Freedom is Antimoral

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
101

A free person can and will do everything, even if you’re personally repulsed and offended by it. Freedom is controlling your revulsion. Sometimes people must do what they hate the most. Sometimes you must confront your fears. Sometimes you must get a shot at the doctor’s office.

It’s like potty training. Humans are potty trained, domesticated, and then they claim that they’re “free to pee anywhere they please”. No, you’re not free to pee. You need to pee into the potty. Your choices are confined. You don’t pee on the carpet. You are NOT free. You are domesticated. If you wanted to practice freedom, then you’d be open to peeing on the carpet, or other more “grotesque” actions.

Think about killing. Children are taught (morality) that killing is wrong, but then, when a teenage boy is 18 years old, then he goes and joins the army, and this “killing is wrong” needs to be untaught, uneducated. He has been taught one thing his whole childhood, but now, as a young adult joining the army, he is taught a different lesson. This produces a hypocrisy, a contradiction.

Why is killing wrong, but sometimes right???

You people are putting the cart before the horse. You are putting morality, the domestication, the potty training, the murder is wrong, before freedom. You have it backwards. Freedom exists before morality, not morality exists before freedom. Freedom causes morality, not morality causes freedom.

You have it backward.

102

Do you mean even if they are personally repulsed by it?

That’s not freedom. That’s deciding that one part of yourself can be sliced off and ignored. It might even be the larger portion of yourself. That part of you is no longer free. Further, the part controlling that part is not free since it much expend energy controlling the revulsion and forcing itself to do things.

That example does not work. I have a revulsion to dying of disease X. An internal struggle might have to take place, sure. But if you are not cut up into pieces, you don’t have to jail a portion of yourself to do scary or painful things.

I’m open to peeing on the carpet. You are treating humans as having single criteria for everything and every choice.

Sure, society is hypocritical in many ways. But that has little to do with the issue of me forcing myself to, say, rape some kids so I am a free person. I don’t become free by doing things I don’t want to do. I become random and then also have a life I do not want and experiences I do not want.

And here you again acting like my argument was based on moral injunctions. You are not reading me. You are just lumping my response in with other ones you generally deal with. You ignore points I make even when I specifically repeat them. And then you make arguments that do not fit as responses to my arguments.

You’ve finished, now, wasting my time. You seem to lack the freedom, here, to notice that not everything fits your simple schema of humankind and I am not saying what other people here are saying.

103

I could, in the name of freedom, keep banging my head on this wall and try to show you how you are missing my points. Or I could choose to do something else, instead, something I want to do. For you those two choices have the same value.

Rape a kid, hit yourself in the face with a brick, eat dog shit, eat pizza, have sex with someone you are attracted to, stretch out a knot in your neck…all equal choices and ones you are as likely to make as any other, even if they revolt you or you won’t like the experience, because this makes you free. You have no reason to choose the latter experiences, because you are free. No reason to prioritize them and avoid the others.

Me, i would rather choose the life I want and avoid experiences I do not like. And oddly, I lose no freedom in making this choice. And I don’t have to be a jailer for my desires and interests.

104

No, Moreno, you’ve done well. You are ready to move up to the next “level”, congratulations. You are unlike the others.

Stage 2 of this conversation is more difficult.

You say that you don’t have to commit some atrocity, like rape and murder, in order to prove your freedom. But how are you “proving” what is free? Let’s say that we had a contest. Smears is the judge. And you and I have a little competition to see who is more “free”. Smears develops some methods to prove freedom. He says that if we do action X, Y, and Z, that this is proof of freedom. So I can do this, accomplish this, and maybe you can’t. Maybe proving you’re free means…eating beetles, worms, bees. Maybe it means eating a human corpse. This is up to Smears to decide.

But the truer challenge is this. How is smears defining freedom? How are you defining freedom? How am I? Isn’t “proof” and “definition” against freedom? Isn’t it, by setting a parameter of “proof” for freedom, that we are in actuality confining freedom to some test, to some game, to some challenge, to some set of subjective expectations?

Think about this, or maybe you already have answers quickly, but this is Stage 2.

105

Not all freedoms are equal. Some abilities and chances are much better than others.

Freedom is not Antimoral.

106

In what way is any action objectively better than any other action?

Let’s say somebody’s life was in your hands. You make a decision to let this person live, or kill this person. However, you know nothing about him or her. It could be a terrorist. It could be a criminal coming to your house to steal from you and rape your wife. It could be President Obama. It could be anybody, a relative even. It could be a homeless person.

Do you let this person live or die? How it is “better” to let live or let die? Remember that you don’t know who this person is.

107

Basically if you try to make your life the way you want it, have the experiences you want to have, avoid the ones you don’t want to have
you are not prioritizing freedom.

You may not like having herpes, but if you see open sores on your onenightstand’s genitals and this makes you NOT WANT to have sex, you are not being free. You are cutting off an experience and you should be cutting off your preferences and fears.

You may like the use of your legs, but if you cannot control this desire and a strong dislike of intense pain, you are not free to jump off that bridge onto the embankment 30 yards below. If you cannot choose to be a paraplegic, you are not free, and if you cannot control that urge to have a good time without jumping off the bridge and, oh dear, use that urge to not be free and jump off, then you are, well, not so free.

Choices due to desire and not wanting certain types of experiences are just as bad as making choices due to moral considerations, since they both lose freedom.

[size=200]The ubermensch decidely will not prioritize talking a walk in nature over running as fast as he can into a wall. Because to prioritize something he likes over another experience is a loss of freedom.[/size] (which is why we see ubermensches running straight into walls as much as we see them in the woods)

We have no innate empathy, so any dislike of torturing someone else or raping them has to be a moral rule following. Really, we are disconnected monads who do not have any preferences. There is no love, only guilt. We have no preferences, only imposed rules.

Our desires are not us. Our interests are morals. Our preferences are actually just new commandments.

All babies would, if not stifled by hypocritical society, grow up into precisely the same blank slate totally free adults with precisely the same lack of preferences, all randomly acting, never choosing one action over another due to desire interest or revulsion.

This is the utopia we are seeking.

And I know what the objection would be. One can rationally, logically choose to not do these things. I pity the person who has to use logic and mental wordy reasoning to not choose these things. Evolution or God gave you desires and intuition for a reason. It’s like doing calculus every time you run out to catch a football.

Mind, mind. The worship of the little thinky mind and to hell with the rest of the self.

And then, of course, you end up having the logical mind limiting your freedom, a logical mind cut off from any way of knowing the life you really want to have.

108

Why do you want me to describe “objectively better”, when you naturally don’t believe in the existence of anything “objectively better” than anything else?

In life, we try to make good choices. You can say whatever you like about that, but that is how life works. We try to make the best choice.

109

And as [i][b]I’ve[/i][/b] said, [b]You can’t have morals without freedom and you can’t have freedom without morals. [/b]

110

lizbeth is right. when you do not have the free-will to discriminate and decide what’s right and wrong, you cannot have morals. and when you don’t have morals, you’ll never understand true freedom.

111

No. the ubermensch will have all options open and his actions will be like a switch he turns on and off as he likes it.

112

First off, I just don’t think you know that for certain. Asserting it sans reasoning doesn’t help much.

What would you say if I said to you…“I don’t believe in an immaterial world and I do believe in free will”.

Also, I have to ask…why do you believe in an immaterial world? That sounds pretty religious to me.

113

If freedom were materialistic, then chains and prison would truly deprive people of their freedom.

There’s a difference between freedom to act and freedom to think or imagine. All actions begin from thoughts. Thoughts cause actions, but actions do not cause thoughts.

114 
 Athet: let's say, someone is chained and locked away in a prison, when that person thinks "I am free, in my mind", isn't that really, when you come right down to it , a denial of facts? When you're neck is in the hangman's noose, can you think, " I know this is happening, but at least I am free in my mind"?

Granted there are exceptions in extraordinary people like Christ, who must have felt free on the cross, because his freedom was supposedly not based on a delusion. Anyone else would have been declared insane, and insanity is no proof of freedom.

115

So you concede that some freedom is real enough for you, but not other freedom. Your statement about the nature of determinism still seems a bit confusing. I’m saying that I believe that there is no such thing as an immaterial world, and that there is such a thing as free will. I think that’s how it actually is. I can tell you why I don’t think there’s an immaterial world, and how I think I still have free will. Now you tell me how I don’t have free will and how there is an immaterial world. I wanna hear this. Please don’t just re-assert that there is. I need you to respond to my objections and address my point of view or I wont be able to agree with you because you don’t seem to be making sense.

116 
Who is this question going to? Just general comment for anyone?
117

Atthet in response to his last post.