back to the beginning: morality

The use of the the word necessity in this link just means need or hunger. We have a choice over what we fill it with. Mostly we opt for low hanging junk food. Those of us dissatisfied with that, who reach further than our grasp, develop a different second nature from others. Again… we are all loved the same and should extend that to others. The only way to truly enjoy life without escaping the reality when everything is crashing down around you.

ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.p … 4#p2870674

This is the pivot of the dao.

self=other
us=them

Demonstrated by heaven on the earthly cross.

Morality = awareness that ones actions are not limited to oneself in their consequences and the following consideration of others in them. There are people with and without morality.
Ethics = a system presenting and arguing for behaviours that are bad and good, desirable/undesirable etc.
Religious Ethics = a system presenting and arguing for behaviours that are bad and good, desirable/undesirable etc. based on religious tenants.
b) theology = a philosophical system that is assumed to be religious, i.e. pre-suppose the existence of God and working within a specific religions religious ethics.
God = either:
a) a religious entity whos nature differs based on the religion concerned but is always its basis
b) speculative agency within nature

David Brooks in the NYT:

nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opin … -wars.html

A commentary on the “one of us” vs. “one of them” morality mentality:

[b]'I’m a fan of FiveThirtyEight, a website that looks at policy issues from a data-heavy perspective, but everyone publishes a clunker once in a while. In February, FiveThirtyEight ran a piece called “Why Democrats Keep Losing Culture Wars.” The core assertion was that Republicans prevail because a lot of Americans are ignorant about issues like abortion and school curriculum, and they believe the lies the right feeds them. The essay had a very heavy “deplorables are idiots” vibe.

'Nate Hochman, writing in the conservative National Review, recognized a hanging curve when he saw one and he walloped the piece. He noted that “all the ‘experts’ that the FiveThirtyEight writers cite in their piece are invested in believing that the progressive worldview is the objective one, and that any deviations from it are the result of irrational or insidious impulses in the electorate.”

‘He added: “All this is a perfect example of why the left’s cultural aggression is alienating to so many voters. Progressive elites are plagued by an inability to understand the nature and function of social issues in American life as anything other than a battle between the forces of truth and justice on one side and those of ignorance and bigotry on the other.”’[/b]

And, come on, let’s be honest: there is an equal and opposite rendition of this from the conservative end of the political spectrum. As though in castigating the liberals for expecting citizens to be “politically correct” about moral/value voter issues, the conservatives don’t have their own “my way or the highway” mentality.

[b]'But over the last few decades, as Republicans have been using cultural issues to rally support more and more, Democrats have understood what’s going on less and less. Many progressives have developed an inability to see how good and wise people could be on the other side, a lazy tendency to assume that anybody who’s not a social progressive must be a racist or a misogynist, a tendency to think the culture wars are merely a distraction Republican politicians kick up to divert attention from the real issues, like economics — as if the moral health of society was some trivial sideshow.

Even worse, many progressives have been blind to their own cultural power. Liberals dominate the elite cultural institutions — the universities, much of the mainstream news media, entertainment, many of the big nonprofits — and many do not seem to understand how infuriatingly condescending it looks when they describe their opponents as rubes and bigots.'[/b]

Of course, here things do get tricky for some. After all, anyone here who doesn’t believe that America mass-produces “rubes and bigots” by the boatloads [along with boatloads more addicted to pop culture, mindless consumption and social media bullshit] isn’t paying attention.

Well, of course, if “I” do say so myself. And while liberals may dominate in regard to “cultural institutions”, let’s not forget that in the news department talk radio along with Fox News are truly powerful forces for spreading the MAGA mentality across the land.

‘The fact is the culture wars are not a struggle between the enlightened few and the ignorant and bigoted masses. They are a tension between two legitimate moral traditions. Democrats will never prevail on social issues unless they understand the nature of the struggle.’

Conflicting goods! At the intersection of identity, value judgments and political economy. And the part those like Brooks steer clear of: crony capitalism, the deep state owned and operated by Wall Street and K Street.

‘In the hurly-burly of everyday life, very few of us think about systemic moral philosophies. But deep down we are formed by moral ecologies we are raised within or choose, systems of thought and feeling that go back centuries. We may think we are making up our own minds about things, but usually our judgments and moral sentiments are shaped by these long moral traditions.’

Dasein! Rooted in historical and cultural contexts that do indeed go back centuries.

Brooks then goes on in his “essay” to explore all of this rather…academically?

You decide.

Recognizing Moral Identity as a Cultural Construct
Fanli Jia and Tobias Krettenauer at Frontiers In Psychology website

That’s the thing you can always count on when human morality is examined and then explained “theoretically”: models.

And, sure, in many respects they do make sense. We all experience emotions after all; and we all interact with others in which “harm, fairness, ingroup, authority, and purity” can become factors. But who is harming whom given what set of circumstances? Whose prescriptions and proscriptions prevail regarding fairness? Who is in the group and who is out? Does the authority revolve around might makes right, right makes might or democracy and the rule of law? What constitutes purity in a world bursting at the seams with moral conflagrations.

Needless to say the “model” comes up short over and again when the world of words that constitutes a theoretical assessment meets, among other things, daily newspaper headlines.

And on and on.

Different cultures, different renditions of the model. Gasp! Some of the differences small, some large. And, no doubt, historically, changing over time. I merely embody just how far this can go when you think yourself into believing that moral foundations themselves are ultimately just agreements that different communities make in regard to “rules of behavior”. And that the factors involved in differentiating one community from another go on and on and on in turn.

Far, far too many for philosophers or ethicists to anchor to any particular deontological path…except theoretically. Or by way of championing this transcending font or that transcending font.

After all, look at all of the many conflicting ones championed here.

duplicate post

They divide people in two distinct ways.

People who think 1 deny 2.
And people that accept 2 do not agree with 1.

In my experience the former group of people are unwilling to concede that fact that the passage of time from conception to birth is a process of becoming: whereas the latter group pf people accept that a pregnancy shows a gradual becoming of a human and want abortions where they are to occur, to happen in the most timely way possible.

The former group of people are intransigent and unreasonable in denying a woman the right to chose to persist in a pregnancy whereas the latter group hope that abortions happen to minimise suffering and pain.

Ironically the former groups who are so called “pro-life” tend to be the same people that suppress sex education and are also against contraception. And by doing that cause more unwanted pregnancies.

I do not know anyone who would urge a termination in the third trimester, but I would disagree with any that did.

Recognizing Moral Identity as a Cultural Construct
Fanli Jia and Tobias Krettenauer at Frontiers In Psychology website

Okay, you’re a Marxist, a fascist, an anarchist, a Libertarian, a Christian, a nihilist, a Buddhist, a Hindu. And as such you believe that “being a moral person is important to an individual’s identity”. You embrace being “honest, compassionate, fair, and generous”.

But only in a community that embraces your own religious, ideological or philosophy values. Only in regard to those who are “one of us”.

What then?

Welcome to the real world, right?

There’s morality in a general sense and morality as it is actually pursued and practiced in a world teeming with conflicting moral and political narratives. Moral action, sure. Practice what you preach. But how exactly do individuals come to preach what they do? You know my trajectory here, what’s yours?

Yes, it seems apparent that different cultures around the world not only subscribe to different moral narratives and political agendas, but subscribe to different understandings of what it means to identity yourself as a moral person.

And, sure, “less biased” results are what should be aimed for in reacting to that which distinguishes a more or less “Western moral identity” from a “non-Western moral identity”.

But my challenge remains the same: How are your moral convictions not rooted existentially in the life that you lived, in the culture that you were raised in, in the political prejudices you came to embody as a result of that?

East or West, my points don’t go away.

Recognizing Moral Identity as a Cultural Construct
Fanli Jia and Tobias Krettenauer at Frontiers In Psychology website

Here of course there are those who readily acknowledge that historical and cultural and personal experiences play an important role in the creation of a moral narrative, but that philosophers and ethicists, among others, can take this into account and still devise something in the way of a deontological assessment enabling us to pin down the optimal behaviors. Whether in regard to prescriptions or proscriptions.

Just don’t ask them to bring their “theoretical constructs” out into the truly vast and the truly varied worlds that we as individuals might find ourselves born and raised in. In other words, to pin down the optimal behaviors “for all practical purposes”.

Instead, the focus remains on the “concept of identity”.

Common sense, right? You’re born and raised in a particular culture and that culture is crammed into your brain over years and years. Many carry it with them all the way to the grave. But what intrigues me most about concepts like the “interface of self and culture” is when they are taken out into the world and examined given particular contexts. The interface of self and culture in, say, the abortion wars…or regarding the spate of mass shootings here in America. The “self”, the “culture” and guns.

iambiguous wrote:

They divide people in two distinct ways.

People who think 1 deny 2.
And people that accept 2 do not agree with 1.

In my experience the former group of people are unwilling to concede that fact that the passage of time from conception to birth is a process of becoming: whereas the latter group pf people accept that a pregnancy shows a gradual becoming of a human and want abortions where they are to occur, to happen in the most timely way possible.

The former group of people are intransigent and unreasonable in denying a woman the right to chose to persist in a pregnancy whereas the latter group hope that abortions happen to minimise suffering and pain.

Ironically the former groups who are so called “pro-life” tend to be the same people that suppress sex education and are also against contraception. And by doing that cause more unwanted pregnancies.

I do not know anyone who would urge a termination in the third trimester, but I would disagree with any that did.

Recognizing Moral Identity as a Cultural Construct
Fanli Jia and Tobias Krettenauer at Frontiers In Psychology website

Exactly! “I” construed by those in the West is in large part derived from the historical advent of capitalism. In particular, the consequences for human interactions derived from the Industrial Revolution where the “wage slave” became deeply engrained in such “scientific management” techniques as Taylorism: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientifi … management.

We now take all of that for granted of course. It’s just the way things are. And yet historically there were any number of communities that revolved far, far more around “we”. Around the community as a a whole. Around the village.

In fact there are still pockets of them around the globe. In the Amazon rainforest, for example.

Instead, there are those who try to argue that the “what’s in it more me” mentality is predicated entirely on what Nature commands or [re those like Ayn Rand and the Libertarians] on what constitutes philosophically the most rational human interactions.

Capitalism becomes just another historical rendition of “social conventions”. Indeed, let the workers try to gain “independence” from it when they get around to paying their bills at the end of the month.

Right, tell that to the working class in China…now that the powers that be have embraced state capitalism as the political economy of choice.

Still, in nations around the globe these days there will almost always be a complex intertwining of government policies that aim for something in the middle…not quite me and not quite we.

The welfare state it is often called.

And, as such, moral relativism thrives.

Recognizing Moral Identity as a Cultural Construct
Fanli Jia and Tobias Krettenauer at Frontiers In Psychology website

All this revolves around the age-old tug of war between “I” and we" in any particular human community. And, of course, the dramatic shift from “we” to “I” once capitalism shifted human interaction from “the village” to the “market”.

After all, it’s not for nothing that Confucianism itself is taking hit after hit in modern day state capitalist regimes like China. Or will someone here argue that “we” still prevails there today as it did back then. It’s the historical, organic nature of capitalism that, in making competition rather than cooperation the main driving force in human interactions, everyone will be pitted against everyone else to see who and what prevails re supply and demand.

In cultures of old everyone had a place in the community and together the community would rise or fall. Today, it can be far more complex and convoluted. And that is because, for individuals, the options can increase dramatically. But among those options there is a better chance that in choosing this rather than that you have to take away the options of others.

Expressions like “dog eat dog”, “survival of the fittest”, “cutthroat competition”, “every man for himself”…how often did they pop up in the time of Confucious?

Recognizing Moral Identity as a Cultural Construct
Fanli Jia and Tobias Krettenauer at Frontiers In Psychology website

And now, whatever we can possibly learn about Chinese society today. Confucius and Mao meet Xi Jinping? A tightly controlled capitalist economy engendering a new set of freedoms for the individual meets a brand spanking new kind of repression from the state. It has to be.

There’s never been a capitalism quite like this before. Indeed, any number of authoritarian right-wing MAGA billionaires right here in America would just love to emulate it.

Bricks in the great wall that is China. Sure, why not describe the Chinese people today in that manner. A place for everyone and everyone in their place. Only not as Confucius and Mao would have imagined the wall to be. A wall that is perhaps rapidly becoming the future of the global economy. A whole new take on the “I” and “we” relationship.

Take unions for example: reuters.com/world/china/how … 0transport.

[b]"The country boasts the biggest union in the world, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), a state-run body.

All unions in China are required to register with the ACFTU and have largely been confined to sectors such as manufacturing and transport."[/b]

Clearly, though, the CCP has reconfigured Communism as imagined by Marx and Mao into something altogether more dynamic. And, for some, altogether more profitable.

The crucial point being to recognize human identity [and morality] today as a political economy construct.

Moral Relativism and Moral Nihilism
James Dreier, David Copp

And you know me: bring any “metaethical theory” you might have “down to Earth”. Explore and examine it given situations that precipitate actual conflicts among flesh and blood human beings.

I start with the assumption that in a No God world the existential nature of morality and ethics revolves around the existential components of the life we lived…and continue to live.

My own subjective understanding of nihilism starts with the assumption that in regard to our moral convictions there are facts that, in the either/or world, are applicable to all of us. Facts about abortion, facts about guns, facts about the role of government.

This nihilist believes that moral language reflects historical and cultural and personal biases that as children we are indoctrinated to believe and that [given a free will world] as more autonomous adults we are often profoundly influenced by. And that only the sociopaths tend toward an “anything goes, just don’t get caught” frame of mind.

As for my own frame of mind being a “doctrine”, I’m the first to admit that it is no less an existential assessment derived from my own constellation of experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge.

Next up: moral relativism.

Nietzsche and Moral Nihilism
Dr W Large

First, of course, how I react to this conclusion may or may not be how you react to it. It all depends [as always] on how, over the course of our lives, we have come to understand the meaning of these words. Both in terms of our personal experiences and in terms of all the books and articles and sources of information we have come upon.

You tell me: What are the odds that yours overlaps mine?

In other words, in noting all of the elements in our lives that came together predisposing us to embrace one rather than another moral identity, we are acknowledging all of the other elements we did not come into contact with. How then are we to know the extent to which, had we encountered them, they might have had a profound impact on our value judgments today.

And, of course, the irony that revolves around those who insist that, however one understands Nietzsche’s own take on the relationship between nihilism and morality, it is nihilism itself – given any rendition subscribed to – that is responsible for the decadence that is sweeping our planet. It is the absence of a moral font [God or No God] that has created the conditions that sustain the amoral “show me the money” mentality of the global capitalists and the burgeoning spread of, among other dissolute elements, the sociopathic personality.

And if Nietzsche’s Übermensch narrative is basically an attempt to supplant the “higher values” attributed to in God by attributing them to so-called superior mere mortals instead, how is that not just another attempt to make the part where in a No God world human existence is essentially meaningless and purposeless go away?

With “eternal return” thrown in as the alternative to oblivion.

Nietzsche and Moral Nihilism
Dr W Large

Again, suppose this could be demonstrated unequivocally to be true. How much would it matter to you? Wouldn’t it depend on the extent to which “meaning and signification” in your life was construed as an essential, underlying foundation that you could anchor your life and death to. Otherwise [existentially] you can always find the things that bring you fulfilment and satisfaction from day to day to day meaningful and significant enough to shrug off that “ultimate” meaning stuff.

That is, until you come eyeball to eyeball with oblivion itself. Then a nihilistic perspective comes eyeball to eyeball with the limitations of nihilism itself. Nihilism only works on this side of the grave. Works in the sense that if you are not anchored to one or another objectivist font, your options increase dramatically. For some, all the way out to that ghastly sociopathic perspective: what’s in it for me? End of story.

Right, like this is necessarily applicable to all of us. Like there aren’t still millions religious and moral fanatics “out there”. And “in here” too. The moral monsters come from both ends of the spectrum here. Historically, for instance. Which are worse? The Hitlers or the Kissingers?

You tell me.

Still, for some of us…

How to live with that? How to decide what to choose in a world where “in the absence of God all things are permitted”?

You tell me.

“Thy will be done…” — [unimposing]

Nietzsche and Moral Nihilism
Dr W Large

Nothing and everything. When, in actuality, over and over and over again, it’s almost never either one of them in regard to connecting the dots between a philosophical assessment of nihilism like the one above and the existential parameters of the lives we live from day to day to day. Is it any wonder then that so many have little or no use for such abstract intellectual conjectures?

No, it appears that what Nietzsche was aiming to accomplish was to replace the God font with the “will to power” Übermensch font.

Whatever that means.

But that’s my point. In the absence of the God font “up there” to settle conflicts of this sort, we mere mortals have managed to come up with any number of hopelessly conflicting secular narratives to take His place.

Is yours perhaps the optimal assessment?

Says who? And those who do say so…what exactly are they intent on putting in its place? There are, of course, the amoral capitalists, the amoral sociopaths, the amoral libertines.

What of your own amoral foundation? What are you intent on doing with it?

And then the part here that always comes back around to God:

In our modern world of course this basically revolves around all of the millions upon millions of “lost souls” who spend their days mindlessly preoccupied with pop culture, social media, mass consumption, and the pursuit of celebrity.

God doesn’t stand a chance there.

And, come to think of it, neither does philosophy. Or, rather, what’s left of it these days.

Well I am not overly convinced biggy. When first started here at ilp, there was a mow long gone ‘philosopher’ here , and his name will come to me, but will defer that.

Anyway his comment was that I should have not abandoned my topic ’ the psychology of philosophy - obviously a reversal to previous thinking that revolved around the opposite: the philosophy of mind. That goes way back in different forms, attaining an up to date immanent associations with modern philosophy.

The point is taken with something ironically coming up at this stage in my let’s call it development: and understandingly not standing in contradiction but in a fallaciouness resembling the paradoxical.

But that’s coming from a hungry cat chasing it’s own tail, so again what i am doing here is what You are suggesting above. But let’s rest that for a moment and settle the strands put forward at this present juncture ( situation or, context)

The 3 stages of psychology are well established, I don’t need to go into that, but for my own sake, since I am just beginning to read it, having found it on an obscure shelf in an abandoned library .

The first is classical , the second existential and the third is that which approaches social , built behavioristic models.
There is the current one, which utilizes all the 3 approaches in a use whichever is a-pro-po. That classification relies heavily and parallels the construction of the ideas bottom up of the philosophical pre-requisite to the more and mire transcending gaps that reversely de-construct it’s unified , essential idea.( re: the mind, which later became what it is perceived progressively: a machine which previously shadowed the brain: with which a presupposed identity held in for a very long time .

That the end result meant a forgone conclusion that some magical process was needed to replace the God head who basically tied up any reservations, that later on was reduced to infinite reps of experience, from the static notion of God the Father, into the Son , Who redeemed His Father’s fracture.

The fracture stopped being a philosophical problem , at the point where no one idea worked to solve it by ‘classic’ psychology.

Next up:

Existential psychology, the age of analysis, psychoanalysis. Still using analogical or parallel modes of differentiating ideas and facts, leading to limits that no one theory could accommodate. Certainly ‘fractures’ were beyond that scope,and although reductionism led to paradoxical results, fractured were both symptomatic on more than one level.
The overcoming by pluralistic reduction below Christianity, led to the evil eye of Descartes’ evil genius to reassert the will, the singular will which left the mode open to an open ending possibility, unacceptable to this , who saw concurrent rewidening of the goals of treatment, vis. pushing the trajectory of the transcendent requirements posed by a surpassed social requirement farther and farther behind

No winder the either/ or language of understanding could nit acclimate in a singular treatment plan. Every for shadow ING became measured by shades of Grey.

Behavior, observation could be it’s own intrinsic plan, and the mind, the singular mind, had to become a machine, in order for memory to be reactivated in all levels to overcome it’s own deficiency.

Only a memory approaching the Absolute could fix the problem necessary to repair the damage to a wirkeable extent.

That Absolute Memory is what consists of God’s perfected plan, which the machine is only beginning to bring to light.

Nietzsche and Moral Nihilism
Dr W Large

Well, he is a madman, right? And, obviously, if there is no God, mere mortals can only “kill” Him by acknowledging that we are abandoning that which we ourselves brought into existence. And once we go down that route we are confronted with, among other things, grappling with why, in our heads, we brought Him into existence in the first place. And [of course] what there might possibly be to take His place.

And we all know what Nietzsche “thought up” here in his head. And look around…there are plenty of fulminating fanatic objectivists in the secular camp. All insisting that, in the absence of God, their own particular “ism” is the next best thing.

Thus…

In other words, for each and every one of us as unique individuals…whatever that means?

What does it mean to you? For me of course whatever it does come to mean for each of us will revolve around dasein. Suggesting that, once again, in a No God world, there does not appear to be a way to determine what it ought to mean…pinning down the most rational assessment of what in fact it does mean.

Philosophically? Politically? Naturally?

Your negation or mine? Mine still comes back to No God. No God and no transcending font. No transcending font and no Judgment Day. No Judgment Day and we mere mortals, utterly lacking in both omniscience and omnipotence, are on our own.

But: if we can invent religion, we can invent Humanism too. Our own Reasons. Our own Vices and Virtues.

As opposed to theirs.

If you negate it back down to bedrock and build up from there, do you ever reach bedrock, or go deeper into the groundless until it gazes back through the eyes of the whipped horse in Plato’s Republic?

Let’s pivot that one round the dao (bedrock, rejected cornerstone) and see what the whirlwind leaves us.

“And why can’t you decide for yourselves what is right?”