An entirely different look at human morality and ethics.

I’m its creator - ask me anything.

Can you give me a basic definition, theoretical framework, or foundation of it to go on?

:-k

Silhouette, don’t dangle that juicy raw meat in front of me without a single reply. I am genuinely curious about seeing your theory on the subject. Don’t allow my overall cynicism frighten you away. :sunglasses:

I genuinely want to see your elaboration on the subject where we can discuss it even more further. I’m curious to see if we actually agree on some points.

Just for the record…

Yes, no doubt about it, there are nihilists out there who really do claim that “all of morality and human ethics is an elaborate fiction of make believe where it is a construct signifying nothing at all.”

You know, whatever that means!

But this particular nihilist merely suggests that “here and now” it seems reasonable to him that human morality is more rather than less a historical, cultural and experiential construct, intertwined in an enormously complex interaction of genes and memes evolving existentially over time out in a particular world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change.

Sound familiar? Well, that’s because, of late, I haven’t come up with a better way to put it.

Morality/ethics is a fiction [in my view] only when it is defined and defended essentially by being anchored to one or another objectivist font: God, Reason, deontology, political ideology, enlightenment, nature etc.

Basically, ethics is just the technical term that serious philosophers have come to assign to the fact that, in any human community, there must be rules of behavior. Why? Because in any human community, wants and needs [either in the form of ends or means] often come into conflict. Brutally at times.

I merely suggest in turn that one way in which to understand these interactions is by way of the manner in which I construe human relationships here in my signature threads. Focusing the beam on the existential interaction between identity, conflicting goods and political power given a particular context.

Which I am always willing to let the objectivists among us choose.

But, instead, by and large, they prefer “general description” “intellectual contraptions” like this:

I’m sorry, but…

What On Earth Does This Mean?

Let him choose a context involving well known human behaviors that often come into conflict over value judgments and react to it given the components of his own moral philosophy. Then I will react to that given the components of my own moral philosophy.

Which revolves basically around the distinction I make between what can be known about reality in the either/or world and what [possibly] cannot be known about it in the is/ought world.

And that revolves around the assumption I [and others] make that “in the absence of God, all things are permitted”.

Calm your nips, I was thinking about the best way to respond to your curiosity. I resolved to add to what I’ve already said with some applications to various common philosophical concepts and stances:

This is the foundation behind the theortical framework of Experientialism, as I typed out and you quoted just before you asked about it…

But I take it that since you’re still asking about a definition even after that, you want more.

Any definition I give you will be a reformulation of the above quote:
Experientialism derives the distinction between Truth and utility from the fact that experience has no gaps, and is therefore continuous.
It describes the departure from Continuous Experience (Truth) to discrete experiences (utility) by means of arbitrary insertions of gaps in experience to distinguish concepts and thus relate them back to one another in a way that approximates their origin. It is only in such a way that knowledge can be formed about what presents itself as existence, and without knowledge there is nothing useful to be said about the Truth. Yet with knowledge, Experientialism highlights a fundamental departure from the absolute, necessarily requiring that knowledge about experience is relative and transitive. “There is truth” is tautologous and tells us nothing about truth, for which we require its dissection into something else, reassembled as a means to refer to the Truth. This is the foundation of “meaning” as only relatively true to Truth.
It is in such a way that knowledge is constructed in either better or worse ways, dependent on the nature of how experience is broken down into concepts and how well they are modelled as interacting with one another.

Experientialism is thus a synthesis of Existentialism and Essentialism, in that existence is essence, rather than one preceding the other - as Continuous Experience. The specific nature of the existence or essence of Continuous Experience is that which is subsequently deconstructed and reconstructed from it in terms of discrete experiences: an amalgamation of concepts and conceptual models.
Epistemology is thereby a matter of Pragmatism where truth is an asymptote, towards which the hyperbola of knowledge may approach or depart.
Ontology is a matter of how concepts and conceptual models are formulated, and epistemologically there is no absolutely True or False way to do this, only relatively better or worse ways.
Morality and Ethics are therefore formulations of concepts and conceptual models that describe better or worse ways of achieving certain values according to what values are applied to the process of formulating concepts and conceptual models in the first place.
Experience itself is also a synthesis of Materialism and Idealism. Matter and idea are concepts derived from experience, and based on experience. Matter is an idea and ideas can be reduced to matter circularly ad infinitum. However both require a more fundamental substance to be considered in either way, whereas experience is either there whether you like it or not, or it is not in which case there is no foundation to existence in the first place.
Postmodernism and Nihilism are resolved by this fundamental basis of Continuous Experience, which is either existent, or if it didn’t exist there could be nothing said at all about anything in any way. Assuming experience is there, you can say something about its fundamental continuity only in terms of discrete experience, only through this act can Epistemology arise, meaning there is both no objective Epistemology or fundamental Modernist knowledge to found anything, only Continuous Experience, which is not “nothing” even though no knowledge objectively and necessarily arises from it in itself, and it is a basis against which to adjudicate the objective privilege of concepts and conceptual models.

Calm your nips. :laughing: :sunglasses: You do have a sense of humor after all. :wink:

What do you think of my expression of the competition of values, truths, beliefs, morals, and ethics in the acquisition of power or influence with everything you summarized above?

Yes, truth is all a matter of applied utility and while truth is acquired through experiences as you adequately described above that is irrelevant, the only relevance of truth concerning utility or experiences is that of enforcement. Truth is nothing or merely an individual subjective manifestation without enforcement, truth only becomes objective when the objective of one’s own opinions are enforced upon others.

Truth, morality, ethics, and values has everything to do with power or influence to enforce upon others.

For me morality and ethics is nothing more than a giant stick or club utilized to influence society along with the rest of civilization. There can be no discussion of morality or ethics without discussing enforcement, coercion, and inflicting punishment.

I know you probably find much distaste in all of that with your egalitarian sensibilities but we definitely do agree upon things on the matter of utility. I’m sure you think much differently on these issues than I do.

I try to hide it on here as best as possible. Philosophy is fo’ serious yo.

The ultimate authority of how true your concepts and conceptual models are is Continuous Experience - I imagine this is where the narrative behind God and gods originated. Making something into a story has always been the best medium for an engaging transference of ideas (on concepts and conceptual models). The dry and expansive way that I’m interested in doesn’t appeal to your average jane or joe. The empirical demands of science are no different to the comparison of concepts and conceptual models with Continuous Experience, and the authority of God or gods is just a more primitive version of the same realisation that only now I am formulating into a coherent philosophy known as Experientialism. It’s all the same thing - the reverence of nature by Pagans is no different either.

On an objective level, an autocrat can have as much political, economic and military power as they like - think North Korea - and still if they claim a spade is not a spade, there will be some degree of cognitive dissonance experienced by the audience to such a claim. There will be some desire to escape. The best dictators are going to be those who revere the authority of Continuous Experience i.e. the way things actually are - perhaps even championing them as surrogates or even claiming to be them (though the difficulties in the latter are quite obvious). “Reality” is the ultimate arbiter of truth, and man is the measure of all useful knowledge about said truth. This is the function of free societies - to delegate truth to plural decentralised sources, from which a better approximation to Truth emerges than is risked by an autocrat who might be just another Kim Jong-il.

It’s a good thing to have competition of values, “truths”, beliefs, morals and ethics - this is why free speech is so important. Opening up interpretations to the intellectual market of people’s crazy ideas allows the unprecedented emergence of new improved concepts and conceptual models (as well as shitty un-thought-out bullshit that tries to shout as loud as it can to validate the value of the author in line with their own perceptions of their own value). Bad ideas are easy enough to rebuke with knowledge of currently superior concepts and their models, but it’s never easy to get dissenters to admit the better truth when they have their own agenda (the Dunning-Kruger effect).

On the other hand it’s perfectly possible to get a majority on the side of a seemingly good idea for as long as that idea holds up, even if there are far better ideas out there. These days, modern popular ideas are never so bad that we instantly annihilate ourselves, but people seem to like to side with the winning team more than they want to risk siding with what would be a far superior team. Identity by association and reputation, I guess, in the absense of the ability to achieve personal success, some choose to live vicariously through another. But deferring to as large a number of scientists as possible is the best way.