Dude, you’re the one who is supposed to make an example. I just gave you a general outline. Get off your ass and do some work, please. But if you want general outlines…
Suppose I am a rich man, who decides to help a poor man. I give him all of my money. I am now poor, and he is rich. Did I help the greater good? Not at all. In fact I harmed the greater good, in so far as how you obtain wealth matters to it, whether you’ve created dependence, or insult, etc.
Making yourself poor in order to help poor people should strike you as ridiculous. And furthermore, you can no longer help yourself. On the other hand, giving money that you spend on things you don’t need does not harm your well-being—it enhances your well-being.
I’d rather be dead than know that I refused to save a child that I could have saved. If you are dead, you don’t have a better or worse well-being—you have none at all. —I mean, you can’t attribute the concept to you anymore, at all. So, you can’t say: “My well-being is worse, because I am dead”. No, it’s not worse, because it makes no sense at all to say you have a well-being at all.
In other news, this is probably better in a new thread.
You don’t define a ‘greater good’, you don’t define ‘harming yourself’, you don’t define well-being. You would make a great priest for the god Bullshitto - no matter what moral decision a poor peon has to make, he has to go to you because you are the only one who understands your moral system. You are either unable to teach it or you are hiding it to maintain control.
You want some provisional definitions, here you go…
Well-being = Physical health + Psychological health + Financial health
Greater Good = Sum of all individual well-beings.
Harming yourself = decreasing well-being.
What you’ve said to me is false, ignorant, lazy, and hypocritcal. I know that you are a great mind capable of better than that.
I AM A RIVER TO MY PEOPLE.
(PS. I won’t respond to any more posts for things that I’ve said a million times in other threads, if it is in this thread. Create a new thread, or post in a previous one. As far as this thread goes, it is not the topic).
Provisional definitions… phyllo asked for some specifics. You provided none. What are all your definitions compared to what? Physical health… for a gold medal athelete or a quadraplegic? Psychological health… Good luck defining that one. Financial health… In Dubai or Haiti? Talk about ignorant, lazy, and hypocritical… :-"
I AM A RIVER TO MY PEOPLE.
(PS. I won’t respond to any more posts for things that I’ve said a million times in other threads, if it is in this thread. Create a new thread, or post in a previous one. As far as this thread goes, it is not the topic).
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Accepting your premises about morality:
If ignorant about how they ought to act and incapable of understanding what’s good for them, it’s bound to be the case that at least some people would be motivated by nothing less than coercion to do what’s right.
Acting how you ought to act just is what’s good for you. …such that if something is good for you then you ought to pursue it? If acting as you ought to act just is what’s good for you is meant as a statement of material equivalence (a biconditional), then whatever one decides is good – do you believe in “the good” apart from a subjective human notion of what is good? – is what he ought to do.
Suppose you are powerful enough to manipulate people, whole masses even, without regard for their well-being, and you do this because you find you can sustain such a system and reap benefits. Does you accept this as a moral possibility? (Why not?)
Well it’s pretty obvious that physical health (for example) is conceived differently for a teenager than an 80 year old man. The analogy, likewise, is that morality is context-dependent. And obviously, that doesn’t make morality subjective----(i.e., there are still right and wrong answers about health for the teenager, and for the old person).
Anyways, there’s no need to think that you need an absolutist, universal definition of physical health for a teenager. You can outline some general paramaters… like having a fucking liver, and other things. And then a medical doctor can get much more specific, about measuring liver function across an average of the population, and placing some individual along that continuum to judge their “health”.
Same goes for the other components.
I take this to be straightforward. What’s the upshot, you ask? The upshot is that there may never be mathmatically precise answers to moral questions----but that doesn’t mean there can’t be right and wrong answers, and that you can’t make moral decisions in an increasingly precise and thoughtful way.
I’m not sure if i’m more disturbed or amused, anon. The hostility is heartwarming, though. The hostility towards common sense, that is.
Von Rivers has provided a good example of what is not serious philosophy. Thank you for that, vonnie.
Tent -
Depends. Philosophical morality - systematic morality, ideally aware of its assumptions, requires language, because it requires logic, in some sense at least. Here, we again have to distinguish between good and bad philosophy, of course. But moral feeling requires the training of dread, guilt, shame, feelings of acceptance and love, and so on and so forth. The training of basic emotions toward a “moral” end. How you decide to divvy up these emotions is not immediately important in every detail. We can quibble about that.
As you might guess after all these years, my view is that it’s not so much an either/or thing - it’s a spectrum, a continuum. But a fully philosophical morality requires language. Much purportedly philosophical moral thinking is political mindfucking, of course, so allowances have to be made once we get down to cases.
In von Rivers’ case, it’s mindfucking of a different sort. Stuff like
doesn’t pass the common sense test - it makes no sense, so it’s difficult to address in any interesting way. It is not interesting to the philosopher.
This speaks a little bit to Smears’ point about sanctions - moral feelings are (again) the result of the training of “unadulterated” feelings that almost everyone has. Psychopaths are a notable exception. We all feel dread. We can be taught what to dread. We are all, or most of us are, taught what to dread, by the approval and disapproval of mom and dad, the family, the extended family, the clan, the tribe, the nation - in concentric circles. I probably still know people who feel dread if they allow an american flag to touch the ground. They feel like they really have done something dreadfully immoral. Go figure.
I was just echoing what Socrates said in Plato’s dialogue titled, “Apology”, and again in Protagoras and Gorgias. —Worth a read, that Plato… kind of a big deal…
Then in this sense, morality is a cultural adventure of moving from vagueness toward specificity. Does this mean that the common person is a serious philosopher without even knowing it? Ummmm… forget I said that. You’ll please forgive me. For some perverse reason, I’m trying to hold the line of moving from the general to the specific. You know, serious philosophy. Otherwise, we might as well drop into the local pub for a rousing bullshit session - or posting to ILP. Oops…
Well, philosophy should always be a move away from vagueness. That’s one of the big problems here on ILP, but also among common people like Kant. The difference is that where Kant is vague, countless articles and papers are written speculating about “what he really meant”. You and me? We’re just vague. When Socrates contradicts himself, or contradicts common sense, he gets himself a “paradox”. You and me? We’re just full of shit.
You sound like the Wizard awarding the lion a testimonial.
The Socratic claim seems commonsensically true, to me.
All philosophy is a footnote to Plato. One of the most important 20th century philosophers said that. Everyone is expanding on what Plato wrote, or else still rebelling against him, like Nietzsche. Nobody who knows their ass from their elbow thinks Plato isn’t relevant. Philosophy has not moved past Plato/Socrates, it has only moved deeper into Plato/Socrates.
Fucking hilarious! For the first time, I finally understand where your train wrecked. You actually think Plato was a philosopher. If Plato was alive today, he’d be a used car salesman or a televangelist. Was he relevent? Absolutely. He is the marker of where western philosophy took a wrong turn. Philosophy has only moved deeper into Plato? That is the biggest joke in anything even remotely connected to philosophy. But thank you for the yuks. You made my day. =D>
Ummmm… forget I said that. You’ll please forgive me. For some perverse reason, I’m trying to hold the line of moving from the general to the specific. You know, serious philosophy. Otherwise, we might as well drop into the local pub for a rousing bullshit session - or posting to ILP. Oops… 