But truthfulness is a virtue and a virtue is a character trait. Character traits are contingent on habituation. How can an essence be acquired through habituation?

It's very interesting I will try reading him sometime. Thanks.
Yes exactly. How else could they be grounded? Moreover, my current view is that our being is groundless; that there is no human nature in other words. Thus if there is no nature to ground them, then our moral theories appear to be groundless cultural phenomenons. Moralities are entirely relative to one's culture in my current view. I didn't always think this way.

I take that back. The thing-in-itself is a brilliant concept that is fundamentally anti-metaphysical.

as thing-in-itself — jancanc

I think the thing-in-itself belongs to a specific historical context involving specific ontological presuppositions. The concept has no place in a post-metaphysical world.

How is the will just not subjectivity?

Two sides of the same coin like subject and object? Will as subject and representations as object. I'm not sure if Heidegger ever critiques Schopenhauer directly but his early writing attempts to demolish the Cartesian/Kantian subject-object ontology at the heart of Schopenhauer's view.

So, I think Levinas might have said that trying to pin ethics down to something like a "human nature" is a form of violence to the Other. By doing so, we'd be trying to ground ethics in the familiar and intelligible when the Other is not this way. — darthbarracuda

Interesting... What does Levinas mean by ethics? I looked up his entry on Stanford encyclopedia which begins: "Levinas's philosophy has been called ethics. If ethics means rationalist self-legislation and freedom (deontology), the calculation of happiness (utilitarianism), or the cultivation of virtues (virtue ethics), then Levinas's philosophy is not an ethics."

I think You are both on to something. T Clark, I don't think you expressed your idea clearly enough when you said "I would add that it should be hardwired. There from the beginning before any social influence." Because, prior to this the definition you quoted mentioned "psychological characteristics, feelings, and behavioral traits", which I think Janus, and Aristotle, are rightly pointing out can only occur through socialization. However, I think what you T Clark are getting at is correct as well, that it (human nature) cannot be merely contingent. I think we need a broader and more ontological definition of what would count as human nature. For example:

something innate while simultaneously pointing to or articulating what is fundamentally distinctive about us — bloodninja

What would be an example of what you're getting at?

Really? How do you interpret "we are adapted by nature to receive them [the virtues]"?

Morality is our necessary "crowd control" system. It's our built in (we have to learn it) self-control mechanism. "Built in" but not pre-programmed. It has to be taught and learned. But "taught and learned" doesn't preclude a built in, biologically based capacity for crowd-control and self-regulation. — Bitter Crank

This sounds A LOT like Aristotle in Book 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics:

"Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name (ethike) is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit). From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit."

In other words, the moral virtues are grounded in our nature, according to Aristotle.

If HN is as I understood you to mean, then HN is such an obvious and uncontroversial fact, so bound up with our background knowledge about the world and ourselves, that it is hard to even separate it out, so that we could evaluate its specific relationship with morality. You may as well say that for there to be human morality there have to be humans. — SophistiCat

Sorry but I have to disagree. Historically, there have been different and conflicting ways that we have understood our own humanity. That our cultural self-interpretation has changed over time, shows that any concept of human nature is highly controversial. Moreover, for a feature to count as human nature, it's not sufficient for that feature to be shared by all, rather it must be innate and it must articulate the being of the human (I hope I haven't made things murky by bringing in being, but being is what this discussion is about, not psychology, or soul, but the being of the human). The general feeling I get from culture today, for example, is that we are fundamentally social/cultural constructions, which is the antithesis of human nature because a social construct is not innate and seems potentially (though not necessarily) arbitrary.

You might like Rorty. He tackles exactly this in C,I, and S. We can understand ourselves as groundless. We simply want a certain kind of society, one that maximizes freedom and minimizes cruelty, for instance. I don't find Rorty completely convincing, but he tackles exactly the issue you mention. — t0m

Thanks for the suggestion. I have never read Rorty, but I definitely will do. He was interviewed in a Heidegger documentary I watched recently. I really liked his demeanor. BTW I'm quite busy with a another project at the moment. I probably won't be ready to discuss The Concept of Time for another two weeks if that's cool? I plan to read bits and pieces of different texts to try to understand it...

It's funny. As I write above, I see this as an issue that can be explained by our physical nature and you focus more on our minds, perhaps our souls, but we come out in very similar places about how it affects our idea of what it means to be human. — T Clark

If by soul you mean being. :)

What do you mean by "human nature," anyway? What would be the difference between possessing and not possessing "human nature?" — SophistiCat

I think for something to count as human nature it has to be something innate while simultaneously pointing to or articulating what is fundamentally distinctive about us (so DNA is completely useless). Examples of this innate human nature are Plato's tripartite theory of the human soul, Aristotle's claim that man is the rational animal, Chomsky's ideas about language, perhaps Nietzsche's the will to power, etc. The difference between possessing an innate nature and not is that if the former is true then we can ground our moral claims and give them strong normative force. If the latter is true, and there is no innate human nature, then it appears that we have nothing to ground our moral claims in so they have weak normative force; we would be a social construction just like the socially constructed moral claims. Morality would be completely meaningless and arbitrary. To the question why be good? there would be no sufficient answer. I hope this clears things up :)

I am torn. If what counts as a moral action is an action that comes from virtue for example, which is my view, then fantasy immediately seems irrelevant to morality. This is because a virtue is necessarily a character trait. And a fantasy is not a character trait. Having said that, do we really want to say that the person who has rape fantasies is virtuous? Why would a virtuous person have rape fantasies? Going with my gut, I want to say that only a vicious person would have rape fantasies...

For example, perhaps when the "fantasy rapist" is with a partner they are unable to be with the other in authentic solicitude (Heidegger's concept). Their rape fantasy would get in the way of this authentic solicitude, and the other would be reduced to a prop. Their sexual union would be structured around dishonesty. Dishonesty is a vice. Thus rape fantasy is not merely amoral, but indirectly immoral...

What someone thinks about, and feels towards, their actions is 100% ethically relevant!

They surely have a different idea but what is relevant is that they have the wrong idea.

Are there different Nothings? Different ways in which Nothing is understood? Perhaps there is a primordial Nothing on the one hand and a not so primordial Nothing on the other? Perhaps Zero is one of these "not so primordial Nothings"?

Interesting questions...

Does Aristotle also mean that morality is objective? — TheMadFool

I think he does think morality is what we would call objective. The nazis used rational means, sure, but having rationality doesn't make anyone virtuous by Aristotle's, or anyone's standards. In other words, rationality is necessary but not sufficient. There are lots of rational psychopaths, for example. In his view, there was a lot more that went into someone being virtuous than merely being rational. E.g., emotions, intention, disposition...

I think another interesting question to ask is: is morality merely just a cultural expression of contingent cultural norms, or is ethics grounded in something meta, and therefore something objective. If it is, what is this something? Why are we moral? Is it because we are all social conformists? This is my opinion currently by the way... I believe morality is groundless and that we are empty conformists. There is a strand of naturalism in 20th century virtue ethics that I don't think I agree with any more...

I didn't realise there were two. It turns out I have the other one which is a thin book also. It was originally intended as an article written in 1924 in response to the 1923 publication of the correspondence between Dilthey and Yorck, but was never published at the time. My library also has the Lecture translated by William McNeill. I'll try to get my hands on this. Thanks, it would be really helpful to discuss this.

Oh nice! That's awesome that you're reading B&T!! I actually got The Concept of Time out of the library the other day. I am about to begin reading it on my train rides to and from work. I have read the majority of Being and Time excluding the final couple of chapters. It is the kind of book that, as difficult as it is, you can keep returning to and get more out of every time. I know there is still a lot more in it for me... After The Concept of Time, I plan to have another go at Division 2 of B&T.

It indicates that man is the kind of entity whose only fixity is being-always-in-progress — t0m

Or, in other words, (wo)man is hermeneutical.

we all have our own individual natures even while we all partake of a common human nature. — javra

I think the concept of hermeneutics fits nicely with this idea: We each have our own meaningful self interpretations while partaking in a common "essential" hermeneutical way of being human.

This is exactly what I'm doing, phenomenology. When I gave the melody example I was using it as a phenomenological example to show the importance of anticipation. The melody would be phenomenologically unintelligible without anticipation. You haven't offered any argument to the contrary. Merely stating that

Everyone observes life differently — Rich

is a cop-out.

meditation is not how we experience the world. Meditation is how we experience a deworlded world. I mean there is no experience of a world in meditation. It is an escape. What use is meditation to philosophy?

That strangers from different cultures might anticipate differently is completely irrelevant. The point is that anticipation, or being temporally ahead of yourself, is ontologically co-constitutive of the melody as melody. If our being was not fundamentally and temporally constituted as ahead of ourselves we would not hear a melody just random collection of notes.

I mean within the context of the melody...

How important is the anticipation? Or the awaiting of futural notes expectantly? To me it seems crucial to the experience.

Can you please illustrate this?

would the example of a musical melody suffice as an example? The present note is framed in terms of the retention of prior notes and also the anticipation of notes to come. We never hear a single note, only the note coloured through the context of the whole (retained and anticipated) melody.
Or is what you call memory morphing different to retention?

Only as possible intent to action, but it is past as it happens. — Rich

While you were writing the above response, and you were pressing your fingers against each of the keys on the keyboard, did you experience

a flow of memory pressing into the present — Rich

I understand time as a pressing into too. "pressing into" for me signifies a forward direction. "pressing into the present" signifies for me that (you are saying) your experience of time is as the past pressing (futurally) into the present. Am I making sense? Do you agree? How is this not absurd?

However, using "pressing into" to articulate your understanding of time shows that you do think of time as primordially futural, does it not? Or perhaps it shows that you need to use a different phrase?

One does not place oneself in the future, one is the future existingly. It is only through being somewhat determined by the past and by projecting into the future that I can make present. In other words the present is derived from the future and past...

I think our lack of being able to understanding one another is due to different modes of temporality implicitly being used by us. You seem to be talking about an objective present-at-hand temporarity that we never really experience apart from breakdown situations where the everyday background flow of involved coping somehow ceases. Whereas I'm using temporarity in an existential sense... Sorry I think I have thrown myself into the wrong discussion here. How rude. I must leave..

Well that is not what I experience. I am oriented towards the future not the present. What I am doing presently only makes sense because I am primordially orientated towards the future. I never experience anything like what you described by memory pressing into the present... can you please elaberate?

Excuse me ladies and gentlemen, may I ask what you mean when you say that something like time or the present exists and the past and future does not? It seems absurd to me to think of something as ontologically fundamental as time as existing. Perhaps you are all using exist in a different way to myself? To me, to say that something exists means that it is temporally determined in some way. And to say that some aspect of time exists or doesn't seems ontologically confused. Is temporality not primordial in your view?

Sorry I'm confused, why do we need presentism to ground ethical claims? If presentism were true there could be no justice. It is new to me, but to me presentism sounds like the nonsense that only philosophers are capable of devising. Do we ever really experience the present? Is the present spanned? How long does the present last? When does the present become past? How can I know if I am really experiencing the present and not the past out of which I make sense of the future that I'm constantly pressing ahead into with my everyday concerns. It is possible to define the present in a non-arbitrary way so that it is distinct from the future and past? I feel like I have never once experienced this "present" that people talk of. Is it the abstract,detached ticking away of time? Because I have not experienced this, never. Is it something spiritual or mystical? I have only experienced the past and the future. Is there something wrong with me? Or is "the present" simply a case of an extremely empty and vague concept that means different things to different folks, and therefore effectively means nothing at all? The present does not exist!

I really like what you're getting at. But could we take it even a step further and say that the past only exists in the future?

I am an amalgamation of my past; my body is the food I've eaten, my beliefs are the ideas, experiences, and concepts that my mind has absorbed, my memories are an unreliable catalogue of my subjective experiences which are no longer the present. — Noble Dust

It is true we are an amalgamation of our pasts. However when we are in the "present" we are always directed towards a future. The way I'm thinking, the present seems to be something that is never really experienced, more of a made up theoretical fiction. The objective ticking away of time is not an experience I have ever had. What I experience is constantly being directed towards the future while being informed by a past, a past that includes understandings, moods, significances, language, other people, happenings, meanings, etc. It is only upon the past that I can press into the future, but if I could no longer press into the future (if I died) then the past could not exist through me. Does this not make sense?

Regarding the darthbarracuda's original question about the holocaust, maybe what we need to do is distinguish between different senses of the past. E.g., objective past, practical past, existential past, maybe there are even more pasts... Similarly with the future.

Sorry if I offended you. I have never had to consider myself a secularist. Probably because I was brought up in a godless world (New Zealand)... My family is not religious, and neither were my school, friends, society, etc.

Our discussion is about how the virtues/moralities are grounded. My view is that the virtues and vices are grounded in the way cultures function. The way cultures function changes with time, and the virtues and vices change with it. To me, there seems to be no plausible argument that the different moralities are determined/grounded by anything other than how our different cultures function.

Given that this is my view, for you to claim that other cultures are less moral because they do not share our 'advanced' value structure seems from my point of view to be prejudiced. For you to make this claim, you must be grounding the virtues in something other than the way cultures function. What is it? God? Reason?

As we (society) evolve we ascend into higher forms of morality, whereas in the ancient times certain cultures would enslave others or oppress others we can now see from history that this is wrong and advance. — MountainDwarf

But by whose standards is this wrong? By your contemporary culture's generic norms?

Un-evolved societies are not as moral as technologically advanced societies. — MountainDwarf

Are you xenaphobic?

If morality determined cultural norms like you say, and given that cultural norms change, does this entail that morality changes? Also would it entail there being as many different moralities as there are different cultures in the world? If this is so then your morality is merely a morality and not Morality. Again I can't see what the difference is between conformist cultural norms and morality.

but not good by what standards?

Okay if you say so, fair point. You obviously know quite a bit about ancient philosophy. Can you please point me in the right direction? If I wanted to learn about Parmenides and his thoughts about being/ontology, where would I look?

Are there any strong arguments against cultural relativism? There are some virtues that appear in all cultures however this doesn't disprove the idea that morality merely an expression of, and is contingent upon, conformist social/cultural norms. All it shows is that aspects of different cultures are structurally similar.