Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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ORIGINAL: Psychonaut23
No Aswad, it doesn't make sense to ask that. Because you and I are obviously both educated enough on this topic to recognize that no answer will be forthcoming.
I'm actually not the least bit educated on the topic. Neither philosophy, nor ethics, nor logic.
Seeing as rationality cannot be objectively determined, positing it as an objective criterion excludes humans from meeting the criterion. Simple as that. You can use it as a subjective criterion, or an ideal to strive for, but both of those eliminate the possibility of showing one morality as false without grading all moralities along a spectrum of falsehood, and you did posit that a morality could be shown as true or false.
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There will always be some uncertainty and subjectivity on what precisely defines a rational person, but at the same time we should be able to agree that there are rational people and irrational people.
That is your position; a poorly defined threshold function.
I posit that different people exhibit different degrees of rationality at different times.
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Any who is familiar with a decent range of philosophy knows that one can easily derail any line of thought by challneging the basic assumptions of philosophy: that reason is possible, that words have meanings, that language communicates.
I haven't challenged the basic assumption. I have simply pointed out that, even given those assumptions, if we bear in mind the evidence, we are stuck with the bottom line that ethics are no more than a human construct which tends to be the time integral of social adaptation to selection pressures over time, with a prevalence correlating to the success that has been had at establishing the dominance of a social group that subscribes to a given ethic.
That does not establish validity or invalidity, truth or falsehood, merely a typical mechanism and a typical result.
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Yeah, okay. Nice little dig at me you're taking there. Except the problem is that you jst made the claim that your own writing is on the same level of Kant, which is a pretty ridiculously brazen claim.
I never claimed that my writing was on the same level as Kant. I implied that I'm debating this with you, not Kant, and that your comprehension of Kant's positions may be less than complete (as compared to Kant's understanding of those positions). And I wasn't taking a dig at you. Don't assume malice, as there wasn't any.
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While at the same time trying to attack the very concept of rationality. You play a very dirty game of pool there, Mr. Wad.
My name is not Mr. Wad, and neither is my screen name.
I did not attack the concept of rationality. I stated that humans do not objectively live up to it.
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Yeah? Who defines what reason is? Oops.
Reason is the poor man's substitute for rationality. Consider it a pragmatic alternative, if you will.
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That's an interesting claim, given that you demonstrate that you think of morality in a universal way yourself later in this very post.
No, I categorize my view of other people in a manner that is functionally universal, and will point out that this stems from my refraining from thinking universally about it: I am concerned with what is, and do not posit any universal validity to my morality. Accordingly, I do not project universal requirements on the morality of others. Similarly, I do not judge others as being moral or immoral without knowledge of the morality they subscribe to, and that is a conscious judgment when I make it. I consistently act locally, in line with my own morality and no reference to universals, based on the situation around me. Whether I judge you to be moral or not, does not affect how my morality dictates me to respond to your actions.
As such, your perception of universality in this case is an illusion.
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Also, I find your claim that morality is a fuunction built into human minds utterly absurd.
Feel free to submit citations to the contrary. As far as I can tell, starting with aversion, then predictive gain, then social compliance, then conformity, then reciprocality and finally abstraction, the human mind progresses through a series of moral operational modes that are supported by the development of the underlying facilities. This is reflected through the evocation of autonomous responses by the inherent faculty for morality, and the early stages are mirrored in other social species of animal.
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I've deleted most of the rest of your post, simply because I am not interested in changing my definition of morality to "compassion," which is what you appear to be defining as morality.
Compassion is not a defining aspect of morality as a concept, and certainly not a defining aspect of mine.
Delete what you will. I shall hold those points to have gone unaddressed.
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I think you've only demonstrated that you used the word morality to mean something other than morality.
Actually, I have demonstrated that other factors than morality figure into behavior, and that one of them tends to be confused with morality. The one that tends to be confused with morality is intellectualized, and does not hold up well under pressure, with the vast majority of people who attempt it spending more time rationalizing their behavior than adhering to their purported morals. Similarly, this intellectualized form is readily overriden by authority figures and the deferral of perceived responsibility, far more so than is the case for internalized morals. Seeing as the intellectualized form cannot be internalized, only habituated, I posit that it is not morality, but simply pretends to be.
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And I posit that morality is not a human faculty, but rather a discovered property of logic, in the same sense that mathematics and physics are discovered properties of logic.
Morality as a property of logic implies a universality you have not demonstrated.
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I utterly reject your claim that morality is a human faculty, and will again point out that you are conflating the human capacity for compassion -- which may motivate a person to pursue morality -- with morality itself.
Compassion more often than not inspires poor judgment, and its role in morality is questionable, at best.
I do not even imply that compassion is necessary for morality.
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I also find your assertion that since humans cannot become perfectly moral we should lower the bar til we can jump over it quite facile.
Trying to be a better broken thing seems facile to me.
And I did not advocate lowering the bar. I advocate a human morality for humans.
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In that case every person is moral and to say a person is moral or immoral is meaningless. If morality is not universal but rather personal, then everyone is equally moral. You are the moral equivalent of Hitler. Obviously there is something wrong with that line of thinking.
There is nothing obviously wrong with that. And you should be aware of the fallacy in thinking that way. When a consequence of a line of reasoning seems absurd, that does not automatically mean that the reasoning is not sound. Rather, it means that there is a conflict between assumptions and the line of reasoning.
In this case, you are making several incorrect inferences.
First off, everyone is not equally moral by my reasoning. The degree to which a person is moral depends on the degree to which their actions are in conformity with their purported morality. Hence, by my reasoning, if you have a morality in the best tradition of Kant et al, but fail to adhere to it, you are immoral. Conversely, my cat is highly moral, because it adheres very closely to its internalized morality (stage 3, social conformity and approval). A robot is perfectly moral unless it has been programmed to delude itself about the contents of its moral imperatives, as it adheres perfectly to those imperatives.
Second, if Hitler did adhere rigidly to whatever morality he espoused, then he was a moral man that nonetheless needed to be eliminated.
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I find your approach entirely facile and really quite silly.
I do not find your approach particularly facile, but I find your analysis to be quite so.
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I've deleted a bunch more because it's little more than you patting yourself on the back for being so very smart (I honestly don't see it, and think the obtuse language is just pompousity)
Actually, it was friendly advice on account of you getting yourself trashed. I note that the advice was not wanted. Again, I shall let the points stand as unaddressed. As for patting myself on the back, that may be your interpretation, which has implications that I urge you to consider more carefully, as no such thing was intended on my part. If I were concerned with pats on the back, I would still have no need to supply them myself, that's justmasturbation.
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If you impose your moral beliefs on others, then you have universalized your morality.
I do not impose my moral beliefs on others.
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If you accept all all moralities as equally valid to your own, then you would have to sit by idly while a father beat on his infant child, while a group of men stoned a woman to death for showing too much ankle, and while Nazis loaded Jews into trains.
My morality permits me to impose my will on others by force when doing so is not prohibited by other aspects of my morality. If I find the actions of another to be distasteful, and have no overriding moral imperative to the effect that I should not interfere, then I will do just that: interfere. This is done without regard for the morals of the other person. Accordingly, I do not need to sit idly by if and when something offends me.
Incidentally, it is not compassion that moves to action in the example cases. A father beating on his child is quite simply offensive, just like someone beating on an animal: it's excessive violence against a defenseless being, which is cowardice of a sort that deeply offends. A woman being stoned for showing too much ankle is offensive out of disparity and quite a variety of other reasons, but would probably be disregarded if I were visiting a country where such was the local custom. Jews being loaded onto a train is offensive because I do not approve of the state wielding that kind of power, nor of the state expatriating its own citizens without a prior offense and adherence to what the state and its citizens agree to be proper protocol for addressing a claim of offenses, nor of singling out groups without individual regard.
In short, all the example cases have something offensive about them, and by my morals, I would be free to act to put a stop to them if able to do so. Nothing universal about it. It's an entirely local (i.e. personal) decision whether or not to act, and a local recognition that there would be nothing morally wrong in my deciding to act.
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You cannot take a stand against evil without first universalizing morality.
I do not subscribe to the spectre of evil. If I did, then apathy and universality would be two prime candidates.
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If you do not universalize morality, then you cannot pass judgment on others.
Of course you can. That judgment simply won't be universal or objective.
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If you cannot pass judgment on others, then you cannot act in response to their actions.
Of course you can. I demonstrated that above.
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You use ridiculously obtuse language that honestly makes my eyes glaze over. You use twenty words when four would do.
I reiterate: my words are purposeful. If you have a specific phrase in mind, I will look into it.
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You are embodying the worst habits of philosophers, and given that you demonstrate that you can speak clearly and with clarity, I would request that you actually focus on brevity and clarity rather than trying to impress me with your ability to torture a sentence beyond all human decency.
I have tried to be somewhat more brief and clear in my reply.
Sometimes, however, clarity is incompatible with brevity.
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The fact is that many of the things you (or anyone else) says can be interpreted in multiple ways, and when you make these huge, obtuse statements they communicate less than you'd hope, simply because they can be interpreted in so many ways.
So far, it seems you're the only one whose interpretation diverges much from the intent.
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And honestly I'm just not interested enough in your opinion to sit down and diagram out your sentences and try to figure out what you're saying.
Which may explain why you don't grasp what is said.
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If you make reading your comments real work, then I mostly won't read your comments.
Which leaves those comments unaddressed, and others who pay attention to them will know why you are wrong, while you will not.
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I actually totally understand what you're saying here, and I sympathize, but at the same time I'm forced to recall that you started this conversation by implying that my difficulty in understanding what exactly you're getting at stemmed from a failure on part rather than a failure on yours, even going so far as to compare yourself to Kant, but that seems a spurious claim after you've acknowledged you aren't a native speaker.
As I noted in the beginning of this post, I did not compare myself to Kant.
I further implied that your difficulty in understanding seems to be, at least in part, due to your failure to read what is written and make an effort to comprehend it. That implication has been borne out by your admission on both counts, and that others have been able to understand just fine.
As I said, I've tried to be more brief and clear this time around.
Let me know if it needs to be simpler still.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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