back to the beginning: morality

[iambiguous]

Was Wittgenstein Wrong on Ethics?
Author: STUART W. MIRSKY
at the Serious Philosophy website

If, for Hume and his successors, being part of meaningful discourse is precluded because value assertions merely mask feelings of approval or disapproval, Wittgenstein seems to add another exclusion from intelligibility here, when such approval/disapproval feelings involve encounters with the inexpressibility, the mysteriousness of the universe in which we stand.

Come on, isn’t that really just another way of echoing my own claim that the moral and political value judgments of infinitesimally insignificant mere mortals on this infinitesimal insignificant rock are utterly swallowed whole by whatever the gap is between “I” here and now and “all there is”? Hell, even the either/or world is awash in any number of what must be staggering gaps ensnared in Rummy’s Rule.

Though, sure, the moral and political and spiritual objectivists among us will be the first to simply shrug that off. It’s bad enough they can’t demonstrate that their own value judgments must prevail here on planet Earth, let alone how pitifully irrelevant they must be in a universe filled with billions of galaxies and trillions of stars and god knows how many other intelligent life forms that might be far, far more advanced than ours.

Fuck that, they insist. it’s still “one of us”. Even against the Vulcans out there. Or the Yodas?

In the case of his own experiences, and assuming that others feel similarly about their own “absolutes,” ethical discourse appears for Wittgenstein to have the character of being important in some sense, even while still being linguistically inapt because of conceptual impoverishment. Such “absolutes,” he apparently allows, have importance in other ways and, in this, he echoes his earlier assertions about the Tractatus, that that book was finally about the ethical.

Right, the ethical as an intellectual contraption. Akin to the argument that if God does not exist we still have to invent Him. Same with deontology. Sans God there may be no way in which to demonstrate “epistemologically”, how all men and women are obligated to behave, but we have to go along with something so that might makes right and the “law of the jungle” don’t prevail.

Fortunately, with the historical advent of capitalism “democracy and the rule of law” were able to split the different. Economic wealth would beget political power such that the ruling class would prevail on most m eat and potato issues [at home and abroad] but different factions would concur that through “moderation, negotiation and compromise” there would be a lot of wiggle room to meet each other half way. And then in regard to “social issues” even more in the way of moderation negotiation and compromise could be sustained.

[iambiguous]

Note to Satyr.

This is what is left of the philosophy board here at ILP.

Now, if you [or Wendy] are willing to compare and contrast your own moral philosophy with mine, given a particular conflicting good, given a particular context, let’s commence an intelligent and civil exchange right now.

But if instead the whole point is to spew out these ridiculous “gotcha!” posts, in which you make it all about me, trust me, I’ve already got a whole passel of Stooges here.

For that take it to Rant.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

This is what you did to this forum…you and a few crazies, which were protected from people like me and they roamed free spewing crap with impunity…without fearing ridicule.

You are my evidence of what happens when Mary is protected from the negative consequences of her judgements and bad choices…you.
you are my evidence as to why abortion is sometimes necessary in a world where Mary Land is protected from the severity of her poor judgments.
Thank you for everything you’ve unintentionally done for me and my forum.

Genes to Memes
Memetic natural selection occurs via discourse…and instead of death, or denial of procreation a meme suffers ridicule and being set aside as bullshyte…like your moral nihilism.

[iambiguous]

@Lorikeet

This is what you did to this forum…you and a few crazies, which were protected from people like me and they roamed free spewing crap with impunity…without fearing ridicule.

You are my evidence of what happens when Mary is protected from the negative consequences of her judgments and bad choices…you.
Thank you for everything you’ve unintentionally done for me and my forum.

Genes to Memes
Memetic natural selection occurs via discourse…and instead of death, or denial of procreation a meme suffers ridicule and being set aside as bullshyte…like your moral nihilism.

Again, take this sort of intellectual garbage to Rant. I will be more than willing to make a further fool out of you there if it is all basically about huffing and puffing.

And how about this…

I’ll take my chances over at Know Thyself and not be protected from you in the agora. All you have to do is to “reappear” me there and not confront me with this every time I go there:

You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum

I will personally invite everyone here at ILP to follow our exchanges there.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

There’s the “huffing and puffing”
Next…the spiel on “I was born a maggot of a two-bit whore…”
Then
“Look what I reduced him to”.
Then “Dasein as I’ve misconstrued it….”
Same shit, over and over.

No garbage in my forum. We like the place clean.
No garbage, no garbage peddlers, no garbage consumers.
No filth, in general.
How butt hurt you are over it, though.
Does it mean that much to you?

Why don’t you continue bashing me, as you’ve already done, by selectively sampling my words and then putting words in my mouth to slander me, like a woman.
I want you to…Do you know how many new members you gave me?
Choice ones, as well.
Morsels you pushed away…by attacking me in the way you did.
You’ve ben my greatest asset here…why would I want you there?
What would change if I allowed you into KTS, imbecile?
You would leave me garbage to clean up for months, afterward.
For months I tolerated your shit.

You made this place what it is.
Responsibility…free-will. Yours.
You and others, but you are a major part in the last year or so.
YOU.

No philosophy…only anti-philoshy… constant negating, undermining…and no alternative, just negation.
Do you offer a better alternative to what you attempt to destroy?
No…your mission to change the wold is to undermine its confidence until it surrenders.
Your sig describes you…you.

Note to others
You know its true.
I’ve watched many of you face this mountain of garbage…and to no avail.
What came of it?
Lost months…you’ll never get back.
He wasted your time with his feminine methods of “argumentation” - he wore you down thinking you would fall into his trap - no insult to women, but they know how they argue and what methods they use to get under men’s skin.
Most females here are more masculine…so there’s that. This heap of garbage is more feminine than many of the girls here.
Ha!

[iambiguous]

@Lorikeet

There’s the “huffing and puffing”
Next…the spiel on “I was born a maggot of a two-bit whore…”
Then
“Look what I reduced him to”.
Then “Dasein as I’ve misconstrued it….”
Same shit, over and over.

No garbage in my forum. We like the place clean.
No garbage, no garbage peddlers, no garbage consumers.
No filth, in general.
How butt hurt you are over it, though.
Does it mean that much to you?

Why don’t you continue bashing me, as you’ve already done, by selectively sampling my words and then putting words in my mouth to slander me, like a woman.
I want you to…Do you know how many new members you gave me?
Choice ones, as well.
Morsels you pushed away…by attacking me in the way you did.
You’ve ben my greatest asset here…why would I want you there?
What would change if I allowed you into KTS, imbecile?
You would leave me garbage to clean up for months, afterward.
For months I tolerated your shit.

You made this place what it is.
Responsibility…free-will. Yours.
You and others, but you are a major part in the last year or so.
YOU.

No philosophy…only anti-philoshy… constant negating, undermining…and no alternative, just negation.
Do you offer a better alternative to what you attempt to destroy?
No…your mission to change the wold is to undermine its confidence until it surrenders.
Your sig describes you…you.

Note to others
You know its true.
I’ve watched many of you face this mountain of garbage…and to no avail.
What came of it?
Lost months…you’ll never get back.
He wasted your time with his feminine methods of “argumentation” - he wore you down thinking you would fall into his trap - no insult to women, but they know how they argue and what methods they use to get under men’s skin.
Most females here are more masculine…so there’s that. This heap of garbage is more feminine than many of the girls here.
Ha!

Again, he comes here and posts crap like this…on purpose!!

No shame whatsoever…in the philosophy forum!!!

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Look what I’ve reduced him to.
For shame.

And it was so easy.

Unless I’m wrong…of course.

[iambiguous]

@Lorikeet

Look what I’ve reduced him to.
For shame.

And it was so easy.

Unless I’m wrong…of course.

Again, he can’t even come up with his own “comeback” lines!! He has to continue to ineptly mimic mine.

And, if anything is objectively immoral in a philosophy forum – where thinking on your feet is actually valued – it’s that. =D>

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Does this even make sense?

Note to Others
No really…someone help me.

[iambiguous]

@Lorikeet

Does this even make sense?

Note to Others
No really…someone help me.

So, what does he do? The same thing!!!

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Is this for real?
He’s collapsing before our eyes.

Note to Others
No really…

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

One last time…

Morality - Genetic
Does not require a god.
Is not a human construct.
It is how humans encoded behaviours that facilitated cooperative survival and reproductive strategies.
It is group dynamics imposing behavioural rules upon every member that wishes to participate, belong, and gain the survival and reproductive advantage.
Group dynamics are not arbitrary they evolve through the interaction of the group with its environment, as the most efficient/effective method increasing the groups survival and reproductive probabilities.
Moral behaviours are not excusive to homo sapiens, but our species is the only one that encoded them, i.e., converted them into ideas, and represented them with symbols/words that could we written down in books and shared across space/time.

Ethics are manmade addendums to the previous.

Ethics - Memetic
Additional codes of conduct that facilitate the overcoming of group size limitations, such as Dunbar’s Number…

Dunbar’s number is suggested to be a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.
Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group.
No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.
Dunbar’s number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with lack a persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.
Dunbar’s number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”
On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint oneself if they met again.

…or overcoming the exclusion of males from reproduction by imposing sexual rules of conduct, i.e., monogamy.

No god necessary. God is how ethical codes were imposed on a species that was not naturally inclined towards their restrictions.
No amorality, because this would immediately exclude you from the group severely reducing survival and reproductive probabilities.
For social species this would mean certain death and its is why being excluded remains so vital to humans, and all-incusicivty is comforting because it makes inclusion almost certain.

Ethical Codes
Ten Commandments. Mosaic Laws.
Ethics are a product of power upon the collective, either contradicting moral behaviours or by making them more strict and exact.

Ethics require an objective, a collective ideal, whereas moral behaviour already has survival and reproduction as its objective.
Every collective’s ideal determines its ethical codes, and in turn determines the type of individuals it will cultivate.
These collectivized idealized types then compete with other collectivized idealized types producing memetic survival of the fittest.
The ideal will not necessarily produce the smartest, strongest, noblest type of man, since simplicity and ignobility may also prove to offer an advantage within fluctuating environmental circumstances.

[iambiguous]

@Lorikeet

One last time…

Morality - Genetic
Does not require a god.
Is not a human construct.
It is how humans encoded behaviours that facilitated cooperative survival and reproductive strategies.
It is group dynamics imposing behavioural rules upon every member that wishes to participate, belong, and gain the survival and reproductive advantage.
Group dynamics are not arbitrary they evolve through the interaction of the group with its environment, as the most efficient/effective method increasing the groups survival and reproductive probabilities.
Moral behaviours are not excusive to homo sapiens, but our species is the only one that encoded them, i.e., converted them into ideas, and represented them with symbols/words that could we written down in books and shared across space/time.

Ethics are manmade addendums to the previous.

Ethics - Memetic
Additional codes of conduct that facilitate the overcoming of group size limitations, such as Dunbar’s Number…

Dunbar’s number is suggested to be a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.
Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group.
No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.
Dunbar’s number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with lack a persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.
Dunbar’s number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”
On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint oneself if they met again.

…or overcoming the exclusion of males from reproduction by imposing sexual rules of conduct, i.e., monogamy.

No god necessary. God is how ethical codes were imposed on a species that was not naturally inclined towards their restrictions.
No amorality, because this would immediately exclude you from the group severely reducing survival and reproductive probabilities.
For social species this would mean certain death and its is why being excluded remains so vital to humans, and all-incusicivty is comforting because it makes inclusion almost certain.

Ethical Codes
Ten Commandments. Mosaic Laws.
Ethics are a product of power upon the collective, either contradicting moral behaviours or by making them more strict and exact.

Ethics require an objective, a collective ideal, whereas moral behaviour already has survival and reproduction as its objective.
Every collective’s ideal determines its ethical codes, and in turn determines the type of individuals it will cultivate.
These collectivized idealized types then compete with other collectivized idealized types producing memetic survival of the fittest.
The ideal will not necessarily produce the smartest, strongest, noblest type of man, since simplicity and ignobility may also prove to offer an advantage within fluctuating environmental circumstances.

Just imagine how much fun he must have had paraphrasing Lyssa here.

Har Har Harr!

Or was it phoneutria?

[promethean75]

One last time…

There could be 587 ways to explain how human social behavior has evolved and what function it has served, and not a single one of those explanations would be prescriptive. Nor can they be. At best they describe a truism, and offer nothing in the way of existential guidance for how to live in a world that produces innumerable, novel situations. Therefore, there is very little value to even knowing any of this outside of being able to pass a school science test.

Beware of anyone who tries to take this banal truism and use it as a template to support their own morality and moral values. Fact is, you cannot derive a prescriptive philosophy out of this knowledge alone, and any attempt to will never get pass the naturalistic fallacy.

Add to this, the fact that environments can change so drastically that former ethical behavior patterns become not only useless, but obsolete.

This guy here will believe that by simply being aware of this basic fact of evolution, any morality that he puts forth as ‘proper’ has gained some kind of support, because of that awareness.

He’ll draw and source all kinds of conclusions and ‘oughts’ from this basic evolutionary fact that simply aren’t there.

The deeper form of this rests in the fear of nihilism. That there IS NO purpose, is too much to bear… so one must try to convince oneself that recognizing the mundane process of the evolution of human social behavior should somehow be something significant in general, and evidence of a ‘proper’ way to live, in particular.

Again, I’m not saying the study isn’t interesting. I’m saying no exclusive morality can draw strength from it or defend itself by its merits.

For instance, anything this twit says about ‘the right way to live’ (pick one… Hellenistic timocracy), is absolutely unfounded and can lay no exclusive claim on the facts of evolution concerning the development of social behavior, itself.

In a word, dasein.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Planning a amoral smash & grab shopping spree in the US, before Christmas.

Any recommendations?
I want high end stuff.

Is it below $900 that you aren’t arrested?
Don’t want to get over that.

[iambiguous]

Was Wittgenstein Wrong on Ethics?
Author: STUART W. MIRSKY
at the Serious Philosophy website

With Hume and many later philosophers in the Anglo-Empirical tradition, Wittgenstein rejects the is-to-ought presumptions of classical ethics (the idea that “good” can be “naturalized” by being thought to just be this or that natural phenomenon). But he goes further than Hume by focusing not merely on the is/ought dichotomy but on the idea that the sort of thing that underlies our moral sensibilities will be seen to be feelings of a very deep sort, feelings which reflect, in at least some of us, the kinds of thing we associate with spiritual awe in the face of a mysterious universe.

Of course for those like Mr. Fun here [in this festive holiday season] morality is a “natural phenomena”. Not sure what that means? Ask him. Only be prepared for his answer to revolve solely around his at times completely unintelligible intellectual contraptions. Pedantic gibberish predicated on the assumptions that his theoretical constructs are by default the only possible manner in which to grasp, well, anything that we do. And these “serious philosophy” assumptions must be true because the meaning that he gives to the words in these ponderous didactic assessments are “true by definition”.

Not sure what that means? Well, follow him long enough and you’ll know the drill before too long.

In other words, the guy loves – really, really loves – to sound like what he imagines a serious philosopher should sound like. Deep, man, deep.

As for feelings of spiritual awe…? What, like Maia feels in the presence of the Goddess? Still, sooner or later those reverential feelings need to be translated into actual behaviors in actual sets of circumstances.

Since there can be no point in wondering about such things, however, and no content in speaking of such wonder – although such wonder is not wrong and may, in fact, be a positive state in which to be – he concludes, with Hume and those who follow him, that moral questions are fundamentally outside the realm of intelligibility.

Fundamentally perhaps but certainly not existentially. The questions are inevitable. Whether you want to call them moral questions or something else. And even the answers are intelligible to the extent that others understand your point. What they do not seem to be however is objectively intelligible. Your answer may be understood by another…but fiercely disputed.

Then what? Then that’s where “I” come in.

Yet, to the extent they reflect something deeper, a religious or spiritual inclination, they are not simply to be ignored. There is a strong, albeit unexplicated, reason in fact to pay attention to and implement one’s religious sensibilities. It’s just, Wittgenstein suggests, that they lie outside philosophy’s realm.

Yes, this makes sense. But only to the extent that we acknowledge that none of us seem able to know for certain what actually is inside or outside of the realm of philosophy. Those like Kant may well be ultimately correct. But how exactly to demonstrate this given a particular context.

Hence, his statement some six weeks later to Waismann and Shlick that it is

“. . . very important that one makes an end to all the chatter about ethics – whether there can be knowledge in ethics, whether there are values, whether the Good can be defined, etc. In ethics one always makes the attempt to say something which cannot concern and never concerns the essence of the matter.”

And what matter might that be?

[iambiguous]

@Mr. Fun

Planning a amoral smash & grab shopping spree in the US, before Christmas.

Any recommendations?
I want high end stuff.

Is it below $900 that you aren’t arrested?
Don’t want to get over that.

His posts are like a fly buzzing around your head. Annoying as hell but harmless.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Just like iamretarded’s post for the last ten years.

Finally, self-daignosis.

[iambiguous]

Was Wittgenstein Wrong on Ethics?
Author: STUART W. MIRSKY
at the Serious Philosophy website

Wittgenstein concludes his talk to the Heretics Society by proposing that religious language has a special significance but no content. It is, he say, a language of similes and that it serves to express our stance in relation to a universe that is finally mysterious to us:

“I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we can say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense.”

Is this not Wittgenstein’s own attempt to draw our attention to “the gap” and to Rummy’s Rule? It’s just that in regard to such things as moral and political and spiritual convictions, our value judgments are just all that much more ineffable. We have no choice but to come up with a language in which to discuss them because there is no getting around them when “for all practical purposes” actual flesh and blood human being choose to interact socially, politically and economically. We express what is of necessity relationships there is no getting around. But it seems entirely more reasonable to accept the limitations of philosophy here. That those such as ethicists, political scientists, sociologists, economists, psychologists, anthropologists etc., are no less impeded by the existential reality of “I” in the is/ought world.

Ethical just is the religious, he seems to be proposing, and the religious is beyond intelligible discourse. It’s something else. But, of course, this is his ethics, is it not, his own sense of what has an “absolute,” as in bottom line, importance to him. It doesn’t follow, it cannot, that all men share in the same religious or spiritual feelings as he does, that all have the same religious inclinations. Does ethics then, as in being the basis for distinguishing our better or worse choices, always boil down to sharing the same deep seated-feelings about things (or the same things)? Hasn’t Wittgenstein, at this stage, really made a mistake?

Actually, I think he is basically concurring that, in the absence of God, all things are permitted. If by “intelligible discourse” one means a rational ethics that all reasonable men and women are obligated to espouse. Until a God, the God, your God is established to in fact actually exist, the “intelligible discourse” can only revolve around a font – a demonstrable font – created by mere mortals.

Though, sure, you might find any number of communities where right makes might prevails. These “shared feelings” about good and bad may be derived from, say, a Manifesto or a political party, or an ideological assessment, or from one or another dogma revolving around “biological imperatives”.

Does that then make Wittgenstein wrong?

[iambiguous]

Was Wittgenstein Wrong on Ethics?
Author: STUART W. MIRSKY
at the Serious Philosophy website

If ethical inquiry is to determine what we mean by “good” in certain cases…does it matter if he, himself, just feels that it all boils down to one’s capacity to stand in awe of the universe, however expressed (in particular doctrinal terms or more generically)? How has that claim added anything to our understanding of ethics which, after all, does have a prominent and seemingly unavoidable place in our daily lives?

How could it add anything more than in acknowledging the gap between what we think Wittgenstein meant by one’s “capacity to stand in awe of the universe” and how we might come to a conclusion about that ourselves?

Given a particular context on our own infinitesimally insignificant planet in the staggering vastness of all that the universe is? Given further that this comes from each of us as but one of billions of infinitesimally insignificant individuals who have lived and died on this Third rock from the Sun"?

We are constantly urged to behave in one way and not another in our daily lives, either by family and friends, or by various societal authorities and spokespersons, or by ourselves (when we search our consciences about the right things to do). And there are many, many reasons to sort through when we want to make a correct decision. How can holding a particular feeling or set of feelings of awe (or recognizing some other very personal sense of what is “absolute”) help us decide what the right choice is for others and, because for others, for ourselves?

What it helps us do is to acquire and then sustain a font that allows us in turn to convince ourselves that the behaviors we choose are necessary because this absolute, awe-inspiring virtue does in fact exist. And since it only has to exist “in our head” there is no further demonstration needed to acquire and then sustain the comfort and consolation that allows us to embody the psychology of objectivism.

And here of course it really doesn’t make any difference if others have brought this about or if you do it yourself. All that counts is that you have accomplished it and, if you are lucky enough not to be confronted with the arguments that I make, you may well take this peace of mind to the grave. And for some, even beyond it.

But here of course you have been confronted with the arguments that I make. And they either disturb you or they do not. And, if they don’t, you will either pursue that with me or you won’t.