the use of reason

Social Forums Non-Philosophical Chat
41

whitelotus, lets be honest, you haven’t read leibniz.
the principle states two things, one i am fine with, one, as i have already said, is metaphysical and crap. first it says that there must be sufficient reason for a choice. fine. but also for teh obtaining of a state of affairs (ie the rock being there)… that is not fine. and i’m certainly not thinking about this in the context of a god.

who else has reason like we do?? computers?? therefore its defining.

and you want some sort of metaphysical grounding for why there should be reason in choices? i’m not reaching at the stars, its a practical matter.

42

whitelotus, what i said IS Leibniz’ principum. And i said right from the beginning that sufficient reason for states of affairs might as well be bullshit. but an understandable misstep given its context. and how is the reason i put forth groundless?
who knows what you’re talking about.

talk about groundless… your saying that there is intelligence in nature. maybe its true, but theres no way we’d know it. theres probably even more people who think evolution does away with a telos… which is basically what you are saying by ‘intelligent solutions to a problem’. you are full of nonsense… what the hell is the ‘problem’? groundless.

as i’ve said before, acouple times, the grounding is pragma. that it works. theres nothing that doesn’t work that is completely reasonable.
so if you want you can try putting bricks to your nonsense about groundless, and the principum, which i have a feeling you’d have to google on first.

43

Sssshhh…It’s " couldn’t care less", babe.

44

i’m not taking for granted that you know what you’re talking about anymore. for all you say, you really say nothing.

why don’t you tell me where there is intelligence in nature. and ill see if i can show you complete randomness, or habit.

didn’t i say pragma was the ground i was taking. or maybe i don’t need grounding, my reason is my grounding, since it’d seem i took pragma for a reason.

45

yes you should. every evaluation is a value judgement… they keep spiraling backwards untill your left with some very hazy idea of “forms of life” and it becomes very much a sociological problem of the reproduction and change of moral knowledge across time and space…

you can evaluate them, and yes you do it with other value judgements. what’s the problem? I’m pretty sure your problem with that would be the answer to the whole thing…

your idea of “properly” is the issue here I think. and yes the piano example was a little weak.

because that is the most useful thing we can say about it… it affords us ever more complex and useful descriptions of the world (but not the teleological “ever more accurate representations of the way things really are”). our descriptions can’t be wrong, just like a hammer can’t be wrong… it is just a less useful or more useful tool for a certain task.

some of those tasks will ultimately come back to values. as I’ve said, these final values can’t be evaluated or justified… they emerge from sociological factors… forms of life… traditions of thought and action…

you should read some philosophy from the last 50-100 years.

46

rob, you can’t evaluate value judgements with value judgement… everything’d become entirely relative. we want objectivity. something like that. ---- morals aswell.

like i said, you should read kant. we describe reality. how couldn’t we, we live in it. your hammer analogy is another bad one.

and you say sociological things. i want my society to judge mmore objectiivly the indian fundamentnalists who burn ntheir wifes with a strogner argument than ‘we think its wrong’… you say why its wrong. they say why its right… and you evaluate… no value judgements.

who should i read? martha nussbaum? there is NO POINT touching anything beyond hume and kant until you understand them. so take my advice.

47

fuck morals? whatever…

you want objectivity… here is the problem. what is objectivity?

I can’t see anything that can be said about objectivity that isnt just an inter-subjective agreement within a certain community…

but perhaps you can spell out some other meaning for me…

well I’m sorry but I don’t think you can. you can still have moral convictions but they ARE perspectivical… this doesnt make them any less “real”… what it does is make them ever evolving and unlimited …

(also non-telelogical and non-metaphysical because you arnt trying to accurately represent some unchanging moral reality that lies outside your-self… your rather constructing your own moral identity… creating and reproducing a moral vocabulary… a vocabulary can’t be more or less accurate… just more or less useful)

if you accept (and I assume that you don’t…) that “objective” is just another way of saying “wide ranging and relatively stable inter-subjective agreement” then you can still be very much, as a society, opposed to wife burning.

you just can’t say “we know it is wrong because we have discovered some moral reality which we can appeal to to decide what our actions should be”…

I can’t see why that would be a useful thing to say anyway… you’d be trading temporary certainty for genuine unlimited potential progress (not progress as distance from truth but progress as increasingly useful complexity in the realisation of values)

(if your goal is to convince people that buring women is wrong then I suggest that film and literature etc. would be a better method than running round in dialectical circles trying to establish a criterion for True moral proclomations… it would be a better “tool” than philosophical reason for that “purpose”… arguing about what values sustain your desire to do so, and by what un-situated super-human criteria they can be judged, is a complete waste of energy)

in other words i suspect that what you are after, in all this talk of “objectivity”, is a suitably rational a-historical answer to the question “do i have a moral obligation to this woman?” (ala kant + plato but not hume) which you can then show to wife-burners in order to change their minds… this is to assert that sympathy and sentiment is less important than knowledge… a desire to know “why I should be moral” when you should be answering “why care about person X” like Kant attempting to prove that the non-cognitive imperitive delivered via the common moral consciousness demonstrates a “fact of reason” - a fact about what it is to be a human being which is more than mere spatiotemporal determinations…

but the moral progress that has lead you to be in a position to wish for a society (and i believe your in one… its a recursive process) which does not tolerate wife burning is not a story of increasing understanding of raitonality or morality (or Moral Law) but of a progress in sentiments… it is not (ala kant again) a capacity to know or exericise rationality that makes us more moral agents but an increasingly wide and flexible sentimentality and capacity for caring etc…

48

thats right, ---- morals. as an airy social value construct. instead, leave out the ‘moral’ in deciding right and wrong. so that its not ‘morally right’, it becomes simply ‘right’.
you obviously know what i’ll say objectivity is… if you’ve read my posts here. you approach right and wrong, and determine it more and less, by the reasons of the judgement.

‘intersubjective agreement’ within a community! get your head out of the sand its time for a paradigm shift.

ill spell it out for you. to continue my example: YOU would not be able to say burning your wife is morally wrong with anything that amounts to a reason why he needs to not burn his wife. afterall, his burning is wife is ‘right’ by his culture. now, i say look at the reason for his burning his wife. say its because ‘so she won’t cheat’. i am going to say that is wrong. (not ‘morally’ wrong, after all, ---- morals, we invent them, we want something more objective). it is WRONG because i have reasons that overpower his, objectively → because they’re more reasonable. if we disagree on which reasons trump which, it will be necessarily because one of us is more advanced than the other.

not that i’d do that… but there are a lot of philosophers who do that, and it is a hell of a lot more convincing than the relativist nonsense you write.

49

i cant help but feel that it is intellectualy dishonest, on your part, to claim that you think he shouldnt burn his wife for practical reasons…

if that’s not your claim, then why do you think he shouldnt?

im yet to hear any of these “overpowering objective” reasons. i have a suspicion that they will either boil down to sentiment, or metaphysics, or they will not be convincing.

not convincing in the sense that no matter what some philosopher souwld like to think, people don’t act intentionally all the time, they don’t allways act with reasons, raitonally etc… a great deal of what people do they can’t even account for, or only do so in retrospect or with great effort.

like formulating the rules of grammer… many of us can’t give accounts for them (explain them) but we can talk none-the-less. and someone pointing out via some (lets say it exists) “overpowering objective” argument that our grammatical rules, which we never even formulated in the first place, are wrong wouldnt (i think) make people change the way the speak.

im saying that people dont allways act in a way that is practical, let alone one that they can explain. if you force them to, and push back and back behind all the assumptions and “non-objective” elements eventualy you have nothing… you eventualy hit up against rules which you can’t formulate and ideas you can’t justify etc etc.

i mean, you must be able to see that there will allways be “assumptions” present in every argument you offer to the wife-burner… pointing that out over and over everywhere and anywhere has been the fairly useless and near-unreadable task of a certain branch of french philosophy for the last 30 or so years…

but I’ll hear them out… lets hear the appeals to objective reason which are going to convince a traditional wife-burner that his actions are un-pragmatic.

it can probably be done… but there will still be assumptions… for instance about the value of utility for instance… things like that.

and there are things where it wont apply, and will lead, (i think) to conclusions that are repulsive… but i need to hear some of your non-burning arguments before I can get a decent grasp on what exactly you have in mind by objectively overpowering reasons against the reasons for a judgement.

also, you havnt told me what you think “objective” means… is being “objective” to approach right and wrong?

wouldnt you need an objective deffinition of right and wrong?

i see: the reasons for the judgement.

but as you’ve said, you then need an objective reason why those reasons are wrong.

so you still havnt said what “objective” means.

to bring us more back to your original conjecture in your first post…

are you suggesting something like Dummett’s verificationalism? (you need adequate grounds for asserting (or acting in our example) and that through adding up fors and againsts in terms of reasons (or warranting ideas) you can come up with a best answer or action?

the key here, then, and I think it is the key for our above example too, is the idea of our conclusions being “made true by the world”… perhaps that would be a better argument… but probably not… lol

50

You can’t evaluate value judgments with another value judgment. True. That is why you might want to identify what it is that would make your own conception of moral reasoning ( !!) objective. One way I could think of is the cognitivist position. To explain vaguely, cognitivists think that the reasoning ( in the form of statements, of course ) we make on morality can be argued as either true or false. This is what you want. Such that there are reasoning universals that do not depend on the prevailing societal or community sentiments. You would know, cognitively, through reasoning that people should or should not do some things because they are morally wrong.

51

Progress in sentiment? Somehow, I thought it should be the other way around. The progress we want to make is not a matter of sentiments, but a matter of correct understanding of moral reasoning.

52

i tend to think that more progress has been made in our sentiments than in our philosophy.

the only real progress has been to recognise that and start asking new and more important quesitons… but this is getting off track…

53

No. This point is very relevant to the topic. Actually, Monooq has opened a thread on a very wide subject. “Reason” is a very big job to do.

Anyway, “sentiments” to me has always had that bad rap of emotional reasoning, not cognitive.

54

well i tend to think that our awareness of others pain and humiliation, and our sympathy for others… our ability to ask and answer “why should i care about a stranger, or a person who is no kin to me, or a person who seems different, or whos habits i find disgusting”

has much less to do with reason and metaphysics and ideas about subjects and objects and human nature and such than it does have something to do with our receptiveness and sensititivty to sentimental stories… “because this is what it’s like to be in her position… because her mother would grieve for her… because she might become your daughter in law…”

you don’t need a philosophical truth for such understandings… and only a philosopher would suggest that one is even worth-while…

“yes but AM I UNDER MORAL OBLIGATION to her!!!” is a stupid quesiton… one that we shouldnt even have to enetertain…

and it is one that will rarely make a difference (except to those few people who find such things important) to peoples actions… and is therefore just a language game…

55

No, no. Understanding through reason does not, in any way, impede on human’s capacity for conscience. In fact, it helps. See, there are things that the laws of the land does not cover. No one is obligated by the law to give alms to the poor. It is up to the individual to do this. In other cases, however, where moral reasoning and the law must coincide—and this is where we could question the law whether it is just or not—moral reasoning is definitely necessary so that we do not arbitrarily create laws, punish wrongdoers, etc. So, sentiments do have a part in humanity, but it is when legalities become a hindrance to moral progress that we are screwed if we continue to use sentiments, emotions, as opposed to understanding through moral reasoning.

56

yes im not really arguing against that… but the sentiments are the basis of that mral reasoning.

you have these basic, well i guess values is the best word, which arnt reasoned but are “sentiment” (which is tricky… theres a little more to it than the word implies… either way though its a sociological issue not an issue of abstract reasoning)

and in the interest of realising those sentiments… of expressing them in intitutions… you then reason laws as tools for that purpose.

so the reasoning you mention is fine… but it is a tool for excersising those “unreasoned” values intitutionally.

im saying we must accept the conventional historical nature of the foundations of our reasoning in moral issues, and then see the actual reasoning proper as being made “true” by being “useful” towards our specific purpose.

the purpose, in moral-legal matters, will be realising those values. in sicentific inquiry it will be something else, and useful assumptions of other types will be reasonably incorporated to accomplish other certain goals and purposes… the basic fundamentals will once again emenate unreaonably from traditions of thought and action…

and so on…

57

Okay, so you seem to say that sentiments are the foundation of our morality, and reasoning would be in the form of investigation or inquiry as to whether we are making the right decisions, no? Sure, if you put it this way, I can understand it. But this seems to me like a longer way of saying reasoning through the use of cognition. Because, basically what happens is, we just debunk our sentiments through reason, in so many words. Yes?

58

im not too sure what you mean… i dont think we debunk them via reason… we put them into practice and elaborate them via reason.

“reason” just being a name for deciding the best thing to do for a certain purpose.

59

Lol !! I think I’m starting to wander off. Time for bed, I think. See you around. * yawn *

Great points you are making.

60

at least i can claim with sway that we shouldn’t burn the wife. YOU CAN’T!
you doubt that ill be able to come up with convincing reasons not to burn the wife?!!? and YOU MISUNDERSTAND THIS: i am not bound to leave sentiment out, sentiment can be a part of my reason, as long as theres a reason for it being in. so my reason can be ‘don’t hurt her’, purely sentimental not practical.
because you see what i am doing is not needing a moral to determine right or wrong. teh way you think you think burning the wife is morally right, depending on where you’re from. and you must not see a problem with that?

they don’t have to act rationally. its fine to act purely on emotion or whatever with a reason that will allow reason out of it temporarily.
and you are seriously prone to bad examples: there are reasons for the rules of grammar. and even now, we don’t do things people won’t understand, in grammar. thats a fairly convincing reason for why we don’t do certain things, and do others. don’t you think?

they don’t have to be practical all the time. or even alot of the time. i tend to think there are far graver, serious problems when the two things that you trumpet more than anything else are ‘morality’ and ‘relative’.

they don’t have to be simply unpragmatic. they can be anything. eg (1) it will hurt

objective here is something you can approach that applys to all humans because of the uniform way they’re constructed. no morals. no social whatever. so our judgement would approach objectivity if the reasons can’t be shrugged off by teh other side as a purely cultural thing, but in fact it makes sense to everyone, because there are some things about everyone that are constant.

marie, i want to leave morality completely out of right and wrong. it has no place there.