Top Ten List

You’re an objectivist. That’s why you still drink water.

Regardless of what anyone says, they still drink water.

That’s very down to earth.

You could have chosen differently, but like everyone else on earth, you didn’t WANT to choose differently, because you understand the objective, political and moral consequences of it.

You’re basically a fraud

We do what we can here. We’re not likely to agree to congregate outside the Huntsville unit the next time a particularly controversial execution takes place. Instead, here at ILP, we bring into the discussion our own personal experiences with the issue. Or we can discuss a film like Dead Man Walking, which powerfully presented both sides of this literally life and death issue.

Here we can think through the conflict and note to others where we draw the line ourselves between logical language, rational thinking and moral behavior.

No, I am asking you [and others] to examine the extent to which any particular individual’s argument for or against the death penalty is embedded [problematically] in the lives that we live in any particular historical, cultural and experiential context.

And while there are clearly things able to be distinguished as being expressed logically or expressed illogically, as comporting rationally with the facts or not comporting rationally with the facts, when we shift gears to value judgments regarding capital punishment, things are often not nearly as black and white.

And the reason that there are “hundreds or thousands of issues and arguments related to capital punishment” is because there are any number of different contexts that each of us grew up in, exposing us to very, very different sets of variables. Issues relating to class and race and gender. Issues embedded in aggravating and mitigating circumstance. Issues embedded in police bungling, jury selection, and out and out fraud. And then all the folks who have been released from prison [on death row] because it was finally determined that they really were innocent all along. Or the extent to which it can be pinned down once and for all if the death penalty is the very embodiment of “cruel and unusual punishment”.

What can philosophers [or scientists] tell us here. And what is beyond their purview, their expertise, their wisdom?

My point revolves around the likelihood that some will be impressed with your own moral and political narrative, while others will only be scornful of it. Why? How is this – these conflicting reactions – embedded in dasein?

Okay, imagine that I did. Here I am telling them that the choices that they make in their lives relating to value judgements are just so many ever and always subject to change existential contraptions in the No God world. Values that are no more necessarily virtuous than those who embrace just the opposite point of view. That “I” here really is just a historical and cultural and experiential construction, deconstruction and reconstruction from the cradle to the grave.

How would their reaction be all that different from the reactions of many here?

Two points:

1] repetitive points can be needless for some or they can finally begin to sink in for others
2] there are always new members here at ILP for whom the points are not repetitive at all. They’re hearing them for the first time and may well have something to tell me that effectively challenges my own assumptions here.

No, iambiguous, you do not agree. “What enough people with enough power will accept” is might makes right or it certainly could be. Ideologue dictators are regularly chosen by “the people” and are not necessary morally aberrant.

I have to ask you, do you keep asking about particular contexts because you don’t see the context of what others claim?

I’d be glad to “be rational” about conflicting goods:

People, or at least people who think about it, tend to come down on one of two sides of the issue of the death penalty - they are usually either for it or against it. But it’s noteworthy that many who are for it are for it in only certain circumstances, the relative importance of which varies a bit from one person to the other. People sometimes even argue about it. And laws are from time to time passed about capital punishment. The courts are constantly involved.

Now, why can’t we agree? And let’s stipulate that agreement would mean something that reveals a clear mandate for all the governments of the world. And that, given the impossibility of even knowing what 90 or 95% of the actual population of the world thinks, that we’re keeping the parameters inside the realm of the possible. But the rest is wide open - educational levels, literacy, IQ, mental health, wealth - it’s all on the table.

Is this starting to look like a waste of time, yet? It does to me. We don’t even know who we want to vote on this and we know it can’t be everyone.

So how do we get the two sides to agree? Well, God comes to mind, except that he has already abjectly failed to produce agreement. But here’s another problem - why the fuck should i care if the whole world agrees? Because i fancy myself a philosopher? Why do you care?

This is all on the skyhooks, but you have a) asked the question and b) not even attempted to give your own solution. The “real world” is that people argue about this stuff using moral language. Moral philosophers provide the vocabulary. No matter what else they claim to do. But moral philosophers have made many errors. The error that they can provide some universal and permanent solution to this problem is just one of many. Ignoring the logic of their arguments will guarantee that you do not understand that which you rail against,which is kind of a waste of time.

Getting obsessed with that certain mistake and ignoring the others will pretty much do the same thing.

But back to agreement - it happens one agreement at a time. Griping about there being no use for moral language, some of it provided by absolutist, rationalist assholes who are still hallowed and followed by many, is the complaint of someone who seldom wins an argument.

The fact is that people do get talked into things. They change their minds. ultimately, it’s the argument they have with themselves, using the tools made available by philosophers, that tells the tale. It helps if those arguments are valid and uses premises accepted as true by that one person. It’s not as easy as it seems.

What I was basically agreeing with was your point that “[m]orality is not fundamentally about what is true.”

Fundamentally in the sense that the might is said to be justified because it reflects the moral obligation of all rational and/or just people. Then you have all of the historical renditions of this. Lenin with his Communist Manifesto, Hitler with his Mein Kampf, Mussolini with his fascism, Mao with his Cultural Revolution.

Or there are those who skip that part and impose their will simply because they have the political and economic and military and police wherewithal to impose it.

And while there are behaviors in any particular human community that can be described accurately as “morally aberrant”, who is to say which behaviors all rational men and women are in fact obligated to choose?

Yep, that’s how it works alright. At least in those jurisdictions that practice one or another rendition of democracy and the rule of law. And not those who are in a position to dictate how all citizens are required to view state executions. Re God or one or another ideological dogma or one or another philosophical assessment. And certainly not in communities where for all practical purposes it’s the law of the jungle.

In my view, human interactions are ever and always embedded in an actual historical and cultural or experiential context. Out in a world where contingency, chance and change are always right around the corner.

Then further in my view it comes down to how any particular one of us implicates that in our own lives.

Again, that’s my point. That and the part about any actual flesh and blood “I” out in any actual flesh and blood world being at the intersection – the existential intersection – of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

In any specific context.

This is precisely the argument I make when confronting the moral and political objectivists among us. There are simply far, far, far too many variables intertwined in any number of actual social, political and economic contexts to ever realistically suppose that some sort of deontological prescription can reflect the ethical equivalent of “one size fits all”.

But: whether accomplishing it is a waste of time it doesn’t change the fact that one way or another rules of behaviors must be proposed and then legislated in any given human community. And then enforced.

Again, it is here where I argue that “I” is largely an intersubjective agglomeration of value judgments out in a particular world of conflicting points of view derived from the actual trajectory of ones life experiences.

And not from God or ideology or reason or logic or views of nature. Not from the intellectual assumptions of folks like Plato or Aristotle of Descartes or Kant.

But that in turn is merely how “I” have come to view this existentially here and now given all the variables that came together in my own life. Many of which are surely beyond my understanding and control.

When have I ever argued that any one of us ought to care about any of this? It’s just that down through the ages there have been any number of folks who called themselves philosophers who took it upon themselves to care about it.

And what I propose we do here is to take their words, their ideas, their concepts, their theories, their intellectual contraptions down out of the “general description” clouds, and stick them out in the world that we live in here and now. As this revolves around the question “how ought one to live”?

My point is that with respect to an issue like capital punishment, there do not appear to be any objective solutions that philosophers, using the tools at their disposal, can provide us with.

Then [for me] it’s probing how others are not down in the hole that I am in when confronting this.

I propose first and foremost that my values here are embedded in the points I bring up here:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

Then I ask others how this frame of mind is not applicable to them. Given a particular context that most here are likely to be familiar with and to have thought about.

Yet another “general description” in which the supposed “errors” that philosophers have made are not fleshed out in regards to an issue like capital punishment.

Again, errors [or truths] that revolve around the part where logic and rational thinking and morality are grappled with “in reality”.

You still don’t get it. Philosophers don’t provide the answers using the tools at their disposal. They provide some of the tools so that you can provide answers for yourself.

Well, you can’t describe philosophers more generally than this, right?

And my point has always been that whatever tools philosophers [or scientists] use in confronting the question, “how ought one to live?”, there does not appear [to me] to be a way to get around dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

All I have ever asked of folks like Faust and KT is that they at least make an attempt to explain why they are not down in that hole I have thought myself into.

Sometimes they claim to have done so. But not in a way that has ever managed to sink in for me.

So, all we can do is to try another context and see what might begin to sink in. Stuff that they propose to me, stuff that I propose to them.

What hole? You don’t know how you ought to live?

I’m not in any hole. I decide how i ought to live. Now, every second of my existence informs those decisions and there are about eleventy-million decisions to make, if you’re lucky enough to live that long.

What would you have happen when you encounter someone you disgaree with? A merging of the minds? When did that ever happen? To anyone? That people were in agreement. i mean, other than a relatively small group? And even then…

By the way, you have accused me of a vast generization. But given the context of many other things I have said, it should be easily understood by anyone who knows that context that I do not mean that everyone we may call a philosopher is any good at providing those tools. So, in which context have I generlized enough to warrant an eyeroll?

The problem in philosophy is not generalization, it’s reification. It’s abstracting the living shit out of an idea and pronouncing the result a thing. Like a Platonic Form. Logic is easier when you are reifying, because you’ve made up all the important words yourself, or copped them from someone who has. Still, these reifiers slip up. But what has that to do with disagreements about abortion? It’s a strategy.

Political economy requires strategy. Ask Plato.

But compromise requires knowing the opposition’s position. Philosophy is the art of knowing their position better than they do. Or at least making them think so. It’s the art of argument for ideas we can conceptually point to but are not quite sure why we can and why we do point to them. Philosophy can tell us why, but has a different influence than experience or chromosomes have. Again, not very many people are good at it.

I thought that philosophy was supposed to be about love of thought.
I made a post about this already.
Love of thoughts, love of ideas, love of the beings which store and distribute ideas.

Love without intelligence is brought to basically nothing, though.
Love is a mode. It’s an existential condition.

Anyone who loves truth needs to also know truth.
Otherwise the love has no direction or goal.

Thus knowing is more important than loving.
Christians would disagree on that.

The hole that revolves around the manner in which this…

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.

…seems reasonable to me.

Thus when I am confronted with a context in which values come into conflict, I recognize that my own values are largely derived existentially from the life that I lived. That had my life been very different I might now be espousing the opposite point of view. And that in regard to opposite points of view, both sides have reasonable arguments to make. There does not appear to be a way for philosophers to propose an optimal point of view.

Thus when I was a Marxist and a feminist, there was no doubt about it: abortion was the absolute political right of all women. Now, I am drawn and quartered by the arguments from both sides. And I recognize that had I not been drafted into the Army allowing me to meet men who profoundly reconfigured my very conservative views on abortion into very radical leftist views, I might easily have remained staunchly anti-abortion as a devout Christian.

Here all you can do with respect to an issue like abortion is to explain to me why you believe this.

How are your decisions not the embodiment of how I construe the “self” here? How do you deal with those reasonable arguments able to be made by both sides?

To wit: abortion.procon.org/

You tell me: which point of view is the most rational? Which narrative is most in sync with virtue?

You either believe that it is one over the other or a rendition of “you’re right from your side, I’m right from mine”

Then what? Then it’s who has the power to enforce their own moral agenda.

It’s not a question of what I would have happen, but how I have come to actually react to those who don’t share my own values. Values that, in any event, I have come to construe as an “existential contraption”.

Another vast generaliztion about generalizing itself.

And political economy is rooted historically in all of the various ways in which the means of production allowed a particular community to set up the distribution of goods and services.

Thus the behaviors of those in nomadic communities, hunter and gatherer communities, slash and burn communities, feudal communities, mercantile communities, capitalist communities and socialist communities overlapped in the sense that they are all of the same species of animal. Human all too human. But there were also differences more in sync with each particular type of economy. And how that then engendered more or less separate and distinct social and political interactions.

Imagine if Plato were around today. What would be the same in his thinking and what might be very, very different?

This is an unfortunate viewpoint. You might have gone in another direction. What you are saying is that you don’t have any compelling reason for action. Most people do have a reason. That may be ideology or religion or god knows what, but when you’re lost in an Existential wasteland and reckon that no one is going to come and rescue you (which is a very Existentialist thing to reckon) you have to strike out in some direction or perish. In this context (are you getting the whole metaphor here?) any direction is better than standing still.

No “I” need fracture here. It’s the “I” that’s getting you away from crying beasts and back to your hut in the shadow of the Temple of Dasein.

Distributive justice, the political morality if you will, is like this, too. So what?

I don’t think Plato would be very different. There are still plenty of Platonists around.

Philosophers can help us to understand what the words “right” and “wrong” mean, before we decide which particular acts are right or wrong. That’s why they so often fall prey to metaphysical lust. So, a morally good act is right because it’s consistent with previously accepted principles. Like Rawls’ fairness or Aristotles virtue.

In the end, moral philosophers help describe the Social Contract, whether that’s what they’re trying for or not. Social contracts occur not when everyone agrees, but because not everyone agrees. If you have no concept of the operative (at a certain time and place) social contract, you will be lost indeed. The social contract is the motherfucking context.

So you were prochoice and now you’re… am I to believe that you have done no thinking, throughout all these influential experiences? What is your case against legal abortion?

Nice.

No, I’m suggesting that what compels the moral objectivists and the political idealists to action is the belief that they are in touch with the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”.

Just as the religious folks are compelled by their faith in God. Just as the political ideologues are compelled by their own rendition of Humanism. Just as the KT crowd is compelled by their own [meaning Satyr’s] assessment of nature.

What is of greatest importance [in my view] is not what they believe that compels them to action, but that they are convinced there is a way in which to know this.

This is the psychological component of “I” that sustains both comfort and consolation in a postmodern world in which meaning and purpose are becoming increasingly more problematic.

One or another variation of this: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296

Instead, I speculate that “I” here is an existential, construction, deconstruction and reconstruction from the cradle to the grave.

They are not lost in an existential wasteland because they do not construe “I” here as I do. So I ask them to reconfigure their moral and political narrative into a discussion involving an actual context. How are they not fractured and fragmented as I am? What is their argument in reacting to the components that are particularly meaningful to me.

Instead, over and again, they “explain” themselves by generating “general descriptions” like you do here.

I’m not arguing that “I” need fracture with regards to conflicting goods. I’m only pointing out that given how I have come to think about “I” at the intersection of identity, value judgments and political power, “I” am fractured and fragmented.

If you are not, okay, fine, try to explain to me why you are not given a particular context. Or don’t and move on to others.

So, in acknowledging this, you are confirming what many believe to be that crucial intertwining of “I” in unique sets of existential variables out in a particular world historically, culturally, and in terms of ones own personal experiences.

That, in other words, this is what the deontologists, the philosopher-kings and the political ideologues [among others] conveniently leave out of their own one-size-fits-all dogmatic strictures.

Okay, apply Rawls’s “general description” of “fairness” and Aristotle’s “general description” of “virtue” to a set of conflicting goods such that they take into account the manner in “I” reacts to particular behaviors based in large part on how individual lives predispose us to liberal, moderate or conservative prejudices.

What is “fair” in the abortion wars? What does it mean to act “virtuously” with respect to gun control laws?

Instead, from my frame of mind, it is back up into the didactic clouds.

My point is that your thinking can revolve around one set of circumstances and then those circumstances radically change and that thinking doesn’t work anymore.

And the argument against legal abortion depends on the assumptions that you start out with.

You might be a Catholic, convinced that abortion is a sin. And surely sins against God should never be made legal.

You might be an atheist who believes human life begins at conception and, therefore, that abortion is murder.

Or you might be a conservative making arguments that flow from assumptions like these: frc.org/brochure/the-best-p … -audiences

My point then is that the folks on the other side have their own sets of assumptions that they deem to be perfectly reasonable.

Neither side is then really ever able to make the other side’s points go away. Not completely.

Nice perhaps because like you often do, he makes a point like this that sounds as though it might be relevant or meaningful or important or clever, but: what “on earth” does it mean? Crying beasts"? A “Temple of Dasein”?

Dasein is understood by me to be but one more existential contraption. It is something that [here and now] I think reflects a reasonable manner in which to construe the “self” in the is/ought world.

But that’s all.

iam - any description of fairness will be a general one in the sense that fairness itself is a general term. Rawls takes great pains to include political thinking in his theory. His books can generally be had cheap at used bookstores that have a philosophy section. I can’t summarize this in a post.

I can’t help it if you just don’t get it.

I’m not sure why you feel that, absent some sort of universal truth, “one” does not know how to live. You may not know how to live, but that’s not a philosophical problem. To say that our thinking revolves around a set of “circumstances” says nothing. Of course it does.

Humans, like other species, are capable of learning. Learning requires generalization. To say that generalizations are no use as a guide to living is to say that learning is of no use. This is a ridiculous statement.

If you google “john rawls, fairness, abortion” you get this:

google.com/search?ei=eV2iXI … QqZCGTYOmo

And this from the first result:

In a footnote to the first edition of Political Liberalism, John Rawls introduced an example of how public reason could deal with controversial issues. He intended this example to show that his system of political liberalism could deal with such problems by considering only political values, without the introduction of comprehensive moral doctrines. Unfortunately, Rawls chose “the troubled question of abortion” as the issue that would illustrate this. In the case of abortion, Rawls argued, “the equality of women as equal citizens” overrides both “the ordered reproduction of political society over time” and also “the due respect for human life.” It seems fair to say that this was not the best choice of example and also that Rawls did not argue for his example particularly well: a whole subset of the Rawlsian literature concerns this question alone. David M. Shaw

It’s basically just one more leap to a particular political prejudice. And then the extent one can attribute his own value judgment here to the life that he acxtually lived predisposing him [finally] to this frame of mind.

As opposed to what philosophy is able to tell him about fairness here?

Whether asking or answering the question “how ought one to live?” is or is not a philosophical problem, will depend on which philosopher you ask.

And for the moral objectivists and the political idealists among us, acknowledging that “circumstances” plays an important part here is not nearly as important as insisting that if you are “one of us” you will have come to understand those circumstances such that the “real me” is then able to be in sync with “the right thing to do”.

Or so it seems to me.

Few want to believe that because they lived their lives in a particular way, they have come to view a set of circumstances in one way rather than another. And that had they lived a very different life they might have come to see them very differently in turn. Or that in having lived very different lives, others have come to understand and react to the circumstances in ways that are just as reasonable to them as your own assessment is to you.

That makes “I” far too ambiguous, wobbly. The self ever and always embedded in contingency, chance and change. Ever and always subject to reconfiguration given new experiences, relationships and access to ideas.

Sooner or later those generalizations are going to be introduced to a particular context in which any number of conflicting moral and political narratives collide.

Then there’s how I think about that “for all practical purposes” and how others do in turn.

I’m not sure what you think the excerpt means. It’s just the intro to a paper. The author hasn’t made his case yet. I mean no offense, but here you don’t seem to know what you’re tlking about. Rawls is really not a bad read.

But it’s not a leap. Rawls is painstaking to a fault. But you not only didn’t read a word of his, you didn’t even read the paper about Rawls.

Rawls general theory would certainly not preclude legal abortion, however. He would allow only persons (and adult ones at that) to be party to his social contract. That paper will probably argue that we in some way accept fetuses as persons. Which of course, many people do. Not so many in Cambridge, where Rawls worked.

Philosophy, yes, but mostly political history tells us a lot about fairness. Rawls was Kantian in a very important way, but no one is perfect.

I meant that you not knowing how to live is not a philosophical problem. And by the way, you can’t get more general than asking how one ought to live.

The trouble with Existentialists is that they want cred for wandering around the mean streets of a world without God. Keepin’ it real an’ keepin’ it together. Geralizations (knowledge) is introduced at every turn, one would hope. In a democracy, the ones who know how it works are the ones who win. An increasingly liberal society is all but inevitable when democracy is fueled by education and affluence. And generalizations. American society is young, though, so it has a ways to go.