Perspective: Your mother is a whore.

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

I saw a post the other day criticising skeptic philosophers, and urging them to put their minds to something “useful”. I can’t remember exactly, but I believe the request was to better the human condition, or race, or themselves. The request could have been some form of other cockamamie bullshit, I am not sure, and it is not important.

There once was a cannibal, on the continent we call Africa, and this cannibal consumed human flesh. A priest visited this cannibal’s village, and condemned the entire group for committing a sin. “What sin did we commit?”, asked the leader of the tribe, to which the priest responded, “You have murdered and desecrated a human being, which is a sin in the eyes of God!” The tribal leader looked at the priest quizzically, and cocked his head. “Who is your God?”

Why is cannabalism wrong? To those who have practiced it and only it, there is no wrong. It is normal. It is a way of life. It is no sin. To those who “know” better, it is a sin. It is horrifyingly abnormal. It is wrong. One perspective may easily condemn the other, and for what purpose? Why does man strive to be “right” and “correct”?

What is truth?

It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Therefore, beauty is not absolute. There is no set definition for “beauty”. It is said that truth is subjective. Therefore, truth is not absolute. There is no way to quantify “truth”. Why, then, can one pole condemn the other? Human arrogance. Is your perspective more correct than mine? On what scale? My beliefs state clearly that nothing is absolute, therefore everything is subjective. The way I see the world around me is by no means connected to the way you see your world. Subjectivity. Individuality. Can you really tell me that murder is “wrong” on a cosmic scale? Only from your individual perspective. Can your beliefs parallel others’? Of course.

Truth is what we believe to be true. Beliefs change, our perspectives change, and the world marches on. Perhaps Jesus was on to something when he said to not judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes?

Everything is based off of individual perspective. To tell someone that their ideas are worthless and “not helping society” is bullshit. Who are you to force your perspective on anyone? Hold your beliefs, share them, understand them.

Don’t be a fucking nazi.

And, unsurprisingly enough, the cannibals ate the priest.

2

youre right, the cannibals are ok. the priest is wrong. this is the problem with absolute morality, it is championed by jackasses like this priest who are wrong retards.

the universal morality that is true in all cases is that you should treat your neighbor as you would want to be treated. the way you would want to be treated can vary greatly from one culture to the next. a cannibal is perfectly capable of wanting to sustain his loved ones after he dies for a day or two and therefore can morally eat his dad. anyone who says he cant is a jackass who will vote for bush.

if the cannibal starts eating a guy and the guy coems back to life and screams ‘oh please stop eating me it hurts’ then i would certainly say that the cannibal is wrong in that he doesnt care that he is hurting others. i would say that any situation can be explained this way. not by christian retards. by me, the golden rule and logic.

3

So If my neighbor comes into my house and murders my wife, I should not report him to the authorities, because I wouldn’t want to be reported if I were in his position? Or if my neighbor is beating the crap out of me, I should not fight back because I wouldn’t want someone to fight back if I was attacking them? If my neighbor(any human) decides to burn down my house I shouldn’t put it out, because if I took all the time to set a house on fire, I wouldn’t want somebody to just come up and put it out?

4

thats a good point, id refute it by saying that god cant expect us to completely take our own shoes off when dealing with other people whose shoes are so different.

he supplies us with psychopaths who truly desire to burn things the same way i desire girls. he obviously doesnt want them treated the same as me.

i believe what he would expect from us is to put ourselves in the shoes of somebody who just burnt a house for no good reason, by accident. because thats the only way we could ever imagine burning a house, by accident.

now if we were innocent, which we know we would be if we had just burned a house, then not only would it not matter if the owner called the cops, but you might even want him to just to clear the air and make it known that you were innocent.

if it turns out that your actually schizophrenic and your alternate personality that you cant understand did it when you were unconscious, would you want to get busted and then treated?

5

It is absolutely true that truth is relative, oh, and that there are absolutely no absolutes.

6

FM

[/b]

7

That statement is a great paradox. If there are no absolutes. Then the fact that there are no absolues isnt absolute. Which means there just might be…something that is, in fact, absolute…i think. Absolutely

Brian

8

I think someone who is stupid and has stupid ideas is not helping society directly. And in some cases there is absolute truth that you can’t contradict and still be right in your own.way. Scienitific laws are one example, though they aren’t as absolute as the name implies. The point is, you can’t simply say “the universe is made of marshmallows, so it’s a sin to eat Peeps”. There’s no relativisim there…you’re just wrong if you say that.

Philosophers who have an inadaquate knowledge of what is, at least for all pratcical purposes, absolute truth, can make stupid statements and have stupid ideas. Mathematics, for example is a form of truth theat is precisely quantifiable. If you disobey a relevant law of mathematics n one of your statements, then your iudea is likely wrong or incomplete. It’s not a matter of perspective at that point.

Obviously you were refering to morals rather than science in your original post. Just don’t forget that sometimes a “philosophical” question has a scientific answer, and therefore is subject to absolute truth.

9

good point tmminionman…mathematical truths vs emotional or moral truths.

I totally agree, there are definatly absolute truths in mathematics. 3 is ALWAYS greater than 2. Where as in moral-matics…absolute truths dont exist. Only personal standpoints and and truths from different perspectives.

all in all, just agreeing with ya TM

-Brian

10

Why? Who are you to tell me that 3 is a greater numerical quantity than 2?

Can you imagine a world, a universe, a viewpoint where numbers are reveresed and 2 is greater, in that viewpoint’s world, than 3?

Numerals are just abstract terms to describe quantity, which is an abstract idea in the first place. Your perspective, though it parallels most other people’s, is not necessarily true, in an absolute sense.

Is it quantifiable to an infant? What about a being that suffers from mental retardation? A rabbit?

Just because you see things, math, as per your example, one way, does that make it absolutely true? If everyone were colorblind, then would the sky be a lovely shade of gray?

We measure and perceive our world in a way that we can understand and accept. You say math is quantifiable, and that’s fine. That’s how you define it. Your own individual perspective, paralleled by millions of others. But just because millions of others agree with you, does that make it absolutely true?

I don’t claim that “truth is relative” is an absolute, though it would appear to be inherent in that statement. I believe truth to be relative, according to my own individual perspective, and I leave the possibility open that I am wrong. That my beliefs are flawed and that I am going to hell. It’s even possible that nothing is possible. See? Because you believe one thing and I believe another, does one of us have to be wrong, and one right? I think women should be able to abort their children, and you don’t, is one of us right, the other wrong?

We’re both right, and both wrong, from each other’s perspectives. Can you truly judge someone if you haven’t seen things from their view? Can you tell me I’m wrong if you haven’t lived my life and seen what I’ve seen, heard what I’ve heard, and experienced what I have? Vice-versa.

What is truth?

11

hang on razn. from your perspective, everybody must be right and nobody can be wrong.

applying the popper criteria, your theory is not falsifiable, and hence not a valid hypothesis. hows that ? (and ya i know, who’s popper to call you on it, right ?)

12

My perspective of razn’s perspective is that they percieve there to be no absolute right or wrong, but showing an awareness too that something can feel right or wrong based on individual perspectives. You can ‘believe’ something to be right or wrong in your own perspective at the same time as believing there are no absolutes… in my opinion.

13

sometimes 3 is less than 2…

3 what is less than 2 what

3 apples is not less than 2 apples

but 3 dozen is less than 2 score

numbers are meaningless until they are applied to meaningful things…

-Imp

14

I believe that you are the one that has very poor knoweledge of what science and mathematics are in order to claim that they are absolutes :expressionless:

The relatavist cause is that “truth depends by the way we speak(or think) about it” and till now I believe there have been multiple instances that have atleast credited such claim.

We can take a look for example at skolem’s paradox.

In the end of the 19th century cantor has proove with his set theory that the domain of arithmetics (i.e. Real Numbers - R) is more than numeralable, which means that the objects which studies arithmetics cannot be counted (R > N).

At the beginning of the '900 the lowwenheim-skolem theorem followed as a corollary Godel’s less famous completeness theorem.
LS stated that if a theory is definable at the first of order (i.e. without quantifying on properties) then it’s domain is numerable.

But now we have a paradox or it is better to say an apory. Using two different languages studying the same object we have come up to two different answers. What we have here is a perfect example of truth changing depending on the language you use to describe it.

Ofcourse this relativism applies only to a limit-case like this one, in both theories “2+2=4” stays a solid truth. Yet this little discordance blows a big blow at mathematical realism and its Idea that it exists a world of stable and absolute mathematical truth that the mathematician discovers with the help of a quasi-mythical intuition or reason.
If we accept the results of the lowenheim skolem theorem we have to accept that mathematics does not describe a single world and thus does not describe accurately the one world which we assume to live.

This is anyway only the tip of the iceberg, there have been many thinkers that in some way or the other have attacked scientific realism. A couple of examples are Kunh (a physicist) and his theory of scientific revolutionsm Poincare` and Reichenbach (the forme a mathematician and the later a pupil of Einstein) with their conventionalism alongside with many other philosopher and philosophies some still actual oters not (as croce’s new-idealism).

So I would be careful before calling philosopher’s theories stupid or ill-informed, because more often then not in can be exactly the opposite.

15

So, apparently there are no absolute wrongs- except judgementalism!!
Eating people must be accepted as a wonderful expression of global diversity (for after all, there is no right and wrong), but criticizing someone who eats people makes you a Nazi. Even if pure moral relativism was self-contradictory, rAzn’s thoughts don’t actually express moral relativism in the first place, since the purpose and attitude of his post was one of moral indignation at jugdementalism.

16

mmmm… if thats so, then why did he call my momma a whore ?

17

It’s not that he called your momma a whore that’s objectionable, it’s that he didn’t tag ‘not that there’s anything wrong with that’ at the end.

18

bs. he doesnt get to call my momma anything, how about that ?

and that pc crap tail on any statement does nothing to make anything right either. what if i said he’s an idiot not that there’s anything wroing wiht it ? quite the contrary, its very popular.

19

If you try to enforce absolutes you run into that fact that those absolutes are subjective. If you enforce subjectivity you run into the fact that for it to work it would have to be absolute. There is something to be said about something that is looking at itself, it can never see it all because it is the thing that is seeing. We are the universe looking at the universe like a child guessing what the child is holding in his closed hand.

20

Don’t you think that killing people for food is wrong? Would you be OK with people suddenly starting to go around doing it? We condemn people for doing wrong things because we think they are wrong. For example, I believe that human life has value. Are my just going to be OK with people killing others? No, if I really believe that human life has value, I am going to want to preserve human life, and if it means imposing my beliefs on others, that is worth it. If you have no morals, there is no reason to impose your beliefs on others, but other than that…

If you believe that something is pretty much true, for example that killing people is generally wrong, then you should try to enforce the implications of that. If enough people agree with you, you will suceed. If not, you will not suceed.