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I’ve already explained why Math is subjective, because it is language, but how it refers to the objective, often. That Math exists or is used is an objective fact, mathematical equations can be Empirically experienced. I’ve also determined that the goal of scientific inquiry is to determine what is objectively true, so you’re just repeating what I said there.

The subjectivity, or lack thereof, of Math and Science have nothing to do with reasons.

I’m not going to answer all of those questions in the second paragraph as they should really be reserved for different threads. Besides, I would just be answering with reasons which would lead to more questions. I agree that my reasons are certainly refutable, but I’m not sure that a morally based reason can strictly be, “Wrong,” certainly some are more unusual than others…

I will answer to the negative emotional impact. It is a matter of my opinion, unless I know that an individual has a decent enough relationship with his family. He may have no family alive. His family may hate him. Unless I know him, then I don’t really know.

beg the question - to use an argument that assumes as proved the very thing one is trying to prove

Thank you. If Only_Humean was wondering, that should show him.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1S8Wqnvuao[/youtube]

I think this thread is pretty much done. I wouldn’t say I’m totally dusting off my hands, after a job well-done… but something close to that. A few honorable mentions are worth making. Dan~, for one, was a beacon of reasonableness when reasonableness came at a premium, and the dark mist of obscurantism overhung ILP. JSSaint made some nice comments. Ambigui asked the right questions—it’s just a matter now of how badly he wants to be the King. I have confidence, regardless. If there was a “most improved” award, it’d go to phyllo. Big progress there… asking the tough questions. Pav and Faust were like Bert and Ernie… siding with the contract business, citing each other’s refuted posts as refutation of other’s. Everybody knows how the contract business ended up. You can draw up the most ridiculous contract imaginable, and the contract will still be ridiculous… it doesn’t justify or underwrite anything to do with morality, but is only worthy if it captures what has to do with morality itself. Most people here are consequentialists now, I think, broadly speaking. Ambigui gets it now. And that’s pretty much it. Good night and good luck.

I knew we were bound to agree on something.

Yes, but, again, Socrates and the philosophic “method” you employ here has a transcending Truth that one can rely on outside the cave. Or however this is understood philosophically by realists. You ask enough questions and eventually you reach a mythical formal morality and the merely existential points of view rooted in dasein become…inadequate?

But all I propose here are particular worlds understood by particular daseins. And particular daseins have reasons to embrace capitalism and reasons to eschew it. And, with no equivalent of the Platonic entity able to parcel out more Formal truths down here “on earth”, we are forced to rely on the extent to which we have come to believe our own existential prejudices reflect a “greater” good.

You have no God though. So, instead, you must reconstruct objectivity out of Reason. But the variables here are so complex [think “mind” alone!] there are any number of ways to define the words used in the analysis to make this “true”.

And then around and around we go speculating as to whether the meaning you have ascribed to them [producing, tautologically, a particular sequence of ideas deemed “logical”] is the meaning everyone should assign them—commensurable, of course, with how we each then relate this to “universality”.

Then we have to reconfigure these words so that somehow they are – theoretically? – in alignment with what we construe to be true empirically about the world around us. And “I” in it.

Then one day we are all dead and gone and the next generation takes up this seemingly Sisyphusian task.

Are we dismissed, your majesty?

You’re proposing scientific measures of morality in terms of neurological activity, not me. I think the project’s far wide of the mark.

So you’re giving up on this line? As you wish.

I’m not begging any question. I said the statement is not a moral one, you bring in prudence, I say it’s not prudential either. Whether they’re the same or not.

It seems you’re not interested in following the arguments, or maybe that there are too many going on in the thread and you’re confusing my points with others’. In any case, it’s a good time to let it rest.

Give me a single reason to think it’s off the mark. That’s what I’ve been asking you for, and you haven’t given a single one. Let’s be honest, whatever points you brought up earlier have been dealth with in such a way that you are now making yourself look to me like the Black Knight blocking the path forward without your arms and legs.

What line? Clearly morality is not context independent, as we both have agreed. Do you now want to give me a reason to think I should have to defend some deontological point?

Then explain what kind of ‘ought’ it is. Why should I have to help you explain yourself when I haven’t an idea what you’re referring to…?

Many years ago I read a book by [I believe] Michael Parenti. He [or whoever it was] bifurcated the world intellectually into two kinds of thinkers—those who practice “the politics of conviction” and those who practice “the politics of convenience”.

The conviction folks construed the world of human interaction as reflecting either good or bad behavior. You did the right thing or you did the wrong thing. Sometimes this was predicated on theological renditions of one or another God, sometimes on secular and philosophical renditions of one or another Reason. Either way they were driven by a doctrinaire commitment to The Objective Truth.

More often than not, their own.

But, even more often than that, they rationalized a vast assortment of means in order to achieve the particular “kingdom of ends” they fancied.

The convenience folks, on the other hand, eschewed these dogmatic, catechismic cinder blocks and, instead, embraced pragmatism [or one or another rendering of Bismark’s “realpolitik”].

Indeed, sometimes with the best of intentions as enlightened Humanists.

Others, however, represented themselves as purveyors of moral or political or philosophical conviction but actually strove to mold and manipulate those around them in an endless pursuit of what they construed to be their own selfish, Machiaveillian interests.

These Bilderberg types [exemplified by, say, Henry Kissinger or the government in China] are the most powerful people in the world. They own and they operate the global ecxonomy.

And that is the way the world works today.

Or so it seems to me.

In my own estimation – and that is all it is, my own opinion – this translates as:

“Give me a single reason that I will agree with to think it’s off the mark. That’s what I’ve been asking you for, and you haven’t given me a single one that I agreed with. Let’s be honest, whatever points you brought up earlier I have already dealth with objectively such that you are now making yourself look to me like the Black Knight blocking the path forward without your arms and legs.”

So then every single context has its own objective reality? And it is just that, regarding some contexts, it is harder to figure out what this is because they are more complex?

Is that your argument?

Sure.

And I have to agree with this or I am wrong?

It is possible to deny reality. If you disagree with that statement, then you disagree with me. Not just in the science case, but in the normative case as well.

Look at the dog, for instance. Ought that culture to invite animal abuse? The answer is discovered by investigating the actual world. You can get your reasons just by looking at the actual dog… from the world itself.

Someone might disagree… and claim to be a dasein and other bullshit. He is denying reality just as if he claimed he was the King of France, or that God made the world in 7 literal days.

Wait, so you can’t think of a way to scientifically measure morality yet claim that it can be done, and the burden of proof is then on me to show you that it’s not possible at all? That’s not how it works. You’re making the claim for objective existence, it’s your burden. Just like the burden of proof is on the theist to prove the existence of God, or on the physicist to prove the existence of new particles.

So, my single reason, as requested, would be that the best criteria you could come up with so far barely took any effort to contradict. What more reason would you like not to believe in the existence of something?

What line? Clearly morality is not context independent, as we both have agreed. Do you now want to give me a reason to think I should have to defend some deontological point?
[/quote]
You’re… not following this discussion at all, are you? Let’s drop it, then.

It’s a purely emotive expression. It may be sympathy with the family of the baby, for instance. Now your turn: in what way is it possibly normative? What prudential/moral lessons can we learn from something completely out of our control?

I don’t know where this comment comes from. Gauging the consequences of actions is often easy. It’s often obvious. We use second order concepts to characterize it. There’s no complex mathmatical or scientific technique needed. It’s a way of approaching moral problems. I’m not doing a scientific investigation, I’m doing a conceptual one. And if you are denying that sometimes people fare worse, and sometimes people fare better, then you’re insane. If you have a problem with characterizing ‘faring better’ and ‘faring worse’ with pleasure and pain, then propose something it leaves out. That’s the question I asked you. Get it straight.

What are you denying the existence of? Suffering? Pain? What?

It would be better for the baby not to be horribly deformed. It ought not have been that way. No one is to blame. But obviously some ‘oughts’ have nothing to do with blame. And no one is to be praised, but obviously some ‘oughts’ have nothing to do with praise. This is clear.

You can fill in the blanks yourself with the opium drip example, can’t you? It leaves out everything separating people on an opium drip from people living good lives. If you think there’s objective stuff there, feel free to raise it.

Suffering and flourishing as single things. Certainly as measurable things, true for all people everywhere in the way that biology and physics are.

So it’s a non-moral ought, then? Because you seem to have been arguing against Faust when he said that.

I would never deny the reality that “Mary had an abortion” if in fact Mary had an abortion.

But you want to insist that either “Mary’s abortion is moral” or “Mary’s abortion is immoral” is an expression of reality too.

Which one? Well, it’s hard to say for now, you note, because abortion as a “normative issue” is complex.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this. Someday it may well be established “scientifically” that it is in fact one or the other. In reality.

You’ve always got me there and then. Just not here and now.

But each individual dasein lives in a particular world and views it from a particular point of view. And while you can demonstrate that “in reality” John abused Rex, you can’t demonstrate that this abuse is necessarily wrong—no matter how many people insist it is.

All John need do is embrace “self-gratification” as a philosophy of life and then hate dogs.

Instead, you need a transcending point of view in order to include normative values in the mix with things that are “in reality” true for all of us.

Or so it seems to me.

You say:

But this is only bullshit because you tell me it is. Because you believe it is. You haven’t proven it however. Not beyond that. Not scientifically. At least I recognize that others are able to point to my belief that it is not bullshit as “true” only because I believe it is not bullshit.

And someone claiming here and now to be the King of France [the France] is patently absurd. And that is because “in reality” there is no king of France here and now. Is there?

But a God creating the world literally in 7 days takes us to discussions about the existence of existence itself. And who among us has a fucking clue as to how that all began. Here, even science is dealing with things it doesn’t even know it doesn’t even know yet.

In my view, you cannot tolerate living in a world without an objective morality. As Peter Singer suggested of Derek Parfit:

Parfit’s real interest is in combating subjectivism and nihilism. Unless he can show that objectivism is true, he believes, nothing matters.

Well, of course, nihilism or no, things matter to us. But some folks – psychologically – seem compelled to embrace the idea that they must matter. And they include in this a belief that their own moral values must matter because they are true “in reality”. And then they go around and around in a circle.

But in a world that is essentially meaningless and absurd – a world that ends for each of us one by one in oblivion – what does it really mean to speak of things – of anything really – that must matter? Nothing matters to you when “you” are dust.

But, truly: A part of me would love to be convinced otherwise. So, please, by all means, don’t ever stop trying to.

This is a common objection, and in my opinion, not a very thoughtful one. Are you suggesting that there is a drug that can give you pleasure while not numbing yourself to all kinds of ways of getting pleasure, like intellectual pursuits, creative achievements, and so on? Even the pleasure of overcoming obstacles? Ultimately, the question is yours. You are the person denying all kinds of things… why don’t you tell me what’s lost? It’s a simple question. I’m not the one claiming to know what it is: you are. Answer it.

And lastly, what is with you just begging questions and so on? It’s this, and it’s the difference between prudential oughts and moral oughts… you keep making assumptions, and never saying a word about them… even after being asked like 5 times. I’m tired of it.

At what point did I say that suffering and flourishing were true for all people in the way biology and physics are? I’ve explicitly denied the notion that there are universals in ethics. You’ve said before (insultingly) that I don’t seem to follow the thread. Is that hypocrisy again?

A non-moral ought? Listen, every time you imply that something could be a moral ought but not a prudential one, or a prudential one but not a moral one, you are begging the question. And the notion that there’s some emotive ‘ought’ separate from both is utterly nonsensical. The baby ought not have suffered. If you think I should call it either moral or prudential THEN EXPLAIN THE FUCKING DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM!!! …So that I know which to call it.

Ahem.

Yes you can. You can demonstrate that it is wrong (in reality) with exactly as much certainty as you can decide that you are not the King of France. There is not the slightest difference. Someone can hate dogs and like kicking them. And likewise, someone can think they are the present King of France.

How is this even the slightest problem for me?