Yes, if you wish differentiate “objective” from “universal” in the manner in which you do: “objectivity” residing in each and every single set of circumstance. But the manner in which I make this distinction is different. For me in every single instance of human abortion an unborn life is in fact ended, taken, destroyed, killed. That’s not just a point of view to me. And certainly not a subjunctive point of view. The life is either aborted or it is not. That is true universally for all unborn life that is aborted.
But with respect to any particular unborn life aborted, some will argue it is moral and some immoral. Why? Because they make conflicting claims/assumptions regarding what is “good” here. And, in my view, no one thus far has been able to offer me an argument whereby the moral conflict is resolved objectively—only that the abortion either did or did not occur.
Now, if you see all of the authors I included on my mundane ironist thread as examples of folks who insist that only they know what is true objectively about all the things they speculate about there, we’ll just have to agree to disagree about that. Unless you can show me how they do just that.
You call it life and that is your subjective view. It is not a universal view. It can be objectively (and collectively) decided when a fetus is considered a mass of cells and when it becomes a viable life form.
I think the ambiguity [controversy] here revolves around whether or not it can be construed to be a human life. A human being.
I suppose someone can argue it is not “life” at all, but that just seems rather strange to me.
And if it has already been objectively demonstrated when that clump of cells does become an actual human being, I must have missed it. Can you cite the proof?
But why is it necessary to start there? Why not at the point of conception…or upon the existence of brain cells…or upon a beating heart…or upon the actual birth?
And that revolves around legality. Morality is much more difficult to pin down.
Here is how I figure it:
Not a single one of us became who we are today without first having passed through every single solitary stage of life—from conception on.
So I argue that abortion is the killing of a human being. Yet I argue in turn for a woman’s right to choose. Why? Because there are conflicting goods here. On the one hand, it is good for the unborn to live. On the other, it is good to live in a world where women are not forced to give birth against their will. How can you have both simultaneously?
But what I focus on with von are those aspects of this that transcend dasein and are true for all of us and those aspects that can only be points of view rooted existentially in dasein.
And I argue further that regarding other value judgments the same predicament will arise.
Edit of edit: Ok, to summarize what I was going to say earlier, what compells you iam, to go through this debate with Mo over and over? Now I’ll just straight up ask this it even though I’m not flattering myself to do so; why is that I can’t start a debate with you? Should I challenge you? Ok, I noticed that you used the term ‘Dasein’ in plural form; ‘daseins’, not to say I understand the conscept better than you, but when I tried using the word ‘Daseins’ to someone very knowledgable on Heidegger they were very confused at what I could be refering to, and basically implied that the term is not to be used in that way.
I don’t think morality is all that different from legality. There are transition points when an action changes from moral to immoral. We define those points as part of the moral system. Let’s look at the morality of stealing. Nobody would say that when a stranger places a hand on your car that it constitutes theft. If he sits behind the steering wheel, with the car running … it is still not theft although it is probably improper and rude - a moral transgression of a different sort. But when he drives off, then it is theft. Same idea applies with shoplifting - you have stolen when you walk past the cashier.
Yes you could put the transition point someplace else but it’s placed where it is convenient and balances the needs of the people(/potential people) involved. Saying that life starts at conception presents a number of practical problems - we don’t actually know the moment of conception, women who naturally miscarry can be accused of murder, women who are forced to give birth may mistreat the child.
Saying that life begins at birth presents the problem of late term abortions producing live/viable babies. That would force the abortionist to make sure that the fetus would not come out of the womb ‘alive’. A concept which makes a lot of people uncomfortable.
Every one of us has evolved from simians but we don’t call monkeys and apes … human. We treat them differently.
Yes, even the law can be approached through gradations. But there either is a law on the book against stealing a car or there isn’t. You either steal one or you don’t. But any number of folks can rationalize taking it as the right thing to do. Maybe they need one for an emergency. Maybe the car’s owner did them harm and it’s payback time. Maybe they base their entire moral universe on what is perceived to be in their own best interest. To you it is a “moral transgression”. Period. But not to him. He is able to justify it to himself.
That’s where the invention of God comes in. God’s is an omniscient point of view able to settle things once and for all. Sans God though, morality is just a point of view rooted in dasein. Or so it seems to me.
But this is not really my point. You can have a law that is predicated on any one particular transition point. Suppose the one chosen is a beating heart. Okay, when the fetus has a detectable beating heart it is illegal to abort it. It either does or it does not have one. But that is not the same as demonstrating that this particular transition point is the most rational when deciding if abortion is either moral or immoral. And it offers no resolution whatsoever when confronting the argument of some that insist it is immoral to force women to give birth against their will. Conflicting goods again.
Yes and we treat snails differently too. But you and I were conceived inside the womb a human female. And without passing through every single one of the “transition points” [from conception to birth] we wouldn’t/couldn’t be around to discuss the morality of anything.
Actually, this thread exist only because I did not wish to conduct the discussion with von on my “mundane ironist” thread. I had begun that with a different purpose in mind. And the is/ought conundrum has baffled philosophers going back centuries now.
My own “dasein” [small d] is derived from Heidegger’s notion that we are “thrown” adventitiously at birth into a particular world. That always struck me as having profound [and problematic] implications with respect to identity and with respect to “I” choosing values out in the world of human behaviors that come into conflict; and in a world without God.
But, on this subject you’re not baffled, I’m not baffled, even Mo’s not baffled, even though we may find his logic baffling. I’ve been all over the board speaking of every aspect of morality and ambiguity, iambiguous, don’t you have anything to say on all that ambiguity I speak of in countless threads?
So there are daseins; your’s mine, Mo’s etc., then there is Dasein, the subjective experience that we can speak of in terms of everyone (just for the purpose of clarification) even though each individual can only really represent or understand it as his own? One of us is near hopelessly confused and I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that it’s me.
Oh, we’re all baffled. It’s just a matter of recognizing the irony embedded in the arguments of folks who insist they’re not.
And I don’t have much to say about lots of posts here. I only have so much time left over after tending to my mundane irony and film threads. Besides, too much of what passes for “serious philosophy” here unfolds up on the sky-hooks of abstraction. That’s my chief complaint about folks like von. “Up there” he knows his stuff [or doesn’t according to others] but down here he is like a fish flopping about out of water. He is hardly ever able to make his words relevant to the world we live in.
Or so it seems to me.
Dasein is something that others can discuss and debate. I start with the idea that each individual is fortuitously dumped at birth into a particular world situated in a particular historical and cultural context—and that this world evolves over time [existentially] amidst endless permutations of contingency chance and change. And thus it is more an inter-subjective experience.
But I take Sartre’s “hell is other people” one step farther. I suggest in turn that “hell is I”. And what I mean by this is that we also tend to objectify ourselves. And that is in order to distance ourselves psychologically from all of the components of our lives that we do not [or barely] understand and do not [or barely] control.
And then I suggest further that in a world sans God the point of human existence is essentially meaningless and absurd. But, sure, at times I would love to bump into someone able to talk me out of that.
Personally I think he’s able, he just doesn’t want to… what ever that means!
So that’s H’s B&T summarized in one paragraph, I mean maybe so, from what I’ve read about the work it seems possible…
I haven’t read that play of his, but that could be a summary of S’s B&N, though it wouldn’t be mine.
So basically you summarized the H’s B&T and S’s B&N and the two summaries in contrast represent the difference between H’s Dasein and Sartre’s for-itself, interesting.
Has that happened, I don’t think I could do it, are you suggesting that maybe Mo can, do you think that he may one day finally come up with the right argument. I have to understand, not that I really have to, but I’m here aren’t I, like a fly on the wall, you could say.
But, why is meaninglesness a bad thing. Did you used to get drunk on “‘good’ ‘meaning’” and now meaningless seems like an absense? Meaninglessness is a presense, a quality, a “meaningful” one, when like me ‘meaning’ didn’t seem to mean much, meaninglessness is very meaningful… But, this may sound like the stupidest question you ever heard or one of the better, I don’t know but where does this meaninglessness lie; “up there” or down here or both?
I mean, “up there” I had never found meaning but I looked, like I dog searching for a bone in a giant pile of manure, so I stopped, at least I think I did and now I’m confident “up there” is meaningless, down here meaning presents itself too me like shit for the afore mention dog everytime he opens his mouth too wide. But, down here there’s no meaning for you, iam, I assume, tell me the secret. Also, is Sartre’s Hellish distancing, a distancing from meaning or a creating of new meaning (but, now “authentic” as Sartre would say)?
You seem to always treat morality as a special case. I see the law and morality, in this example, as working essentially the same way. The universe only exists as matter end energy in time and space. There is no embedded concept of ownership. Yet you say “You either steal one or you don’t.” as though it is some clear objective fact. It is a fact based on the definition of ownership and control over objects. Whether some action is theft or not depends on that definition… whether it is an immoral action depends on the a slightly different definition.
Anyone could claim that he is not guilt of theft or immorality by saying that he does not accept a particular legal code or moral code. To be part of a community, one accepts some rules.
If God is ‘invented’, then morality is a point of view rooted in the values of the invented God, which are the values of the inventors.
What would a meaningful human existence be like? Would sky-daddy need to whisper the purpose and goal of your life into your ear? He would have to explain in what way your life is important and significant?
Personally, that’s not my consern with Mo, my concern is when someone says they don’t know things that are knowable in the context of “up there”. Down here, well obviously we all have much to learn.
That’s just it, there is no point for me, meaning has always been meaningless. What I get from having it is pain, but let’s not put to much meaning towards my pain, as for understanding it, I have to understand it to defeat it.
Huh? What does ‘knowable in the context of up there’ mean? Are not all things ‘up there’ mere fabrications of the mind? Or rather different minds. Some one mind may not know or understand what another mind has fabricated.
If meaning is meaningless then how can you be a nihilist? Being a nihilist and not being a nihilist would be the same thing. For Imabiguous, a meaningful state is different from a meaningless state. Or so it seems to me.
Actually, it has been many years since I read either of them. I majored in philosophy at Towson State University and my favorite courses revolved around existentialism. But I doubt my take on Heidegger’s Dasein or Sartre’s hellish people bares much resemblance to what, say, a serious philosopher would note. I have my own way of thinking about them.
Anyone might. After all, in the past there were folks able to persuade me that Christianity, Unitarianism, Objectivism, Marxism, Democratic-Socialism, Anarchism etc. were not “the answer”.
Someone just has to convince me that dasein is not the starting point in understanding identity and that Barrett’s idea of “conflicting goods” is not relevant in grasping the parameters of morality “out in the world”.
But: Just think of all the experiences, books, films, relationships [and other sources of information] I have not come across yet in regard to these things. I can only speculate about them based on the sources of information that I have stumbled upon. A small fraction I suspect.
Again, I don’t believe there is no meaning in the world, only that the particular meaning I ascribe to particular things [like identity and politics and moral values] is rooted in dasein, history, culture, political economy and the limitations of language [and logic].
And “up there” logic and epistemology are potent enough. But what interest me [philosophically] is this: How ought one to live his or her life? And what is the most reasonable manner in which to understand one’s identity? What can philosophers tell me about that? Go up there, sure, but eventually I want to know how that will be integrated into all the stuff we call living our life down here.
We could live in a culture with no written laws. Just “traditions” where right and wrong are passed down orally through the generations. And in this culture it may be understood that invading another tribe’s land and taking everything of value is not construed to be stealing at all. It is in fact their right to do so; and for whatever rationalizion they come up with.
How would we be able to demonstrate to them that not only should there be written laws against stealing but that stealing itself [taking the property of others] is inherently immoral?
You may be able to do this without a God, but that just doesn’t make sense to me. Without an omniscient and omnipotent font to referee disputes, it comes down to alleged moral truths that mere mortals, what, “deduce” into existence?
But we do live in a culture of laws. And I’m sure there are lots of lawyers who can point to the exact law “on the books” that makes taking another’s automobile against the law—a crime. And John can readily admit that, yes, it was against the law to take Joe’s car and that, yes, he did take it. But he can also argue that he felt he was morally justified to do so because ____________________.
He just fills in the blank with whatever rationalization he happens to believe.
Look at all the Communists who construed private ownership of “the means of production” in Russia [or in China] to in fact be theft “against the people”. From their perspective the laws this ownership was predicated on is the part that is immoral.
So how does the philosopher resolve this once and for all sans God? Instead, he takes a political leap and either embraces capitalism as the most rational political economy…or the least. As though either way that makes it so!
And what are human “communities” but actual flesh and blood entities situated out in particular worlds governed by the prevailing historical and cultural and ethnic “rules of behavior”?
I don’t believe in God. So His role here is irrelevant to me.
But ask the historians what constituted a meaningful human existence down through the ages. What is the one thing all of these communities shared in common? It’s simple: survival. And what are the components that survival must revolve around? That’s simple too. For any community, meaning must first and foremost must revolve around procuring 1] food 2] water and 3] shelter. And then defending itself against enemies. And then creating an environment stable enough to reproduce the community.
And, in crucial respects, this transcends dasein.
But where things start to get tricky is when folks start squabbling over the best way to go about this. And then things really get tricky when folks start in on discussing the most moral or just or equitable etc. way to do so.
Bingo: back again to conflicting goods understood in different ways by daseins.