The noumenal begets the “thing-in-itself”. And how could anything other than a transcendental point of view grasp that? In other words [for all practical purposes?], God. No God, no categorical imperative. Again, I don’t see how anyone can get around that other than by positing Science or Reason as an alternative. And that begets scientism and metaphysical authoritarians like Ayn Rand.
Not a single one has been solved. Or, rather, they have been “solved” by folks positing vast and varied moral and political agendas.
Besides, sans God not a single human behavior is necessarily immoral. Any behavior can be rationalized. If for no other reason every behavior already has been. Up to and including genocide.
Give me an argument opposing a single human behavior that you can demonstrate is ontologically immoral. How could any mere mortal do so?
Why do you suppose that, over and again, the religionists are quick to point out how we need God [a transcendental, all knowing, all powerful point of view] in order to make distinctions between vice and virtue? What do you suppose Dostoevsky meant when he pointed out that, in the absense of God, all things are permitted?
These are not “natural rights”. They are political rights. They exist only because they were thought up, fought for and were then able to be enforced. And there are any number of political forces out there ready and willing to take them all back.
In the phenomenal world, nothing is necessarily good or bad. Not morally and politically.
On the other hand, I can’t exclude my own point of view from my own point of view. So, I am not necessarily right either.
I think “noumenal” is more akin to “spiritual”, where the ‘thing-in-itself’ refers to the “spirit”, “soul”, or “essence” [metaphysical base] of a perceived object. ‘God’, then, represents what we appeal to for guidance in understanding the noumenal realm – which seems to be “Reason” for Kant.
Our ability to rationalize is obviously not restricted to what we directly experience. I can give damn good rationale supporting my position that people shouldn’t smoke crack even though I’ve never actually tried it […or maybe just don’t remember].
I’d actually have to agree with this. How does one “solve” a moral problem in any definitive sense? A pragmatic approach relies more on approximation than anything definitive.
One might argue that they are “natural rights” which have fallen under influence. Our interest in human rights would be heavily determined by physiology, I would imagine. That is to say, no rights are “natural”, some are just more organic in their conception [ex. We recognize ownership, so we assume a right to it].
I assume this would be the case in the noumenal world as well. Valuation, as such, requires perception, which is why something might seem inherently valuable to us – because our ability to value is inherent.
This is correct, statik, but difficult to demonstrate. That’s because it’s a “neitzschean” analysis. That’s “Advanced Philosophy 101”. Not everyone is going to get it. You’re going to Kant’s motive, and not his method.
It seems to me that you’ve come a very long way in a very short time.
Bryan Magee from his chapter on Kant in Confessions of a Philosopher:
[b]…if everything that occurs within the empirical world is subject to scientific law…then…acts of [human] will cannot occur in the empirical world. That means that that part of our being that chooses and decides, initiating physical movements [at least those movements we designate as acts of will], has its existence someway such that it is not part of the empirical world…
Once a physical movement has been initiated in the empirical world its consequences according to whatever the laws of science are will inevitably occur. If I throw a ball, its path througth the air will be a parabola modified by air pressure, and what parabola it is will be determined by several factors combined: the mass of the ball, thec angle at which I throw it, and the force I put into the throw. I cannot choose to throw that ball in that way without its describing that parabola. It is only whether I throw the ball or not that is up to me. I can choose to throw it or I can choose not to throw it, and that is the extent of my choice. Once I have thrown it, the laws of physics take over, and they cannot be prevented from carrying the matter through to the end.[/b]
[Magee’s emphasis]
How significant is this regarding the nature of Kant’s moral philosophy?
It seems to come down to that mysterious relationship between mind and matter. If the human brain is entirely matter and all matter obeys the laws of physics how does the mind transcend the laws of physics?
If we do in fact have free will is this a manifestation of reality that reflects what some call the “noumena”? How can we possibly know this for sure?
Yet any particular individaul can find himself in a situation where smoking crack makes a lot of sense. Consider for example the rationales given by Ren for shooting heroin in the film Trainspotting. Any particular life can reach the point where taking away the pain becomes the number 1 priority.
How then would someone construct an argument that smoking crack is entirely irrational? How would an argument be constructed to show that all people in all circumstances and for all time to come are being immoral if they do so?
Some argue that access to safe and affordable health care is an inherent right of any citizen in the “civilized world”. But others argue this is not true at all. They argue instead that health care should be bought and sold in the marketplace without any government intervention whatsoever. Just like any other commodity. Same with access to education or to the legal system. A citizen is basically on his or her own. They are totally responsible for their own lives. How do we determine if this is so?
Bad premise. Phenomena are not subject to physical laws. Physical laws, the laws of science, are descriptions. I could describe a cat to you. That doesn’t make the cat subject to my description. I’m not even sure what the rest of this passage even means.
So what?
But again, the ball is not subject to physical laws - this is a reification. Those laws are the result of our observations. When a phenomenon “breaks” the law, we just write another law. None of this means that we really know what’s going on.
Not at all, as far as I can tell. Just remember, Kant is one of the worst moral philosophers ever. Why do you even care?
Again - there’s that word “obey”. The mind doesn’t exist. Brains do.
You can’t look as causation as “event a causes event B”. The world is better described in terms of processes. We snip a morsel out of a very long and complex process and isolate “events”. Even brains are not studied this way. They are studied in terms of processes. That means that it’s not a matter of simply tracking inputs and outputs - the processes change and mutate those inputs.
Kant thought in terms of events - We perform the (static) moral act A in accordance with Immutable Law B. None of the “laws” of the sciences are immutable. That’s all they do, is mutate and change, as our observations proceed.
it’s not. the “noumenal world” is a joke.
Haven’t seen the film, but, but moral rules exist precisely because almost anything can make sense to a given person at a given time.
“Public” morality doesn’t exist because it’s “reasonable”, but because it’s an effective governing tool. That doesn’t make it evil. Private morality is a different matter, but we are here very far away from discussing that.
Only Kant would try that. But he was a boob. No one ever followed his moral teachings, and no one ever will. I tried to tell you about ordering social goods, but you weren’t interested. Morality does not justify every act singly. A moral system is full of trade-offs - the rationality of single acts is not important.
We don’t. Philosophers provide context, not answers. Vocabulary and not solutions. Systems and not the parts of those systems. The entire matter of rights has been defined by philosophers. You cannot even talk about them without referring to philosophy, whether you know it or not. Philosophers provide the ideas and not the - they can’t live your life for you. least of all could Kant. He barely lived his own.
Noumena = ‘thing-in-itself’. There’s no begetting relationship; they’re just the same thing. This is an area beyond the limits of human reason. Utterly unknowable. This is where Kant puts the ideas of god and morality. This makes Kant an agnostic about both. This is also why you shouldn’t be reading any other Kritik than the first one. …(Have you ever known a historical German philosopher to stick to the one area of philosophy he is excellent at? No—they’re not like Americans. Once you get them going they can’t stop).
The categorical imperative does not rely on anything other than your human faculty of providing reasons for your actions. Every developed person has this. This is what makes us equally morally considerable. So, if you want to know the moral course of action, you have to use the same reasons that anybody could. The categorical imperative just follows—“act on the maxim that anybody could”. If it’s not OK for me or somebody else to lie, then nobody can.
This is absolutely ludacris. Slow down and think before you type. I already gave you a ton of examples of very clear progess and solutions to problems. Problems morph and change, but there are victories all along the way. The United States no longer allows slavery, for instance. And yes, “applied ethicists” apply ethics—so, obviously there is some theorizing involved.
Again, TOTALLY PREPOSTEROUS. I’m not even going to ask what the “rationalization” for genocide was. You should not use the word as if anything at all would count as a “rationalization”—because it obviously doesn’t.
Dostoyevski was wrong. Not everything is permitted precisely because there is no god. If there was a god, I wouldn’t care what people did here, to other people, to animals, to the environment. I wouldn’t care because god would punish them. Since there’s no god, we need rules—and corresponding punishment. That’s obvious.
We need rules, and, up to this point, religion has been the single most effective management tool in creating and maintaining those rules on a mass scale.
Kant realized this and made an attempt to use a religious-like formula, but as an appeal to Reason [rather than God]. He wanted to establish the same kinds of moral rules, but do so in a way that does not necessarily rely on authority to dictate, and enforce, those rules. Therefore, Reason must become both ethos [in creating the rules] and pathos [in enforcing those rules]. The trouble being that no two people are going to learn/interpret the rules, or experience an appeal to emotion, in exactly the same way.
This is what still confuses me about Kant. He dealt heavily with notions like perception and perspective, yet he shows a seemingly naive faith in Reason [as if absolute, or universal in some way] when it comes to morality. Not to mention his many critiques of Reason and his attempt to rationalize his moral theory from the ground up. The Categorical Imperative, for instance, seems like a hasty attempt to give morality non-theistic basis. But, why so hasty? Did he actually believe “Reason” to be infallible? Doesn’t seem that way to me. My only other guess is that he figured a faith in ourselves, in Reason, is no less rational or noble than a faith in God. Perhaps the problem, then, is that we lack the honesty to hold ourselves accountable for our own actions. But, again, it doesn’t take a legendary philosopher to figure that much out.
This is an exercise in semantics to me. There are material objects [including us] out in the world. They are correlated spacially and temporally. They interact in accordance to what some deem to be “the laws of physics”. Our senses can detect and react to them in various ways. These signals are then intertwined chemically, electrically and neurologically in the brain/mind such that, cognitively, we can discuss them with others. We exchange propositions about them said to be either rational [true] or irrational [false]. Or, perhaps, as likely as not, said to be neither one nor the other.
Noam Chomsky in Men of Ideas:
How can we decide to say things that are new but not random, that are appropriate to situations yet not under the control of stimili? When we ask these questions, we enter into a realm of mystery where human science so far [and maybe even in principle], does not reach. We can reach some understanding of the principles that make it possible for us to behave in a normal creative fashion, but as soon as questions of will, or decision, or reasons, or choice of action, arise, human science is pretty much at a loss…These questions remain in the obscurity that has enveloped them since classical antiquity.
And this does not change when we shift gears from science to philosophy. Yet reading your posts one would never guess this is the case. You speak of these relationships [or so it seems to me] as though your “logic” has nailed them down. And, again, that frame of mind doesn’t really interest me because it projects [to me] as, by and large, the internal logic of scholasticism.
Yes, that is Kant’s [and Magee’s] point. But there is a profound and fundamental difference between a mind deciding to throw a ball and what happens to the ball after it is thrown. If matter is enthrall to whatever makes matter matter how is mind [as matter] not equally enthrall? How does one account for “will” in the world of matter? It is like no other matter that has ever existed. How does your logic explain it other than through the assumptions you make about what the words in your premises mean. How, in other words, you define them.
You insist:
As though that clears everything up.
John, enraged at Joe’s betrayal, throws a knife at him. And, like the ball, the knife does its thing and slices through Joe’s belly. Human biology does its thing and Joe dies.
So here we have mind and matter [or mind as matter] manifesting itself in many ways. Lots of inputs and outputs interwoven in a number of “processes”. But how did matter mutate into mind such that minds become enraged at betrayals, throw knives into people that kill them precipitating other minds to judge the behavior morally? What can “logic” tell us about this when the inputs and the outputs and the processes are all added up?
Maybe, but some of them seem considerably less mutable than others. Otherwise we couldn’t send folks to the moon, purchase smart phones or invent technology like computers. Some material relationships seem to obey laws as close to immutable as we are ever likely to see. We can’t just have “points of view” about them as we do in reacting conflictedly to conflciting moral and political claims.
More to the point it is a necessary governing tool. It is rooted in the astonding complexity of nature and nurture intertwined in human interaction. But we interact as daseins. In other words, evolving points of view that are ever situated out in a particular world in a particular place at a particular time.
And where does the private “I” begin and the public “I” end? Not to mention the other way around.
Again, I have no real understanding of what in the world this means.
I understand that. many people will say the same. To illustrate the importance of the distinction, I usually use an example that i believe is found in Nietzsche - that Plato’s Forms are made possible only by a misunderstanding of language. Plato reversed he process of abstraction, in believing that the particular is abstracted from the general (universal). he therefore misused the term “catness” for example.
Agreed.
I have no idea what that means.
What I am saying is that those “laws” merely describe those interactions. As we have found interactions that don’t fit the laws, those laws have changed. As we explore further away from Earth, our “laws” of gravity have changed. Right now, no one really knows what gravity is, because theory has not caught up with the available data. That’s not much of a law.
Right - we can discuss our perceptions. The laws are laws about our perceptions. That much we know. But it’s a leap to say that the phenomena we perceive are “obeying” the laws we use to describe our observations. This counts, especially when you’re talking about Kant. And this much he even agreed with - so far as that goes.
Here is another confusion in language. We say they are true or false. Yes. But that they are rational is another matter. Is it rational to say something that is true, is true? Yes. But that’s not the Reason that Kant is talking about. They are two separate issues - not perhaps in common parlance, but you are looking for something more than our common thoughts. Kant sure is. Different writers use the words “reason” and “rational” in somewhat different ways, but is we’re talking about “correlation” or “verification” we can use true and false in the most common way. A statement is true if it correlates to our experience. Reason, especially for Kant, is prior to experience, logically. And it doesn’t depend upon experience. The Categorical Imperative is a formal law. It does not account for experience - the form is prior to experience. In this way, he makes the same mistake that Plato does, but in spades. This is perfectly rational, but doesn’t make any sense. There is no testing against observations, which is why it’s easy to make the CI look ridiculous when it comes down to actual cases.
And now Chomsky? When are you going to read some real philosophers? Chomsky was another politician.
The logic of the argument is either good or bad - it’s the premises that count. If you want to make a case without logic, be my guest. In fact, my natural inclination is to make evidentiary arguments. The fact is that this is mostly what I am doing. It’s not a deductive argument at all, at base. You are not really arguing with my logic, but with my evidence.
I don’t accept your assumptions - that there is any such thing as a mind and that it could “decide” to do anything. I’ve already written about this extensively.
It’s not just about words. I don’t accept a nonmaterial mind. That’s not just words - it’s the philosophical ground I have staked out. I see no evidence that there is a nonmaterial mind. As I have said, more than once, “will” is a sum. It’s not “mental”. It’s a collective noun and includes all of our motive abilities. It’s essentially the Nietzschean concept, to save time. These are not assumptions about words, but about what humans are.
It clearly doesn’t, because you keep asking me about minds.
Again, you ask about minds. This is a dead end, I’m afraid. We can only talk past each other.
I didn’t claim that we all have a point of view about computer chips. I am saying that we don’t have to be 100% correct to build a computer. The history of science is that we are never 100% correct. Einstein is not thought to be 100% correct, yet we can build nuclear bombs. I don’t make the news; I only report it.
I agree - we are processes. Everything is. That’s why scientific laws change. You seem to think that a theory has to be entirely correct, complete and eternal or it’s trash. I bet you room is really neat, too. We have nothing like that - not in science, not even in mathematics (Godel, anyone?). We have useful tools - and morality is an extremely useful tool for social order. Social order isn’t everything, and no one would want a completely ordered society. Approximations are just fine.
That’s one of the issues that (gasp!) philosopher explore. You either find those discussions useful or you do not. But to deny that Western Civilisation has been influenced by those discussions is to turn a blind eye to the obvious. No social leader gives a crap about Rand and Chomsky, by the way.
You could find out if you wanted to. But reading Rand and Chomsky won’t help.
Does an agnostic lend his name and his intellectual imprimatur to expressions like “categorical imperative”; or to acting in accordance with one’s “moral duty and obligation”.
No, he owns up to them as intellectual contraptions the validity of which rely soley on the internal logic of the analysis itself. At least that is how I see it.
But my “human faculty for providing reasons for my behaviors” is always situated circumstantially out in the world of interacting daseins. Either the existential reasons each individual gives for acting are legitimate or there is only one truly rational behavior that each individual must grasp and accept in order to be construed as, in fact, “behaving rationally and morally.”
And lying is the classic example of how existential narratives unfold “in reality” out in the world we actually live in. Is it okay to lie? Well, that depends, doesn’t it? Isn’t that the common [and common sensical] refrain? To never lie occurs only in Hollywood movies—for laughs.
iambiguous wrote:
Not a single one (practical moral problem) has been solved. Or, rather, they have been “solved” by folks positing vast and varied moral and political agendas.
In my view, you refuse to acknowledge the extent to which such “progress” is rooted in political narratives. How would you back up the claim that human slavery is necessarily immoral? Historically, slavery shrivelled organically with the advent of capitalism. Capitalists prefer wage slaves to actual human chattel. Chattel have to be fed and clothed and sheltered. “Free” workers are on their own. But it’s really just a different kind of slavery however when you have no choice but to sell your labor at the going rate. Only the advent of additional political narratives—organized labor, unions, socialism, government intervention, a burgeoning middle class—turned the tide for the toiling masses. But little of this involved abstract philosophical discussions of moral duty and obligation.
iambiguous wrote:
Besides, sans God not a single human behavior is necessarily immoral. Any behavior can be rationalized. If for no other reason every behavior already has been. Up to and including genocide.
Again, present us with a philosophical argument that is absolutely irrefutable regarding genocide. You can’t. You can only reach the point where you simply insist, “It is just wrong!”
But those who have committed genocide beg to differ. They justify it for reasons that make sense to them—racial, ethnological, political, economic. And since there is no actual omniscient and omnipotent God to contradict them [or to punish them] who are you to take His place?
In other words, if there is no ontological and teleological meaning to fall back on by way of vouchsafing your own point of view that is all it can ever be, a point of view.
Now, it is not my own point of view, true. I believe genocide is a moral abomination. But that can only be an existential narrative. I can’t confute those who think [or behave] otherwise. And, no matter how outraged you become, neither can you.
He is wrong? Why, because you say so? And those such as myself who suggest he made his own leap to God because he clearly sensed that without Him all things really are permitted—we are wrong too because we do not share your own point of view?
I will readily acknowledge I may well be wrong here. But how would you or I or anyone reading this go about demonstrating that, with an air-tight philosophical argument, this can be determined beyond all doubt?
Kant himself clearly grasped the need for a transcending point of view. And, perhaps, someday, so will you.
Sure, why not? You can’t just assume god is required for that—that’s supposed to be something you have to prove.
Your problem with the principle of never lying has nothing to do with the actual content of the principle. Your criticism is that you’re not strong/good enough to adhere to it in all situations. And that’s fine, but let’s be clear about it. Or, perhaps your criticism is that in some situations you have a duty to lie—or something like that. That’s fine, you don’t have to agree with Kant. But you can’t expect other people just to take what you say on faith, either.
What is the point of these comments? Why are they from left field? …My point was that progress is made by applied ethicists. I gave examples. You denied that and them. I called you preposterous. So, what is your point? I may agree, but I’ll never agree that we’ve never made progress on moral problems.
I can use any moral theory that ever existed to prove that genocide is absolutely wrong. If you want to try to refute it, do it on your own time… but it will be a waste of your time, and offensive to people.
Some actions are always immoral. That doesn’t mean every person acts morally. And it doesn’t mean that what people think is moral, always is. You’re confused.
Just read this again, and reflect on it. What does your heart say?
Do you really think that if no god would punish you in your next life, that you can do whatever you want to anyone—no matter how atrocious? —Whatever rights and wrongs are, they have nothing to do with gods. That’s the exact opposite of what Dostoyevski said. And he was wrong.
[Material objects out in the world] are correlated spacially and temporally.
It means that ever since the big bang matter and energy have ceaselessly, symbiotically reconfigured themselves into heavier and heavier elements that precipitated gravity, electro-magnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces.
Or, perhaps, these forces are inherent components of whatever precipitated the big bang itself.
In any event: Who the fuck really knows…right?
Eventually these “forces” evolved cosmologically into galaxies with stars and planets like earth. All [presumably] mindless matter obeying whatever makes mindless matter evolve from nothing at all into everything there is. Including us.
But when you include us you include “minds”. And no one really understands the fundamental relationship between mind and matter. And until we do it is ultimately futile to suppose we can understand what we may or may not be obligated to do in order to be thought of as rational and ethical beings.
I’m just reminding everyone of this. Especially those who seem utterly convinced that they do…that they do in fact…grasp the fundamental nature of these astounding relationships that go back [at least] 13.7 billion years.
As you note, no one really understands what things like gravity are. But what we do know about them has to be pretty damned sophisticated to send men to the moon and back. Or to build jet planes and skyscrapers.
Or just imagine how sophisticated science has to be to invent the iPad!!
Yes, that is an important contribution from Kant. That is Magee’s point. But how do we understand the existential implications of this in discussing human moral interaction—either with or without God? We describe our experiences but our descriptions do not equate with what they describe. What then is what they describe? Is it somehow connected to a “level” of reality that might allow us to “transcend” the “merely phenomenal”?
Again Magee from the chapter on Kant:
Reality as it is in itself, unconnected with us, cannot possibly be of the character of experience, and therefore since the only ways we can gain any apprehension of it are dependent on the forms of experience, we cannot apprehend or understand it. So independent reality is hidden. This in turn means that empirical reality cannot be all there is. We know this to be a fact for another reason, unconnected with this, namely that we have direct and unmistakable experience of initiating movements of our bodies at will, and this means that we know for certain that some of the movements of some of the material objects in the world do not have their complete explanations in terms of the laws of physics, although we remain at a loss to know how they are to be explained.
It always comes back to the deeply mysterious nature of mind as matter. It is the only matter able to loop back onto itself and question the nature of its own existence!! And neither you nor I nor anyone else fully grasp the implications of this for discussing either God or Virtue. Among other things.
Me, I keep waiting for an argument [Kantian or otherwise] that might convince me to embrace either one of them. But just because I don’t I’m no where near foolish enough to suppose that settles it.
Thus when you propose…
…I think: What is this but more semantics? What is this but more words defining, defending [and then analyzing] more words still? You chop your logic and get this, others chop their logic and get that. And no one is suggesting this should ever stop. How else are we going to get in closer to whatever reality may or may not be other than by trying to?
I’m just of the opinion that none of us should ever imagine we already know what reality…is. Or that our way of apprehending it is the only way to apprehend it.
Sure, you may well be a lot closer to the bullseye here than I am. But even so how does this really get us any closer to understanding the most fundamental relationship between mind and matter? Or between human experience, human language and Reality itself?
What are the ontological premises here? What can your logic tell us about the ontological conclusions? How is your analysis not also entangled in the internal logic of the argument itself? After all, this far out on the metaphysical limb, it’s not like the words can point to anything other than more words, right?
Basically this is your “evidence”, isn’t it?
Or are you proposing that how you understand the arguments that swirl about human autonomy is the only logical way in which they can be understood?
Thus when I ask:
You respond:
What in the world does this mean? Tie this analysis into the very act of reading these words and then responding to them.
Explain how the matter known as mind is able to accomplish this. Do we have autonomy or not? And how did mindful matter manage to mold and manipulate matter into…the internet?!
Or, to cite another example, what is truly going on now in, say, Egypt? How is “will” a “sum” over there now? How is what is unfolding there “not mental” and how does it relate to the “not mental” reality of American foreign policy in that part of the world? What is “mind-as-matter” amidst all of this explosive change?
And, sure, we often “talk past each other” here. But I root that in the limitation of logic and language. There are just parts of “reality” they may well not be privy to at all.
To say that we cannot experience reality fully is not to say that it is completely hidden from us. Further, that we cannot know all of empirical reality does not mean that there is something else - wholly different from that reality. We can’t know the entire empirical world - that does not imply that there is anything that is not empirical - that’s essentially of different stuff than that which we do know. Magee is an abomination of logic. You’re poisoning your mind. I guess I can’t stop you.
That some phenomena are not explained by “known” laws of physics may say more about the incompleteness of those laws than it does about the “nonphysical” nature of certain phenomena. Overall, though, this is your, and Magee’s theme - that which is not 100% certain is not known at all. You will never get any answers to your questions, if you think this way. It’s not an all-or-nothing scenario.
Magee is just another jerk out there who wishes to fill in our gaps in knowledge with what “must” be out there. There is no “must” about it.
No, it doesn’t. You are insisting that “mind” means something nonempirical or nonmaterial. But you have made this up of whole cloth. What mind? There is no mind. You are just positing that anything science can’t (yet) explain must be unexplainable by (the physical) sciences. That’s a huge leap.
It is better than the case you make. “There’s some stuff in the world, like minds and noumena, and i don’t know what it is or what it does, but it must be there. Because science hasn’t explained everything yet.”
Science explains nothing. Humans do. That we are limited in our narrative does not imply that it is useful to just make stuff up.
What is you case for the existence of minds?
It means that there is no such thing as “mind”. Dude - if you can’t get that, that this is what i mean, I’m done.
There is no matter known as mind. It’s just a word we use. There is no matter known as leprechaun. Why is this so difficult?
You keep asking me about “mind”, about what it does. Don"t you see that’s like asking me what Santa’s shoe size is?
You’ll never get it. It’s not like there’s some big 'will" over there. There are as many wills in Egypt as there are people in Egypt.
Does an agnostic lend his name and his intellectual imprimatur to expressions like “categorical imperative”; or to acting in accordance with one’s “moral duty and obligation”.
Yes, and it is precisely because the deontologists [religious, philosophical or political] are unable to demonstrate—categorically and imperatively—why we must submit to a moral duty [their’s] that they fall back on God or Reason or Science to “prove” this is true. In other words, a font said to transcend the ambiguities and uncertainties that ever marble the vicissitudes of the actual lives we live.
I don’t have a problem with lying. At least not if I deem a particular context calls for it. My problem revolves instead around what I deem to be the intellectual bancruptcy embedded in the assumption that mere mortals can ever be entirely principled about it. Such “principles” are inevitably rooted in dasein and in particular existential narratives. I merely try to persuade others to agree with me about this. But not based on faith. I ask them to demonstrate why my own arguments are unreasonable. But I will be the first to acknowledge they are not principled. To insist on that would contradict my whole point here.
And my point is that “progress” here is embedded in political connotation. Where is your indisputably rational argument that demonstrates how any examples of “applied ethics” are beyond all conflicting points of view? You wish to equate the morality of human behavior with the mere description of it.
You say:
I say:
What about the moral theories rooted in fascism or racism or ethnocentrism or the most virulent forms of nationalism? I reject all of them. But that is not the same thing as demonstrating philosophically they are necessarily irrational or unethical. After all, given the enormously complex and convoluted manner in which human relationships have unfolded historically, anything can be rationalized; if for no other reason almost everything already has been.
One may be outraged hearing a Nazi defend the Holocaust [and I certainly am] but in the end few will be persuaded to abandon it by the arguments of others. Why? Because human motivation is never reducible down to to some nice, neat, either/or intellectual/moral contraption whereby everyone just nods their heads and agrees, “yeah, that’s the most reasonable thing to do.”
Not even regarding the most extreme behaviors. And, leaving them aside, what about all of the hundreds and hundreds of lesser moral and political conflicts that rend us? Where is the progress being made regarding abortion, economic justice, human sexuality, drug use, gender roles, capital punishment, race relations, the role of government, gun control, stem cell research, affirmitive action, religious freedom, just war, political rights and on and on and on and on.
What progress? And who gets to say what constitutes progress?
You merely insist:
But all this means is that, cross-culturally [and over time historically], some behaviors have been deemed wrong by almost everyone. But, again, that is not the same thing as having access to an argument that demonstrates beyond all doubt they are necessarily wrong. There are people, after all, who argue that, in the end, it is a dog-eat-dog world and each individual has to decide for his or her self what is okay or not okay to do. Is that necessarily wrong as well? Okay, provide us with the premises that establish this such that no one can possibly refute it.
Instead, as with so many others, you are reduced to insisting: “What does your heart say?”
But trust me. You don’t want to go there. If anything, the “heart” is a more turbulent jumble of emotional, psychological, instinctual, intutitive leaps of faith than the mind. It is certainly more deeply rooted in dasein and in subjectivity.
On the other hand, admittedly, as you keep pointing out, you are never, ever wrong about these things.
And I do have to admit I may well be. But how exactly would we go about establishing something like that?
Reality as it is in itself, unconnected with us, cannot possibly be of the character of experience, and therefore since the only ways we can gain any apprehension of it are dependent on the forms of experience, we cannot apprehend or understand it. So independent reality is hidden. This in turn means that empirical reality cannot be all there is. We know this to be a fact for another reason, unconnected with this, namely that we have direct and unmistakable experience of initiating movements of our bodies at will, and this means that we know for certain that some of the movements of some of the material objects in the world do not have their complete explanations in terms of the laws of physics, although we remain at a loss to know how they are to be explained.
Choose a particular existential reality you have experienced recently, and speculate as to what might or might not be hidden from us.
I basically agree. But until we are able to fully grasp the nature of mind as matter we cannot entirely rule out “something else” either. I’m certainly open to being persuaded. Thus to insist Bryan Magee’s query is an “abomination of logic” says far more about your logic than it does his.
At least to me.
Again, that you actually imagine you have answers to questions like these—or answers considerably more sophisticated than the speculations of Magee—says more about your psychological profile than the sophistication of your logic. In me own humble opinion of course.
And if one day scientists attain their TOE how would the mind of man not be but another inherent manifestation of it? The determinists would be proven correct and this exchange we are having now would be but another inherent, materialistic facet of it. How, after all, is human autonomy even possible in a world entirely governed by the brute facticity of laws?
But would you not insist this must be true? And how is that different from this “must” be true.
Someone once speculated that, “‘reality’ is the only word in the English language that should be put in quotes.”
Or, perhaps, “must” be put in quotes?
Cite an example of my insisting that “mind” means “something nonempirical or nonmaterial”. I, like Magee, am merely speculating about the implications of mind as matter being like no other matter that has ever existed. It is a profoundly mysterious enigma.
I simply point out no one has provided an argument that persuades me to believe this problematic relationship begets a particular God or a particular philosophical equivalent regarding value judgments and moral claims.
Scientific explanations are offered by scientists. Scientists are human being. Therefore science explain things.
What stuff have I “made up”? I am merely offering my own existential conjectures about “minds”. And I am certainly no dualist. I just point out the obvious: That matter somehow managed to evolve into mindful matter. And this mindful matter is able to speculate about a reality that is not matter. Beyond that I am just curious, not dogmatic.
You, on the other hand, do seem to be far more, well, dogmatic:
And:
Of course there is matter known as mind. Mind is simply the word those who speak the English language invented to speak of that which the brain does in pursuing everything from mathematics and modern art to sex and situational ethics.
And if you wish to equate the word “mind” with the word “leprechaun” that is certainly your perogative.
That misses my point entirely. My point is that it’s not an all-or-nothing game. “To say that we cannot experience reality fully is not to say that it is completely hidden from us” means only what it says - that partial knowledge is partial knowledge and not no knowledge. Which means that “So independent reality is hidden” is not correct. Independent reality is not completely “hidden”. We just don’t know all of it.
Mind does not exist. Magee’s logic is off for the reason that I just cited, again. To say that we don’t know everything does not imply that what we don’t know is of some different nature than what we do know. It’s just a leap to make that claim.
Then make a counter-argument. It’s easy enough to worry about my twisted logic, but more difficult to actually argue against it. Magee has simply not done that.
It wouldn’t, because there is no empirical evidence that “mind” exists. “Mind” does not even denote an empirical entity. What in the world are you talking about?
These laws, again, are our own, human narrative, determined by our human observations. This does not mean that there is anything that is not material - it means that we cannot discern those things. We have five senses. We can only know what those senses tell us. That does not mean that there is something that is not material - it means our abilities are limited. Now, maybe something “metaphysical” is out there, but we could never know what it is, and we sure couldn’t name it.
I am appealing only to evidence. Magee has no evidence. He has no evidence that there is something nonmaterial out there. Nor could he. All we know is what we sense. Just assuming that there is something of another stuff is different from claiming that we know anything ultimately through observation.
Then we would better use a different label - if it’s unlike everything else we call matter. I could say an elephant is a bird, just different than every other bird. What use is there in that? What would I be communicating?
That’s unfortunate. That means you are living without values. I have been philosophising for some forty years, if you count the day I became an atheist (at age 12) as the beginning. If I had done this all this time and still had no clue how to live well, I think I’d try another hobby.
My point there was that science isn’t some objective arbiter.
And using that as an excuse to avoid making any philosophical decisions.
But you are insisting that “mind” is some special matter without evidence, and in fact, in the face of scientific evidence. And no argument to the contrary is even acknowledged by you. I guess that’s not dogmatic.
I appeal to the evidence. That is not dogmatic. Dogma is a claim that has no support “on the ground”.
Brain function. That’s not some mysterious matter that we don’t know about yet.
No, it’s not. Even by your definition there, mind is both matter and actions.
Gilbert Ryle did a very thorough analysis of precisely what those who speak the English language refer to with ‘mind’, and it’s absolutely not cognate with “what the brain does”. It is a very good read, I’d recommend it en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Mind
Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, he very clearly dismantles the confusions about mental processes that dogged philosophy for a long time.
I think this might be the crux of the argument you’re having with Faust.
Faust, I assume by “mind doesn’t exist” you mean that mind doesn’t exist in a non-physical form - independently. It is not a separate substance or form that interacts with the physical world. Is that right?
The “mind” is not synonymous with the physiology of the human brain. If that were so, the “mind” would be more akin to a process [constituted by enumerable smaller processes]. Also, if there were, in fact, matter ‘known’ as mind, the whole notion of duality between mind and body would be nixed.
Think of a Leprachaun and picture his form, color, etc. Where does that image exist? It is a result of processes in the brain, but surely does not exist in the brain as you see it. That image has no place, no context, aside from what you give it – it doesn’t actually exist within anything. “Mind” is the abstraction, and reification, of a container for thought. I think this is what Faust is getting at, if I understand him correctly.
It has been recognized and discussed in public forum. Methods are not near as archaic.
Enron.
Again, recognized and discussed in public forum. Acceptance, or at least “tolerance”, being promoted. Advancements in education, research, and socio-political political policy. Gross sexual deviancy is is more widely recognized and punished.
Rehabilitation centers. Increased security on pharmaceuticals. Considerable advancements made in research and development. Far more education, research, and public information about the effects of respective substances.
…Sarah Palin is running for President. Nuff said.
Check out Albert Camus. Also huge public debates about this. DNA evidence clearing innocent people.
…seriously?
Many new, differing perspectives. Look at the protests in Egypt.
Far more stringent laws concerning ownership.
is still taking place. Nice.
…is an advancement.
Exists more than ever.
Ever heard of “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity”? Doubt people recognized those concepts in the dark ages.
Consensus. Whoever wants a say in what constitutes progress.
[Note: What I’ve given are examples of advancements, not solutions].
Correct. And this is in line with Ryle, by the way. “Mind” is a useful metaphor, but it is only that. I am saying basically what Ryle says (and it’s not a surprise, as Ryle is a linguistic philosopher and roughly follows Russell in his use of logical types).