Put differently, to say that morality is for cooperation is a teleological claim, and according to your understanding of science this is not a scientific claim at all.

But the science of morality can study why our moral sense and cultural moral norms exist. — Mark S

A moral norm involves valuation, and therefore any field which prescinds from matters of value cannot appraise moral norms, except insofar as it explains them away. But to predicate cooperation of morality is to explain one value term with another value term, and "science," as you have described it, cannot do this. The account is therefore not even logically coherent.

If you claim "Cooperation is moral," that's not descriptive. — Philosophim

Right.

But the science of morality can study why our moral sense and cultural moral norms exist. There is a growing consensus that “human morality” (here our moral sense and cultural moral norms) exists because it solves cooperation problems in groups. — Mark S

There are fallacies at play here. "A moral norm aids cooperation, therefore the moral norm exists for the sake of cooperation." Not only is this fallacious reasoning, but it also departs from the "is" questions that you associate with "science." There is no "is" fact that moral norms exist for the sake of cooperation. Further, this conclusion contradicts the answers you would often receive if you asked the moral actors why they hold to their moral norms. The person who engages in this form of reasoning basically says, "Well, these people tell us that they hold to their moral norm because of X, but they really hold to their moral norm for the sake of cooperation, because [insert fallacious argumentation]."

It is basically Bulverism combined with a substituted motivation, and this has nothing to do with science. One center of the problem is the equivocation between moral norms as active via intentional agents and moral norms as passive via a mechanism such as evolution. Once someone speaks about "moral norms" in this latter sense the equivocation trap is set. The latter sense is in fact not a moral norm at all; it is a correlation.

What the so-called "scientist" has done is redefined morality in terms of expedience, and once that redefinition is complete it gets folded back to cover over the colloquial understanding of morality. Plato was already fighting hard against this move 2500 years ago. Of course it is true that many people throughout time have acted only for expedience. Such people do not believe that morality (or justice) in the true sense exists, and many of the "scientists" come from this group, importing their own view.

We shouldn’t train horses the way we train horses either. Now that we understand that other animals are cognitive, emotive creatures that construct their worlds on the basis of goal-oriented norms, we can jettison mechanistic behaviorist ways of thinking about non-human animals, and perhaps also move beyond Aristotle’s animal rationale distinction between homo sapiens and other species. We are beginning to learn that moral thinking does not start with humans. For instance, the sense of justice has been studied in the wild. — Joshs

This is simply confused. Horses are not humans, nor do they approximate humans. Sorry.

I don't disagree with your assessment at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I do. We don't educate children the way we train horses, and this is for more or less the reasons you gave. When a 4th grader is taught math, or is taught the golden rule, or is taught to think before they act, or is taught to recognize when they are angry and count to ten, they are being educated in the form you indicated. But in fact it is the parents who are primarily responsible for education in this deeper sense of civilizing the child and teaching them how to be human.

- Interesting interpretation. :up:

I've never known any liberals to say this. Can you provide an example? — Tom Storm

For example, look at the post written a few hours before yours, where MacIntyre is being quoted:

Rawls explicitly makes it a presupposition of his view that we must expect to disagree with others about what the good life for man is and must therefore exclude any understanding of it that we may have from our formulation of the principles of justice. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Liberalism as we now understand it is the idea that no conception of the good life is to be imposed, and everyone is to be allowed to pursue their own notion of the good life.

...fundamentally 'the work environment' is not an object of ethical value. It is functional, to my mind... — AmadeusD

This is another of those strange dichotomies, "It is functional, therefore it is not ethical or unethical." Note that things like genocide, slavery, and drug trafficking are functional, along with pretty much everything else.

I’m assuming his non-opposition is a business move, to avoid alienating some of his fan base. — Joshs

I'm sure that's part of it, but I think it's only one piece of the puzzle. For candidates on the right, he did extended interviews with DeSantis, Christie, and Ramaswamy, but they have all dropped and I know he is not a fan of Biden. It would be interesting to know whether he extended an invitation to Trump. In any case, I haven't been following politics very closely so I will leave it at that, especially for this thread.

“Messing with the system that makes most other people happy,” to use your phrase, would presumably involve active restraints or disincentives on certain behaviors, as government policy. And Rawlsian liberals believe this is not the right approach, that tolerance of stupidity and wickedness is, in the end, the lesser of two evils. I emphasize again that this whole theory applies to social structures, not individuals. Personally I despise all forms of bigoted rhetoric, for instance, and do everything I can to oppose it; I’m not the least bit personally tolerant in this area. But I don’t want my government to censor or ban it. I’m also against a life of selfish pleasure, but liberalism asks me to tolerate in my role as citizen your choice of lifestyle even though I disapprove. — J

The problem is that liberalism presents a faux neutrality. To say, for example, that hate speech is permitted but assault is not, is to lapse into non-neutrality. What liberals do is highlight all the ways that liberalism is tolerant and paper over all the ways that it is not, and then announce that they are neutral and uniformly tolerant.

What is needed is a criterion by which the state acts, such that hate speech is permissible and assault is not. Liberalism is incoherent because it claims to be value-neutral, and yet there is no way to distinguish hate speech from assault given value neutrality. One could appeal to the proximate regime (modern liberal democracy) or the remote regime (democracy), but the mere appeal to a regime without a justification of the regime is a petitio principii, and this is precisely Rawls' error. It is a stretch for @Count Timothy von Icarus to call it an individual preference, because it is rather a cultural or societal preference, but both are in the same ballpark.

It isn’t only personal desires that thrive in a liberal democracy. So too do ideas, values, commitments, imagination, and deeply experienced “projects” of all kinds. — J

But only at the private level.

I guess another way of saying it is: Rawlsian liberal democracy is our best shot at creating a society that allows you or me the unfettered opportunity to argue for our personal morality, and perhaps see those arguments prevail. — J

But only at the private level.

Whenever someone's arguments oppose Rawls' vision, then they are by definition not allowed to prevail. Liberalism is a two-tiered scheme, where everyone is allowed freedom within the set boundaries, and no one quite knows why the boundaries are what they are.

Granted, "liberalism" in the older, non-Rawlsian sense derives from thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, and they were more willing to try to defend the regime than Rawls was. Rawls is like a politician who sums up and sets forth the values of a people. He does not attempt to justify those values.

One thing we can be certain of is that is is not accuracy or reliability. No matter how indirect an information source is, it can still be accurate and reliable. — hypericin

Already answered:

Well, perhaps I should have said that I don't believe that indirectness entails inaccuracy, because there is a correlation. On average, the more players we add to the telephone game, the more distorted will be the final result, but it is nevertheless possible to achieve an accurate result even with a large number of players. — Leontiskos

Also unanswered:

Second, if the direct realist agrees that fingers, nerves, and brain are involved in sensation, then what is it about your argument that makes us draw the conclusion of indirect realism instead of the conclusion of direct realism? Is it primarily that word, "potentially," along with that final sentence? — Leontiskos

It's fairly important that you be able to identify what it is about your claims that should make us favor indirect realism over direct realism. If you can't identify this then I'm not sure what we are doing.

I'm afraid I still only have one clear answer: for perception to be "direct", naïve realism should be true. The features of our perceptions must be present in reality, so that barns really look red, and violins sound as they do, independently of an observer. But we all agree this is not the case.

Failing that, it seems we are talking about different things. You must be talking about something other than the relationship between perceptions and reality. — hypericin

I think it is a matter of accuracy or reliability. "Are we able to form true propositions which accurately and reliably get at what truly exists in the world?" The so-called direct realist says yes. The so-called indirect realist says, "No, we do not know whether our knowledge is about the world or merely about our representations of the world."

There are a lot of pieces to this debate, but I see Kant as a father of indirect realism, and I think a central task would be to address Hume's skeptical arguments which got the whole ball rolling. Yet since most indirect realists have not read Hume and are simply inheriting an English-speaking philosophical tradition, that approach is not ideal for these settings.

So more practically, I think direct realism is the prima facie (naive) view. Indirect realism responds, throwing it into question. The central argument for indirect realism seems to be analogous to the idea that <if we had only one eye we would not have depth perception>. More precisely, <if we had only one eye, we could not move, and nothing in our field of vision ever moved, then we would not know or understand depth of field> (depth of field would be "noumenal"). This is of course true, and if our epistemic situation is analogous to that scenario then indirect realism is true.

But I am a direct realist because I have two eyes. The most basic way to rebut this central argument for indirect realism is therefore triangulation. I have knowledge of depth of field because I have two eyes, because I can move around and examine things from different angles, and because the things in my field of vision move and in so doing provide information about depth of field. Again, this example is merely analogous. I have two eyes, but I also have five senses; and there are billions of humans collecting data for comparison. Animals and robots collect information as well, and this can be leveraged to one extent or another. These are all forms of triangulation, and reason itself is the ultimate tool of triangulation, coordinating the data from all of the various inputs. Only where there are irreconcilable conflicts between the eyes, or the senses, or large populations of people, does indirect realism become plausible.

So if direct realism is the starting point, and if the central argument of indirect realism is that error checking is impossible, then I think triangulation suffices to answer that argument against the prima facie position. It's not a knock-down argument, because someone might argue for the position that all human beings are equally biased, and all of the senses are equally biased, and animals and robots are also equally biased. This argument would undercut the triangulation by reducing all of our various sources of knowledge to a single, flat perspective. But I think this position which denies triangulation is implausible in the extreme.

Finally, modern philosophy got hung up on certitude, and indirect realism flows out of that. When the indirect realist says, "We do not know whether our knowledge is about the world or merely about our representations of the world," everything depends on the meaning of that word 'know'. Even someone like Aristotle or Aquinas would admit that we cannot know this with perfect, mathematical certainty. Similarly, the views of Parmenides and Heraclitus cannot be disproved with perfect certainty. If someone believes that all knowledge must attain to that level of certitude, then they will be an indirect realist. But this standard of certitude is of course strange and unrealistic. Generally when we form opinions we do so in an implicitly abductive manner, choosing the view which is most certain or most plausible. It seems to me that the more certain view here is direct realism. I am more certain that I have knowledge of reality than I am certain that I do not have knowledge of reality, although it is possible that I do not have knowledge of reality.

(There are of course other things at play even beyond Hume, such as the modern mechanistic view whereby man is viewed as a machine, which is something Aristotelians have directly addressed in the form of dialectic materialism. But triangulation seems to be the central consideration at a more surface level.)

So stasis and boredom are never burdensome? We have a word to describe people for whom all activity is a burden: lazy.

I'm favourable towards Vervaeke but a bit wary of Peterson. He's hated by the left. And he's expressed support for Trump, which is a fatal turnoff in my books. — Wayfarer

I won't belabor this, but I don't believe he has. The left has a consistent difficulty in distinguishing someone who doesn't oppose Trump from someone who endorses Trump. They assume that everyone who hasn't opposed Trump therefore endorses him. From what I have seen Peterson hasn't opposed Trump in this upcoming election, but neither has he endorsed him.

The reason that anything appears reasonable is precisely because of the way that actual conditions, context and enviroment intertwine with background history to redefine what is at stake and at issue in the determination of the goals of reason. Trying to separate reason from the real contexts of its instantiation is a recipe for dogmatism. Understanding is enacted in pragmatic interactions, not transported from a transcendent authoritative realm to grace the present from the past. — Joshs

The world exists in a precarious balance of the coincidentia oppositorum. Environment conditions reason and reason shapes environment. To reject either is folly. And yet there comes a point when we must make a choice as to the hierarchy of—from a Platonic perspective—the various parts of the soul. This choice shapes us, and "immanentists" who favor environment and conditioning become immanent, ingrained into their environment and disagreeable to transcendence; while ""transcendentalists"" who hold fast to the idea that there is a part of the soul which transcends environment and conditioning end up transcending and transforming their environment. An immanentist balks at the OP not only because it is based on the work of a Catholic, but also because in bypassing pragmatism and relativism it stretches up towards the transcendent, thereby "making all things new."

In the absence of a sense of the sacred, there is no pole star towards which we orient ourselves. — Wayfarer

A few weeks ago on a road trip I listened to a conversation between Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke, originally given a much better title, "The Rebirth of the Sacred." I thought it was interesting, and I was actually impressed with Vervaeke. (Peterson is a bit exasperating in that interview - I wish he had handed the reins to Vervaeke.)

In that same interview Peterson talks about a book he is working on, which looks to be a psychological version of Peter Simpson's Political Illiberalism. From my understanding it is a critique of the liberal Enlightenment view which undergirds the idea that the individual can be morally or religiously neutral, as if one could approach such questions of value from a purely objective vantage point. I don't see that critique as controversial, but I am glad to see it being popularized.

Well, Hume and Nietzsche would be forerunners of the attack on reason. Schindler's argument, which seems credible, is that this has expanded from individual thinkers and lines of critique to whole areas of discourse where reason is secondary. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think that's fair, so long as we are open to the various additional factors that exercise an influence.

Some of the bullets, particularly the last, would seem to make identity trump reason. Of course, there is also a difference between "all past discourse and attempts to produce rational evidence is corrupted by power relations, identity, etc." and "reason cannot adjudicate these issues, even in an ideal setting." Yet it's easy to see how one bleeds into the other, or how the former, if it makes the conditions where reason is valid utopian and forever out of reach, essentially becomes the latter for all practical purposes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, you're preaching to the choir. :smile:

Agree 100%. I meant more that it's an accident that similar lines aren't popular in other places, that it doesn't seem like a necessarily Catholic set of ideas. But I agree that historically it has an extremely close relationship. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, I don't think it's Catholic per se. I think it's important to be able to read a Catholic's book on Plato without reading all sorts of religious influences into the text. The emphasis on "power relations" has become so strong that many find it difficult to concentrate on or address an idea without constantly adverting to the religion of the person who thought it. This is related to your newer thread, where you make the point that reason must be allowed to transcend its conditions and environment, having authority in itself. Viz:

In a consequentialist era the notion that reason is per se authoritative is elusive. On a Platonic metaphysic of participation, acting reasonably flows from the inherent authority (ex-ousia) of reason... — Leontiskos

Oh, there are plenty of other ways of determining what is the case besides using Popper’s method. I’m not a Popperian, I’m a Kuhnian, so I don’t think science itself should proceed by the method of falsification. — Joshs

Okay.

But perhaps you can explain to me what kind of non-dogmatic method of truth-making allows Schindler to assert that liberal politics is evil because it doesn’t accept the truth of the resurrection. — Joshs

From earlier:

...The second prong is that liberalism as Schindler defines it requires a denial of the ontological impact of the Incarnation, and that this is objectively evil (as privation) regardless of any good intentions involved. The second prong requires Christian premises, namely that the Incarnation had an ontological effect, and Schindler is not unclear about this fact. — Leontiskos

For someone who believes that the Incarnation occurred and changed reality, a political philosophy which requires neutrality on the truth-value of the Incarnation is evil.* Similarly, for someone who believes that the Holocaust occurred and changed reality, a political philosophy which requires neutrality on the truth-value of the Holocaust is evil. Germany goes a step further and basically requires non-neutrality, prohibiting the denial of the Holocaust.

But I think did a good job underlining the problems with your understanding of "dogmatism."

* Note that Schindler specifically says that he is speaking of evil as privation, not as intentional moral evil.

Isn't the Christian doctrine that 'Our conscience is a part of our God-given internal faculties, a critical inner awareness that bears witness to the norms and values we recognize'? I can see a line from Aristotle's 'nous' and Augustine's doctrine of 'divine illumination' to that conception. The point being, again, that severing the link between individual conscience and the larger sense of reason as an animating factor of the universe leaves the individual marooned in a meaningless universe, a stranger in a strange land. — Wayfarer

Conscience is a notoriously ambiguous term, and there are different conceptions of conscience even within Christianity.

But to your point, today we are seeing a constriction of the idea of conscience due to the conditioning from individualism, such that "conscience rights" are potentially thought to exist independent of any appeal to religion, tradition, or reason. I think Catholics would see that as a corruption. ...But none of this adjudicates your difference with @J.

Yes, what you say about Simpson's criticism is similar to the points that Nussbaum and others have made. — J

Okay.

As for cultural relativism, I don't know what Rawls may have said about it to Hare or anyone else, but to me it's plain from reading A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism that Rawls was trying to craft a conception of justice that was in some important ways transcultural for democracies. I'm not sure if Rawls ever gave an argument as to why an autocracy, for instance, could in principle not be just. He was concerned with finding a firm basis for liberal democratic values as he understood them, and also (to quote his opening statements in Political Liberalism), "to develop an alternative systematic account of justice that is superior to utilitarianism." — J

This is a salutary correction. I was glossing Simpson, and would probably need to go back for a tighter critique, but I can't remember all of the sources. For Simpson Rawls' intuitions are related to modern liberal democracies, and systems derived from Rawls tend to be unable to adjudicate disputes involving cultures which do not adhere to those (cultural) intuitions. Simpson sees Aristotle, in his Politics, doing for a variety of regimes what Rawls did for modern democracy. The crucial difference is that after showing how to optimize (or corrupt) each kind of regime, Aristotle argues for a particular ranking of the various regimes. It is this final step that is required for a universal morality or political philosophy, and it is what Rawls never attempted.

BTW, the only thing I thought was unfair about Count T's reference to Rawls was this: "We might try to imagine ourselves 'behind the veil of ignorance,' but we can't actually place ourselves there." I took this to mean that the thought experiment couldn't succeed, because we can't actually become ignorant in the right ways, and that Rawls was somehow overlooking this. But this may not have been Count T's meaning. — J

Fair enough. :up:

Let’s say that we take Popper’s model of good scientific method as our basis for determining non-dogmatic thinking. Applying this criterion, Schindler would have to base his claim for the truth of the resurrection on objectively measurable, verifiably repeatable evidence, that was capable of being falsified. And even after being validated by the consensus of a community, it found not be assumed to be true in any absolute sense, since for Popper we can only falsify. Something tells me Schindler would not accept such a criterion. — Joshs

I'd say this is actually the claim that any non-Scientistic methodology is dogmatism, which is a remarkable claim. Ironically, these varieties of Scientism are very often themselves forms of dogmatism.

I don't think Popper even believed that. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Me neither.

(@Wayfarer)

I think this is partly an accident. There are still a large number of Catholic universities with large philosophy programs, and that's where a lot of this sort of work gets done and where it is more popular/not met with disapproval. So you get a system where Catholics are introduced to it more and where non-Catholics go to Catholic settings to work in the area and become Catholic. Either process tends to make the the area of study more dominated by Catholics. Given trends in Orthodoxy, and podcast guests I've heard, I would imagine we would see a not dissimilar phenomena in Eastern European/Middle Eastern Christian-university scholarship but for the fact that they publish in a plethora of different languages and so end up more divided. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'll back up @Wayfarer on this. It's no accident that Catholic universities tend to have large philosophy programs, nor that these philosophy programs tend to be Platonic or Aristotelian in nature. Indeed, Catholic clergy are required to have what is the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and this education leans into Platonism and Aristotelianism. You won't find this at all in Protestantism. Orthodox are warmer towards philosophy than Protestants, but they don't come near Catholics. There was a point in the Medieval period when the Orthodox Church turned a corner, rejecting Barlaam and opting for Palamas, and that decision cemented a distrust in philosophy and eclecticism. For my money the two most philosophically robust religions are Catholicism and Hinduism.

---

Once reason is made "a slave of the passions," it can no longer get round the passions and appetites to decide moral issues. Aristotle's idea of the virtues as a habit or skill that can be trained (to some degree) or educated has the weight of common sense and empirical experience behind it. We might have a talent for some virtues, but we also can build on those talents. But if passion comes first, then the idea of discourse in the "good human life," or "the political ideal," loses purchase on its ability to dictate which virtues we should like to develop. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Okay, this makes good sense to me.

The separation of reason from the will, and the adoption of Hume's bundle of drives ("congress of souls" in BG&E) makes it unclear exactly who or what is being freed, and how this avoids being just another sort of tyranny... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right. Still, I would maintain that Hume and Nietzsche are more consistent than the undergraduate, and therefore the misology problem and the consistency problem come apart.

The identity movements of the recent epoch run into similar problems. I recall a textbook on psychology that claimed that a focus on quantitative methodology represented "male dominance," and that the sciences as a whole must be more open to qualitative, "female oriented," methods as an equally valid way of knowing. The problem here is not that a greater focus on qualitative methods might not be warranted, it's the grounding of the argument in identity as opposed to reason. For it seems to imply that if we are men, or if the field is dominated by men, that there is in fact no reason to shift to qualitative methods, because each sex has their preferred methodology grounded solely in identity, making both equally valid. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree.

Rawls might be another example. In grounding social morality in the desired of the abstract "rational agent," debates become interminable. We might try to imagine ourselves "behind the viel of ignorance," but we can't actually place ourselves there. Thus, we all come to it with different desires, and since desires determine justice, we still end up with many "justices." The debate then, becomes unending, since reason is only a tool, and everything must circle back to conflicting desires. Argumentation becomes, at best, a power move to try to corral others' desires to our position. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As noted above, I think Rawlsianism only works if Rawls' cultural intuitions are granted as premises. So I wouldn't lump him into the same camp as Nietzsche. Hume could arguably fall into this Rawlsian mold. I think Hume has more respect for cultural intuitions than is sometimes recognized.

Rawls might be another example. In grounding social morality in the desired of the abstract "rational agent," debates become interminable. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not a Rawlsian all down the line, but I do think you're being unfair here. — J

Some months ago I was reading Peter L. P. Simpson.* His view is that Rawls' thought leads inevitably to cultural relativism, and that when this charge was brought against Rawls (by Hare), Rawls simply claimed that none of his work was ever intended to overcome cultural relativism. Simpson holds that it is quite possible to read Rawls' early work in this way, but that it was interpreted and received as being intended (or at least capable) of overcoming cultural relativism. Such an interpretation remains to this day.

For Simpson the proximate problem was not the desires of the "rational agent" (this was an ongoing problem beginning as early as Machiavelli, which Rawls inherited). The problem is that Rawls' starting point is intuition, and the intuitions with which he begins happen to be cultural intuitions. So for a culture which adheres to the intuitions that Rawls develops, his moral system is appealing, but because Rawls' approach is not aimed at universality, many cultures do not so adhere.

* See, for example, "A Century of Anglo-American Moral Theory," by Peter L. P. Simpson

Compared to not existing, it’s inarguably a burden to be, do or know anything — AmadeusD

According to Aristotle the depraved man does feel this way, so I will take your word for it. :joke:

My simple example above demonstrates that indirectness does not imply inaccuracy. — hypericin

Well, perhaps I should have said that I don't believe that indirectness entails inaccuracy, because there is a correlation. On average, the more players we add to the telephone game, the more distorted will be the final result, but it is nevertheless possible to achieve an accurate result even with a large number of players.

Maybe so. "Indirect" describes the relationship between sensation and the world. Just like the number on the meter, sensation is correlated to features of the world, casually connected to features of the world, potentially accurate informationally. And yet, it is at a casual remove from what it measures, and completely unlike what it measures. — hypericin

(I assume you mean 'causally'/'causal')

First, to echo Banno's question, what would the correlate to indirect, "direct," mean in the context of your claims? Apparently knowledge of the sandpaper without fingers, nerves, and brain processing would be direct?

Second, if the direct realist agrees that fingers, nerves, and brain are involved in sensation, then what is it about your argument that makes us draw the conclusion of indirect realism instead of the conclusion of direct realism? Is it primarily that word, "potentially," along with that final sentence?

- I don't believe that indirectness implies inaccuracy.

So, it only makes sense to say we feel the sandpaper, but feeling/sensation is indirect. — hypericin

I would say that I feel the sandpaper with my fingers. My knowledge of the sandpaper is mediated by my fingers.

It seems to me that your word here, "indirect," is being asked to do far too much work. My guess is that you think the subject is removed from the sandpaper by the four steps you gave such that a kind of temporal data transfer occurs at each step, like a game of telephone. If so, then all of the contents of indirect realism come into view. Is that your theory, or is it something else?

- But you are importing a homunculus theory. Most obviously you are doing this by conflating mediation with indirectness, and this goes back to the same idea that reality could not be accurately mediated by sense organs. Less obviously you are making Cartesian assumptions about the ontological and temporal relations between the homunculus and the various apparatus he is using to interact with the world. Although this latter assumption won't bother materialists, it is not derivable from your argument or from experience.

We don't feel our nerves, but neither do we interact with brain signals. The fact that a functioning nervous system is necessary for sensation does not prove what you seem to think it proves.

Now... how to convince my younger me that this is so.... :D — Moliere

Ha!

It's pleasing to me to have some consonance between us. — Moliere

Well let me bring up religion to rectify this... ;)

On the Catholic view that which unifies a friendship defines its quality (and at least this much is largely drawn from Aristotle). So the friendship between two people who go out and commit murder together is of a low quality given that that which unites them (murder) is diminishing for themselves and for the community. Their relationship is bound up with that which diminishes both of them as persons, and their mutual effect on one another is negative. On the other end of the spectrum would be a friendship between two people who, say, go out and play high quality benefit concerts where all of the proceeds go to St. Jude's Children's Hospital. This is a friendship of high quality given that that which unites them is ennobling for themselves and for the community. Their consort is associated with beautiful and skillful music, joy for themselves and the community, and aid for struggling children. Their mutual effect on one another is positive and ennobling, as is the effect of their friendship on the community. Most friendships are more mundane, and consist in things like shooting pool, or going to the beach, or talking philosophy.

Of course an important part of a friendship is the mutual sharing of life (joys, sorrows, boredom, and all the rest). Aristotle says that we come to regard our close friend as a second self. So even if you only see someone on Tuesday night when you shoot pool, the friendship is much more than just pool, and the conversation, banter, and other interpersonal elements may be truly primary. Nevertheless, in the Catholic tradition the most important things for understanding the quality of a friendship are the activities and experiences that are shared, and these will also come to define the nature of the friendship over time. Conversation itself is a very versatile activity, such that there are some friends who like to gossip, others who like to talk philosophy, others who like to party, others who are liable to provide emotional support, etc. A particular friendship always has a kind of form which distinguishes it from other friendships.

Then—long story long—comes along the activity of sex, easily one of the most intense pleasures that humankind has ever known. Sex is more than capable of overpowering and dominating a friendship to the point that one or both of the friends begin to use the other for the sake of this end, and even when the embers cool there can be a sense of loss and nostalgia for the overwhelming power of that initial romance. Although any activity can invert a friendship such that the friend becomes a mere means to the end of the activity, this is more common with intense pleasures like sex or drugs.

The second danger in sexual relationships is a kind of self-sufficiency and immanentizing of the friendship, such that instead of playing benefit concerts for the community the couple becomes ensconced in their world of two, eventually falling into ennui. If Narcissus became lost in his own reflection, this sort of couple becomes lost in the immanent gaze of one another. In this case it becomes hard to say what exactly unifies the friendship apart from this self-love. There is no transcendent aspect which takes them out of themselves and allows them to be ennobled, moving deeper into life. Of course childlessness and birth control are for Catholics central to this predicament, for not so long ago children were the inevitable consequence of sex, and to have a child is to be drawn out of oneself into the care of an other and care for the community.

I don't mean to nag on sex. The friendship of marriage is surely a friendship with the highest potential given that it allows you to share such profound parts of your life with someone else. But as Aristotle says, "The corruption of the highest is the lowest." And as you say, in the end it is not the pleasures of sex that are most cherished by romantic couples. The best cases are proof that there are possibilities of friendship that transcend even the most intense bodily pleasures.

Too long - I agree. :grimace:

(I will use your term "burden" rather than "harm's way")

So deontologically, if one believes that others should not be used as means to an ends, it would be wrong to put others in a situation whereby they have to be put in harms way in order to "grow". — schopenhauer1

The Kantian deontological maxim is something like, "Do not use others as a means to your own ends." If a parent teaches a child a skill, then arguably, according to your ideas, they are "burdening" the child. So when Honest John teaches and forces Pinocchio to perform, he is taking advantage of him and using him as a means for his own selfish ends. But suppose that Geppetto teaches Pinocchio to make toys in order that Pinocchio might make a living. In this case he is using Pinocchio as a means to Pinocchio's own ends, and it is actually a parent's duty to educate their children in this manner. A relation between a parent and child is different from a relation between two adults. Thus your means/ends analysis is flawed.

Your distinction between example 1 and example 2 does not hold water given the fact that example 2 also fits your definition of "necessity" (). In example 2 the burden was not created "just to see that person overcome the burden," but rather to provide the child with skills of survival and independence. Further, the duty of the parent to educate includes more than helping the child survive. If a parent teaches their child to dance for the sake of the child's happiness, they are not violating Kant's morality. It doesn't matter that dancing is not necessary for survival.

Kant's maxim does not include a dispensation for cases where the end is necessary for survival. The maxim is not, "Do not treat others as a means to an end unless the end is their own survival." Your Kantian argument and your survival argument are therefore two different arguments, but neither one succeeds.

(Another odd presupposition here is that everything a parent subjects their child to is necessarily a burden.)

What the two share is not general "irrationality," but the claim that rationality has no authority or cannot be trusted. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, and I was not saying that the common irrationality is unrelated to misology. I should have used the term misology, but I did specifically speak about "distrust of reason." My question was: does this scale up from undergraduates? Or is it only to be found in amateurs? My suspicion is that misology can be found in developed thinkers, but that the rational inconsistency dissolves as we move away from amateurs. If this is right then misology does not necessarily involve the inconsistencies (e.g. trusting medicine, opposing conservatism, etc.).

Many influential thinkers have attacked reason: Martin Luther, Rousseau, Hume, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is their error the same as the undergraduate's error?

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Incidentally, you may enjoy the essay/chapter from Peter L. P. Simpson, "On Doing Wrong, Modern-Style," found in his book, Vices, Virtues, and Consequences: Essays in Moral and Political Philosophy. It begins with this same illustration of relativism in the classroom, but moves into moral philosophy, including the ancient view of the common ("shared") good that you speak of elsewhere.

The argument is that the validity or reason and argument is discarded selectively, and that this is a commonality in unquestioned dogmatism and relativism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seems that until 'dogmatism' and 'relativism' are better defined, the claim reduces to something like, "Dogmatists and relativists are irrational in a similar way." The jumping-off point seems to be undergraduates. I do think this is right, for the inability to challenge or question one's own positions tends to involve a distrust of reason, and the belief that reason cannot suffice to establish firm conclusions also involves a distrust of reason. Yet if we are talking about undergraduate types, then we are from the outset restricting ourselves to an investigation of amateurs. Would the points still apply to well-developed thinkers? At the very least I think the inconsistencies would dissolve as we move away from a consideration of amateurs.

I dont agree with this assessment. — Joshs

Which assessment in particular?

I don’t necessarily disagree. I should have posted the youtube link right away , since I think it is relevant to the OP that Schindler’s arguments are supposed to represent a bulwark against dogmatism, and yet he presumes as fact the appearance of god in the world, and presumes the manner of his appearance. I don’t understand how that isn’t dogmatic. — Joshs

I think this is all wrong, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that D. C. Schindler is a giant hypocrite, and you were able to conclusively learn this by scrambling after short YouTube videos. Who cares? What does it have to do with the arguments of the OP? Is this not more ad hominem? The antipathy towards religion on this forum crosses a line at some point, impeding philosophical discourse.

To be honest, I had no idea who he was either till you mentioned him, and then I scrambled... — Joshs

:lol:

But he does say that liberalism is the political form of evil, and defends this by arguing that god has already revealed himself in history , so for liberals to deny god is to deny this real history as the foundation of the Good , regardless of their intentions. — Joshs

This is a caricature. Schindler's argument there is two-pronged. The first prong is historical/cultural, and even Nietzsche would agree with it (namely that we cannot pretend to go back to a pre-Christian era). The second prong is that liberalism as Schindler defines it requires a denial of the ontological impact of the Incarnation, and that this is objectively evil (as privation) regardless of any good intentions involved. The second prong requires Christian premises, namely that the Incarnation had an ontological effect, and Schindler is not unclear about this fact.

(Relatedly: no, I don't view you as "a threat".)

But, as my posting history will reveal, I’m perfectly happy to get into detailed and respectful discussion on such issues. — Joshs

Ad hominem "provocation" would be an odd way to initiate such a thing.

I believe that when someone writes a serious and thoughtful OP the initial posts have a particular responsibility to respond in kind if the thread is to succeed. Ad hominem quips intended to provoke are particularly pernicious at the very early stage of a thread. At best they derail.

There's a window of decision between receiving data and having an experience of the data. — AmadeusD

Decision does not precede the registering of sense data. 's quip about hypericin's "homunculus" was more pithy and effective in communicating the point at issue.

We experience representations, not objects, in terms of sight. — AmadeusD

Then you've acceded to the option I gave where one speaks about light/sound instead of objects of sight/hearing. In <this post> you seemed to associate sight with objects and hearing with sound (representation), and I was pointing to the incongruity.

- If you can't carry the 1 then I guess that's that. If I were quoting you I would have used the quote function.

- I made a point and you ignored it, so I was thinking the same thing. (Your either-or model is untenable.)

- That's cute.

Is anybody saying something to the contrary? — flannel jesus

"Either you're seeing reality as it is, OR your sight is something subjective, crafted by your eyes."

Really? D.C. Schindler? I didn’t realize you were that conservative. — Joshs

Another top-rate contribution from Joshs. :roll:
At least this time your ad hominem doesn't have such elaborate wrapping paper.