There's a previous thread that takes this argument and applies it to the ethics of believers: The moral character of Christians — Banno

You are sort of the king of ad hominem, no? If there is insufficient ad hominem on TPF, you show up and remedy the problem. :roll:

Clicking on the reply button places the reply in the third person. — Banno

No, it doesn't. Go read any post on TPF. 99.9% of them engage the person they are responding to, rather than talking about them in the third person.

↪Count Timothy von Icarus collapses liberalism into capitalism, but that’s a mistake—one Lefebvre might help us avoid. — Banno

It's interesting that you continue to speak about the Original Poster in the third person as you face your audience. That sort of tactic reads a lot like propaganda, or advertising. Maybe it would be better if we actually addressed the people we disagree with, instead of giving speeches about them.

I am reminded of some psychology/neuroscience research that showed similarities between moral approbation and disgust/fear of contagion. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think that's right, as long as you meant something like "disapprobation" rather than approbation.

You could probably go deeper with that thought using the idea of memes as being akin to viruses. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think what you say is exactly right, but I think the explanation needs to be taken a bit farther.

Not all viruses are pathogens.* Some are in fact beneficial. Therefore we are not actually concerned with virus contamination per se, but rather with pathogenic virus contamination. What this means is that we need a way to determine whether a virus is pathogenic or beneficial, otherwise the disgust/disapprobation phenomenon can never get off the ground in the first place.

The term "social norms" has the same bivalent nature as "virus." To merely pass on norms for the sake of passing on norms, or to merely avoid virus contamination for the sake of avoiding virus contamination, is not rational (at least unless we have reason to believe that norms/viruses are good/bad either per se or at least on the whole). So someone who has no justification for determining whether a virus is pathogenic or beneficial is not rational in trying to avoid contamination; and someone who has no justification for determining whether a moral norm is true or false is not rational in propagating that moral norm within society. If we can't assess the particular then we can't assess the aggregate, and pointing to the aggregate is not a real solution until we can also point to the particular (translated into virus language: "If we can't assess the virus then we can't assess the question of contamination, and pointing to the disgust/disapprobation phenomenon is not a real solution until we can also decide whether the virus is pathogenic or beneficial"). This is precisely the same problem that runs up when he leans so heavily on faith that he falls into a vicious circle—as fideists are also wont to do—for faith in a scientist who cannot discern a beneficial virus from a pathogenic virus is otiose.

In other words, it seems to me that what basically happens in these cases is that we forget to distinguish viruses from pathogenic viruses, or matter from form. For example:

• Moral proposition: "Attend to the victim"
• Virus: "Inattentiveness to the victim"
• Social norm: "Attention to the victim"

But when you run this algorithm day and night without keeping Aristotle's mean in mind, what you end up with is the excesses of intersectionality and a culture where victimization (or its appearance) is the ultimate prize. When the culture reaches that extreme everything flips, and the virus becomes beneficial whereas the social norm becomes pathogenic.

Jonathan Haidt follows some of the disgust research. His conclusion is that conservatives tend to avoid contamination whereas liberals tend to seek contamination (or cross-pollination). The societal pendulum swings to the left when excessive conservatism pathologizes good viruses, and it swings to the right when excessive liberalism greenlights pathogenic viruses. Nevertheless, the point I want to emphasize is that we must be able to determine which viruses are beneficial or pathogenic and why. This is the task set before us by the OP, at least insofar as social norms are concerned.

* I realize that I am here altering your negatively connoted sense of 'virus', but bear with me...

Ok. I try to start from the beginning. Aquinas says that one can fix his will in sin. — boundless

But you've already deviated from the text. The text says:

• "A man is said to have sinned in his own eternity [...] also because, from the very fact that he fixes his end in sin, he has the will to sin, everlastingly."

That's a kind of syllogism, and you are trying to contradict a conclusion without addressing the premises, which is a form of begging the question. We can formulate it this way:

1. A man fixes his end in sin
2. Therefore he has the will to sin, everlastingly [or: he sins in his own eternity]

Note that nowhere here is the claim that a man fixes his will in sin.

So the first question to ask regards (1). Do you disagree with (1)? Do you think (1) is impossible, or something?

To me this mean that at least after death, according to Aquinas... — boundless

But I've already pointed out that the quote says nothing at all about death. How are you interpreting Aquinas to be saying something about death when he in no way mentions death? We can't engage Aquinas if we are not attending to the words he writes. In that case we are not engaging Aquinas at all, and are really engaging something else, perhaps a strawman.

So, yeah, I can imagine that one can fix his will to remain in sin 'forever' but it doesn't necessarily imply that the will at a certain point must become irrevocable. — boundless

No one is saying "must." What is being said is, "Can." And if we couldn't will something for eternity then how could we fix our end in that something? If one can fix their end then—ceteris paribus—they can will that end for the term appropriate to the act, and for eternal beings this term is eternity. Someone who thinks we can't will marriage for life will not get married, or admit that a couple can properly perform the act of fixing their joint, earthly end. Someone who admits that the couple can perform that act must also admit that the end can be willed for the term of earthly life.

I honestly think that the idea 'if everyone will be ultimately saved, then evangelization is useless' suffers from various problems. — boundless

Well read what I actually wrote: "If everyone turns out fine in the end, then there is no ultimate need to evangelize or even help others." What do you think about that?

I'm going to leave it there for now. This conversation is beginning to sprawl and becoming unwieldy, and what is needed is for you to attend to the words and arguments on offer, rather than deviating from those words and arguments. If you don't properly read and interpret the words of Aquinas or myself, then I fear that multiplying words will do me no good. Maybe narrowing the conversation will make it easier to attend to the actual words being written.

- That's precisely the sort of irrationality and intransigence that justifies dismissal. :up:

surely it must have something to do with the non-alphabetic characters in the thread title. — Wayfarer

That's it. A surprisingly large number of threads have search problems because of this. I actually removed the characters from my Anselm thread title because it was causing such problems.

()

Having sound arguments is only one kind of acceptable justification. There are others. — frank

I think you're nitpicking. What does the expert have that you don't?
(Evidence is not had independent of argument and reasoning.)

I've never maintained that. — frank

Your earlier posts seem to tell a different story.

- That was the most interesting post-length piece I've read in years. This variety of introspective honesty has become especially rare in the United States, perhaps at least since 2016.

optimism, amounting to a disregard of death — Adorno

Although I don't get too involved in political discussions, when my progressive friends ask why I oppose communism, that is just what I tell them. Utopianism ends up justifying too much.

Fdrake's recent thread is closely related to this one, and there I tried to say something similar:

While this is correct, appealing to the inherent mismatch of ideals with reality is a cop out, and serves as an explanation for any impermissible act consistent with the operative principles of a society that allows it. Which is to say, it exculpates any moral evil imaginable. A principle that exculpates any moral evil is, definitively, evil. — fdrake

(Proper link to fdrake's post - see bug)

Sure, but aren't we ignoring the other side of the coin? Namely that appealing to the inherent mismatch of ideals with reality is a cop out, and serves as an explanation for any act inconsistent with the operative principles of a society that disallows it? As in, there was a downside to the French Revolution, and I'm not convinced your construal is able to come to terms with that downside. The promotion of an ideal is not unobjectionably good, given both that there is moral worth to the stability of the status quo, and that false ideals are very often promoted. — Leontiskos

I guess. — frank

So if you can only rationally accede to an expert if you presume that they possess sound arguments, then you cannot accede to an expert regarding the proposition, "Do not kill the innocent," while simultaneously claiming that such propositions are not rational (i.e. cannot be the conclusion of a sound argument).

More simply, if you continue maintain that the only possible support for a proposition like, "Do not kill the innocent," is rationalization, then you would be irrational to assent to that proposition on the testimony of an expert. Indeed, if some field is full of nothing more than rationalization, then there are no experts of that field.

Naturally those who fight the insurgents will likely call them terrorists. Even to admit that there is an insurgency is an admittance that give the other side justification of being an "enemy combatant". Enemy combatant isn't your ordinary criminal. — ssu

Is your definition of "terrorist" just "enemy combatant"? Do you disagree with the proposition that all insurgents are terrorists?

I assume that you are thinking of the question from a philosophical perspective... — ssu

I think political scientists also have to reckon with logical validity. Suppose, as seems reasonable, that a terrorist is not merely an enemy combatant; and it is not true that all insurgents are terrorists. If this is right, then it looks like your arguments are invalid.

Edit: This is the puzzle for me. You have wanted to talk about terrorism since your very first post. That’s fine, terrorism is obviously on topic. And we have talked about it in the intervening posts. I think we’ve hardly disagreed at all: terrorism should be opposed, terrorists can be dismissed, exported, censored, etc. So it doesn’t seem like a fruitful topic. What more is there to say about terrorism? But just because we have covered terrorism, that doesn’t mean we have covered the notion of dismissal. This is because there are all sorts of forms of dismissal unrelated to terrorism. I think the most interesting ones involve using a moral judgment of the dismissed as part of one’s rational grounds for dismissal. I suggested the topic of treason, since it is also related to international relations but gives a fresh, non-terrorism topic. Again, I'm not sure what else there is to say about terrorism.

A slogan is not a fact. — Vera Mont

But you are relying on slogans yourself. This is your argument:

1. Free enterprise does not necessarily involve exploitation
2. Capitalism necessarily involves exploitation
3. Therefore, free enterprise is not capitalistic

#2 is the sort of slogan I might find on a bumper sticker. It seems to me that if a Marxist thinks capitalism is problematic because of the right to private property, then they will object to free enterprise for just the same reason. There are many, many such overlaps between the concepts of free enterprise and capitalism, to the point that for most purposes they are irretrievably wed. The layman does not know the difference at all.

I don't think rational is a property of statements. It's about the way a person believes or behaves. You believe P rationally if you have a decent reason to believe it. But the bar doesn't have to be particularly high. If you believe P because experts agree that P, then you're behaving rationally, and your belief is rational. — frank

In your case the question would be: Okay, so then you don't think, "Do not kill the innocent," is the conclusion of a sound argument?

If you believe X because experts attest to it, but you simultaneously deny that the experts could have any sound arguments to hand, then you are being irrational. (This is precisely why faith is only rational if the guarantor is thought to have access to knowledge.)

An unwillingness to engage in a rational discussion.

I'd say the fact that a person is being irrational is grounds to write off their views, their arguments, their thought processes, their senses of the facts. You may get the the point that conversation is impossible. — Fire Ologist

Okay, good.

But this still is never grounds to write off the whole person. — Fire Ologist

Sure.

Ending the conversation is justified. Preventing them from causing harm in their irrationality is justified. Teaching others about the rational and the irrational, using the irrational opinion as an example of such irrationality is justified. — Fire Ologist

Agreed.

Never. We are mistaken every time we equate a whole person with any one thing they say or do, or even the many things they say or do. We are mistaken for identifying ourselves or others, with some group or ideology. It's is just not the case that people are so simple they can be known completely by other people. Personhood, is an ocean. Opinions, ideologies, life's work, these are rivers, creeks, puddles. — Fire Ologist

Okay, but is a material position sufficient to deem them irrational?

In my view, if you think someone else is a person, but that person has immoral, destructive beliefs and behaviors, and that person is always irrational, then that person is beyond you. You are justified in refuting everything they say, disengaging in any conversation, telling them they should stop, stopping them when they assault or worse. Such irrational immoralists do not cease being persons because they are buried in confusion, irrationality, immorality and destruction. And it is the fact that they are always people that forecloses both the ability to truly write them off, and forecloses the possibility that it can be justified that I write them off. Such a person should be our goal to assist in their salvation. — Fire Ologist

Okay, good points.

I think the point of you posing these questions is to demonstrate just what I'm saying - writing off people is a mistake in itself. — Fire Ologist

Maybe that's part of it, but another part is to provide sound criteria for different forms of dismissals, so that we do not shade too far into excessive dismissal. Dismissal of personhood would be an extreme example of that, but there are also ways in which we tend to dismiss someone as irrational when they haven't actually shown themselves to be so. Only if we know what it actually means to be irrational or racist will we have a starting point to make proper judgments regarding these matters.

When we have to shake the dust off of our sandals and turn our backs on people, we shouldn't think of this as foreclosing all hope for such people. We just foreclose our individual ability to reach them, today. Who knows how and whether reason and truth will penetrate their hard hearts some other way, some other time? They are people, just like me, who grow. We should hope and pray hardest for those people who we cannot even fathom how they think and do what they do. — Fire Ologist

This is sound advice. :up:

However, are the "rules" different for a professional journalist, whose reason for existance is the dissemination of information? — LuckyR

Sure, but I think we want to talk about philosophers, scientists, sociologists, etc., rather than journalists. Journalists are constrained by the Overton window in a special way.

Even if the bomb is dropped intentionally on a legitimate target with the knowledge that innocents are inside and that death will likely result, it is permissible under double effect. It is not the same as murder. — BitconnectCarlos

I'm fairly confident you're misreading Anscombe, as a side-effect is not intended. But Bob Ross and I beat this to death a year ago, and the topic will take us too far afield.

For me, the overriding force behind the prohibition is DCT. I agree with you that the murderer does not belong in society (so I do see merit in other reasons). Perhaps the murder occurs where there is no society, though. — BitconnectCarlos

Okay, so then you don't think, "Do not kill the innocent," is a rational statement? There is no reason not to kill someone just because he is innocent?

All I'm saying is that if I had to pick the main reason, it would be DCT although I do see merit in others. I'm sympathetic to the idea that murder really damages the psyche or soul of the murderer. And as mentioned, I agree that the murderer is unfit for society. — BitconnectCarlos

Okay, so maybe you think the statement is rational because it harms the murderer.

So in response to: "that's not liberalism's problem, it's consumerism, capitalism, secularism, individualism, etc." I would reply, "give me one example where the two don't go together?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

Simpson has a somewhat different angle. Here is a part of Simpson's early sketch:

The Mythical Character of This Story

This story about liberalism (thus schematically stated), about its rise and its superiority to illiberalism, is almost entirely mythical. It is a colorful story so universally taught and so universally believed that few are able, or able very easily, to see through its colors to question its truth. The myth has become a sort of instinctive state of the public mind, whereby people are caught up into the belief that liberalism, or something analogous to it, is the only acceptable doctrine about political life. This belief, however, generates a paradox on the one hand and insinuates a falsehood on the other.

The paradox is that while liberalism claims to free people from the oppression of states that impose on everyone the one true doctrine espoused by the state, liberalism itself imposes on everyone such a doctrine: namely liberalism itself.[1] Liberal theorists have long been offering solutions to this paradox. Whether they have succeeded in theory is questionable.[2] Whether they or any others have succeeded in practice seems plain to view. They have not. All those in professedly liberal states who, for whatever reason, do not accept the liberal doctrine, or are suspected of not doing so, become enemies of the state. They must at the very least be watched carefully, and if their unbelief in any way proceeds to attack against the liberal state and its interests at home or abroad, they must be hunted down and rendered harmless. The liberal state has proved itself as ruthless against its opponents as any illiberal state is supposed to have done.

The falsehood is that the liberal state, contrary to the myth, is not a solution to some longstanding political problem. It is rather the invention of a new problem that before hardly existed. For the state is not a timeless human phenomenon whose history can be traced far into the past. On the contrary, it is almost entirely an invention of liberalism itself, first in theory by theorists and then progressively in practice by men of power and influence who, whether sincerely or insincerely, embraced the theory. This claim, which may seem more startling than the paradox, needs extended explication and analysis. — Peter L. P. Simpson, Policital Illiberalism: A Defense of Freedom, 3

Politically, Simpson sees Liberalism as bound up with the State in a way that precedes its capitalistic or democratic character:

The Idea of the State

The first question to ask, for it is key to correct analysis, is what is meant by the state. An answer to this question is provided by Max Weber, the founder of modern sociology, who in a perceptive insight seems to have got to the heart of the matter. Here is the apposite quotation:

> Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially
> intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions . . . have known
> the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have
> to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims
> the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given
> territory.[3]

By the state, then, is meant that special organization of political power that takes to itself a monopoly of coercion; that is, of the use of force to impose obedience to laws and policies. Note too, then, the novelty of this idea, for what Weber brings to our attention in this quotation is the difference between what existed before and what exists now. Before the modern emergence of the state, no institutional structure had a monopoly on coercive enforcement. The power to coerce has, of course, always existed and always been part of communal human life. Weber is not saying anything new by associating force with politics. What is new in his analysis, and in the state he is analyzing, is how this force relates to politics. In the past the power to coerce was not concentrated at any one point but diffused through the mass of the population. The nearest approach to the state in premodern times (though Weber does not mention the fact) was tyranny, where one man or a few did possess something close to a monopoly of coercion over everyone in a given area. For this reason was it typically called a tyranny: instead of all the citizens sharing control, only one or a very few did. Even kingships were not tyrannies in this sense, since kings ruled through powers of coercion diffused in the general mass. — Peter L. P. Simpson, Policital Illiberalism: A Defense of Freedom, 3-4

He goes on to distinguish Hobbesian liberalism from Lockean liberalism, where the latter seeks to impose restraints on the state in a way that the former does not. He notes that "practical men of power" tend towards Hobbesian liberalism, and thus in practice liberalism always tends in the direction of a totalizing state.

This is only one aspect of Simpson's analysis, but from this it is easy to see how liberalism is inimical to freedom. For Aristotle and the ancients a monopoly of coercion is a tyranny, plain and simple. This is also why, at a deep philosophical level, the common liberal opposition to the right to bear arms in the second amendment to the United States' constitution is a bit bewildering. For Aristotle, the liberal complaint that the U.S. denies a full monopoly of coercion to the state would be seen as a kind of blinkered brainwashing of the demos.

-

That's fair, I didn't even write it as an OP, and I didn't really write it to make it clear that my interest was primarily not in "all critiques of liberalism," but rather the advocates of liberalism's general tendency to be blind to critiques that question whether or not liberalism's definition of freedom is adequate (as opposed to critiques that call into question whether or not liberalism delivers on freedom as liberalism itself defines freedom; the second sort of critique essentially accepts the premises of liberalism). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's fair, and I think it's an important critique.

And there are lots of men and women who have encountered this sort of "personal failure." Millions it would seem. So the question is, at what point do we stop thinking this is an aggregate of millions of personal, individual failures and begin to say it is a systematic, social failure? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, I think that's a worthy critique.

- Yeah, I think that sums it up in a nutshell. :up:

Not a word about colonialism or slavery, class hierarchy or capital, unlewss all enterprise is capitalistic. — Vera Mont

It doesn't say "enterprise," it says "free enterprise" (i.e. a form or aspect of capitalism). Your own definition disagrees with you, and you fudged it by omitting the word "free."

Free Enterprise -

an economic system in which private businesses compete with each other to sell goods and services in order to make a profit, and in which government control is limited to protecting the public and running the economy — Cambridge Dictionary

That sort of disambiguation is helpful, given how nebulous the term "liberalism" can be. Some people associate everything they love with liberalism, and others associate everything they hate with liberalism. The first group argues for liberalism by arguing for something they love; the second group argues against liberalism by arguing against something they hate; and no one seems to be talking about the same thing.

- If you think that every insurgent is a terrorist, then I think you must have an idiosyncratic definition of 'terrorist,' no? I am starting to wonder if you do have some tensions with free speech if you are trying to do things like label all insurgents terrorists, and then restrict speech based on that extension of the term. But it's hard to see how any of this is related to the OP, or where it is going.

I think one could kill the innocent and not be wrong. Anscombe's paper on the doctrine of double effect really hammered home this point for me. She'll use an example, e.g., a bomber flying a mission against a weapons factory who incidentally ends up killing innocents.

Bombing ports or weapons factories is necessary for war, and Anscombe holds that what is necessary cannot be evil.

Murder is a specific type of killing, one that is uniquely wrong. It involves making the innocent one's target. — BitconnectCarlos

Nothing that one does by accident is wrong per se, and this of course includes accidentally dropping bombs on the wrong people. Whether or not we call such an accident an act of killing is arguable, but it doesn't much matter.

For example, if you and I are running a race and our legs get tangled up as we round the corner you might claim that I have tripped you. Whether or not we want to say that <Leontiskos tripped Carlos>, everyone knows that I did not really trip you, in the culpable and intentional sense. If these were proper acts of killing and tripping, then a baby playing with a gun would be tried for murder if the gun went off and someone died. Any intentional (non-accidental) killing that is unlawful is murder. What is key in distinguishing murder from some variety of manslaughter is not the target, but rather the intentional nature of the act.

But coming back to the point, do you think that intentionally killing the innocent can only be seen to be wrong via divine commands? Or do you think that one can understand that intentionally killing the innocent is wrong even without the help of divine commands?

- I think I agree with most of that except the idea that traditional metaphysics departs from empirical knowledge and logic.

But to the earlier point:

I think there is a normativity at play. Premises must be consistent with human experience and the overall human understanding of reality. — Janus

...One can do an intersubjective thing and call that rational, even with respect to morality. So one might say that racism is not objectively irrational but it is intersubjectively irrational. That could perhaps constitute a point of more general agreement within the thread.

I myself think racism is objectively irrational, in much the same way that "3 > 3" is irrational. Or as you imply, any implicit argument for racism will seem to be unsound, given that the conclusion is in fact false. This doesn't mean that we can beg the question and assume ahead of time that everyone's argument is unsound, but it is a basis for a judgment that the position is irrational.

Interesting, thanks! — boundless

Sure.

But IMO it is a digression. — boundless

It could be relevant but I don't see it as philosophically central.

I am simply not buying this, especially if one says also that during life one can repent until the 'last breath'. — boundless

I don't think you understand what Aquinas is saying, because what Aquinas says there does not contradict the possibility of repentance "until the last breath."

Along the same lines, Aquinas might say that at a wedding a couple, "fixes the end of union, and have the will to unite, until death do them part." This in no way implies that the couple will never divorce. When Nietzsche talks about eternal recurrence he is engaged in a very similar idea to Aquinas.

Incidentally, a lot of people believe that wedding vows are impossible, and it is for the same basic reason that they believe mortal sins are impossible. The idea is that humans don't have the power to incur such lasting consequences, in this case such lasting promises.

In the case of the damned, either the 'irrevocable destruction of the good in themselves' can happen during life or not. If it can happen then redemption can be impossible even during life in some cases. If not, then I do not understand how redemption is impossible. — boundless

That is a reasonable argument. I would say that their evil can become subjectively irrevocable during life, but that the Catholic Church holds out hope for their repentance based on factors external to their person. For example, a saint might shake them out of their complacency. It may be worth pointing out here that if everyone turns out fine in the end, then there is no ultimate need to evangelize or even help others.

Note that a corollary to your premises is that irrevocable destruction of the good only ever occurs at death, and not because of death. As if, coincidentally, anyone who ends up in Hell is on a declining path that bottoms out at the exact moment of death, and not a moment before.

Your basic idea here is that death is an arbitrary cutoff, and you are working that idea via the Church's doctrine that no living person is beyond repentance. I think the basic response is that death is not an arbitrary cutoff from God's point of view (nor from Aquinas' philosophical perspective). The notion that the time of our death is arbitrary is already a denial of God's providence. Theists do not believe that people have untimely deaths and get unfairly damned by sheer luck.

One reason I find the fixity of the will at death reasonable is because it is an epistemically conservative position. Infinite reincarnation is much less epistemically conservative, as are accounts of formative post-death experience. The slogan YOLO (you only live once) is widely shared even in pluralistic societies, and that same basic epistemic intuition undergirds the fixity of the will at death. I do not find plausible the idea that our earthly lives are too short for moral or spiritual formation, or that we have some good reason to think that our earthly lives are accidental, such that our destiny-orientation will be fundamentally changed by temporal experiences outside our earthly course. If humans can fix their end, then the point at which it is fixed can always be called "arbitrary" by someone or another. I see no reason to believe that the natural human life is not sufficient for the moral and spiritual responsibilities enjoined on it by Christianity. ...Heck, we even see in aging people a tendency to become "fixed in their ways," as if fixity increases in proportion to natural death. Empirically speaking we seem to have asymptotic habitus.

St Augustine said: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you". If one accepts that the union/communion with God is the highest good, when such a state is reached, one has simply no reason at all to abandon the state of eternal bliss and fulfillment. That's why I think that (if classical theism is true) one can't fall again. — boundless

Okay, so it seems that you think that the human will only ever arrives at unmovable rest in God himself. That it can never place its (permanent) end in something other than God. That sounds like Hart, and it carries with it no philosophical difficulties, but I think the difficulties begin to arise when we move beyond philosophy, into theology and particularly Scripture.

In the state of hell, it's different, after all. One is in a state of torment and frustrated desires. — boundless

Flannery draws a nice comparison between Hell and the problem of evil. A similar argument could be made: if humans are not able to rest in evil, then why do so many humans rest in evil? If Hart were right about the ineluctability of the good, then there would be no such phenomenon as the chronic addict. The universalist is again and again forced to impose a strong dichotomy between the created order and what they think is a better arrangement, "What is and what should never be." If the premises of universalism were true then it seems to me that Satan and Adam would never have fallen at all, there would be no evil, there would be no chronic addiction, there would be no child starvation, etc. If the good were ineluctable in the way that the universalist posits then the created order would look entirely different.

Correct. But of course this is persuasive only if one already believes that one can commit a mortal sin as defined by the official doctrine of the Catholic Catechism and that if one dies without repenting from such an act he is eternally condenmed to hell. — boundless

I think one only has to believe in the notion of mortal sin. If you don't believe in Hell, then you don't believe in mortal sin, at least not really. This is because mortal = mortality = death = finality. In Scripture death itself is a consequence of sin.

The fact that mortal sin requires a certain degree of knowledge and consent is where things get confusing. I doubt you believe that, say, a 5-year old child is capable of a mortal sin (even if you say to him or to her that, say, murdering innocent people qualifies as such and he or she does that). But if one considers the finitiness of our lives, the intricate web of relations and influences between a human being and the cultural, social and even physical context where he or she lives and so on, when we can safely posit the 'cut-off' between 'being able to commit a mortal sin' and 'being unable to commit a mortal sin'? For instance, at which age does one get the ability to commit a mortal sin? — boundless

This is an example of an elaborate argument for the idea that there is no such thing as a mortal sin. Such arguments are almost always epistemic, as this one is. If you want me to engage an argument like that you will have to make it more formal, as dangers of emotion and rhetoric become rather pronounced in these areas.

And supposedly one in Heaven has his or her innermost desires perfectly fulfilled, has full knowledge to experience the 'best possible state' and is actually experiencing perfect beatitude. It's clear to me why, in these condition, a truly rational agent would have the will fixed to remain in communion with God. — boundless

Yes, that is a reasonable account. :up:

What tells you if it's being used or misused? A rational argument? — frank

Why do you ask questions or post on TPF at all if the only answers you will get are rationalizations? If you didn't think your interlocutor would answer honestly rather than rationalize, you wouldn't ask them a question at all, and you wouldn't log in to TPF.

To inhibit the expressions of terrorist should be understandable. — ssu

Not really. "Terrorist organization sues Finland over free speech rights," isn't exactly a common headline.

I think we should always evaluate the perpetrators culpability. — ssu

For example, the law distinguishes manslaughter from murder, but with terrorism there is no such distinction. The law does not distinguish terrorists who were acting in good faith from terrorists who were acting in bad faith.

You've ignored the question about the traitor twice now.

It's also possible to rationalize disrespect for others in general. I think that's why morality isn't based on rationality. People naturally rationalize whatever they're doing. Rationality is kind of like fashion. — frank

The age-old answer to this claim is that rationality can be used or misused, much like a gun. "Rationality can be used for rationalization, therefore it is not normative," is a lot like saying, "Guns can be used for murder, therefore they are not good." There are accountants who use their accounting skills to embezzle funds, and there are accountants who use their accounting skills to account. Using the art of accounting to ensure that others make accounting mistakes (and overlook your embezzlement) is a perversion of the art of accounting.

Else, if rationality was nothing more than rationalization, then different levels of rationality would have no non-social effect. But that's obviously false. The person who is more rational will be much more skillful at navigating nature, and nature doesn't care a whit about rationalizations. Similarly, cultures that are more rational will succeed vis-a-vis nature in ways that cultures which are less rational will not.

I would call that unreasonable, procedural, and cruel and unusual. — T Clark

Well we were discussing procedural vs. cruel and unusual by separating the two, so that we can see each in its own light. When you combine them all together and decline to consider them separately there is no possible way to have a philosophical discussion about whether the "cruel and unusual" value judgment possess a non-procedural nature.

As I said, let's leave this here. I don't want to distract from where you want the discussion to go. — T Clark

I don't see that procedural vs evaluative is off topic.

We should notice from the terrorism example just how extremely rare this should be. There are huge numbers of people that are suicidal, but only a minimal amount who would harm people when killing themselves or take on such lunatic ideas that terrorists in Western countries promote. However, if we want to keep these rare events at a minimum, then government do check what basically is otherwise "free speech". — ssu

Okay. Incidentally, how do you see the issue of speech impinging on the question of terrorism? Are you thinking of cases where we inhibit a terrorist's forms of expression?

Preventing harm to others is a moral move. How could it be non-moral? — ssu

I added this to a previous post after I saw your question:

(An ambiguity arises here, where the moral judgment could be seen to undergird one's own act of walking away (i.e. "At this point it is better for me to walk away"). That is a non-hypothetical ought judgment, after all. But when I call dismissal a moral act what I mean is something else. What I mean is that we are entering into moral judgment upon someone else. The question of whether a dismissal is a moral dismissal depends on this question of whether we are entering into moral judgment upon someone other than ourselves.) — Leontiskos

Laws have to have a moral basis, don't you think? — ssu

Yes, but the question here is whether there is an specific need to evaluate the perpetrator's culpability. If we do that, then we are involved in a moral judgment of the person, and we don't always do that. In the case of the terrorist I don't think we really care about their culpability. We don't care if they acted in "good faith" or "bad faith."

Terrorist see themselves as having a just moral cause, naturally. — ssu

Is there a moral difference between a terrorist who believes he has a just moral cause and one who is acting in bad faith, say, by desiring excessive and disproportionate revenge?

Is there a moral difference between a terrorist and a traitor?

Interesting question! Let's take racism; if someone thinks a person is to be shunned, dismissed as inferior or even vilified on account of their skin colour, it is obvious that there is no rational justification for such an attitude because there is no logical or empirically determinable connection between skin colour and personal worth, intelligence or moral rectitude.

So, shall we say their attitude is irrational or simply non-rational? I'd say that if they concocted some completely bogus supposed connection between skin colour and personal worth or intelligence then their attitude would be based on illogical or erroneous thinking, and it would then be fair to say they are being irrational.

If on the other hand, they said they just don't like people of whatever skin colour then perhaps we could say their attitude was simply non-rational or emotionally driven. Then again it seems unlikely that their emotional attitude would not be bolstered if not entirely based on some kind of erroneous thinking, — Janus

Okay, and I am wondering if we can simplify this a bit. I would want to say that if someone asserts a proposition then their assertion can be either true or false. If someone provides reasoning for a proposition their argument can be sound or unsound, and valid or invalid. So there are two basic categories: true/false and sound/unsound, where validity is presupposed by soundness and invalidity is a particular form of unsoundness. Everyone will agree that an invalid argument is irrational, but there are disagreements about whether things like false assertions or unsound yet valid arguments are irrational.

In any case, I think we are on the same page with this.

For example, in regard to justice, to the idea of all people being equal before the law and being equally subject to it and equally deserving of rights. I think this is not so much positively rationally justified as it is negatively, and by that, I mean that there is no purely rational justification for treating one person differently than another tout court. — Janus

Okay, interesting. It's as if we are open to the possibility that one person ought to be treated differently than every other person, but it would have to be shown that this is true, and we doubt that it will ever be shown.

So, murder is objectively wrong because it is not something a functional community could condone ( at least when it comes to its own members). — Janus

Yes, I tried to say something similar <here>.

There is a live question in this thread about whether self-defense—both personal and communal—is rational. It is instrumentally rational in that it preserves a need, but many are undecided on the question of whether someone who decides to die for no reason is being irrational.

↪Leontiskos I have no idea what "finite sins" are; no one talks like this. — Sam26

That phrase does not appear anywhere in the post you cited. Perhaps you are responding to the wrong person.

If I were to ask you to give your fundamental reason why murder is wrong, what would you say? For me, it's probably because God/the Bible/the universal lawgiver says so. I'm inclined toward divine command theory, and my outlook is fundamentally biblical. — BitconnectCarlos

I am not a divine command theorist. I think murder is wrong because it involves killing the (legally) innocent. On this view the prohibition against murder is just a particular variety of the prohibition on killing the innocent.

So with reference to the OP, we might exclude someone who kills the innocent. You yourself claimed that this is beyond the pale. We might ask the OP's question, "Why?" I gave a general answer <here>. A more fine-grained answer would delve into the notions of guilt, innocence, and desert. To kill an innocent person is to give what is not due; what is not deserved. The irrationality arises from this disproportion of desert.

There are different legitimate (in my opinion) reasons for not entering into discussion with an individual. The first would be what you have described as "moral" disagreement (the Nazi example). However, to my mind the reason to not engage is solely to not give the individual a platform to broadcast to other third persons... — LuckyR

Sure. Among the many things that occasioned this OP, one thing was an old dustup between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein in which Klein is critiquing Harris for platforming Charles Murray, who is involved in racial IQ research for the sake of policy proposals.

That exchange is highly complicated, but Ezra doesn't think Harris is a racist. I don't know that he even thinks Murray is a racist. But in a build-up to that discussion he called Harris a "racialist." I'm not really sure what he meant by that, but it might mean something like, "Someone who provides a platform to people who are espousing ideas that could be used as fuel for racism." A simplified version of Ezra's position would be <No one is allowed to do racial IQ research or platform anyone who does racial IQ research, because that research involves the possibility of giving rise to racism, even if the researcher and platformer are not themselves racist>.

Questions of platforming and of "the possibility of this being read in the wrong way by other parties" are interesting because they subordinate speculative reason to practical reason. It's like saying, "You aren't allowed to discuss that topic, because something bad might happen," or, "You aren't allowed to perform that scientific research, because something bad might happen." If moral non-cognitivism is true and there is no ultimate connection between speculative and practical reason, then there can be nothing wrong with this approach.

On Harris' view Ezra is involved in a highly irrational and unrealistic form of political correctness. At 1:45:11 Harris says that every single male finalist of the Olympic 100m dash since 1980 has been of West-African descent. In effect he asks, "Are we racists or 'racialists' if we notice such a fact? Or do we have to avoid noticing such facts for the sake of political correctness?"

Platforming is a complicated debate, but one way of approaching the OP would be as a search for a rational basis for eschewing racism. This rational basis would provide a way for us to both eschew racism while also being intellectually honest about the 100m dash finalists.

But the broader issue is rational justification for dismissal/exclusion in general, as highlighted in cases like the flat Earther.

The OP offers a broad indictment of liberalism. But there is no clear argument. You've written a mood piece. The dissatisfaction is real, but the reasoning is thin. Liberalism is accused of being hollow, flattening, spiritually dead. But the case is assumed rather than made. — Banno

There is something right about this critique, and it gets at what I have called, "The 30,000 foot view." This goes back to my first thread on TPF, where I advocated for argument that is transparent and which exhibits vulnerabilities for others to engage. Ideally an argument or position should provide opportunities for an opponent to object and engage. Overly broad critiques are not altogether cut off from this possibility, but in fact what happens is that only opponents who have an extremely wide foundation of learnedness are able to properly engage broad critiques.

With that said, I don't think there is anything unusual or grievous about this OP. This strikes me as a TPF-wide issue.

(This post functions as a kind of addendum to the OP)

's example of dismissing the flat Earther is very helpful in getting at the sense of the OP. Now RogueAI used the notion of "fun" to dismiss the flat Earther in a non-moral way, but I want to look at a different way in which one might dismiss the flat Earther:

1. Stupid people are to be dismissed/ignored
2. The flat Earther is stupid
3. Therefore the flat Earther is to be dismissed/ignored

This is largely descriptive, as it is a very common experience. If someone asks, "Why did you walk away when he started claiming that the Earth is flat?," a common response would be, "I don't engage that level of stupidity."

Now the judgment of stupidity could be moral or non-moral, but I think it is often a moral judgment with the flat Earther. It is something like, "Shame on you. You should know better" (negligence). Or after talking to them for hours the stupidity is thought to become culpable via obstinacy. Or perhaps we might begin to suspect that they have an ulterior motive, and are intentionally at cross purposes with us—we might begin to suspect that they are trolling us or goofing around.

At this point 's notion of instrumental rationality and morality as a set of hypothetical imperatives comes into play. It seems to me that moral indignation is not instrumental, and this is because it involves a "non-hypothetical ought judgment." Thus to dismiss someone or judge them beyond the pale also involves such a (moral) judgment. Kevin Flannery's, "Anscombe and Aristotle on Corrupt Minds," is a good entry point into this issue from an Aristotelian angle.

(An ambiguity arises here, where the moral judgment could be seen to undergird one's own act of walking away (i.e. "At this point it is better for me to walk away"). That is a non-hypothetical ought judgment, after all. But when I call dismissal a moral act what I mean is something else. What I mean is that we are entering into moral judgment upon someone else. The question of whether a dismissal is a moral dismissal depends on this question of whether we are entering into moral judgment upon someone other than ourselves.)

Nevertheless, this thread is not primarily a speculative debate about hypothetical vs non-hypothetical moral systems. Instead it is rooted in experiences we commonly have, experiences of dismissing, excluding, or judging someone to be beyond the pale. We can approach these experiences both descriptively and normatively. That is, we can ask why people tend to think their dismissals are (rationally) justified, and we can ask what is required in order for a dismissal to be (rationally) justified. Of course someone might also argue that we are never rationally justified in dismissing someone on grounds of morality or culpability.

The interesting thing about the dismissal of the flat Earther is that it appeals directly to rationality, for stupidity is a synonym for irrationality. , "All of our various pejoratives seem to signal irrationality, but we do not deem all forms of irrationality to be immoral." In much the same way, we might call the racist or the bigot stupid. Nevertheless, the uncertainty often comes home to roost with the flat Earther, given that there are always portions of the conversation when one begins to question one's presumption of stupidity.

In that case, at most, the moral indignation would be only instrumentally rationally justified. — BitconnectCarlos

Right, but it seems to me that moral indignation is by its very nature not instrumental, and the force of my question comes from this premise. I don't find moral indignation to be localizable in the way that an instrumental reality is. In most cases it erupts spontaneously, much like laughter does.

Of course, there's rationality beyond instrumental rationality; — BitconnectCarlos

You edited your previous post at the same time you wrote this line, didn't you? :wink:

Logic exists — BitconnectCarlos

I don't think the existence of logic entails that there is non-instrumental rationality. Logic is basically a framework for instrumental rationality. But in any case, what is at stake here is the question of whether there is a non-instrumental rationality that could ground moral claims, making them more than merely instrumental or hypothetical.

When I originally read your I thought you were joining the many moral non-cognitivists in this thread, claiming that we do not have rational justification to say that racism is immoral, and therefore we cannot say it.

I now see that you were not saying that, but there is a wrinkle along these same lines. If we are only permitted to assert things that are rationally justifiable, then in order to say, "Racism is immoral," or, "Racism is not rationally justifiable," we must ourselves be able to rationally justify these claims. So if we hold to that premise then I think "not rationally justifiable" may need to be transformed into "irrational."

Presumably your hesitancy would come in the religious realm, where you want to say that a religious tenet could fail to be rationally justifiable without being irrational. I think this may end up splitting too many hairs between holding a proposition and "giving air to an assertion." On my view a religious tenet can have a characteristically different form of rational adherence, but it nevertheless requires rational justification. In any case, this is opening a whole new vista and can of worms for the thread.

- :100: :up:

Peter Simpson's "Political Iliberalism" is another example. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have been reading this. With the subtitle included it reads, "Political Illiberalism: A Defense of Freedom."

Liberalism is failing, and I think it is now important to have proper alternatives so that we don't fall into something worse.

No, and I think the examples you gave of the kinds of attitudes which you say are deemed to be beyond the pale are generally attitudes which are not rationally justifiable. — Janus

Okay, good. I would even go so far as to say that they are irrational. Is that the same as what you are saying? Or are you making a more conservative claim?

Note that many here are claiming that something like racism is neither irrational nor rationally unjustifiable. For example, let's take 's concession and place it in more direct relation to the OP. Consider this statement:

This thread is meant to tease out exactly what is going on in that sort of phenomenon. If we had to break it down rationally, what is it about a racist, or a Nazi, or a bigot, or a liar, or a betrayer, or a troll (etc.) that rationally justifies some form of dismissal or exclusion? — Leontiskos

The thesis of the moral non-cognitivist* requires that there is no rational connection between any of these types of person and dismissal. For example, there is no rational connection between a bigot and the act of dismissal, such that it is no more or less rational to dismiss a bigot than it is to dismiss anyone else. "Some people dismiss bigots; some people dismiss grandmothers; some people dismiss gardeners; it's all a matter of taste. One is no more or less rationally justified in dismissing a bigot than in dismissing a gardener." That seems wrong to me, and apparently you would agree.

* I believe this is the proper descriptive term for those who would divorce morality from rationality, but others might quibble with it.

- I don't think it is rational to do that. Do you think so?