(1) The criteria or standard to evaluate the moral value (goodness or badness) of an act is justice. I.e., if the act is just, then it is morally good, and if unjust, then morally bad. It is nonsense to speak of an act which is morally good yet unjust, or morally bad yet just.

(2) Justice is defined as: equality in treatment among all men.

(3) Under such a definition, justice is objectively evaluated. — Samuel Lacrampe

Doesn't our notion of justice involve more than equality of treatment? Equality of treatment implies that 'all men' are equal, yet we know that is not the case. If we only act fairly, meaning give each person an equal slice of cake, then what about the starving person who comes to the table? To treat everyone equally would then be to preserve inequality.

Let us suppose that the other people at the table give the starving person some extra cake. Must, in the cause of justice/equality they all give the same amount? And if only one person donated their share of cake, do all the remaining shares now become 'unjust'?

I think that to solve such problems we have to bring in more rules. But once you have more than one rule in play then you can no longer reduce it to a mathematical type calculation and we are back to morality as usual, where people don't agree and can't find way to resolve their disagreements.

Why is it that most people accept the idea that parents treat their children better than strangers? Evolution provides the perfect explanation. No moral philosophy does. — LD Saunders

Yet moral philosophy might question whether we should treat our children better than the children of strangers. And some of us might actually try to treat all children equally.

If evolution was the driver for our morality, then surely we humans ought not to be capable of even thinking such contrary ideas, let alone putting them into practice.

Or, if we can adjust the theory that evolution is responsible for morality so that it 'explains' both putting our own children first - but also not putting our own children first - then as a theory it will be unfalsifiable and therefore no longer scientific.

They who represent a nation in the world represent a vast array of interests. Somehow they must act to benefit as many of the particular interest the people have as possible. Every other nation has the same situation. — Bitter Crank

'Somehow' indeed!

Just because people share a nationality there is no reason to think they have common interests, so to say that a nation will act in its own interests begs the question. In all the historical examples of empires there were sections of the population who were opposed to that empire; who would have derided the manifest destiny or civilizing mission slogans as just that; slogans, the equivalent of 'America First'. In other words, imperialism was always just politics.

Statements about the world cannot be reduced to simply true or false.
— Londoner

Is it not a true statement that you have replied to my original post? — hymyíŕeyr

In logic a proposition/statement must be something that can have the value of being either true or false. We are free to assume either, since a piece of logic is valid as long as the rules have been correctly applied, not because the conclusion is 'sound' in the sense of being a fact.

In other words logic is simply about following the rules; if you bring in empirical considerations you are bringing in an extra non-logical rule.

Nor is your own statement simple. Propositions in logic are only true or false, whereas ordinary language is complicated. For example, I cannot understand the word 'original' in isolation. I can only understand it by relating it to other words like 'copy', 'first', 'unusual', 'earliest', 'authentic' etc. So it is like a 'Chinese box', whenever we try to pin down some elementary thing that is simply true or false it turns out to contain a sub-set of terms and logical relations. There was a lot of work trying to reconcile logic and ordinary language, but it cannot be done.

These components would include things like, the idea that you have statements which can have the truth values 'true' or 'false',.... — hymyíŕeyr

The problem is that these components are not really statements, not in the sense of claims about the world. Statements about the world cannot be reduced to simply true or false. So when in the OP you write about of logic 'being applied every day and it works' I do not think it is. It is a purely formal system.

He did not claim everything was predetermined. What he argued was that systems are not stable, so the current economic system was inevitably going to turn into something different, just as previous systems have done. He had no illusion that this must result in communism, or that a successful revolution was inevitable; he had after all seen several failures in his own lifetime and wrote studies on historical examples. Nor do I think Marx thought of himself as being a member of the working class.

(1) God exists in the understanding, but not in reality.

Or

(1) A being than which none greater can be imagined exists in the understanding, but not in reality. — Agustino

I'd say both sentences use the same word; 'exist', but the word has a different meaning.

I can say 'dreams exist', or 'this concept exists' etc. or 'Harry Potter exists' and we understand the meaning of 'exist' by what it refers to. That meaning is different to 'London exists'. If there is a confusion over what is meant, we can ask. 'You say Harry Potter exists?' and get the reply 'I meant he is a fictional character'.

So I do not say why the idea that something 'exists in the understanding' is connected to the quite different claim that something 'exists in reality'.

PossibleAaran

Yes, I would say that a deductive argument, in the sense of one where the premise entails the conclusion, isn't any use if we are making an assertion about what exists.

I would not agree that 'The premise, "I think" is supported by direct acquaintance'. If I am acquainted with something, then two things are involved; me and the thing. In that case, the thought is not purely an object to me, nor am I identical with the thought. Like any object of perception we cannot say where the perceiver leaves off and the thing perceived begins, (if indeed either side exists at all).

As I say, the object of the exercise is not to show the thing, the thought, exists, but to show the thinker exists in the sense of being a consciousness, so in order to do that the consciousness must be distinguishable from the thought. If the two were directly acquainted in the sense of being one and the same thing, we would not have done this.

You write that 'scepticism itself presupposes a subject'. I would say that it rather makes the notion of a 'subject' meaningless because the word 'subject' is only understood relative to 'object' and skepticism denies there are objects.

But one does not have to be a skeptic to do this. We can give an entirely materialist account of human existence. (Just as we can give an entirely idealist one). Or we can suggest a mixture. But there is no way we can examine a particular perception and discover which account is correct.

I would say there is a similar problem with the claim that 'I exist'. I do not understand what that means; i cannot just exist, I have to exist as something. For example, I might say 'this stone exists' and mean it can be sensed. I might say 'that dream existed' meaning I am telling the truth about an experience I had, and so on. But I cannot understand 'exist' on its own, without a context.

So does 'the thought' exist? Exist in exactly the same sense that the 'I' that it is supposed to prove exists? That cannot be the case if 'the thought' is an object to the subject that is the 'I', (but not the other way round). So, if the sense in which 'the thought' exists is different to the sense in which 'I exist', so we cannot use one to prove the existence of the other.

mrcoffee has correctly identified what I have been reading lately, along with Merleau Ponty (how's that for a name-drop!). Hence my desire to test some of it out here.

It seems to me that we are begging the question, as does the formulation 'I think therefore I am'.

What sort of argument is that? Plainly, the conclusion is entailed in the premise! So is the bit after 'therefore' telling us something new? Is 'I am' something more than 'this thought'? If it is, we need something more, some additional premise. Or is it only saying 'I' is synonymous with 'this thought'?

Because, if it is only meant as a synonym, that 'I' seems to quickly take on extra meanings. For example, we shift to talking of 'consciousness', something that is distinct to the 'thought' , we have 'awareness', we have 'particular thoughts', all of which are assuming notions of perception, of personal continuity through time, that were not there in the single original 'a thought'.

If we remember that the object of the exercise is the 'I am' bit, then the problem with saying: when you are acquainted with the thought "the bacon smells good", it makes no sense to doubt that you are thinking that thought is that it doesn't explain what is meant by that 'you'. Indeed, there is no need for a 'you' to be involved at all, that reaction to the bacon need be no different in kind to a chemical reaction, where we find no need to posit that there is a 'you' within each chemical that is 'having' that reaction. Or, if we did extend 'you' to such things, that is not the sort of 'you' we were trying to get to, the one with 'consciousness'.

I think it only works the other way round. We must start from 'I am'. How do I know I am? I just do; I have no choice. If I say things like 'I think' it is only because it is founded on an already existing sense of myself, as something that does things. As I say at the beginning; 'I think...' is predicated on that 'I', there can be no 'think' without an 'I', so the 'I' cannot be the conclusion.

You are directly aquainted with the fact that you are thinking. It is right there before your mind, and when something is before the mind in this way, there is just nothing more you could want by way of proof. — PossibleAaran

But if it is 'before your mind' then you are not directly acquainted with it. We would have two separate things, subject (your mind) and object (your thought). 'Consciousness' would then just be another object of perception and we certainly can doubt any object of perception. Or if we can't, why wouldn't it apply equally to any object before our mind? 'I see a doughnut, therefore I exist'.

It only seems to work because 'consciousness' seems to be a ghostly immaterial thing, like 'mind'. But really I am never 'conscious of consciousness', just as I never 'think of thinking'. In practice I am always conscious-of some thing, I am always thinking-of some thing.

To conclude from 'I think' that 'I exist' is no more than to say that a verb must have a subject, but it doesn't explain what is meant by that 'I'. For example, it my be that Descartes is newly created moment by moment, so that the 'I' has no continuity. It might be that the 'I' is not Descartes but a demon who places each thought in Descartes head. Descartes may have no material existence - there may be no material world at all. For Descartes to conclude he is Descartes - a man, rational, continuous and so on - needs a different set of arguments.

In my opinion, here Marx is simply pointing out that this book he is describing individual capitalists and landlords just in terms of their economic role, as representatives of an economic type, even though - as individuals - some might have ideas and aims that are outside the norm.

It is an interesting sentence in that Marx is often taken to be describing what he calls a 'natural history' of society. That society has to be the way it is because it is governed by laws of economics. But if that was the case, then how could we ever change things? Marx wants us to be free, but also sometimes seems to be arguing that we are slaves of history. There is a discussion of this by Adorno (History and Freedom Lectures). (You will find it if you put the paragraph you quoted into Google.)