress to lay on the individual..more burden. Whey we need someone to live so they can go through your "good habits and manners" regimen is not explained other than it is the next best thing once born.. which is at that point simply a band-aid not a remedy. Since there is no remedy, why even provide the burden? Because the group "wants" it? And why abide what the "group" wants?
Quoting apokrisis
At least we are now talking about things in the world of how it "feels" to the individual, whatever the origin (social dynamics..biology etc.).
Quoting apokrisis
Eh, this does not matter for the individual antinatalist though. The system, just because it is involved in your development does not mean one must like it. It is not an inevitable pairing, simply a truism that society and the individual cannot be separated.. it does not NEED to be a mutual admiration society though (no pun intended).
Quoting apokrisis
I mean, if the good is heaping stress on ALL individuals and various amounts of pain for MANY in the "progression" to today's society, ok.. but that is really discounting all the pain to get here. So what worked also caused stress, burden, angst, and physical/psychological harm.
Quoting apokrisis
Though some socio-economic conditions can be changed, certain human conditions will never go away- instrumentality for one. Stress and contingent circumstances are other things that will probably remain. Since you do not recognize it (at least as a member on this forum.. not necessarily as you actually live your life and reflect).. I cannot much go further because you do not even acknowledge the phenomenon.
What is the difference between 'real' and 'absolute' here? If you're thirsty, a drink of water is a good, and examples of such utilitarian goods can be multiplied indefinitely. The issue with ethical theory is that it wants to find something that is good, independently of any particular need or want, good in its own right. 'Absolute' in that sense, is what is required.
As David Albert said of Krauss' book on this idea 'The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.'
What it is, from a philosophical perspective, is the attenuated remnants left by the dissappearance of the material atom. (Unless it is endowed with the attribute of intelligence, but then what would it be?)
Yep. As I say, you are appealing to trancendental values in talking about pleasure, pain and empathy in the dualistically disconnected fashion that you do.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You forget that semiotics is about meaningful signs - there is interpretance built in. We form signs so we can respond with habits.
And then those sign relations are hierarchically open ended or recursive. Creating a robust layer of wise habits is what allows the further thing of intelligent variety.
We can ignore the suffering of going to the gym by focusing on the longer term benefit of getting fit. And after a while, the pain of the gym becomes a pleasure. We suffer when we can't go.
So as a model of feelings (and habits), semiotics is hardly downgrading feelings to signs. It is opening feelings - as just signs - to more sophisticated worlds of meaning. It is doing the very thing of allowing you to care about abstractions like "world hunger" or "specieism".
Quoting darthbarracuda
This is just you being wedded to concrete thinking like any good reductionist.
Can one be proud of a nation that can't produce individuals you would be proud of? It might be possible - where they make you stand around the flag every morning and sing some ancestral anthem - but we would hardly call it rational.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Jeez. How many -isms do you need to establish your moral identity?
Quoting darthbarracuda
So are you meaning to confirm my point that harm can only be mutually minimised and never in practice eliminated? Moral organisation consists of collectively targeting its minimisation.
In the real world us queuers make complex judgments. If someone's needs are visibly greater, we may indeed let them jump ahead, in hope that we live in a world where that behaviour is a norm, and in the belief that our example will indeed be paid forward. But also we resist queue-jumpers in the knowledge that it is quite natural for people to cheat to the extent they can get away with it. So game theory - a balancing of conflicting impulses by the third thing of an optimisation principle - gets applied in real life.
Quoting darthbarracuda
It is everyday life that matters. My complaint is that when you are challenged by exactly this kind of proximity principle, you start talking about finding yourself dying slowly in a motorway pile up or the existential horror of the Holocaust.
Quoting darthbarracuda
So it is metaphysics. But your metaphysics makes different presumptions than mine.
We are back into adolescent whinging then?
Life's too hard to even get out bed in the morning. Everyone is always bugging you about chores you need to do.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The social system we have in fact requires your dissent. That is part of the pairing. There is no point giving people the power of choice if they never bloody exercise it.
But as usual, it is about balance. It would be a little crazy to remain in a position where you seem to find everything about your social circumstances a burden. If your dissent is that strong, do something more than whinge metaphysically.
And you with faux "big-pants" adult to admonish :-} for rhetorical points? Can perhaps the overlooking of actual human emotion for calculus of group-oriented goals be adolescent?
Quoting apokrisis
And your point? Even if it was as cliched as that, what is your response other than circular arguments? Of course I do not think the argument is or should be characterized in such a way, but that won't stop you from framing it in a way that makes fun without actually addressing the argument.
Quoting apokrisis
Ok.. so we agree there for once.
Quoting apokrisis
Nah, I do not think there is much to do except whine metaphysically, so that I do.
What did your namesake say about that?
He said we are manifestations of Will and can diminish it by being a pure observer of forms in art/music, lessening our own egos with empathy with the suffering others, and diminishing our own craving with ascetic practice.
That is certainly the problem for those who are seeking "the particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world".
But as a structuralist - one who sees reality as the product of formal constraints on free possibility - one would point to gauge symmetry for example as a rather absolute reason why we have particular particles as particular excitations of particular fields.
It is a mathematical impossibility for there not to be an electron or a quark with their particular spin characteristics if the possibility of spin cannot be eliminated from the world.
So Albert is talking about the lack of an absolute substantial base from which to build upwards. However the Peircean argument in particular sees "stuff" emerging due to top-down formal and final causation. In metaphysics currently, you would call it ontic structural realism.
Right, we cannot measure good, because we don't know exactly what it is, but that doesn't mean there is no such thing.
Quoting apokrisis
If entropy is a way of measuring things, a tool of measurement, not a quality to be measured. How can you compare this to good, which is a quality to be measured.
Quoting apokrisis
No scientist has told me to shut up and calculate, though I've discussed these things with some. I'm a metaphysician, they are scientists, we each do what we do, and don't try to tell each other what to do. Still, we can have meaningful discourse.
Quoting apokrisis
How do you know that the quantum vacuum is three dimensional?
Quoting Wayfarer
I see a difference between relative and absolute, and both relative and absolute things are real. So, your example is of a relative good. The drink of water is good in relation to the thirsty person. We can determine whether any particular good is relative or not, by asking if it is deemed "good" for the purpose of something else, some further end. The drink of water is good, to relieve the thirst. Relieving thirst is good for keeping the person alive, etc..
When we reach the final end of this chain, that is the thing which is "good in its own right". For instance, Aristotle designated happiness as the thing which is desired for the sake of itself. This would be the absolute. But why must there be such an absolute? I see no logical necessity for this. We go through our lives doing this for the sake of that, and that for the sake of something else, until we die. Then even after we die, others are going through the same process, this for the sake of that, and that for the sake of something else. Where is the absolute good? Why would we even fool ourselves into believing that there is such a thing as an absolute good? If all the goods which we know of are relative, then why not apply inductive reason and say that all goods are relative?
It's your life. But you seem to expect me to take it seriously.
It's actually a famous line. You know that, don't you?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We know that our vacuum is both quantum and three dimensional. And these facts may well be directly connected. That would be a hope for a Theory of Everything. And indeed, dissipative structure arguments are being used to explain why three dimensions are optimally balanced. But its still work in progress to say that is the connection.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In my book, absolutes represent limits and so are by definition unreal in being where reality ceases to be the case. And that's why reality always needs two complementary limits to give it somewhere to actually be - the somewhere that is within complementary bounds.
What exactly do you take transcendental to mean, if not all-encompassing and universal throughout nature? That's exactly what I deny as an anti-realist! However, if you're talking about transcendental phenomenal experience, then absolutely I would say that pain, pleasure, and compassion are transcendental, pervading all our conscious and rational choices.
I'm saying there appear to be brute experiences, or transparent experiences. You're saying we can deconstruct them, and show their origins, and somehow this changes our perspective on things. It's akin to me saying there is the color green, and then you saying green is just blue and yellow mixed together, and there "is no green". There's green right there in front of your face! The origins of the color green doesn't matter in this case.
Quoting apokrisis
Once again you are arguing that what we have done (historicity) and what we are currently doing constitutes what we ought to do. Just because we murder animals doesn't mean we should murder animals. Just because we've made it this far doesn't mean we should continue.
Those who made it were the lucky ones, not necessarily the smart ones. And that's what life comes down to: the fetishization of genes, or gene-worship.
Quoting apokrisis
Huh? What does this mean?
Quoting apokrisis
Excellent, so we agree on at least one point. Harm is pervasive and impossible to get rid of. But this need not constrain our ability to think of what could be the case. Indeed I would personally argue that the state of the environment and our programming makes us morally disqualified in some sense. The world will never be "good", yet this does not stop us from acting ethically. There is too much imperfection, too much decay and insufficiency, to be even a candidate for a decent world. But this doesn't mean we can stoop to this level.
Quoting apokrisis
So what? What if you found yourself in the Holocaust? I'm sure you'd wish everyone else would adopt the principles I am advocating.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, yes, metaethics is a sort of metaphysics. But it is metaphysics in the service of ethics, not the other way around.
Why does anything need fixing or repair to begin with? What is so important that requires us to suffer? What great cosmic transcendental goal are we all advancing towards that justifies our collective troubles?
Extinction, that's the end-goal. Quite inspiring, truly.
Ethics becomes not a system of progress and triumph but a recovery mechanism meant for janitorial service, cleaning up the mess. Almost all ethics is affirmative, and thus second-order, as it forgets its own structure. Consequentialists are forced to accept that murdering a person can be acceptable - and although I am a consequentialist myself, the fact that I have to accept that murdering someone might be necessary just goes to show how royally f*cked up our little armpit of the universe is. The fact that we have to compromise should make us take a step back and think about what is going on that forces us to compromise in the first place. A truly good world would not require compromise, or the choosing of a "lesser evil". A truly good world wouldn't have any necessary evils.
I've been tinkering with the idea that utilitarianism might be a kind of virtue ethics. I think it was Mill who said that compassion is the virtue for ethical living.
Quoting mcdoodle
But surely we can reasonably estimate what the consequences are going to be. Is this not how we live our daily lives? I press the letter B on my keyboard; I am reasonably confident that the representation of B will appear on my screen. I am reasonably sure I will not explode when I take a drink of water. I am reasonably sure that I will be able to pass this midterm. etc. Intentions don't change the reality of an outcome.
Err, if it pervades nature, that makes it immanent. And immanence is opposed to transcendent, not transcendental, in this context.
Focus on causality. We are talking about the reasons things are the way they ought to be. We are talking about the origins of the shaping constraints, the lawful regularities.
To say that formal and final causes act from outside the realm of material and efficient cause - as Plato did, and as Western religions do - is to claim transcendent origins.
Immanence - as argued by Anaximander, Aristotle and other organicists - is about self-organising materiality. The formal and final causes of being arise within the world itself.
Quoting darthbarracuda
First, I would be more likely to talk about electromagnetic radiation and opponent channel processing if I were deconstructing qualia in terms of physicalism.
And then the phenomenological fact that green can be mixed from yellow and blue paint ought to tell you that your experience is not actually brute at this level even. It ought to raise the question of why you can't phenomenologically mix two paints to arrive at red, yellow and blue? Or why the rule for mixing light is different in that now it is yellow that is composite and green that is primary.
Woo. This phenomenological shape-shifting really ought to bother you. And it's right in front of your face - if you ever open your eyes and mind.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I'm sure no matter how many of thousands of times I correct you, it won't make a difference.
The argument is that history proves a state of constraint right - as the best reflection of that history. But then constraints, by their very nature, are permissive and even positively enabling of degrees of freedom. Part of the deal is that they set the degree of disagreement or novelty it is useful to see. And even that is itself subject to the principle of evolvability.
With living systems, the constraints can include information about when to stick with the rules, when to break away and experiment. Animals under stress are designed to increase the mutation rates and so make possible greater than usual adaptive changes.
If you want to make an argument for veganism, no problems. Others are making an argument for paleolithic diets.
My argument already endorses a degree of experimentation of any kind. Let society suck it and see. If there is collective social merit in not eating animals, expect your wishes to come true eventually.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Sure, we can talk about fictional worlds. But fictional worlds would have fictional moralities. So there doesn't seem a lot of point in wasting too much time on what can't be changed.
Again, your antinatalism might lead you to argue for the wiping out of all life with an integrative nervous system - the minimal qualification for sentience. Leave reality to jellyfish, daffodils and bacteria. But as I have pointed out, you won't in practice beat life so easily. Antinatalism is always going to lose as it only takes a couple of sneaky breeders to slip your net.
Quoting darthbarracuda
One could always wish. But given that is not the way reality works, we need instead to focus on more practical responses to the threat of nasty demises.
Godwin's law not withstanding, aren't you at all troubled by the familiar debating point that Hitler was a vegetarian, Himmler wanted to ban hunting? The same pervasive Romanticism that justified their Nazi racism, justified their anti-specieism.
In any case I don't see how this is at all relevant to the discussion. You continue to assert that what I believe in is transcendent woo and I have consistently pointed out that I am limiting morality to minds, and thus it cannot be transcendent.
So if we're talking about value, then I am arguing that it is immanent in minds. That is all.
Quoting apokrisis
How could it "bother" me if qualia is not real? How can I do anything if "I" don't exist?
Illusions, coherent or not, are still transparent. You can't just deconstruct your own experiences and pretend that they aren't really there.
All of this is just a red herring. Or I guess you could say it's just a herring, because our qualitative experience of red isn't actually there...?
Quoting apokrisis
So once again you are thrusting practical applied ethics into theoretical normative ethics. Stop doing that.
Quoting apokrisis
This changes nothing about the ideal. Since when did we have to content with what the universe offers us? Why do we have limit our own expectations?
Quoting apokrisis
Again, practical vs theoretical.
Indeed I don't believe AN or veganism or anything like that will take off. But this doesn't change the truth value of them. If I can convince a few people to go AN or vegan than I will have done some legitimate good. The rest of ethics is just applied and practical ethics meant to compromise for everyone else's shortcomings.
Quoting apokrisis
ehh...no. People can hold morally correct views but for shitty, contradictory reasons. Aren't you troubled by blind pragmatism, the same reasoning that went into the running of Nazi concentration camps? What a load of rubbish, organizing reason like this, as if my reasoning can be identified as a certain "kind" of reason and is prone to such things like bigotry and genocide, whereas your superior "kind" of reason isn't. You haven't even identified what it was about Nazi policy that makes it similar to what reasoning I am using, you've just asserted this and claimed association without justification, leaving this association hanging in the air like a fart, tainting the legitimacy of anything I say, as if being a vegetarian is potentially causally linked to Nazism. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves - does that mean democracy is suspicious? Christianity is linked to the crusades - does that mean every Christian is a war-mongerer?
Clumping them together is fallacious, and I honestly don't understand why you even mentioned it without providing any justification.
The same reasoning that led the Nazis to racism led some of them to vegetarianism. The same reasoning that led altruists to vegetarianism led them to things like democracy (how about that, non-pragmatic thinking leads to solutions that actually work?! Who would've thought!!! - it's bullshit to claim that everything that worked, worked because of your special pragmatism). So your fallacy of association fails in virtue of its own fallaciousness and exclusion of alternatives.
Nietzsche would have fallen under this vague "romanticism" term, yet he was vehemently opposed to nationalism. And Peirce, your philosopher-Jesus, was a womanizer and eccentric douche, and Aristotle was the personal teacher of Alexander, who was basically the ancient world's Hitler (without the racism). Pragmatism must be inherently predisposed to douchebaggery... I can cherry pick too!
In any case it is highly suspicious that you are willing to clump together rational inquiry with irrational racism and bigotry and call it "romanticism", as opposed to your enlightened pragmatism. It's insulting to compare the reasoning that goes into these ethical claims to the same "reasoning" behind racism and bigotry. But you try to get away with it by splitting reason down the middle, an us vs them mentality, and conveniently failing to make a thread on your views and instead attacking everyone else's views while weaving and dodging and moving the goalposts in an almost troll-like manner. According to you, we're either an enlightened pragmatist, or a bottom dwelling scum sucker who's lost in transcendence and associated with racist bigots. Bullshit.
Yep. You are employing a dualistic ontology and you don't see that as a problem.
Quoting darthbarracuda
:-}
Quoting darthbarracuda
Calling Peirce a womaniser is a bit strong. That charge says more about the uptight community within which he lived. And he was an eccentric douche to the degree that many of the mathematically brilliant can have an autistic streak that makes them somewhat unfit for the regular world.
But fire away. If you want to draw some kind of conclusion about the value of philosophical arguments based on the moral character of their originators, then amuse me.
I mean, you were the one who brought up the apparent relationship between vegetarianism and Nazism. A brilliant move, really.
Please explain to me what exactly is involved in the reasoning of vegetarians and Nazis that make them both "romantic" according to your book.
I would say these are not ethical examples. If you take those standard thought experiments that Michael Sandel uses about saving one life versus saving many lives as trains pass underneath bridges - such examples do tend to assume that the consequences of each act are perfectly knowable, and in this sense I don't accept them.
Where an ethical question involves action between humans or between a human and other creatures, we are not pressing a B on the keyboard: we are taking a step without being at all sure how the other is going to respond. Conciliation and negotiation are the stuff of living.
But I'm not claiming this happens all the time. It's easy enough to know the consequences of paying people starvation wages and to institute more ethical wages. Even then, though, who knows how the world may respond? For example, other organisations who are less responsible and more cunningly secretive may price the ethical ones out of the market while using indentured workers. So a 'victory' for ethical investors can turn into defeat because of unintended consequences.
I think our social and political lives express culture, which has a history. There is no clear rationality in nature, on my reading. You are claiming 'natural principles' lead to 'rational support', but on my reading that's not a logical step, the premiss does not imply the conclusion. Humans have found in themselves - from the 'natural' - inferential powers and have deliberately, culturally fostered rationality (and other qualities, like compassion and warmongering). They might have developed one way, or another, but socially it turns out they have developed thus - where we have reached.
There's no need for gods here. It's just a different metaphysics. You and I see 'the world' differently
To me all your claims about what nature has in mind, which was the phrasing you used at the start of this thread, are about what you have in mind, which you ascribe to natural principle because of your belief-system, which is your own choice within a culturally, historically determined set of 'constraints', which was in turn originally set in motion by our 'natures'.
It is always going to be the case that we model the world to the best of our abilities. I haven't claimed absolute knowledge in some thing-in-itself fashion. So your epistemological argument is moot.
That leaves the validity of my claims. And they are based on modern science. So well based - as good as it gets when it comes to inquiry into nature.
I know, I'm just joking around. Take a famous line literally and see where you can go with it...
Quoting apokrisis
I think that this is self-contradictory. The "quantum reality" is produced by a discontinuity of time created by relativistic principles. There is a disjunction between time from the perspective of a moving object, and time from the perspective of pure energy, which is radically different from a moving object. This is analogous to, or actually the same disjunction in a different form, as the disjunction between rest and movement, in a conceptual structure which allows for absolute rest. Quantum principles were developed to account for the observable effects of this gap in the understanding of time. Therefore anything "quantum" is necessarily four dimensional as time is understood as a fourth dimension in quantum principles.
Quoting apokrisis
I really don't think this is the case. I think you are misrepresenting, or perhaps even misunderstanding your own "book" in this statement. You allow that the absolute "energy" has real existence. Energy is an absolute, it represents the limit of physical existence, as formulated in the special theory of relativity. You clearly allow that this limit has real existence.
Quoting apokrisis
Why is employing a dualistic ontology seen as a problem by you? Dualistic ontology has proven very successful in the past, and it was developed due to very successful arguments, demonstrations and proofs, such as Plato's, that monist principles cannot grasp reality. Why do you apprehend dualist ontology as a problem rather than the solution, which it really is.
Quoting apokrisis
If we reject dualist ontology, as a problem, for no apparent reason, except that it complicates our understanding of the world, or makes us face the reality of things which we would rather not face as real because they complicate our lives, when the world is clearly complex, we are not modelling the world to the best of our abilities. The models are deficient due to this failing to account for aspects of reality which dualism gives us the capacity to account for. That is the real problem, rejecting the best models, dualist, for no reason, accept perhaps to facilitate the simple life.
.
It's a problem if the dualism is positing non-physical existents. Why? Because there are no non-physical existents.
People call other things "dualism," too, though. I'm not sure what he meant by your supposed dualism. (I haven't read through every post since I last saw this thread yet . . . this board seems to go in spurts. It's really slow for awhile, then suddenly there will be 100 long posts in just a few hours.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Did he explicitly say that? It seems like he'd say there is no such thing as "absolute energy," and I'd agree with him.
What is time then?
Quoting Terrapin StationI didn't mean "absolute energy", what I meant is the absolute which is called "energy". According to the principles of special relativity, energy is conceived as a limit to physical existence. Apokrisis had defined absolutes as "limits", which are by definition uneal. But by the way that Apokrisis refers to entropy, and entropification, it is clear that this absolute, energy, is believed to have real existence.
Change and/or motion. Or in other words, it's processes, or changing relations of matter.
Whatever that would be.
Right, and I don't believe that these things, relationships between individual things, are properties of the things themselves. How could they be? A relationship between A and B is neither a property of A nor B, it is the property of the thing which determines that relationship, a human mind.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Exactly, Apokisis speaks as if this thing called "energy" is something real, but denies that limitations, absolutes, are real.
In a word, spiritual purity.
Romanticism boils down to the complaint that the modern technological mode of existence is soul-less and impure. It is dirty, messy, disgusting, unclean, ugly and joyless.
So Romanticism inspired a particular kind of back to nature organicism and back to the past Volkisch-ness or rural community lifestyle.
Of course early Romanticism had a lot of overlap with the Humanism arising out of the enlightenment. But Humanism was anti-theistic and socially optimistic. It was forward looking and celebrated the modern possibilities for human growth, personal freedom and the triumph of rationality.
Evolutionary theory also plays into it because it showed that humans were animals and so raised questions for both the rationalists and the irrationalists (the sentiment driven romantics) in terms of how animals ought to be treated.
Anyway, the association between vegetarianism and romanticism is well known.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_and_Romanticism
Just as is that between Nazism and romanticism.....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lkisch_movement
So on the one hand there is a rationalist version of back to nature that arises from the rejection of theistic world views and a proper scientific, ecological and evolutionary, understanding of life. This views does not seek spiritual purity as its ultimate good. Instead it is more likely to celebrate the messy and confused imperfections of existence. Life is a balance, a negotiation, full of dynamism and passing variety.
Then there is this other view of back to nature that unites the romantics, Nazis and vegetarians. Purity is the ultimate good. Hence the sentimentality about children, bloodlines, untouched nature, medieval peasantry, animal innocence, etc.
An obssession with purity allows the rationalisation of extreme or absolute positions. That's how the Nazis could justify their concentration camps. That's how vegans can justify their own non-negotiable beliefs. If purity is the good, it is rational to argue imperfection should be eliminated by any means necessary.
But if your view of nature is instead essentially stochastic, then there will always be variety and imperfection. The good is now always about a global dynamical balance that constrains existence in a statistical fashion yet is also creatively sloppy, still fruitfully disorganised and playful at the margins.
Correct, and what carries out this act of relating other than a human mind? You know, A and B cannot be related to each other unless something actual relates them. If it's not a human mind, it must be something natural which is non-physical.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Of course it means that it's separate from A and B. It's not described as part of B nor as part of A, it is described as A moving in relation to B. Clearly, it's in the mind which does the relating. If it is not in the mind, what do you think it is. If it's a physical object, we should be able to see it, or otherwise sense it. But we see A, and we see B, and we do not see the relationship between them, that we infer.
Quoting Terrapin Station
What supervenes on A and B, the human mind where the relationship exists?
Quoting Terrapin StationObviously it does depend on the human mind, because as relationships, is simply how we describe the world, and descriptions are produced by the human mind. That one thing is moving in relation to another is simply how we describe things. Show me the physical object which is called "one thing moving in relation to another" if you really think that movement is a physical object.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A and B.
Yeah, they're actual and they have various relations.
You're making zero sense. Why would it have to be something non-physical? We're talking about two physical things. The relation, since it supervenes on the physical things in question, is physical.
If "supervenes" is meant to suggest that the relation follows the physical things, as a result, or effect of their existence, this is a false premise. Human beings plan the relationships between things, manufacture the things, and put them into those intended relationships. So the relationships which the things will have, after they come into existence, are prior in time to the things themselves. The relations exist before the things do. That's what planning is.
If you mean "supervenes" in some other way, you have no premise to conclude that if a relation supervenes on a physical thing, it is necessarily physical. Then your argument is non sequitur. There is no reason to believe that things of different categories cannot interact. That, I think, would be a ridiculous proposition.
Either way, this claim is very unsound. It does nothing to support your claim that there are no non-physical existents.
Do you have any examples? Until you provide specifics, you'll have the advantage of ambiguity.
As far as I can tell this is just Luddism.
Philosophy has been a struggle against nihilism. You have the side that rejects aspects of the world, and you have the other side that tries to affirm them. Plato vs Aristotle, Stoics vs Epicureans, Aquinas vs Augustine, Schopenhauer vs Nietzsche, etc.
Quoting apokrisis
Sure, at least the French Revolutionaries were, who came at least a century after Locke, who was a deist, and Hobbes who had a sour view of society in general. It wasn't until Rousseau that we have a major thinker who thought everything would be a-ok if we all just went back to nature.
Quoting apokrisis
In fact it seems that Darwin himself was a product of a "proto-Darwinian" movement, stemming from the Enlightenment, which was trying to formulate a new "secular religion" that could explain the human condition in a more "naturalistic" manner. He was right, of course, but his theory owe a lot to the environment that Darwin was a part of.
Quoting apokrisis
But the association between vegetarianism and romanticism does not mean that vegetarianism is bullshit because romanticism is bullshit (which it's not obvious that it is either).
It would be akin to saying that philosophy is bullshit because an extraordinary about of philosophers in the past were misogynistic, and misogyny is irrational, therefore philosophy is irrational. Correlation does not equate to causation, and in any case the arguments presented for vegetarianism should be analyzed for their own merits and not from their apparent "origins" in romantic thought, despite vegetarianism being practiced thousands of years ago, cross-culturally.
In any rate the article you cited goes on to show how scientific theories of the day, as well as perennial liberal thinkers, were important motivating reasons to see humans and non-human animals as "interconnected", as opposed to "God's chosen", which we see so commonly in religious and rhetorical assertions.
Quoting apokrisis
It's a good thing that my vegetarianism, as well as a good deal of others' vegetarianism, is not motivated by that wishy-washy poetic nonsense. "Back to nature!", la-dee-dah, for the Fatherland!, nope, that's not my position at all.
Unless of course you want to argue that compassion is somehow "romantic" and not just basic decency.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, indeed people tend to be staunch believers in something and think that belief is all they need to do. We live in an imperfect and violent world, belief ain't gonna change shit by itself. We have to compromise. I accept this. But this compromise is what we ought to do in practical terms, simply because the theoretical (which we can certainly conceive of) cannot be brought about because of certain contingencies, typically those involving and laziness and apathy of humans.
These romantics you cited are approaching this whole game from an aesthetic point of view. Animals should be treated with respect because it fulfills some aesthetic for a modern day Garden of Eden, lah-dee-dah, we'll all be animal lovers and live in a great happy family, yay!
I'm coming from a purely ethical point of view, paintings and orchestras be damned, one that stems directly from a conception of the phenomenal experiences of another animal. "Intersubjective experience".
Quoting apokrisis
Yet it seems that it is you who has an aesthetic for the universe. You use words like "sloppy" and "playful", or "creative" and "balance", when you could have said "non-uniform", "complex", "different", and "equilibrium". There's an aesthetic going on here: the universe is something utterly fascinating and bottomless, just an explosion of amazing material, and has anthropomorphic qualities - the Scholastics thought the point of life was to come to know God, and now you are arguing that the point of life is to come to know the Universe (an aesthetic pantheism). The Universe is just bristling with potential, waiting for the memorable and curious scientist to discover something new in a blaze of intellectual passion and triumph. And the more we come to know the Universe, the more we see ourselves as part of some great, beautiful cosmic tale...
If that isn't romantic then I don't know what is.
The simplest way to put supervenience is that it's the properties of a collection of things interacting as a system. It's an identity relation rather than a "follows/following" relation.
In some cases, sure--when we're talking about artifacts. Of course, not everything is an artifact. I don't know why either you're focusing on artifacts all of a sudden or why you're maybe positing the ridiculous view that everything is indeed an artifact.
I wasn't forwarding anything like a logical argument. I was simply stating a view. I certainly hope that you don't believe that you're mostly stating logical arguments, because you are not. Not at all.
OK, so you're making everything into a "system", a whole, things and interactions between things, and saying that the "system", or whole is physical. That's there is a whole, or "a system" and that it is physical is an unsupported assumption though. Clearly the empirical evidence indicates that things are not all part of one system. This was my point when you joined the discussion. Apokrisis had claimed that we make models to the best of our capacity. But if we model everything as one system, when clearly the evidence indicates that it is not, and we have the capacity to produce a dualist model, which can better account for the complexities which we observe, then we are not making our models to the best of our capacity.
If you assume that there are two systems, and one is "the physical", then the other is not. If there is two (or more) systems, and you wish to group them all together as "physical", then we have to account for the existence of whatever it is which separates one system from another. Either way, there is the necessity of introducing more principles then just things and interactions, and the claim that all is physical is unsupported by the evidence. That is because we need a principle to account for the existence of a "system", or a whole, if such a thing is supposed to be real.
Clearly you assume that the system is something real, as it is the grounds for your claim that things and interactions can be classed together as one, "the physical". But this is the exact issue I had with apokrisis. Apokrisis claimed that limits, are not real, they are simply ideal, but then continued to speak about systems as if they were something real.
This is what you did say.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I take the word "since" to imply "by reason of". Therefore the logical argument is implied that if something supervenes it is of the same category as that which it supervenes. In reality though, according to the concept of supervenience, the opposite is the case. Supervenience requires a separation between two distinct categories. So to think that supervenience implies that the two things are of the same category, is completely wrong.
If this is the "view" which you wee stating, I just thought I should point out that it is based in some extremely faulty logic. Perhaps you'd be wiser to quit stating that view.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, of course one thing that supports it is that the idea of nonphysical existents is incoherent. What would you be positng aside from matter physically situated in the world, and dynamically changing in those physical situations, with respect to other matter?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Where the heck is "one system" coming from? Why would we be bringing up counting how many systems there are?
OKQuoting Terrapin Station
Matter, and "the world". Two things, necessity of dualism.
How would "the world" be different from matter + its dynamic situatedness with respect to other matter? In other words, what are you positing additional to matter + its dynamic situatedness?
As opposed to your unsupported assumption that they don't refer to the same thing?
That makes an assumption that just in case words differ, the words refer to something non-identical, at least in lieu of an argument for them being identical. But that assumption is unsupported. You're simply claiming that it's so.
Not really. I agree that vegetarianism has been held by romantics, but also of non-romantics. It is incorrect to assign a causal relationship between the two.
Yeah, jokey strawmen is a good way to have a conversation when challenged.
Anyway, re what words refer to, that's determined by what an individual has in mind by the term in question.
Quoting darthbarracuda
That's why I didn't say it. Instead I highlighted two ways people approach the natural world, and thus the question of the good.
My criticism of your approach is that it is essentially from the romantic perpspective and not from the enlightenment or rational humanistic perspective.
So you are always seeking purity or perfection. You reify suffering as pure qualia for instance. And the slightest imperfections of existence become intolerable for you as a result.
Because it is only natural to seek perfection. In any case, it's not romantic at all because I'm not applying an aesthetic to this issue; non-human suffering is not bad because it disrupts some special organic family, it's because suffering absolutely sucks and I recognize this.
Does mild suffering suck absolutely or only relatively?
Do you see your problem yet?
What does this mean? Suffering sucks regardless of intensity, although intensity offers prioritization.
And thus if this permits prioritisation, then you have no issue with a little bit of suffering being balanced against a greater amount of pleasure?
Or even a fleeting amount of suffering being outweighed by long periods of fairly neutral affect - no strong feelings at all?
It can only be if you take some essentialist approach to suffering that you could object to these logical consequences.
A pragmatist understands a calculus of risk and reward. No pain, no gain, the say. But you have been taking a purist line which seems fundamentally intolerance of chance or "imperfection".
To call suffering "mild" is to abuse both terms. A little pinprick isn't a case of suffering, clearly, because it doesn't break someone's spirit.
Quoting apokrisis
If the same person is experiencing both and they consented then no, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Nobody is being instrumentalized.
Quoting apokrisis
I doubt the existence of neutral feelings. You might not be feeling anything but you're still in a state of mind, or a mood, which is either positive or negative. Analysis leads to the realization that most moods are not enjoyable but rather striving.
Quoting apokrisis
Because you shouldn't gamble with another person's life, or use another person's life for your own benefit, against their will.
How do you define 'ways that work'. Can you give an example?
So from what I understand you'd say our innate impulses, when sufficiently constrained, can be considered our moral intuitions? Or rather, our impulses are generated out of some innate understanding of what is good (*for us*) ?
Maybe this is a right approach. What comes to my mind is the end of 'coming back to stability' -- the body desires food or shelter or some other thing in order to bring itself back to some equilibrium set-point. If temperature seems to have suddenly changed from a given set-point, then the body struggles to bring it back to that set-point. People desire food, naturally, when the body is devoid of energy -- it strives to hit the minimum baseline of satiation and the pleasure taste encourages more food intake until the baseline is met (**or at least until the maximum capacity of intake is met)..
But then there's more to that. There's a difference between 'good for me' and 'good for us'. And it's certainly fair to say, as much as we are whole in terms of our 'biological selves', we are also parts of much larger biological selves. Communities of people, communities of ecosystems. Intuitions that power those interactions can come into conflict. What's good for my community may not be good for 'me' at a given moment per se. I may have an impulsive desire to jump in front of the bullet that's about to hit my comrade, but what of my impulse to save my own self. So then to define what's good would have to take this sort of stuff into account.
And then there are goods that have nothing to do with stability or equilibrium. We know that if we want to be healthy we need to keep under a certain weight, eat certain foods, exercise regularly. If we want to be a carpenter or a chef or a cleaner or a philosopher, if we want to change ourselves in any way we'd need to break out of that stability and into something we're uncomfortable with. We may believe that's good for us and perhaps it might be.. but that intuition certainly doesn't have the same origin as the intuition driving our desire for food. Accounting for these sorts of 'goods' seems to involve something more than just what comes out of our biological impulses. I feel like there's a distinction between intuition and impulse