Terrapin Station

Not that I'm a Christian or religious believer at all (just to emphasize that again, because I'm about to defend them a bit), but the idea is that the...

Wouldn't part of god's perfection be the laws he's set forth?

Your posts keep reading to me, without you saying as much explicitly, like you're really just wanting to express that you're relatively "conservative"...

I'm an atheist, by the way. So I was just addressing the logic of the argument. If there are gods, and there are good reasons to believe that the god ...

Your initial post is a bit confusing in my opinion. You seem to actually be talking about at least three things: (1) Gods (2) Laws that gods issue (3)...

It seems to me that the only thing there is to support it is some rather loose fantasizing based on reifying mathematical conventions.

No. The only ones that exist in some form are the ones that people are currently playing, currently thinking about, or the past ones that are recorded...

Why would you trust random strangers on the Internet to give you advice on this rather than just going to one of your professors or your academic advi...

What annoys me about empathy talk, especially criticisms of a lack of empathy when people try to use them as argumentative leverage/try to paint thems...

The idea of empathy is not that you're literally going to have someone else's perspective. That's obviously not possible. The idea is to not be so sel...

Doesn't work for a couple different reasons. First, ought statements are not true or false. They're not actually statements (in the sense usually used...

We could pin this as an example of what not to do.

My dreams are nothing at all like my waking life phenomenally. The phenomenal quality of the two is completely different.

It's difficult to get people to vote every four years even. They're going to want to vote on stuff weekly (or even more often)? What are you basing th...

Why couldn't it be that you're predicting what his preferences will probably be, based on knowledge of most persons' preferences?

"x is not reducible to biology" . . . that's a claim. What's the support of it? Concepts are reducible to biology. They're mental phenomena. I'm a phy...

In other words, "It is morally wrong to murder," ontologically, is a brain state. "It is morally wrong to have the brain state that it's wrong to murd...

Ah--yeah, that makes sense, but I'd say it's another topic from what I've been focusing on. I like to do one small step at a time . . . especially bec...

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at there. A theory or a law that morality only occurs in a particular location?

Okay, but how would that work. We can point to someone helping a little old lady across the street. We can point to someone giving food to someone who...

I don't, because it actually requires a bunch of additional "shoulds." "One should act in accord with one's moral views." "One should act in the most ...

First, I use "subjective" to refer to mental phenomena, and "objective" to refer to the complement--"nonmental phenomena" so to speak. My mental pheno...

Yes, it's a brain state. That's the only place where moral whatevers occur (I don't want to call them judgments because I don't want to be seen as sta...

Is democracy an illusion? No. Is there any "direct/'pure' democracy" where people simply vote on everything and that's that? No. Could there be a "dir...

Wait, so then why would there be no need of the binary approach?

That's fine. We just need the evidence then of moral whatevers obtaining in a nonmental location.

Although how much good is it doing? You're not continuing to follow through. :wink:

Well, unless it's located in one place and not another.

So in your view nonmental things can treat something with attention and kindness?

How would you say that nonmental things consider something? How does that work physically?

I've been around philosophy long enough to never assume that anyone might not be claiming something that seems insane to me. "Constituted" is often us...

Wait, so you're saying that if we took one person and every other person but that one were to die or disappear, that one person would no longer exist?...

So where would you say moral truth occurs aside from personal preference?

So for example, if you were saying that moral judgments (or whatever you'd call things like "murder is bad") are somehow embedded in social relations,...

For the subject/object distinction to fail, one has to be claiming that there are not (a) brains functioning in a mental way, as well as (b) things th...

None of that has anything to do with what I'm actually talking about though. You're talking about how we interact with others, preconditions for certa...

This is where the upshots become important. There are implications to moral whatevers being located in one place versus another. And those implication...

My view is about the physical location(s) where moral whatever-one-wants-to-call-thems occur. I'm in no way saying that moral views aren't influenced ...

I explained this earlier, by the way. When i talk about moral judgments, I'm talking about making an evaluation a la good/bad, permissible/impermissib...

Of course. In many different ways. They're about things we experience in the world, they have an impact on our interactions, etc. It's just that the m...

I'm not asking you about judgments per se. There's no dispute that we make judgments, is there? There's a dispute about what sort of stuff obtains non...

I never said anything like "Our moral judgments do not involve the world." I said that moral judgments (again, or whatever someone would want to call ...

Is it dishonesty that's leading you to evade like that or what? I really am curious what's going on in your head.

I think we're embedded in the world. I think that "what we ought to do" is only a mental phenomenon. We certainly look around the world we're embedded...

The broken dog is nonmental. Nonmentally, it's not a moral problem. See how easy it is to straightforwardly answer a question? Can you try that now?

Didn't you claim that how things should be is a nonmental phenomenon in the broken pup somehow?

Let's talk about the non-end part where we detect things with objective instruments. Are you able to do that?

You're asking how we do this? For example, we can take an x-ray. Now, describe at least one way we would use an instrument to detect anything about mo...

What? I'm asking you to do something. Are you capable of doing it?

It's easy to explain, re nonmental propeties, how we check whether a dog's bones are broken, whether the dog is alive, etc. If there were a dispute ab...