How would one know that morals are part of the substance of the world and what, in particular, the world commands?
The point Chester is making: because God told us.
A seriously good question to ask. =D>
I’d make an exception for Hume. I think his extreme kind of scepticism (the problems of induction and causality) has never been adequately refuted by subsequent philosophers. All the others have been argued “through” by subsequent generations; Hume seems to have been argued “around”.
1st off, is, is nothing like ought.
Is, is descriptive, this is how the world is, I’m fat, you’re ugly.
Ought, ought is prescriptive, this is how the ought to be, I ought to be skinny, you ought to be beautiful.
Ises, are mental reflections of how the world works.
Oughts, are mental projections of how the world ought to work.
Ises, are apparent/evident in the world and objective (input).
Oughts are nowhere apparent/evident in the world, they are expressions of our wants and needs, hopes and dreams and subjective (output).
Ises are an acknowledgement of the world.
Oughts seek to change the world, or keep the world from changing, they’re expressions of our will and often our imagination.
Ought = an explicit order
The world ought to be less violent! = I command the world to be less violent!
The same would have been said (and very probably was) about Newton, 200 years ago.
If you can’t think PAST those people, then you aren’t thinking at all.
You may not be able to deduce an ought from an is,
but my question would be, from what then?
The Bible? The Koran? Telepathic Aliens? Reading tea leaves? no wait, that’s an is
Even morality as commanded in the Bible reduces to an is - it is a fact that some people claim it as moral authority.
I don’t miss the point so much as bend it towards something I feel is [perhaps] more relevant to…the human condition?
For example, the misuse of the word reality.
Newton is as much at a loss here as all the others in proposing a more enlightened distinction between the way world is in reality and the way the world ought to be in reality. And it is something physicists never really consider with respect to the relationships they probe.
Some things are real for all of us. And some things only appear to be real from a point of view.
Nietzsche argued Hume away… Give me a cuple of hours and I’ll produce the relevant aphorism.
It would be a faith to believe that such a situation exists…it would also be a faith to assume such a situation doesn’t. It all comes down to whether you believe in God or not.
I think that there is a very good chance that God exists, and as belief in His existence brings many benefits, then why not favour belief in Him rather than disbelief in Him?
The argument between differing descriptions of God, and which is correct, is simply settled on outcome (ie, which society is the best to live in).
Newtonian physics is still valid and still in common use. It just has flaws at a certain scale.
The problem with Nietzsche is that if you take a few more hours you’ll find an aphorism to refute the first aphorism.
You’re just trying to sneak your ol’ buddy Pascal in by the back door.
From Rationality.
If you are not doing what you do, choosing what to do, based on rationality, then there is no option but that you are doing so IRrationally.
That is the point.
Move PAST where they WERE and get to he details of greater accuracy, not quibbling over which of them was better.
REality doesn’t give a tinkers damn about WHO said what.
Good point in case.
Hell I have always seen Hume and Kant as merely beginners. Geez, who couldn’t think past their beginnings. And that is no shame on them. They had to start somewhere. But it is embarrassing to see so damn many people worshiping them as thought they were “the Saviors”. It’s just non-sense.
Well, I think you have to recognize that at the time these guys lived, some of their opinions could easily have got them jailed or executed.
So we do “owe” them.
http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/GeneologyofMorals.pdf
The book is The Genealogy of Morals. This is the Kaufmann translation. The relevant aphorisms (1 and 2) are on pages 51-53 of the .pdf file.
1
– These English psychologists, who have to be thanked for having made
the only attempts so far to write a history of the emergence of morality, –
provide us with a small riddle in the form of themselves; in fact, I admit
that as living riddles they have a significant advantage over their books –
they are actually interesting! These English psychologists – just what do
they want? You always find them at the same task, whether they want to or
not, pushing the partie honteuse of our inner world to the foreground, and
looking for what is really effective, guiding and decisive for our development
where man’s intellectual pride would least wish to find it (for
example, in the vis inertiae of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and
random coupling and mechanism of ideas, or in something purely passive,
automatic, reflexive, molecular and thoroughly stupid) – what is it that
actually drives these psychologists in precisely this direction all the time?
Is it a secret, malicious, mean instinct to belittle humans, which it might
well not admit to itself? Or perhaps a pessimistic suspicion, the mistrust
of disillusioned, surly idealists who have turned poisonous and green? Or
a certain subterranean animosity and rancune towards Christianity (and
Plato), which has perhaps not even passed the threshold of consciousness?
Or even a lewd taste for the strange, for the painful paradox, for the
dubious and nonsensical in life? Or finally – a bit of everything, a bit of
meanness, a bit of gloominess, a bit of anti-Christianity, a bit of a thrill and
need for pepper? . . . But people tell me that they are just old, cold, boring
frogs crawling round men and hopping into them as if they were in their
element, namely a swamp. I am resistant to hearing this and, indeed, I do
not believe it; and if it is permissible to wish where it is impossible to know,
I sincerely hope that the reverse is true, – that these analysts holding a
microscope to the soul are actually brave, generous and proud animals,
who know how to control their own pleasure and pain and have been
taught to sacrifice desirability to truth, every truth, even a plain, bitter,
ugly, foul, unchristian, immoral truth . . . Because there are such truths. –
2
So you have to respect the good spirits which preside in these historians
of morality! But it is unfortunately a fact that historical spirit itself is
lacking in them, they have been left in the lurch by all the good spirits of
history itself ! As is now established philosophical practice, they all think
in a way that is essentially unhistorical; this can’t be doubted. The idiocy
of their moral genealogy is revealed at the outset when it is a question
of conveying the descent of the concept and judgment of ‘good’.
‘Originally’ – they decree – ‘unegoistic acts were praised and called good
by their recipients, in other words, by the people to whom they were
useful; later, everyone forgot the origin of the praise and because such acts
had always been habitually praised as good, people also began to experience
them as good – as if they were something good as such’. We can see
at once: this first deduction contains all the typical traits of idiosyncratic
English psychologists, – we have ‘usefulness’, ‘forgetting’, ‘habit’ and
finally ‘error’, all as the basis of a respect for values of which the higher
man has hitherto been proud, as though it were a sort of general privilege
of mankind. This pride must be humbled, this valuation devalued: has that
been achieved? . . . Now for me, it is obvious that the real breedingground
for the concept ‘good’ has been sought and located in the wrong
place by this theory: the judgment ‘good’ does not emanate from those to
whom goodness is shown! Instead it has been ‘the good’ themselves,
meaning the noble, the mighty, the high-placed and the high-minded,
who saw and judged themselves and their actions as good, I mean firstrate,
in contrast to everything lowly, low-minded, common and plebeian.
It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to
create values and give these values names: usefulness was none of their
concern! The standpoint of usefulness is as alien and inappropriate as it
can be to such a heated eruption of the highest rank-ordering and rankdefining
value judgments: this is the point where feeling reaches the
opposite of the low temperatures needed for any calculation of prudence
or reckoning of usefulness, – and not just for once, for one exceptional
moment, but permanently. The pathos of nobility and distance, as I said,
the continuing and predominant feeling of complete and fundamental
superiority of a higher ruling kind in relation to a lower kind, to those
‘below’ – that is the origin of the antithesis ‘good’ and ‘bad’. (The
seigneurial privilege of giving names even allows us to conceive of the
origin of language itself as a manifestation of the power of the rulers: they
say ‘this is so and so’, they set their seal on everything and every occurrence
with a sound and thereby take possession of it, as it were). It is
because of this origin that from the outset, the word ‘good’ is absolutely
not necessarily attached to ‘unegoistic’ actions: as the superstition of these
moral genealogists would have it. On the contrary, it is only with a decline
of aristocratic value judgments that this whole antithesis between ‘egoistic’
and ‘unegoistic’ forces itself more and more on man’s conscience, – it
is, to use my language, the herd instinct which, with that, finally gets its
word in (and makes words). And even then it takes long enough for this
instinct to become sufficiently dominant for the valuation of moral values
to become enmeshed and embedded in the antithesis (as is the case in contemporary
Europe, for example: the prejudice which takes ‘moral’,
‘unegoistic’ and ‘désintéressé as equivalent terms already rules with the
power of a ‘fixed idea’ and mental illness).
Lessee it then!
From the basic, fundamental reality of human interaction. When people interact they do so from a point of view that is never entirely the same as any other. We all have our own deep-seated wants, needs and desires. And they revolve around production and reproduction.
But there are any number of ways in which any particular human community can be ordered to accomplish this. But one thing we know for sure: there are always going to be lots and lots and lots of conflicts regarding which is the best way.
Look around the globe and you can describe any number of contrasting ways in which to sustain human life. And these have been evolving historically now for centuries.
So, which way is the most rational? the most ethical?
In my view, we don’t know because [possibly] we can’t know. There is no epistemological rosetta stone in a world teeming with “conflicting goods”.
Wait… was that an absolute “up there” truth I just heard you claim!?