Really? And this has bothered you for how long? — Isaac

It's the same political shenanigans, just now they've invented a new cudgel 'disinformation'. — Isaac

Are we having a conversation? I don't understand what you are saying. Americans cannot agree about their elections and do not trust the results. Their democracy is not working. Are we in agreement about that?

The things you think are false other people think are true. — Isaac

I assume you think that, and by and large I disagree. Obviously I cannot totally disagree. But I think we can, and that we need to, find the truth, agree what is true and enforce the truth. You know the warning, "don't buy a pig in a poke", (A poke is a cloth bag) The reason is that unscrupulous persons might sell you a cat in a poke, claiming it is a pig. If you let the cat out of the bag, you will know it is not a pig. We can agree, I think, that a cat is not a pig. At the point where we cannot agree such things, talk has become meaningless and the market unusable. And we ought to be able to agree that losing an election is not winning the election. and if we cannot, democracy has become unusable.

I'm absolutist about freedom to speak the truth. If there is a fire, shout fire, publish and be damned! Freedom to lie, to make promises and not keep them, to deceive, to manipulate, not so much.

I'm surprised that folks are so undiscriminating about speaking truth and speaking falsely. To tolerate untruth is to tolerate the undermining of all communication and the whole of society. Even capitalism cannot function without standards of truth in advertising without honest accounting, and so on. If politicians, salesmen, police, and ordinary people had the right to lie, society would collapse.

First off, the statement you quoted was directed at 180. — ToothyMaw

Were we not discussing together? My apologies for interrupting.

You just assert that moral facts don't exist because they just don't. — ToothyMaw

This is the way of facts. My keys are in my pocket. This is a true fact because my keys are in fact in my pocket, and that is the truth. It is self-evident to anyone who examines my pocket and unprovable to anyone else. If you have some moral facts in your pocket, you can describe them and we might believe you, or we might think you are describing unicorns. I have no argument that unicorns do not exist - they just don't.

However, I am definitely a moral realist. Humans will not long survive without attending to the moral world. You might think of morals as analogous to laws of physics. they do not exist as facts about the world, but describe the way the facts work - ethics as social physics.

{Promises are rather popular with moral realists: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/promises/ }

Irony means the opposite of what it means, unless it is being used ironically, when it should be understood without irony.

I'm not sure what you mean by the identification being unnecessary. Grateful for clarification. — Amity

That's a bit complex; here is not really the place to go into it, but very briefly, identification is making a connection of identity of any sort I am British, I am aphilosopher, I am going to win the lottery - the underlined are the identities, and the connection is an emotion pride or shame hope or fear. So when I say that the identification is unnecessary, I mean that I can acknowledge the fact that I am here, writing stuff that we might call philosophy or perhaps psychology, I don't need to have an emotional attachment to it, such that I am hurt if someone calls it nonsense. Of course there is a public aspect to identity, such that if the mods think I write nonsense all the time I get thrown off the site, but again, that is only a problem to me to the extent that I am emotionally invested in the identity of philosopher.

French is hard to learn. — Olivier5

It's a fairly simple language and has many root words in common with English, because the last invasion of the French was never repelled. Far from being hard, it is one of the easiest languages for an English-speaker to learn, and far easier than the reverse, because spelling and pronunciation and even grammar are so very inconsistent in English.

And of course the Welsh, The Scottish, The Northern Irish are expected to learn English and be grateful.
And this attitude (that everything not English is difficult and a huge imposition) does much to explain the appalling government that the UK suffers.


All of which is by the fucking by, to the point that the borders have to be drawn before you even know who to ask about who they want to be ruled and exploited by. This is a necessary and unavoidable democratic deficit: the UK apparently has an unassailable right to independence from the EU based on an internal referendum, but Scotland has no such unassailable right because [made up waffle]. So we now apply "made up waffle" to Donbas, Crimea, Ukraine, or whatever other region we like, citing the split up of Czechoslovakia , or the break up of Yugoslavia to taste. Shit happens, and then, with luck, we get a semblance of democratic control, or at least the illusion of it.

I fully recommend addiction to hope! — universeness

The triumph of religion over spirituality.

Hope is as hollow as fear. — Tao Te Ching - Stephen Mitchell

One projects oneself into the future, and identifies with the imagined future self. Thus hope and fear arise together as acts of imagination - one fears the worst and hopes for the best. Better to keep the mind silent and stay in the present. On a practical level, of course one has to foresee and prepare - it is the identification that is unnecessary and causes the suffering of hope and fear.

Spirituality is presence, secularity is absence of mind in thought and imagination.

Hope destroys fear. — universeness

No hope and fear always arise together; one hopes to win and fears to lose. What you claim here is the gambler's fallacy, that leads to addiction.

whether or not moral claims can be objectively true. — ToothyMaw

"Taking candy from a baby is wrong." has the grammar of a proposition, but it does not have the meaning of a proposition. It has the meaning of a command: 'don't do it!' Commands are not true or false, they are obeyed or disobeyed.

Morality is not made of claims of fact but commands, demands, exhortations, pleas, advice to act thus and not so. It is not 'truth apt'. But to conclude that, if something is not truth apt it is false, would be a serious mistake; commands are not falsity apt either. The justification for 'tell the truth' is that lies are worthless talk, no one wants to listen to lies.

Do you know what meta-ethics is? — ToothyMaw

A mistake. The very same mistake that is made by those that try to make the world conform to reason and logic instead of conforming their reason to the world - metaphysicians.

"Look both ways before crossing the road." "Don't eat the yellow snow." I am not offering any proof, but try the experiment if you are sceptical and get someone to report the results in your obituary. "Honour thy father and mother, that they leave not the estate to the cat's home and that thine own children learn what is expected of them." Some ways of life are better than others, and one of the worst for humans is a life that concerns itself entirely with its own benefit - the proof is in the joy and misery of life, not in the pontifications of logicians.

The "is" of morality doesn't address justifications for morality, which is the point of this thread. I know evolutionary psychology is great and all, but it is kind of irrelevant to this discussion. — ToothyMaw

I don't think it's irrelevant. It explains that, and why, murder is wrong but war is right, why there are the moral strictures there are and how they are not arbitrary in the main but sometimes they are, and why different environments produce different moralities in the same species. The justification of any morality is 'group interest' - nature demands it, the ancestors say it, God says it, everyone says it except the individual, who insists on asking "why should I?" as though they are not part of a larger whole. What other question are you considering?

Would antisemites be doing a good thing if they refused to bow to the will of people who aren't assholes? — ToothyMaw

Dilemma questions such as this (if I understood you) arise out of consideration of group conflict - ie conflict of scale. Family, tribe, nation, species, ecosystem, all have a claim on the individual's loyalty and self-sacrifice. We are seeing the result of the failure of traditional moralities to consider the interests of the environment. We have not been taught to make that identification in particular by Capitalist economics, which is founded on the merciless exploitation of environmental resources as slaves, as ancestor fossils, and as the living environment. 'Why should I not burn fossil fuels?' has a very clear, very cogent answer, that we need to learn to internalise as a species. Antisemitism, racism, the persecution of any sub-group, corrodes the cooperative functioning of society and prevents us from acting together to address global issues.

Incidentally, my good friend Hume did not deny morality, He merely denied the authority of reason. Thus you cannot get an ought from an is, nor a will be from a has been, nor an object from a sensation by any reasoned argument. But he was no more against morality than he was against science.

What does it even mean for a moral claim to be correct? "You ought not steal candy from a baby." certainly doesn't mean you don't steal candy from a baby.

It seems to me that morality develops out of conflicts between social and personal advantage, and represents the social advantage in the first instance. But this becomes complicated immediately by the fact that social and individual advantage are closely intertwined. Other things being equal, the group is advantaged by the individual being advantaged - just not at the expense of the baby. But the group functions as a group by means of convention. Language is a convention that allows coordination between members, and established habitual behaviour also allows coordination.

Anything that undermines the cohesion and coordination of the group for individual advantage we can call treachery, and the punishment of treachery is advantageous to the group.

Et voila, we have a naturalistic account of both crime and punishment, that sets out the difference between individual preference and social mores, such that torture can be possibly defended as beneficial to social cohesion under certain circumstances, but never normalised as everyday social interaction. In the first video, the beginning of lying as the undermining of communication for individual benefit; in the second, ritual ordeal as initiation into the group and demonstration of the ability to sacrifice personal advantage for the group.

Can you determine whether or not it is in one's "pragmatic favour"? — Janus

If one can feel their teeth, it's not one's pragmatic favour. Inappropriate link

You are here, after all. — Banno

No, I am not there. No I am not commenting. I am elsewhere and resisting.You reduce me to the words and then point out the contradiction, and that is the giant turd of analysis.

Like your mountain? — Banno

Imaginary mountains are definitely a (no)thing round here. Try this fictional one for size

The dance is a cure for those who would sanctify words. — Banno

I prefer my illness to your cure.

Oh, I'm still trying to, sir. — Moliere

Poetry seeks to overcome the weakness of words - easily given, but sometimes as easily broken - by invocation. One calls into being something that was not, by a creative verbal act. The weakness of this thread is that it does not even try to escape the dance of words - there's a red house over yonder, where even the blind can be seen to. Let there be Red!

And it was so, because the invocation was puissant. Thus poetry builds language as fast as doublespeak destroys it, and so builds the world anew, as @Banno would have it. What does it mean that in a century we have gone from a nature red in tooth and claw, to a nature that is the greenest of greens? (This is an observation intended to evoke a transformation, not a question to answer.)

[What is ineffable? {response} But look we are talking about it, so that isn't it.] That is a gigantic turd of analysis, or a pathetic joke of logic.

What is creativity? Only original answers will be considered.

A Valediction

If we must part,
Then let it be like this.
Not heart on heart,
Nor with the useless anguish of a kiss;
But touch mine hand and say:
"Until to-morrow or some other day,
If we must part".

Words are so weak
When love hath been so strong;
Let silence speak:
"Life is a little while, and love is long;
A time to sow and reap,
And after harvest a long time to sleep,
But words are weak." — Ernest Dowden

Eff that, Mothersuckers!

The argument is that moral claims are never true. But notice that truth is a value.

In the world of thought and words, truth is the value. A lie may have value to someone just to the extent that it is believed to be true. Thus in the world of words,if it is true that moral claims are never true, then it follows that moral claims have no value. Or at least, they only have value as lies that manipulate.

But notice the inequality between the lie and the truth. the lie can have value only by virtue of the dominance of truth. Without the dominance of truth, language itself has no value and hence no meaning; so the lie is always parasitic on the truth. the lie has meaning and value by virtue of the truth.

Thus even in the world of words, the truth must prevail, {by and large}, or else the world of words itself loses all value.

The world of words is a microcosm of the social world. Money has value to me because the nice people at Walmart collect it. Philosophers agonise, and then they go shopping...

The inequality applies to money too. If "we" do not trust the money, it has no value. Economists call it "confidence". I like money because you like it too. We all just stopped liking bitcoin so much...

In the case of money, the truth is a fabrication. What does this mean?

But there is another world, not the world of words or the social world, but the natural world. Here, reality bites. The torturer is the lord of this material world - allegedly. Being tortured, then, is what? It happens rather more often than I would like to admit. It has no meaning. It has no value. Eat shit motherfucker.

Or is there, perhaps, another way? You do not have to partake, you do not have to realise, you do not have to engage; thus freedom; thus virtue. The value of your virtue is not to you.

I'll see your 96, and raise you the roof.

There are no correct moral claims. — Leftist

Is correct not better than incorrect? If it isn't your claim has no force, and if it is your claim is contradictory.

Do it, now. — Krishnamurti

And then there is silence for a moment, until the answer is given: "It stops."
And when the answer is given, it is clear that it has not stopped.

And those 2 are the brightest and the best, so I rather doubt you will get much better responses in the forum. If only they could have managed the 4 minutes, the world would have been transformed, but thought had to come up with an answer - it stops, not seeing the performative contradiction.

It is like a Zen Koan, set up to block the road of thought; it is a question that cannot be answered with words or thoughts, but only with one's whole life.

I am an anarchist, and as such, I do not accept that there is any rule preventing the making or imposing of rules. If you don't want to obey anyone else's rules, that's absolutely fine, but you will probably get locked up or killed. And wipe your feet before you come into my house.

I have more than 50 discussions, and I cannot remember ever having a poll or a question.

If you don't want a question or a poll, I think the trick is not to tick either of the boxes.

I tend to disagree. But my point is that there is a natural understanding of intent relating to deliberate acts and unintended but perhaps foreseeable consequences that only applies when the primary goal is presumed. So the folk intuition could be to give the benefit of the doubt - presumed intent when the secondary consequence is positive and vice versa. The facts so far support my hypothesis as well as Knobe's, but the environmental org experiment might distinguish them.

Because intentionally harming the environment would be daft unless it was unavoidable given the main intent, and likewise making a loss.

There is an ambiguity in the meaning of intent: I intentionally break eggs in order to make an omelette, but my intention is to make an omelette, not to break eggs. Oil companies do not intend to cause global warming, merely to sell product, but now we know that they know that they are causing it, and I at least, am starting to think them culpable because reckless.

In short, it seems groups can be seen as more intentional based on morals too, rather than just CEOs and generals, well morals or maybe just the words ‘harm’ and ‘help’ for other reasons. — invizzy

We inflict collateral damage, which is an unfortunate and unintended consequence of our military humanitarian efforts. They murder innocent civilians.

Try the experiment with Green-piece org instead of ACME Inc. We all know that companies conduct business for profit and there is usually an environmental cost. But if a group has the improvement of the environment as its aim, one has to presume that the environmental effect is deliberate, and it is the profit or loss that is likely unintentional.

I don't think it's completely a matter of class, but also, and perhaps more so, of occupation. If a life-guard fails to save a drowning man, we tend to condemn, whereas if he built a wall in his spare time and it collapses and kills someone, we might forgive. But with a bricklayer, it would be the other way round.

"A cobbler should stick to his last."

That is to say, the experiment may be being misinterpreted: not 'intuitions about whether outcomes are intentional are based on how moral we see them', but intuitions about whether outcomes are intentional are based on whether or not they are part of the job-description.

That is Machiavelli's position, that the ruler should not be squeamish about breaking a few eggs in the course of making the omelette of the state; that to be a weak ruler is the worst sin for a ruler. Thus to fail to make a profit is the worst sin for a CEO; everything else is 'justified' if it facilitates the goal of the occupation.

Ever since Machiavelli, the morality of the rich and powerful has been completely different to that of the folk. We do not judge them by our own standards. We excuse the harm because it is not part of his duty, and we praise the help for the same reason. We might judge the minister for the environment differently, and even possibly excuse him if he harmed the economy.

Time for some more outrageous propaganda.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/getting-closer?fbclid=IwAR1Wvtzz3bT3Ar_x8sSuPtpwSEQWxIF4KLIQhuylm64jgzJQTX0YrDJ3GdY

Arne Naess.
Contribution studiously ignored.

Audre Lorde.
Contribution studiously ignored.


But what did the Romans ever do for us?

Contribution to what? Curiously, the list of the great and the good so far on the thread seems to leave out the philosophers of environmentalism, of feminism, of anti colonialism. It is surely not the business of the philosopher to contribute to society but to challenge it. It is not our business to answer to a miserable accountancy that cannot value anything except in terms of convention and complacent compliance.

The analogy is to psychosis symptoms such as conspiracy theories. The specific reason I think this should be considered is an understanding that mental content is something emergent from physical brains but not the same thing. — Mark Nyquist

Yes. I think the analogy works up to a point, and bearing in 'mind' that talk of computer virus is itself an analogy from biology. But up to more or less the same point, a much earlier model of possession by evil spirits will also work. A false theory is created by a malicious agent, as is a computer virus, and is designed to infect, and take possession of the hardware and use it to spread itself.
And that moral story survives as the notion of white hat and black hat hackers/magicians.

Such an understanding seems to point to a policy of isolating infected persons, and brainwashing them by way of removing the infection. That is a dangerous understanding.

I would like us to put ourselves into the pictures and analogies we make. Is it perhaps a certain paranoia in us that we need to arm ourselves in advance with a theory by which to understand the mystery of the other? Is our theory of mental illness itself a virus that we are spreading, that is infecting the world.

Even on the internet it is proving very difficult to sort the memes of God, from those of the devil - truth and sanity from lies and folly.

To get a mental image of this, imagine a virus on a computer network. Agent Based Models are a way to computer model this and simple models can show progression of a virus moving from node to node on networks with some nodes affected and other nodes unaffected. In biological brains the biology can be functioning normally but the corrupted networks of mental content are the cause of the abnormal condition. — Mark Nyquist

Do you think your informational computerised view is much different? Are we machines? Are we infected by viruses? The very idea seems like a virus that has infected us.

I see this as a very moderate expression of an argument for a genetic component to moral behavior. — T Clark

No disagreement from me. Social relations are a survival issue. Communication, and therefore truth, is a survival issue. But alas in humans, genetic programs for behaviour can be overridden to a large extent by learned behaviours and identifications. The programmed socialisation becomes socialised antisocial behaviour, by the propaganda of the day. There can only be one winner. There can only be one winner. There can only be one winner.

The topic would better be called 'Deciding what to be'. What to do follows from what one is. If one is Buridan's ass, one dithers and cannot decide. If one is a football fan, one cheers on the team, and boos the other team. It is connection, identification with the other that motivates something bigger that mere self-interest. Hurrah for philosophers, I say, and boo to soldiers. Hurrah for truth and boo to lies. Hurrah for peace and boo to war.

If one is a modern individual with no loyalty and no connection to others, one does what one likes, which is probably nothing much, and one is always anxious about the other who is nothing but a rival and competitor, liable to steal one's dinner.

babies as young as three months old, long before they have language, are already judging other people's behavior and making value judgements. — T Clark

Babies are dependent on (M)others, and therefore make connections and loyalties very quickly, because their lives depend on it. It is only a very recent possibility to live without direct connection to humans or the living environment. We have created the mechanical life (and hence the amoral governance) of which we now complain.

Therefore choose solidarity with humans, with bees, with tigers and with the forest. Choose 'Team Life'.

ought we not? — Isaac

I think we ought, but I think we ought to do so carefully, with respect for differing opinions.

I certainly do not trust my (UK) government to do what is best for most people in the UK let alone the world. And that is a question I also don't know the answer to, - in the case of a conflict between the interests of the world and the interests of the people it represents and governs, does a government have a right or a duty to do what is best for the world?

Simple question - do those millions at risk of starvation because of the continued war get a say in whether it's worth it or not? — Isaac

I'm at risk of dying of cold because I cannot afford the heating bill. So I get a say. And I say that defeating fascism is expensive and costs many lives, but also saves many lives. One can never make the pragmatic calculations of such global events, because no one knows the future, and no one knows the alternative future brought about by making a different decision. War is disgusting and starvation is disgusting, and if we all thought you knew how to end them, we'd all vote for you.

There is no good solution because fossil fuels, and especially oil, are the backbone of our economy. It's the thing that made the industrial revolution possible and makes the economy tick, because it's a cheap, easy to use and an energy-dense source of energy. Add to that there are whole industries build on derivatives of oil and natural gas. — ChatteringMonkey

The story is that the economy progresses to improve life for us all, and science provides the best solutions to all human problems. It now appears that science and the economy have produced an existential threat to humans. And you want a "good" solution? Time to change what we think is good, I'd say.

Endless growth is cancerous.

and it is this idealization of the objects in your environment that you are conscious of, not a faithful recreation of the color patches that make up your putative visual field. — Srap Tasmaner

Because, of course, one is not normally interested in colour patches in one's visual field, but the latest dresses and trainers in the material world that material girls live in.

It's a nice thought, but demonstrably false. — Srap Tasmaner

Well I'd need to see that demonstration. But anyways, back to Hume, your fun video actually uses the term 'imaginary' to describe the colour constancy and lighting compensation that happens. Which scores a stupendous predictive hit for Hume, even if I got it wrong.