Love only makes sense when it is globally reciprocal, everyone loves everyone. Reciprocal love isn’t good enough, Bonny and Clyde loved each other, but most people hated them.
Love from the sense of taking the good with the bad, sort of an unconditional love, is also unacceptable… like a heroin addict who mostly feels like shit but loves the high for a bit, we do this with relationships too and call it love.
Love only makes sense when it doesn’t waver, as it does with heroin addicts, and when it is mutually global… otherwise it’s just selfishness or misery with glimmers of enjoyment.
That’s all about love, the rest is nonsense. Don’t speak about love, speak about reciprocal love, and don’t just speak about reciprocal love, speak about globally reciprocal love, otherwise the term just becomes evil or suffering and doesn’t convey what people are attempting to communicate.
This sounds like
if it is not all perfect immediately - everyone loves everything - than any love you feel is worth nothing. Right down to specifics: If a mother loves her newborn, who is not really in a position to love but can need appreciate, than the mother’s love is worth nothing. If you love your wife but occasionally feel cold towards her or in frustration do not accept her completely on occasion, then your love is worth nothing and means nothing.
Possibly this attitude might make for good heuristics in a programmed, mathematical universe, but it doesn’t seem useful or loving, even, in one with humans or life in general.
It’s certainly not “everyone loves everything” I don’t think Bonny and Clyde should be loved in any possible universe. The point is that we have earned our love, that we have all earned it. Not that it’s given out freely when people don’t deserve it. You can love a newborn, just like you can love heroin, you can love inanimate objects, I suppose the reciprocation in this sense is just that it always works for you and doesn’t bother them or gives them a sense of feeling loved back. My problem is with the pockets of love where hatred festers for others, such as the Bonnie and Clyde example, or Eva and Hitler. I don’t believe in unconditional love, I believe in rational love and love that is not evil. Love can be pure evil. You can love to chop people into little pieces while they are still alive and enjoy torturing them until death, you can even unconditionally love the hypothetical creator for the bounty of these victims… love can be PURE evil. So the issue I have is that people don’t clarify this.
I need to add to this, because what i wrote above doesn’t make as much sense unless I say this…
You don’t have to hate a person to love chopping them into pieces… another thing people confuse is evil and hatred. It is evil to catch people and chop them into pieces while they’re still alive because you love doing that and you of course love them for being there for you to do that, unconditionally, unconditional love can be pure evil.
But what is done out of love is done beyond good and evil; it cannot be subjected to moral debate. And there are so many different kinds of love and levels of love that it would be nearly impossible to quantify them all.
Chopping people up is a bit rash, I agree, but you will never convince anyone such an act is evil. You’re telling a noble lie; you want to trick axe wielding psychopaths into not chopping people up by lying to them and making them believe chopping people up would be evil… and that being evil is bad.
Bollocks. If you want to stop the axe wielding people chopping psychopaths, you have to become an axe wielding people chopping psychopath chopper. Might is right. Dialectics is dirty and underhanded. A man only tries to convince by philosophical argument because he has failed to convince with his chopper!
Actually you’re just saying what is done out of emotion is beyond good and evil, you may as well just say that what is done out of hatred is beyond good and evil. You said as much later when you said might makes right… however, might makes right is a judgement of good and evil, a good argument vs. an evil one, you believe it is a good one, yet you say that might transcends right, and that it is beyond good and evil… which means that you’re refuting your own argument by making a judgement of good or evil about it. You contradicted yourself just by typing this post.
I stipulate that contradiction is evil and non-contradiction is good… you stipulate that you can’t make your argument.
I don’t think Zoot Allures meant what you think he meant.
I think he was talking purely descriptively, not prescriptively and even then, not quite literally that ‘might makes right’. It’s how the world functions - you can be wrong, but if you are more mighty, you can just threaten the one who is right into submission and thus make yourself appear right in eyes of the majority. It doesn’t, actually, make you right of course, but aside from you knowing that you’re wrong, there’s practically no difference.
Good and evil are interchangeable with desirable and undesirable, respectively. Contradiction is evil (undesirable)… if your ultimate goal is to arrive at truth.
My point with the baby is that it is not reciprocal. The baby is not going to show you the care and concern you, hopefully, show it. It will not take into account your needs (to sleep, for example). I am not blaming the baby, obviously. It has not reached the stage of awareness, understanding, independence and so on to be able to reciprocate or even feel love in the way a parent does. (though it is pretty common that a parent will have a love for the child that is not reciprocated in full, regardless of age. This can cut the other way of course, but I see this as part and parcel of childhood.
OK, I got mislead by the OP, in part by what I quoted above.
I generally agree. I think the use of the word ‘love’ can be questioned here, but I’ll emphasize agreement first.
I don’t think the various uses of the word love are the same. Now people may use the word love sloppily and in a sense you could be attacking that use.
But it reads here as an equivocation.
You must misunderstand my position, Ecmandu. AOC hit the bulls-eye. I deny that good and evil exist, so there are no self-referential paradoxes in my reasoning. I am not saying that might is good or that right is bad, or vice versa. I am saying there is only ever correct action in terms of functionality. By might I might mean ‘the proper means’ and by right I might mean ‘accomplishment’. This is a purely descriptive assertion and I don’t claim any of this is good or bad in the way philosophers talk about it. I don’t moralize the subject.
You, for example, have a theory of morality (based on your sexual stratification idea) which is the thing that your lines of reason always lead to (this is good because it means you are capable of system building). If they support the theory, you consider them ‘good’ or ‘right’. This is prescriptive, and it means you are claiming something should be such and such because you believe this would be ‘good’ or ‘right’ (this is circular and question begging, notice).
I would only ever say I want such and such, and I would never be able to explain why. But do I really need to? I do not find it necessary to justify myself as an immoralist because if I tried I would end up in contradiction and nonsense. Neither would I ever try to declare absolutely ‘this is good, and that is bad!’ because I wouldn’t be able to tell you why.
Maybe I am a contradicting intellectual mess. Who wants to know? I’m a philosopher. It comes with the territory.
At least you recognize that moral relativist dilemma. You did a fine job dropping me right into it. Fortunately for me, it’s an easy dilemma to get out of. And, its an obvious logical contradiction easily spotted. Not one of the more meatier fallacies you have to actually look for. You get only two points for calling that foul on the self-referential thing. Two points is better than nothing, though.
p.s. I like that bit on the Ed3 contra James physics thread about absolute reference frames being needed for there to be the very possibility of the spontaneity of relative reference frames, or some such thing. When I read that I was overcome with the feeling of the epiphany of the glory and the grace of the presence of the love of the spirit of God. Like God was this absolute framework, E. You ever see in those movies when a bright light suddenly shines and there’s that sustained C sharp by the choir? Like that.
I think that ambiguous words are being tossed about without regard to clarification as if they were absolutely understood by all people.
There is the feeling of love, “flove” and the act of love, “alove”. The two do not always come together. There is agape, the love for all within an entire group/species. And there is the more common love merely for known associates. There is a/flove of the imagined person as perhaps seen on TV who doesn’t truly exist. There is the altruist a/flove, such as mother to child, expecting or demanding no love in return. There is the contract love which is merely a self-interested trade (the common or secular marriage in the West) requiring reciprocation with penalties for perceived contract violations. And as with good and evil, love and hatred have their objective, subjective, and perceived forms. And of course the misdirected, misunderstood, transfixed, and/or confused a/flove forms.
And then as for myself, there is “Rational Love”; well thought-out, deeply rooted/felt, and properly justified even though altruistic and might be applied to anything/one.
The very ambiguous topic of “love” is hardly going to be put to rest any time soon.
Do you think this was a good post/reply to me? That’s what I meant when I said you were contradicting yourself. You consider amoralism to have no contradiction, yet you assert it as a positive argument of superior standing, if you’re amoral towards your amoralism than you’re contradicting yourself by typing the post in the context of a motivational system (good and bad).
I think altruism is based upon motivationally calculated systems. Parents forgive their children because those children will likely support them in some way financially (working on the farm, to visiting them in nursing homes they pay for). I actually have a term I coined called “psychopathic empathy”. The analogy is when some family of Nazi’s has a child who isn’t a Nazi, they keep trying to convert that child and fear what will happen to the child if he/she doesn’t convert, so they will still love this child even though they are psychopaths. I actually think this type of empathy is common in society.
Love can be divided into these forms I suppose, but it’s basic property is enjoyment and its subsequent desire. We didn’t get into fear here… some people “love” because they fear what might happen should they remove themselves from the situation more than staying in the situation.
To me this implies binary evaluation. If someone has sick beliefs or beliefs that can lead them to horrible behavior, then all their feelings and relations are also sick and horrible. I do not think this is the case. I think one can have real empathy and compassion for some and not for others, even if the latter lack is based on wrong ideas. People can be trained to see some people as nothing. But this training has not destroyed the ability to feel and relate to everyone. Ifyou think this is an excuse for Naziism you are not understanding.
I would include empathy. I do not think that a heroin addicts addiction is love. There is desire - and a desire in part NOT to feel and that is not self-love - but not love.
Well my perception of good and evil, right and wrong etc… is very binary, and perhaps global as you stated. People can be nice to everyone and be evil, because some people don’t deserve being nice to. You’re nopt using the word love in terms of empathy as it’s used in language, you’re developing your own private language, and language is about common use and evolution… I used to LOVE ice cream… did I have empathy for it? From your perspective I couldn’t have actually loved ice cream, and almost everyone in the world is using the term wrong.
If my argument was ‘positive’, whatever that means, I was not aware of it, and I consider my argument to be of ‘superior standing’ only because I believe it is true… while I believe many other theories of morality are not.
And how can someone be ‘amoral toward their amoralism’? What the heck does that even mean?
Btw, contradictions in moral relativism are really linguistic problems rather than conceptual problems. Morality or ‘valuality’ (you might as well call it) cannot be captured in language or defined by the logical rules that govern language because it transcends all of this. We can’t speak about morality objectively like we can speak about an object or process in the world.
It’s very easy to speak about morality objectively in language… if you have a suicidal tension of zero and a high homicidal tension, and nobody kills themselves, you have utopia… everyone is perfectly happy to be here, inherently, inherently moral. Make suicide as easy as possible and nobody does it, that’s utopia, that’s a moral LAW, and I just spoke it with words.
That is because you have a very limited and selfish (young) oriented mind at this point.
Children are born not understanding love at all. They think only in terms of self-feeding and wanting to BE loved (“Me, me, me”). When they never mature, they never learn anything more than that. And that is why certain very influential people want to ensure that white males never mature, else they will learn the one thing that would save them.