Haha, indeed James has been lurking around me and insulting my friends; calling them snakes, saying they would all anandon me except him. Of course he was the only one who betrayed me, and his treachery is evil, sick and perverse.
In fact the man seems to be for a good part responsible for the disease that has nearly brought down ILP. Somehow he has mastered that art of insulting, discrediting, distorting and simply fucking people over by lying about them to all others to a level that makes it seem professional. Its part of what ILP needs to get under control. I suggest the mods monitor this thread and ban him when it is reasonable to do so.
So now you have gotten down to being just an out and out liar. You are going to run out of things to accuse me of. And still not find the slightest reason to believe any of them. As someone else recently observed of you, “He’s just lost it”.
There are objective facts that can be known about cows if you are a veterinarian. There are objective facts that can be known about abortion if you are an obstetrician. If the cow is sick, the vet either can or cannot heal it. If the woman is afflicted with an unwanted pregnancy, the doctor either can or cannot abort the baby.
These are facts. Objective facts applicable to all of us. And not just subjective opinions. Not just “certain points of view”.
But how can a cow being sacred/slaughtered or an abortion being moral/immoral be anything other than a subjective point of view rooted [by and large] in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy?
Where is the argument that demonstrates otherwise? In other words, the argument that is not just something that any particular individual [as dasein] claims to know/believe is true “in his head”.
We can speak of The Philosophers, The Scientists, The Theologians. But, in my view, they are all stymied here. They are all entangled in my dilemma above. They just don’t know it.
Unless of course I’m wrong.
And I’ll be the first to admit there is no getting around that until someone really does come up with a theory of everything. And then effectively connects the dots between his or her “world of words” and the world that we actually live in. The world where human beings have been conflicted over value judgments going all the way back to the caves.
But it’s not just a question of semantics to the woman who is forced to give birth…or to the baby who is shredded. It’s not just a “language game” to them.
As one of Richard Rorty’s “ironists”, I am often ambivalent regarding distinctions to be made between that which can be taken literally and that which [instead] becomes hopelessly entangled in our own subjective spin. So to speak. :-"
And how will this ever not be just a point of view? Only the existence of an omniscient God can settle it once and for all.
True, even in regard to the “fact of the matter”, one may ultimately need God. At least when someone makes a claim that comes down to either believing it or not believing it. In other words, a claim that cannot be substantiated beyond that.
I recall for example the courtroom scene from the film Reversal of Fortune. Sunny von Bülow is hovering like a ghost above the proceedings below. Speculating on what the outcome of the trial might be. Now, there was “the fact of the matter”: Claus is either guilty or not guilty of putting her into an irreversible coma. The jury acquitted him. But was their own decision in fact the right one?
And, if he was guilty, was his behavior necessarily immoral? How could that be established in the absence of God?
My point though is that, when something is a fact, it may be possible to establish it. But with regard to conflicting value judgments how are facts established then? Is abortion in fact moral, or is abortion in fact immoral?
Yes, those who embrace the capitalist political economy will insist that it ought to be embraced by all rational men and women. And those that embrace the socialist political economy will insist that it ought to be embraced by all rational men and women.
Then what?
Well, both sides then construct their own rendition of “the good”. But all you are arguing here is that, given the assumptions that both sides start out with, they are “right” and the other side is “wrong”.
But there can be no doubt at all that someone plays the stock market if in fact it can be established that he or she does play the stock market.
Sure, you may want to believe that she does not have a terminal illness. But that does not alter the fact that she either does or she does not.
Instead, where the moral quandaries come into play is when someone with a terminal illness decides to seek out a Dr. Kevorkian to perform an assisted suicide. Is that “in fact” moral or immoral?
If someone is able to convince himself or herself that the morality of abortion can be construed as a “factual judgment”, more power to them. But I am not. From my frame of mind, it becomes a “fact” only because they are able to convince themselves that my dilemma above is not applicable to them. They believe or claim to know this “in their head”. But that [to me] is no where near being able to demonstrate to us that all rational men and women should believe/know this too.
Yes, but that is basically my point. This reflects how I construe behaviors in collision re the embodiment of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
In other words, “in your head” you seem convinced that this…
…is as far as a rational mind need go. But it does nothing to obviate the conflicting goods in my view. One side values the prisoner being executed, the other side values his not being executed. Both sides make reasonable arguments given the premises they start out with. Value ontology does nothing to change that. Or nothing that I am able to grasp.
Back again to abortion. There may well soon be a law here in America that forbids all abortions. Now, if there is an omniscient/omnipotent God this law would either be in accord with His will or it would not be. If there is No God though, then these things are decided among mere mortals who are in no way shape or form omniscient/omnipotent. At least not with respect to conflicting value judgments.
Yes, if you had the power to ban me, you could do so. And if I clearly broke one of the rules, you could note that. But if I broke none of the rules you could still ban me simply because you don’t like my point of view. That’s the part that revolves around political economy [power].
But how would you go about demonstrating to us that it was necessarily rational to ban me. Or necessarily ethical.
How would that not be the embodiment of dasein and conflicting goods? A subjective valuation based on the asumptions that you make regarding that which constitutes a rational/ethical reason to ban me.
Again: What on earth does this mean? If you were confronted with two people who were on opposite sides of any particular moral/political issue, and noted this to them, how would it enable them to reconcile or resolve their conflict?
Iambig, is abortion a matter of personal investment for you? Because I think that is the only way in which I can understand your position.
It is, of course, a life-and-death situation, so always irreconcilable to itself. To accept this is easy when you have no personal investment, but I imagine it becomes ridiculously hard in the other case. As carrying an unbreakable tension within itself, it can form a hub for a man to balance his intellectual ventures, to remind himself that nothing is set an that the most important questions are unanswerable… a locus of his daemonism. But I could only interpret this as the expression of a secret wish to philosophize, to venture into the labyrinth without fear.
::
Inn the end VO and AO are based on irreconcilable premises. It’s either one or the other. As with all things, we need to look at both origins and ends. VO has built a society, into which I am indeed losing my old, fearful, conspiracy-obsessed self - I no longer care for any of the things that used to inspire fear in me, and doubt of man and his future.
To derail or detour the thread a bit into the ground of its own causes - I wanted to bring up Parodites’ philosophy of consciousness. This dates from 2011, and it’s a very basic sketch.
[size=95]“I have gone on about my theory of consciousness, the reflexive nature of it, and the disintegration of the drives… Instead of the repression of one drive by another drive or drives, you get simply one drive acting separately from the others. Instead of sublimation, you get multiple drives operating in unison. This unison I called active consciousness, because it is involved in the higher ventures, like art, the production of genius, the creation of values. You could picture the consciousness of man as a number of pendulums swinging… In most men the pendulums are separated by a great distance, they swing not together but at different speeds, by different paces, etc. A lot of them do not swing at all, they have run down over time, a particular drive has atrophied, ie. human domestication prevails. But in the man of genius all the pendulums- the drives, instincts, thoughts, and emotions which constitute consciousness… are close to one another. If one pendulum swings, it hits up against the one next to it, and it to the one that follows, and so on, until all the pendulums are operating equally. Genius is measured by how little stimuli is needed to induce the entire consciousness to activity, the greatest geniuses need only a little stimulation to become very, very conscious. The fact that the drives operate as one leads to the strange behavior that allows the association between genius and insanity to be possible. Sexuality, intellect, all the emotions, etc… all operate as one. Of course this is all archetypal, no genius, no man, has every united in his consciousness absolutely all the constituent drives available to human nature. They have achieved greater and lesser degrees of such a union, which always operates against a much stronger, much larger background of the unconscious which, again, is not repressed memories and drives, but those drives, thoughts, etc. which resist integration and still operate as separate forces.” [Parodites, A New Ethics][/size]
At one point in my life, I was opposed to abortion. Why? Because I was raised in a family/community that taught me to be opposed to it. Then I was drafted into the Army, sent to Vietnam and there I met fellow draftees who gave me a whole other perspective. I became a feminist. Then my friend Mary had an abortion and that ruptured my life because my friend John was opposed to it. Then I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon the idea of “conflicting goods”.
What I now await is the manner in which you are yourself able to show how one of your own value judgments goes beyond this. In other words, the manner in which you intertwine VO “out in the world” pertaining to your own views on a moral conflict we might all be familiar with.
What do you mean by “irreconcilable to itself” as it pertains to the manner in which I construe conflicting goods here? We can live in a world where pregnant women are allowed to choose abortion or a world in which they are forced to give birth.
But we can’t live in a world where women have the right to choose and babies have the right to be born.
There would seem to be three options:
1] might makes right: those in power make the rules
2] democracy and the rule of law: moderation, negotiation and compromise prevail
3] right makes might: an objective moral truth is established and all rational men and women agree to abide by it
As a moral nihilist, the “best of all possible worlds” would seem to be #2
But I remain snagged on this though:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
Ah, now I see the assumption. No, this is not the case. Laws will never be final across the world and man will never completely obey the law. This is why it is rather sensible to look for the compromises that can be made, for compromises will inevitably be made in life-and-death problems. Abortion is like war. It sometimes is what all the parties want and then it gets ugly. But life is for a great deal ugly, and moral absolutes about practical cases are part of that ugliness.
The violence of moral positions on such issues is … inhuman. I can’t really condone it.
Yes, it is rather my value judgment that the issue should not be an issue. There should be no law for or against it. People should figure it out. That is what life is, figuring life out locally. That is what Dasein is anyway.
The most inevitable option in any case; compromise. But I have to believe in the possibility of compromise between the parties involved before I could ever believe in meaningful compromises dealt out by the state - i.e. compromises that will be possible to integrate into the fabric of society.
I repeat my original answer, which is that to state that you could as well not have been what you are, is to state a blatant untruth.
Necessity is fixed at the heart of all philosophic thought.
Well then, you’re an objectivist. When science determines that an abortion has been performed, you consider it objective fact. The reason you don’t think the abortion was moral or immoral is that science has not been able to determine that it was.
I can accept this, though I think even science does not necessarily establish objective facts, but just interpretations that multiple subjects agree upon (supposing that there even are multiple subjects, i.e., other minds).
Check out Popper’s verisimilitude, Sauwelios. There is a very basic objectivity to science in the way of determining simple, quantifiable object facts generally about the world and things in it. The theory that an abortion is performed by the termination of the fetus and not by dancing a tango is probably objectively true. Epistemic concerns and subjectively relative interpretations of the world are really irrelevant here. Some things are just plain ol’ objectively true, bruh.
disclaimer: I may be totally wrong about what I think Popper means by verisimilitude (I have trouble enough just spelling it).
Why not establish facts in the same way? Why distinguish between value judgments and factual judgments at all? There is no evidence that anything is moral or immoral. Why suppose that some things are, then? Why not just say, “I (dis)like this”? I’m reminded:
“How often they [commander and legislator philosophers] have deliberately blindfolded themselves simply so as not to behold the narrow ledge that separates them from a plunge into the abyss; e.g., Plato, when he convinced himself that the ‘good’ as he desired it was not the good of Plato but the ‘good in itself,’ the eternal treasure that some man, named Plato, had chanced to discover on his way! This same will to blindness dominates the founders of religions in a much coarser form: their ‘thou shalt’ must not by any means sound in their ears like ‘I will’–they dare to fulfill their task only as the command of a god; only as an ‘inspiration’ is their value legislation a bearable burden under which their conscience is not crushed.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 972, Kaufmann translation.)
(Note that I do not agree with Nietzsche that this actually applied to Plato; I think Plato only pretended to be convinced of that.)
See my critique of the establishment of “facts” above in this post.
To me, “conflicting goods” only means conflicting notions of what is good. If there is no evidence that an abortion has been performed, why believe someone who claims that one has been performed? Likewise, if there is no evidence that abortion is immoral, why believe someone who claims that it is immoral?
Well, I think that, by subscribing to the fact/value distinction, you actually empower them. I say it’s as much a factual judgment as the judgment whether an abortion has been performed, and, in the absence of any evidence, equally probable to be faulty.
It’s about those premises. Premises are where thinking starts–if at all–, not where it ends. Applying logic is not thinking. Value ontology is far beyond those bickering sides with their precious premises. Those sides simply have different values: these are what their premises really derive from, not facts. And with regard to their deeper values, those sides are basically the same–almost indistinguishable really, like ants. They both want to believe that they and what is good for them exist independently from their insistence that they do.
I entirely agree. I could not convince others by demonstration; I would have to resort to dialectic, sophistry, rhetoric, poetry.
Really? Doesn’t your example already presuppose agreement upon what a fetus is and what its termination entails? So that the theory that an abortion is performed by the termination of the fetus is true by definition? Definitions that have been agreed upon?
If it is that it is also the establishment of a logic, or ‘justice’, within that absolute relativism.
In as far as there are facts, it is a fact that the self-valuing logic, if the terms are applied as they should be, applies to every thing that can be identified. It is rather the insistence on this particular fact that is a value, and that creates values.
You could actually explain to them what is happening, and predict the sort of things likely to happen once that baby is born or not. You could ‘be there for them’ an help them make a wise decision. Is that not the aim???
Absolutely: what I said was not meant to define it, just to point out something important about it.
Just to be clear, though: am I right that you mean “‘justice’” here in the sense that behaviour that is logically necessary is by that very fact “justified”?
I agree with the first statement. I’m not sure I understand the second, though. How is this insistence a value, and how does it create values?
What I mean… and again this may not be related to Popper’s idea… is that if there is agreement on what theoretical description of event X is (the procedure of abortion on what is called a fetus), there can be an almost unlimited number of theories that can be objectively ruled out as theoretical explanations for event X.
I don’t think the dispute can be about what, objectively, an abortion is or how one is performed (certainly not by dancing a tango).
Are you saying the event itself can be two different events at the same time?.. as in, for person A there is not an abortion being performed at the hospital at time 1 while for person B there is?
You’re coming from some serious epistemological relativism if this is what you mean. Being over critically analytical about the nature of perception under a Kantian scope (as N did in book two or three of the WTP)… exaggerating the implications of empiricism (almost to the point of solipsism) and denying any kind of independently existing, objective world.
I think W tried something like this when Moore showed him his hand; no, George, you cannot say “I know here is a hand”. Or maybe he was trippin’ over something else, I dunno.
You are right that first of all it is a valuing. This valuing creates values. By that fact we can judge the insisting itself as a value as well as a valuing; the valuing is/can be valued.
