Look, you are either convinced that objective morality exist [in a No God world] or you are not.
And you are either convinced that others can learn from you to embody rational/progressive behaviors regarding conflicting goods [in a No God world] or you are not.
But:
You will either bring all of this down to earth in order to substantiate your claims or you will not.
But you can’t resist it:
What I had proposed is very positive and generic like, learn how to fish, increase your level of philosophical education, see the pros and cons of various issues and other self-improvement methods.
You tell me: Is it even possible to be more abstract?
Yet even in discussing abstraction you fall back on more of it:
Abstraction??
This is your problem that prevent you from any breakthrough.
As I had stated many times, all knowledge has to start with abstraction from past experiences to progress.
If you dismiss abstraction as ‘clouds’ then you are into trouble.
It is very unfortunate you have very rigid and non-pliable neurons in the learning part of your brain.
Well, if this is true it smacks of determinism. And if determinism is applicable what does it really mean to hold me responsible for whatever I think, feel and do?
I sense your thinking is very perverted from the norm and that is why it is giving you so much problems, dilemma and conundrums.
The norm? Subtantiate this please. A context. A set of conflicting goods.
This basically revolves around two things:
the extent to which your day to day interactions with others
precipitates conflicts that revolve around value judgments that
precipitate out of sync behaviors that
precipitate actual consequences.
I am not too sure what this is leading to. Perhaps you can give an example.
Whatever the problems with the above, I would propose we ‘learn how to fish’ as a generic approach to deal with the issues.
Are you telling me you have never encountered others who objected to your behaviors because they violated their own understanding of right and wrong? What on earth then does it mean to “learn to fish” here? How was the dispute “dealt” with to the satisfaction of both of you?
Instead, your argument [to me] is that there is a progressive Middle-Way behavior out here and that in the future both of you will come to embody it if you wish to be thought of as rational human beings.
But only if this is “dealt” with first in an exchange of “general descriptions” of human interactions. You have this “thing” about “generic solutions to life’s problems”. But that doesn’t surprise me at all.
For example this thing:
- The truth of suffering (Dukkha)
- The truth of the origin of suffering (Samudāya)
- The truth of the cessation of suffering (Nirodha)
- The truth of the path to the cessation of suffering (Magga)
And then when I ask you to bring this down to earth in order to grapple with an actual suffering human being in an actual context, you don’t see the point of that. Or you claim that [with me or with others] you already have done this.
I’m just not privy [yet] as to where and when.
Either that or we just have to agree to disagree regarding what that exchange entails.
Note the views of ‘existentialism’ is not mine but that is the general theme.
Indeed, that is why folks like de Beauvoir wrote novels in order to situate the general themes out in a particular world that revolved largely around the actual existential lives of herself and those around her.
Even the mother of all Objectivists, Ayn Rand, made that attempt.
But the general view with existentialism is it does not provide existentialists with as set of practices to get them out of the problems of life it exposes. Agree?
No, they suggested that those who insist that “essense precedes existence” [in the is/ought world] acted out of “bad faith”, acted “inauthentically”. Why? Because in order to embrace their doctrinaire, dogmatic and generally authoritarian moral/political prescriptions, they insisted that everyone else had to embrace [b]the same set of practices that they did[/b]. In other words, the psychology of objectivism: one of us vs. one of them.
That you know what is true not what you know is true.
But even if you bring the parents in, then the main theme is still skills, i.e. parenting skills. If the parents has sufficient knowledge of what is good parenting [knowing] and has the ability to put that into practice, then they will not subject the kid to 24/7 practice.
Again, you are actually arguing that if the progressive parents have sufficient knowledge and are able to impart this knowledge skillfully to their children, they will then discern precisely where that line is drawn between too much tennis and too little tennis.
And what might that entail?
Note we can deduce from empirical observations and matching with average expectations of what good parenting entails.
As for tennis we can gather evidences [good and bad] from what all the top tennis players and other non-pros has done in their life. This is not difficult at all. Then we can abstract the general norms of what constitute good parenting in relation to playing tennis and other sports.
Again, substantively, “what might that entail?” What particular behaviors would be in sync with a “progressive” frame of mind in regards to striking a Middle-Way balance [from day to day to day] between too much tennis and too little tennis?
What would all of the great tennis players agree upon here?
Though I suspect that you [much like me] don’t really have a clue because you [much like me] have never been a parent faced [existentially] with that dilemma. You just know that if one thinks about it in the right way equanimity will prevail.
Theoretically as it were.