The system where the vote of the stupid and/or uninformed is equal in value to the intelligent and and/or thoughtful. (The rational vote is equal in value to the irrational vote.)
The system where 50% plus 1 imposes their will on the 50% minus 1. And in practice, with vote splitting, often 30% is decisive. 
The primary purpose of democracy qua voting for representatives (democratic republic, not direct democracy) is not that the voters should produce the best most knowledgeable results, or that the voters should as a whole or majority have the best knowledge or be esteemably rational-minded, but rather the primary purpose is simply to bind representatives (elected politicians) directly to the will of the people, namely to ensure at least a minimum standard of representation.
It isn’t too crucial for all or most voters to be highly informed and highly passionate and highly rational; these tasks are to be performed by the elected representatives. Politicians are “subject matter experts” or they become one after being elected, to a larger degree than most voters are. Yeah it’s not perfect, and all other things equal we want the most rational and knowledgesble voting populace as possible, but in any case the system works better than any other.
Millions of people who don’t need to invest huge sums of time and energy studying a vast purview of politically-relevant data are able to each pick a few narrow issues that are important to them, and vote on those issues only; the result, en mass, is that politicians who are elected are a statistical representation of their respective districts. It’s a pretty cool system if you think about it, especially considering that perfection is impossible and that most people, including intelligent ones, don’t generally want to spend so much of their lives studying politics or becoming rationally knowledgeable about a hundred different aspects of the practical requirements of administering a massive society such as ours.
All I am doing here is noting “for all practical purposes” the existential relationship between any particular individual’s historical, cultural and experiential “personhood” and the particular political prejudice that she subscribes to at any particular point in her life. And how new experiences, relationships and sources of knowledge/information might change that.
As opposed to any number of objectivists who argue that, through either God or Reason or Science or an objective understanding of Nature, it is possible for all truly rational and virtuous folks to embody their obligation to behave in one way to the exclusion of all others.
Pertaining to for example an issue like gender roles or the role of government or the conditions necessary to call a war “just”.
As for “the motion of every molecule in a hydraulic fluid” please point to the part here where “identity” and “conflicting goods” are factors to contend with.
Indeed, if we do in fact live in a wholly determined universe, then what really would be the difference between human interactions and the interactions of things that are wholly mechanical? Only our illusion that mindful matter is somehow compatible with autonomy?
Autonomous matter or autonomic matter? Or, as some speculate, a combination of both reflected in an understanding that we have just not derived yet.
Or, rather, that some may well have arrived at while others are yet to be convinced of it.
Okay, with respect to an interaction of your own in which others have challenged your value judgment, note those factors that are entirely necessary in order that all reasonable and virtuous men and women can differentiate the right from the wrong way to behave.
Why were you right, why were they wrong?
Over and over, the same stereotyping of “objectivists” and the same requests. 
And if I write something then the usual response : “what on earth does this mean?”, “what point am I missing?”, “how does this address my post?” and the non-stop cut and paste - your personal bio, your bullet proof analysis of the “objectivist” mind and the “objectivist” threat. 
Again, James:
With respect to abortion [or to any other set of conflicting goods], how would you connect the dots between your reaction to it as a political issue in the society, economy, government forum, the manner in which you construe RM/AO in the philosophy forum and the manner in which you construe the meaning of the Real God in the religion and spirituality forum.
At least Daniel will go there.
Do you know “how to be right”? Do you have the perfectly rational answer?
If so, then connect the dots for us here and let us commence a discussion and debate regarding that which you conclude.
Instead, you insist…
I challenge you to note that exchange.
Note to others:
If you do recall James accomplishing this task, I would very much appreciate your attempt to sum up the points that he raised. Or in providing a link to the exchange.
In other words, after this “brief discussion”, if she doesn’t think like you do, you will then ignore her. Why? Because in being necessarily right about everything, anyone who does not share your own exact frame of mind is, by definition, necessarily wrong.
And that is not like me at all. I always assume that my own arguments here [relating to these relationships] are just subjective/subjunctive intellectual contraptions rooted largely in dasein.
Note to others:
How could bumping into someone who embraces a conflicting moral/political narrative/agenda regarding an issue like abortion have nothing to do with value judgments? The only way this makes sense to me is if RM/AO is in sync with hard determinism. That way even conflicted value judgments precipitating conflicting behaviors would all be in sync with the only possible way in which human interactions can unfold.
Over and again I note that my chief interest here revolves less around grasping the meaning of a particular theoretical/scholastic argument and more in exploring the manner in which those propagating one are able to convey how “for all practical purposes” their conclusion is applicable to actual human interactions that do come into conflict.
That way in illustrating the text it either will or will not make the point easier to understand.
Maybe there are moderators here who just don’t like Kids.
I would never ban them myself. Instead, I prefer to let the Kids make even greater fools of themselves by, well, posting!
In other words, pick one:
____ 
____ =D>
____ :-"
____ 
____ 
____ 
I agree. Which is why I probe the extent to which moral objectivists are then able to demonstrate that their own value judgments are predicated on the sort of evidence that all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to share. As opposed to providing a “theoretical argument” – an “analysis” – constructed by and large out of certain didactic assumptions [intellectual contraptions] that they have concocted “in their head”.
You wouldn’t be around. That brings the argument about abortion down out of the clouds and confronts each and everyone of us with a simple fact: that before we become a philosopher we must first have been conceived; and then have been a zygote, an embryo, a fetus, a new born.
And, in my opinion, it would seem to be inherently problematic to speak of when the unborn becomes a “person”. Given that each and every person that is born must of necessity have been all of those other biological entities that come before their actual birth day.
Yes, and then all of those situated at one or another juncture along the moral/political spectrum insist that only one frame of mind can actually be right. And it is their frame of mind.
And then for each and every faction, that seems to settle it.
Indeed, going all the way back to the pre-Socratics, when has that ever not been the case?
Well, until you come to folks like me.
Isn’t that the general consensus pertaining to folks like Kant, Descartes, Aristotle and Plato?
That, in order to establish morality objectively, there must be a “transcending font” that mere mortals have access to?
That is what I explored above with J. relating to “the interaction between Kant, God, the Kingdom of Ends and morality as Christine Korsgaard encompassed this relationship in her book Creating the Kingdom of Ends.”
How is morality not just a particular construct rooted in particular historical and cultural constructs?
If you confront the rapist what then is the argument that enables one to concur that this behavior might be deemed rational from the perspective of the sociopath but is still necessarily immoral [philosophically] in a world sans God?
With God there is omniscience, which would seem to suggest the knowledge necessary to wholly differentiate good from bad behavior; and then the capacity to make certain that no one who does behave badly ever gets away with it.
Also, omnipotence. So there is no question of the evil-doers not being punished.
Sans God, where is the equivalent of this among mere mortals?
The same for many secular objectivists: Only for God they substitute Reason. Rational behaviors are deemed necessarily virtuous behaviors. Being rational is what makes them so.
Objective morality pertaining to what particular set of conflicting goods? From abortion to capital punishment, from gender roles to the role of government, from sport hunting to animal rights, from gun control to the separation of church and state, from human sexuality to gambling, from social justice to economic equality, from busing to the use of torture, what constitutes being “closer” to objective morality?
Let’s bring folks like Uccisore and Peter Kropotkin into the discussion and see if we can pin this down.
Well, here, discussions revolving around identity, value judgments and political economy are often more along the lines of “I think like this and if you don’t you’re an idiot”.
Okay, let’s put this in context. A context in which the folks from both sides argue that it is their narrative and their narrative alone that comes closer to “objective morality”. In fact, 5 will get you 10 that their narrative has already nailed it.
My point is only this: that we seem to be hard wired by the evolution of life itself to connect the dots between “in my head” and “out in the world”. And that in making these connections we seem predisposed to look for answers into which we can anchor “I”.
Now, with respect to the world of either/or [math, science, nature, logic etc.] the dots connected are applicable to all. But in regard to the world of is/ought, the dots connected seem embedded far more [to me] in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
For the objectivists, it is as much about being certain that one of us must be right as it is which one of us actually is. I merely speculate that this may well have more to do with human psychology than philosophy.
In other words, that conflicting value judgments bring us closer instead to the limitations of philosophy. In part because regarding conflicted human interaction there are not often neat lines to be drawn between our cognitive reactions and our more deep-seated subjunctive reactions. And that’s before we get the parts of the brain ruled more by libidos and instincts and states of mind that are considerably more subconscious and unconscious.
How realistic is it to expect that one day the human species will evolve into Vulcans?
Blood morals. Those that proceed from blood – body, genes, instincts, past, nature, character, inherited potentials, younameit – rather than from some sort of code, as in the case of Apollonian immorality of deontological ethics, or some sort of pleasure principle, as in the case of Dionysian immorality of consequentialism.
Think of virtue ethics and Aristotle.
It’s difficult to understand if you do not accept, and thus do not understand, that our actions are for the most part predetermined.
They are instinctive. They pop up automatically. We merely organize them by saying “no” when they become self-destructive.
Apollonian nihilists cannot function without a code – a pattern of behavior made fully conscious such that people can put it into practice, imitate it, in a linear, routine-like, manner, like a robot, following step by step instructions, with all effort there is consisting in repressing one’s instinct.
The mind defending itself from its instincts by blocking the body-to-mind route.
Dionysian nihilists, on the other hand, cannot contain their instincts within their minds. They must let them prematurely leave. They must expulge them out of their minds. The source of pleasure principle. Whatever allows instincts to escape one’s mind through the mind-to-body route is good. Whatever does not is bad.
The mind defending itself from instincts by shooting them through the mind-to-body route.
In both cases you have this hatred of instinct which makes it difficult for both parties to understand virtue morality.
This distrust, even hatred of instincts according to pre Socratic philosophers derives from a time of behaviors relegated to pure survival, existentialistically speaking. The pre mordial angst, can conceivably originate from such primal time. and applications to modern civilization, with it’s repressions, are visible only in the temporary lifting of instinctual-sexual repression.
This is pretty academic. The object-intentional-subject connection is temporarily lost in primal fear, and the objective becomes merged with the object, during the modern existential crisis.
This is why I fear nihilism, for the same reason Heidegger did, since de-ontologically, only war can cure repression. We are talking of repression of pleasure=good, versus primal fear of the existential object’s conflation. This is obliquely why Freudianism was a minor key trying to sublimate major fears. These fears of existential nihilism, where relationships could not connect the dots between objects, objectives and objectivity, because of the conflation, is the state of pre-Socratic realm. Aristotalism, was basically a way out of despair, and it has failed us. Now, the only way out, is backward, into facing that, which is hidden, accepting it’s freedom, without the need to articulate it.
This is why god’s existence is contingent upon it’s necessary self creation. Once this is accepted, then the nihilistic problem between identity, and values will disappear. Nihilism is remains a signal of a frozen post classical morality issue, founded on this hidden ideal, which needs sustainance.
I’m going to continue to ignore all the discussions that don’t actually involve me if that suits everyone? There seem to be two or three arguments going on here in which I, as it were, don’t have a horse in the race.
Wyld: That is an interesting passage. I don’t know that it supports your earlier post though. In response to your earlier post I would say that morality is not subjective in the least, though our understanding of it may be depending on how we flesh out “subjective”. When we say humans created the concept of “morality” we are being truthful but incomplete. Humans have created several concepts of “morality”, often without realizing they are talking about something different. However, when I use the term “morality” I am referring to the way in which persons ought to be or act, how we ought to live, if indeed there is such a way. That is not a subjective thing, that seems to be precisely the thing we are seeking to grasp about reality and which I, I think, have articulated some features of here.
Iambigious: If you think we cannot come to objectively true conclusions through logical analysis and rational philosophical consideration, then you massively underestimate philosophy.
No, that is not problematic in the least. Yes, I wouldn’t have been born and therefore be around today had the fetus that one might want to consider “me” been aborted. I also wouldn’t have been born if any number of other events had occurred differently prior to my conception. But that they led to me being around today seems completely irrelevant to whether those actions were wrong. Unless you are suggesting that my being around specifically is of huge moral consequence?
Yes, people think their point of view is right. If they didn’t, they would have a different point of view. The fact that people are wrong about the truth says nothing about the truth but, perhaps, something about people.
Yes it is the general consensus that rationality and morality are essentially the same, but I see no reason to accept that as true. Agreement does not necessitate truth.
Again, the argument that it is wrong is the thesis we are discussing.
Why does punishment help us know that things are wrong? Also, if omniscience encompasses the knowledge of what is right or wrong, then there must right and wrong. So, given that we don’t have reason to suspect there are any gods who can help us out, we might as well get on with trying to figure out what that is.
Again, you are assuming there are conflicting goods. I can only come up with one candidate for moral value that seems to fit the bill. If you have others, let us hear them.
I disagree with your categorization of philosophical discussions surrounding ethics. Perhaps you would like to go to an ethics class and listen out for the phrase “I think like this and if you don’t, you’re an idiot”. I suspect it won’t come up.
It is the “seem embedded far more [to me] in dasein” part which I take issue with because when people say “no I have come to this ethical conclusion through reasoned analysis and logical inference from known facts” you reply with “nope, probably you just liked that conclusion better”
No, objectivists need not assert that one of us must be right. We may all be wrong. And, we can make wrong for the fact we could be wrong about objectivism, and that the error theorist may be right. I have no problem admitting that there may not be an objective morality. But, until that is demonstrated to me, I am going to keep working on what that objective morality must be, if it indeed exists at all.
I don’t see any reason why we would need to be Vulcans. I think the human mind is up to the task of doing philosophy even with its limitations.
Magnus: Our actions are not for any part predetermined. They are free in the strong sense of the word. (In other words, bring on the arguments for determinism!)
Even if you own this forum, you cannot argue against predetermination and for freedom without a ground. To use the others argumentative thesis, simply by opposing it and stating an anti-thesis lacks credibility of the kind that would involve a denial of the history of what went down 200 years ago. As a modern modernist it seemsignoring the past signals denial of it’s effects, if not it’s causes.
With that said, please point to themes besides Kantwho you would like to exclude from the conversation, but than a PHD thesis should include all applicable points of view not merely a re-affirmation of views presented.
Since nobody knows what is “determined” or “predetermined” until they carry out an action, the concept is irrelevant to all decisions. One does not know if one is predetermined to kill his unwanted child with a baseball bat or not, until he has killed it or has not killed it. All talk about determinism is an foolish looking back and rationalizing actions as “I had to do that. I had no choice.” It’s for old men and children.
A code of ethics is just a written list used for guidance and education. It’s written down because each rule was thought to work in the past and it may still work. None the less, anyone can go against the code, if he is prepared to endure the punishment that society will heap on him. Everyone is always choosing to act morally or immorally.
Again dubious. Everyone knows what pre-determined or determined means, even before the action is preformed.
In case of children raised in accordance with their parents’ determinations, and their parents’ and so on, before the age of the child’s reason, the chances are far greater that the child will act accordingly to their parents’ determination. That this exists in the social sciences is beyond doubt. This is the whole idea behind the idea that it is incredibly difficult to raise children out of the cycle of poverty. The viscious circle of the welfare recipients reliance on public assistance is well documented generationally. Other genetic senses of determination do occur, but this concept is contesting with the effects of situational determination.
In what other sense of determinism be argued against?
The concept is relevant precisely because predetermined actions arise spontaneously, separately from, though not always in contradiction to, one’s expectations and desires.
Our nervous system is stimulated – flooded with nervous activity – whether we want it or not. And instead of ignoring – repressing – this activity in order to carry out what we want to carry out we would do well to pay attention it.
People who know how to meditate – to keep a bird’s eye on their nervous system – are well aware of the fact that every action is spontaneous and predetermined and that choice merely consists in choosing which action to focus on, to pay attention to, such that there is no repression.
In the case of Apollonian nihilists, there is a kind of clinginess where they focus too much on one action and ignore all others. This they call “choice” because it takes effort to repress all other impulses but is this, this clinginess, really a choice or just a specific type of inability to choose?
Choice is a type of necessity. It is not the opposite of necessity.
The sense that a choice is free rather than necessary is created by the identification with a particular instinct – innate pattern of behavior – that wants to persist. The mind forgets that the identification with it was a necessary event and it ignores every gap in its persistence interpreting it as a temporary and insignificant loss of control.
There is no “free will” in the sense of metaphysical choice that lies beyond necessity. There is only this pattern of behavior we refer to as choice and related ability, the ability to choose, to persist in instinct one has identified with.
Meditation is a detachment from one’s instincts in order to acquire an elevated view of one’s state of instincts from the above. This detachment, this rejection to identify with any one of one’s instincts in particular, is what allows us to see what they really are, namely, predetermined patterns of behavior.
By separating our self from our actions, we get to see that our actions would play out the same way anyways, meaning, we do not determine their content. Their content is predetermined. What we do – the only thing we do – is we organize them or disorganize them and we identify with them or dis-identify with them.
What aspects of yourself, of your body, of what is fired within your nervous system, do you identify with?
That is the relevant question.
Do you identify with the totality of your self? Do you strive to maintain a bird’s eye view over your nervous system? Do you seek to recognize, to register, every instinct sent from your body to your mind and to process it within, rather than to eject it from, your mind before it is converted to action carried out by the body?
Or do you only identify with individual aspects of your self, with a selection of what is fired within your nervous system, ignoring everything else within it? Do you strive to persist in these aspects even at the cost of all other aspects?
The comprehensive, all-embracing, view – bird’s eye view – of one’s nervous system is a form of objectivity that I refer to as personal objectivity. Personal, because it is relative to one’s position, perspective or vantage point. Nietzsche calls it perspectivism.
This is different from impersonal objectivity that is endorsed by Socratic rationalists, among them scientists and other Biguous-ean “objectivists”, who demand a different vantage point than one’s own: an absolute, omniscient, God’s eye view vantage point that produces universal agreement by the virtue of being absolutely, unmistakably, true and straightforward to adopt; the kind, in short, that is ideal but not realistic, for it clearly does not exist in reality.
Most people don’t understand that in the absence of objectivity on impersonal level there still remains objectivity on personal level. Instead, most equate personal with subjective, so they end up becoming only one thing they can think of: personal subjectivists, to use a pleonasm for the purpose of emphasis.
Both subjectivity and impersonal objectivity stem from self-hatred; from hatred of one’s body, one’s instincts, one’s biological heritage; from the difficulty and the inability to maximally utilize, mobilize and organize one’s inherited potentials; from the impossibility to engage one’s natural faculties to the fullest.
Because they are biologically a mess, a mess that cannot be organized, they have no choice but to discard their genetic heritage and start from scratch by either reinventing themselves using their imagination (subjectivity) or by submitting to some external authority, some sort of emperor, some sort of expert, who convinces them using lies that he knows truth in the absolute sense of the word (that would be impersonal objectivity.) In the first case, they create their own lies then submit to them. In the second case, they submit to other people’s opinions.
Not every subjective factor is bad. One must be able to distinguish between subjective factors that are good and subjective factors that are bad. You must not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Instead of rejecting your own self – your biological heritage – because it is faulty, you must take your time to find the precise location of your fault so that you can correct it without destroying the good parts of your self.
Not every change is good. Change that makes you smaller isn’t good.
It’s not enough to simply change, transform, adapt. You must also build, grow, improve.
Why not, or how not?
I believe those passages are highly relevant and do indeed coincide with the points I was making, but I’ll wait until you explain exactly what you mean with “I don’t know that it supports your earlier post”.
“Ought to” comes from “is”, contra Hume. So yes I agree with you that morality is objective. But there is no objectivity without subjectivity, because if you remove “subjects” and their perspectival, interpreting nature and their emergent inter-subjective dynamics then what is left of objectivity?
In fact, subjectivity comes from objectivity as a kind of spin-off, an excess of sorts. Subjects only exist because of how “objectivity” has become localized, limited, perspecrival, which means living, which means finite. My point is very simply no less than to claim that the entire duality between subject and object is a false one, a false conceptual split that does not accurately render the reality of what we are attempting to render by employing those ideas. We need to reverse Husserl’s eidetic reduction here: we need to find what it is about subjects that allows them to “be subjective” with regard to objectivity, which will therefore also point us to precisely how objectivity is able to construct subjects. To this latter point Hegel is very good, and the passages I quoted are highly relevant.
“Ought to be or act” to achieve what? 
Even when designing a vehicle … what a bus “ought to be” is different from what a dune buggy “ought to be”. The purpose determines the appropriate form.
Precisely.
The “ought to” is a function of the “purpose”.
The purpose of code is to preserve memory in an inorganic, technological, memetic, written and otherwise symbolic form.
Code is either useless or harmful if it cannot remind its user, its reader, of something he already knows but has forgotten.
Code is meant to externally stimulate, through word-to-body route, certain genetic memories.
It’s not meant to be a replacement for genetic, organic, memory but a supplement to it.
It’s how genes reproduce themselves through words.
But the opposite is taking place nowadays where code is used as a set of instructions, a map of behavior, to be followed literally, without any connection to the body.
It’s what no-lifers, bloodless zombies, use in order to fill themselves with life. At least in appearance. A dead body does not become alive when you mummify it. It is merely preserved.
For healthy people, code is meant to unclog the blood flow through their veins and arteries, not to replace it.
Whatever is genuine, which means natural, is resistant to precise and extensive codification for the simple reason that it is a product of generations of natural selection and thus of very complex structure.
Code is thus meant to reflect only certain important aspects of one’s life; not everything, not necessarily in detail and not necessarily with high level of exactness.
It’s just a symbol meant to awake some sort of memory.
To be able to express yourself in exact terms is a virtue. But only under the condition that it does not come at the cost of being unable to express yourself creatively.
It’s a also problem when people cannot use lateral thinking in order to identify the meaning of – the memory intended by – the code.
It’s even a bigger problem when they rebel by demanding that everything be literal, obvious, exact, specific, detailed, conscious . . .
It’s a sympom of the hatred of the body, of the difficulty of engaging unconscious faculties – intuition – to determine on one’s own, using one’s personal effort, what is meant by the code.
It is a symptom of tightly-coupled models of reality. Models the components of which are so interdependent with each other that when one component goes down the entire system goes down; when one component is broken the entire system is broken.
Nietzsche called it “will to system”. His writing style, reflecting his thinking style, was opposed to it by being aphoristic, which means, loosely-coupled.
Loose coupling refers to an architectural style where components of a system are independent from other components as much as possible. This makes the system modular: easy to decompose, decouple, take apart, open up. The sub-components can thus be removed, fixed or otherwise changed, then plugged back into the system. Or replaced. It makes the system easy to maintain: fix, modify, update, upgrade, extend. And not only by one person but by many. It enables cooperation. When one component goes down other components remain functional. Faults are easy to identify and resolve. The good, the functional, can be separated from the bad, the malfunctioning. It need not be thrown away with it.
People who are making too many questions, or demanding exactness, are unburdening themselves from responsibility. Their models are tightly-coupled, thus, nearly impossible to adapt. In order to adapt them, they must abandon their models and start from scratch . . . or downgrade them, destroy them, considerably.
Be wary of people demanding every word be defined . . .
Note that there are many different purposes. How do you choose one? Which one of the infinitely many purposes one ought to choose?
His question is general “what is the best way to live?” which includes within itself the question “which purpose to choose?”
You didn’t answer that question.
Aristotle did when he said “to pursue human flourishing” which amounts to my “to pursue strength, power, health, growth” and “to act out one’s character”.