(1) Animals experience pain.
(2) Causing unnecessary pain is wrong.
(3) Humans eating animals is unnecessary in most circumstances now.
(4) Humans eating animals is wrong in most circumstances now.

Can you please spell out how your inquiry interfaces with the above argument?

Science is inconclusive on whether plants feel pain. — Tzeentch

There are good indicators that they don't. They don't have neurons or behave like they have central executive functions. The kind of "evidence" that says plants feel pain is more a philosophical interpretation of evidence - like reading some study that some species of plant communicate through "communication => mind states => pain" into evidence that they (1) can experience things in a manner that makes them agents and (2) have pain states. IE, it's not about what is established about plants, it's about reading what is established about plants in accordance with an already held doctrine.

This is a red herring really anyway.

The animals we usually eat feel pain, we should not cause unnecessary pain, eating animals is unnecessary in many circumstances for many people, we should not eat those animals in those circumstances. Simple.

I don't understand.



There's no good reasons to believe that plants suffer. Or bacteria. I dunno about insects. So the argument doesn't apply to them since killing them does not inflict harm.

Unless, apparently, one is Isaac, whereupon, displaced by philosophical contemplation, one only infers or perceives that one eats oysters. — Banno

One of those philosophical distinctions pretending it is not, @Isaac throws environmental interventions like eating into the process of perception.

I'm not here to argue that we don't eat oysters, I'm here to point out that a naive realist (among which I count myself) and representational realist (in the sense that we interact with the world only using representational processes) agree on the causal chain of eating oysters.

Animals experience pain.
Causing unnecessary pain is wrong.
Humans eating animals is unnecessary in most circumstances now.
Humans eating animals is wrong in most circumstances now.

When we grow up into racist grandpas, systemic species-ism is going to be as tone deaf as systemic racism now. We're gonna be the racist grandmas and grandpas, oblivious to our own prejudice, seeing it as natural. We'll feel the borderline lethal humidity of earth and be unable to connect it to our own desires to eat the juicy delicious meat. We'll be old fashioned, consigned to the history of how we got in this mess, nostalgic over rendered fat. And make no mistake, it is delicious.

oyster->oyster perception connection in eating->human eating oyster

We cannot eat the oyster in itself as eating is a perceptual interaction = We eat the oyster in itself using a perceptual interaction.

Do you emphasize causal separation given (the middle node in the graph) or that the oyster is eaten (that the middle node on the graph acts on the first node to produce the third)?

This is very strange. It's oddly parallel to Stove's Gem: we only have access to our inferences about the world, and hence we do not have access to the world... — Banno

x->y->z

Causal separation can smell a lot like causal isolation.

If I told you that x approximates y with error, and that y approximates z with error, one way of reading the processes is that z only approximates x given y. Another way of reading it is that z approximates x using its dependence upon y.

In these terms, it's a question of whether access behaves like a walk or a neighbour in a causal chain. Isolation given a given can be the same thing as access without one.

The statement can perfectly well refer to something empirical, such as observed behavior or verbal report — SophistiCat

I imagine that two people being in love is a rather vague thing involving the dispositions, acts, social context... It'd be hard to draw a line around a bunch of phenomena and go "Yep, that is the truth condition for X and Y are in love". Are you suggesting that dispositions aren't included in that blurry-at-the-edges web? I imagine that "X and Y are in love but X does not have any dispositions regarding Y." would be another of those Moorean puzzles of assertion; a violence against the phenomenon by failing to reflect a vital aspect of it.

Whether or not one's conduct is adequate to one's beliefs and attitudes (when there even is a conduct to speak of) is a separate question from whether beliefs and attitudes are right or wrong. — SophistiCat

I don't think it's separate; if we separate an action's pragmatic consequences on stakeholders its agent's disposition from evaluations of rights and wrongs, it isn't clear that we're still talking about the same thing. All I'm trying to say are that statements like "You're right, I shouldn't've treated you like that" can be true! And they don't need to refer to some purely extra-human thing to be so - their truth value turns on whether the action concerned was or was not adequate in context. Rather than an extra-human goodness or rightness.

How can we expect any statement about humans to be true if it has to correspond to event type which does not vary with the actions and perspectives of humans?

I am also willing to say that the statement is true (otherwise we would find ourselves making Moorian paradoxical pronouncements like "It's raining, but it is not true that it's raining.") But when I say "Hitting babies is wrong" I don't mean it in the same way as when I say "It's raining." There is no referent implicit in the former statement.Its truthmaker is my moral attitude. — SophistiCat

I'm a bit uneasy attaching right and wrong to arbitrary ought statements myself; I don't like ought statements to begin with. It construes "ought" as an operator on "is", and "is" contains all the truth conditions in that framing.

I think that this comes down to an argument about the type of states of affairs, and whether that type excludes relationships between agents, dispositions and states of affairs.

Truth conditions have to be a statement of an event. Characteristic instances of the type are like "it is raining" or "the ball fell through the hoop", physical facts like "an ionic bond occurs between sodium and chlorine to make salt", and descriptions like "snow is white". The motivating intuition for grouping these things together is that their truth conditions do not depend in any way upon a human's disposition toward them. This facilitates a sharp division between states of affairs (under a description) and attitudes agents have towards them. Morality is aligned with a pro attitude of judgement towards a state of affairs, like {Sally, thinks this is wrong, hitting a baby} - the morally valanced component is all in the middle term, rather than the state of affairs of baby hitting.

I don't think the sharpness of this division between dispositionally dependent and independent content survives the enmeshment of social facts and dispositions. From the social facts side, consider the event "Sally and Lizzy are in love", this will be true when Sally and Lizzy are in love. However, Sally loves Lizzy is a disposition of Sally regarding Lizzy. Lizzy loves Sally is a disposition regarding Sally. If we must take dispositions regarding states of affairs as separate from states of affairs, then "Sally and Lizzy are in love" must either not be truth-apt or false as by assumption neither disposition corresponds to a state of affairs that can be included in a truth condition so their composition cannot either. Regardless, Sally and Lizzy are in love, so it should be true, no?

I think this forces us to consider dispositions as a component part of states of affairs rather than parsing them simply as attitudes towards states of affairs. If moral evaluations are a type of disposition (as assumed above), this makes moral evaluation a state of affairs. This leaves room for an account of what it means for a moral evaluation to be a state of affairs.

I take a pragmatic view of what it means to hold a disposition. A disposition has pragmatic consequences. So "Sally and Lizzy are in love" entails behavioural commitments which manifest as proximate consequences for both agents, and the type of behavioural commitments + proximate consequences depend upon the dispositions held and the agents.

So for an agent to hold a moral evaluation is for them to commit themselves to behaving in a manner consistent with the moral evaluation they hold. However holding that commitment does not suffice for the proximate consequences engendered by holding the commitment being adequate for upholding the commitment's intended proximate consequences. Only the actions manifested in accordance with the commitment are adequate for it, as they are what yield the proximate consequences of the commitment. IE, there are moral errors (infelicities of moral conduct) that arise in the mismatch of a moral evaluation and the actions used to satisfy it, and moral skill (a good enough fit between the evaluation and the actions). If the actions do not satisfy the evaluation in virtue of being infelicitous in some way, then it is true that they do not satisfy the evaluation. And vice versa. The truth condition there isn't a type of disposition held by the agent, it's whether the actions were adequate for the disposition or not.

The sense of adequacy is facilitated by the moral evaluations of engaged parties; those which really are affected by the proximate consequences of an agent's actions, including the original agent. Events concerning stakeholders to the actions and evaluations thereof. Objectivity (it really being true that one's actions can be in/felicitous in context) without universalism (contextual dependence of all moral conduct and evaluation).

But when I say "Hitting babies is wrong" I don't mean it in the same way as when I say "It's raining." There is no referent implicit in the former statement. Its truthmaker is my moral attitude. — SophistiCat

So I don't think the moral attitude suffices; it doesn't give a good account of moral error and conduct being adequate. Whether the actions cash out the disposition. And I don't think the picture of dispositionally independent states of affairs is in accordance with moral conduct's immersion in social contexts, "external/objective" truth conditions break when considering the truth conditions of collective actions/institutional facts/social facts.

I think when he speaks like that lots of people see him as a strong leader sticking to his cards. Performing certainty. It is sad.

Are you not commenting on me bringing this up with someone who self-describes as being on the right? — Judaka

Well, the dynamic in the argument is for "privilege is a useful category in discourse" and "privilege is not a useful category in discourse". An argument strategy that highlights the fallibility of all opinion which uses data doesn't really address the issue in question.

Privilege cannot be separated from leftwing identity politics and this much is obvious — Judaka

If we agree on all the facts, then the correlation between "identity politics issues" (race, gender, disability) and economic ones (class) is absolutely there! Addressing inequalities in the identity register addresses them in the economic one to the extent their correlation is causal.

I read a good example of this today regarding snow clearing in Sweden. It used to be that snow clearing was mostly devoted to peak hours road traffic by cars - which is (and the statistics show it) by and large a form of travel that men do for work. Men travel less in other ways, too.

But a super majority of injuries and serious injuries didn't even occur on the prioritised clearing areas - which is strange, as they're supposed to be tuned to injury prevention. This opens up the question of whether it's an optimal allocation of resources. Someone came along and highlighted the gender disparity in planning - the news went apeshit about left identity politics. So then there were focus groups and research done to look at how travel differences break down by gender, and how slipping injury breaks down by gender.

Lo and behold, the data revealed that men and women in Sweden had very different travel needs, and greater emphasis needed to be placed on women's travel needs to optimise the allocation of snow clearing effort. Women "trip-chain" and go on "care trips" much more when travelling, these include walking and short car trips much more than the daily commute by car. It was then better optimized given this data, the number of injuries went way down, and it even saved public money as the predicted public health care costs from prevented slipping injuries dwarfed the public roadcare maintenance costs! The investment had a great fiscal multiplier. The snow clearing was optimised for the wrong kind of trip, which disproportionately effected women! The awareness of privilege was required for this improvement, and people still laughed it off as identity politics and virtue signalling and posturing and whatever.

So it wasn't simply a discursive intervention, it was an economic one. Imagine how much better we could do if policy was optimised by recognition of privilege (like gender disparity), then subsequent analysis and intervention used those insights. It's like making the "search space" for an optimisation problem better, you will only get improvements.

Again, technically speaking, white privilege isn't saying anything untrue - the statistics back up most of the claims being made. How we look at attractiveness and intelligence is changed when we describe it or even refer to it as an "unearned advantage" and in this way your framing becomes a philosophical position. — Judaka

Ultimately this means that there can be no sufficient evidence for any "philosophical position" to be true. Which is plausible, considering reasoning is fallible. If there's a strict distinction between facts and interpretations thereof, anyway. If the distinction is relaxed; as it behaves in practice; there are more and less reasonable things to conclude from the same evidence. And whether any particular claim is more or less reasonable given evidence depends on the claim and the evidence.

As a generic condition of reasoning it applies regardless of political opinion, and it is very disingenuous that you selectively reference one type of opinion haver whenever you bring it up.

To me there's two things going on here. There's the question of what is/isn't morally good. For a large number of questions I think there's a right answer to that question. It's a linguistic question, no different to asking "what is the correct way to use the term 'morally good'". In proper Wittgensteinian sense the answer is not clear cut, it's fuzzy at the edges, but this fuzziness cannot be resolved ever. Likewise with social contexts. When the grocer delivers potatoes, you 'ought' to pay him because that's the meaning of the work 'ought'. It means 'that action which the social context places an imperative on you to do'. So if someone were to say "When the grocer delivers my potatoes I ought to punch him in the face" they'd be wrong. That's not what 'ought' means. — Isaac

:up:

Asking this question of morality is where questions of moral realism come in. The how of making moral decisions is not via any meta-ethic. We can prove that using fMRI scanning, we definitely do not need to consult areas of our brain responsible for things like meta-modelling to make moral-type decisions. There does seem to be some similarity in some moral decisions, there's also a lot of dissimilarity. So there's an interesting question as to what causes this. My preferred answer is long and complicated because I tend to think morality is a messy combination of numerous, often conflicting, models. The point is, though, that whatever model we come up with to explain the similarities/dissimilarities, it has no normative force for exactly the reason you gave. — Isaac

:up:

With models about the physical world, the best answer is 'there's an external reality'. That's why I think that dropping my keys will cause them to land on the floor, and so does everyone else, because we're all interacting with the same external world which has patterns and rules. — Isaac

Hm. Looks similar to this:

I don't think that what you are talking about here is the same as what the OP and the rest are talking about. I like to think of "objective morality," or moral realism, as a kind of correspondence theory. Just as with the non-moral correspondence theory, where the truth of a proposition is judged by its degree of correspondence to a putative true (physical) state of the world, a moral proposition is supposed to be true to the extent of its correspondence with some true normative state - this "objective morality." And this correspondence cannot be trivial; it cannot simply be implied by what the words mean - otherwise, of course, seeking moral truths would have been a trivial matter. — SophistiCat

Let me see if I can make an argument that consolidates both your points. You both seem okay with how I've used the terms "moral conduct" and "moral evaluation", broadly anyway.

By moral conduct, I mean actions undertaken by agents which have intelligible proximate consequences for self and others that depend upon both what the act is and how the act is done. By moral evaluations, I mean any judgement concerning the adequacy of moral conduct by any standard. — fdrake

(1) In order for "moral objectivism/universalism" to be true, there would need to be true statements about moral conduct.
(2) In order for a statement to be true, it has to correspond to some (physical or external) state of affairs.
(3) A statement can be true or false when and only when it concerns some (physical or external) state of affairs.
(4) Statements concerning moral conduct do not concern any (physical or external) state of affairs.
(5) Therefore statements concerning moral conduct cannot correspond to some (physical or external) state of affairs (3,4, putting the negation through the when and only when).
(6) Therefore statements concerning moral conduct cannot be true or false (5,3).
(7) Therefore there are no statements concerning moral conduct which are true or false. (6, restatement)
(8) Therefore "moral objectivism/universalism" is false. (7,1)

Does that reflect what you both think?

Academia is mostly a pyramid scheme in which grad students get payed almost entirely in doing work that they love at most 25% of the time. You get the job you thought you would have, maybe, when you've been in it for 30 years. I know people who've been in it for over 10 and they're still on zero hours contracts - multiple ones for teaching and research -, with almost no opportunity for career progression. They're constantly putting their life on hold.

The senior academics I've talked to, when they're drunk and actually frank about things, talk about research leadership effectively being a high tier manager in a corporation - you are mostly doing paperwork and trying to attract funding, you need to get an empire of grad students to actually do "your" research, which you don't spend time doing. You mostly become an expert in your own conjectures and marketing them for the "public interest" or you immediately have a business application in mind.

Being successful at university is mostly a question of conscientiousness - doing the hard study, treating it like a job, working like fuck on essays and exams. You do not need to be a particularly creative thinker, you mostly need to be thorough and put the effort into demonstrating that you understand the material. The profile changes a bit for actual research work as a grad student - your conscientiousness is still very valuable, but you also need to be able to learn new things in your chosen field quickly, turn failed ideas into relevant work, and actually be good at creative problem solving and creative questioning. This is where my experience in academia ends, never had a permanent contract, I've only done post grad things and been a research assistant in a couple of labs. The pace of output is typically very slow, but most of the time you feel like you're rushed off your feet having to actually learn new information. You will spend evenings reading papers because you do not actually have the time during work hours to learn what you need to learn to do what you need to do in work hours.

My advice on taking academic research as a career path; only do it if you love it so much you can't imagine doing anything else. Only do it if you already love it so much you will fucking bleed and shit and become a modern hermit for it. Only do it if you're prepared to be obscure, anti-social and exceptionally pedantic as a day and night job for most of your adult life. I guess ultimately, only do it if going through it itself is valuable to you.

But getting a degree in a technical subject - like dual majoring in hard science, doing applied mathematics or statistics with a machine learning component, or doing any flavour of engineering or operations research, actually will allow you to enter into more job markets at entry level. You can often get exploitative entry level positions using those skills (with below livable pay for 60-80 hours work weeks) by going to graduate job fairs.

Academic job networks are also very nepotism prone. you may end up with a decent entry level job if you're a good graduate and you happen upon the right connections.

1. Cartesian ontology proved that Solipsism cannot be disproven logically. Heidegger does not dispute this conclusion. — gurk

I don't think he disputes it directly. His account does very much undermine the motivating framework that allows solipsism to get going, though. Human beings are "beings in the world", rather than minds in perceptual cages that have phenomenal content. He tries to use everyday life as a starting point, albeit a very quotidian stereotype of everyday life that excludes vital aspects (eg. human bodies, politics, personalities...). Rather than beginning in abstract space of reasons and searching for necessary structure.

2. Heidegger's novelty was not in addressing the problem of the un-knowability of the noumenon, but rather in ignoring the noumenon and using phenomenological experience instead of the cogito as the "axiom" for building his ontology. If he occasionally claims that the noumenon can be known, the claim does not have a logical basis. — gurk

I don't know how you're using the word noumenon. Regardless, the relationship of a human to their environment is conceived by Heidegger as predominantly practical rather than epistemic; knowing (with its structures of concepts and judgements) being just one flavour of practical understanding. I imagine that when he's talking about hammering, he thinks that the "noumenal hammer" (yuck) is moved in the act and that this is essential for understanding how a hammer works. Its use really does help put nails into things.

3. Since his ontology is based on phenomena, he spends a lot more time investigating human psychology than other ontologists would. — gurk

I think it intersects with psychology in some places - like his analysis of moods+dispositions and private experiences (erlebnis? It's been a while. Edit: Also note generic phenomena are not private!). But it's quite different in others - most of the phenomenal structures he analyses do not concern mental qualities or patterns of thought, or even the individual human beings that have them. But I think what you're saying is broadly true; he discusses psychological, sociological and linguistic themes and treats them as relevant to ontology. Since ontology for Heidegger begins in the analysis of human beings.

Would it be a valid criticism to state that his major achievement was in translating Eastern ontology into philosophical language for a Western audience? Or am I still missing something? — gurk

I don't know much about Eastern philosophy or how Heidegger was influenced by it.

"It turns out Republicans can accept a batshit insane candidate so long as it's consistent insanity" - Christopher Wylie

Found this which might be of interest to you - it talks about Heidegger's conception of predication (in statements) as a kind of "seeing as" (seeing something as something), and how it derives from a more practically oriented "seeing how" - somewhat analogous to Wittgenstein's distinction between saying and showing but couched in terms of perception.

I don't see room for Heidegger between two things that shouldn't be separated. It seems like you're saying he focuses on phenomenology, which is certainly true, but where are the noumena? This is my difficulty. You can't have a sound ontology without addressing noumena. — gurk

Whether Heidegger is ultimately an idealist or a realist of some flavour is debated. There's support for both:

In so far as Being constitutes what is asked about, and "Being" means the Being of entities, then entities themselves turn out to be what is inter-rogated. These are, so to speak, questioned as regards their Being.But if the characteristics of their Being can be yielded without falsification, then these entities must, on their part, have become accessible as they are in themselves. When we come to what is to be interrogated, the question of Being requires that the right way of access to entities shall have been obtained and secured in advance. — Being and Time, Macquarrie and Robinson translation

So there's strong support for the claim that entities themselves inform inquiry regarding them so long as the method of questioning is appropriate for the type of entity. That entities in fact do this is a very realist position. But as regards being itself, he makes remarks like this:

Entities are, quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed, the acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their nature is ascertained. But Being 'is' only in the understanding of those entities to whose Being something like an understanding of Being belongs.

Things like that make Heidegger scholar William Blattner strongly believe Heidegger is ultimately an idealist of some sort. An idealist with regard to being, a realist with regard to entities. Which, I think, can be decently analogised to relativising the ontology of entities to a conceptual scheme (though I assume Heidegger would insist that conceptual schemes are representational devices of objects for subjects, a Cartesian "for-us").

These investigations, which take precedence over any possible ontological question about Reality, have been carried out in the foregoing existential analytic. According to this analytic, knowing is a founded mode of access to the Real. The Real is essentially accessible only as entities within-the-world.

That makes him pretty close to Kant (empirical realism (ontic realism) and transcendental idealism (ontological idealism)), so if you're meaning "noumenon" in the Kantian sense, there's some textual support for an analogue of it in Heidegger's thought. Though I think remarks like "(entities) become accessible as they are in themselves" (through their manifesting as phenomenon) would make Kant advocates very uncomfortable I imagine.

If you're using the world "noumenon" as a proxy for nature in its indifference to us, I agree with you that this is a weak point in his approach. If you're using it in the Kantian sense, there's a similar conception in Heidegger "the Real is essentially accessible only as entities within-the-world", and "the world" is more similar to "what is derived from and implicated in human activity" than indifferent nature.

Not sure I follow... The means of that representation would just be something like — gurk

A formula like $\forall x: \hphantom{,} R(x) \rightarrow C(x)$ is a representation. The means of representation is the practical competence that maps the understanding that red things are coloured to the formula of predicate logic. The formula in predicate logic merely expresses the fact, which we learn elsewhere through the use of language. Think of how your formula and my formula are understandable as the same thing, but how we don't have to go through a proof that my functional notation is the same as your set membership notation (for finite domains anyway). I think Heidegger is very right in highlighting this flavour of equivocation; and I agree with (my understanding of him) that we often don't notice the equivocation because of the unexamined trappings of theorizing as a practice.

Do you have any examples of this Heideggerian violence? I'm generally familiar with Wittgenstein but his criticisms of language, ironically for this discussion, are easily solved by using logic instead. — gurk

Well, the above thing you did is a decent example of it I think! There's a generic sort of formula for it Heidegger reuses - when people are using representational devices (like a translation into predicate logic), the standard mode of apprehension for objects output from the representational device (the specific formula components and what they mean) does not resemble the mode of apprehension of the concerned objects in its usual function (the network of linguistic and theoretical competences that enable the translation). People do the same thing with truth apt sentences (here's looking at you @Banno), and all the world becomes equivalent to a function that maps a sentence to a truth value. Studying Heidegger attunes you to the sort of error that confuses the properties induced by the use of a representational device with the properties of the entities themselves. I think. At the very least, being able to suspend the philosophical impulse to treat everything as an object with associated predicates is valuable. A bad framing of an issue can induce us to see things in it which are not there; regurgitating the framing rather than analysing the issue. (Heidegger is pretty guilty of this too I think!)

Another thing I think is a good example is the idea of a "quale", which is allegedly an experiential property that we experience as a component part of an experience (like the red part of an apple's skin). It's a split done in retrospect (reflectively) and induced by the representational behaviour in reflection (which regards experience as an object of analysis) rather than being innate to the experience at the time. The use of qualia vocabulary often splits experience up in a manner unexamined in using the vocabulary. This is a me example, not one I immediately know of textual support for in Heidegger (though I recall Dreyfus talking about qualia like that in a lecture).

Then how would one describe Heideggerian ontology using predicate logic? — gurk

If you need citations for things I will find you them.

I think for him analysing something with predicate logic requires taking a theoretical stance towards what is analysed that reduces it to a present at hand entity if you treat logic as characterising the being of its entities when you use it. I'll spell out the reduction.

If you treat an entity as you do in predicate logic, it's an element of fixed domain of discourse to which predicative statements apply or fail to apply, like "If x satisfies P(x) and for all c such that P(c) - P(c) implies Q(c), then Q(x)" - the entitites x are connected to characteristics of their being (predicates) which can be turned on or off corresponding to whether the statement is true or false of the entities in question.

There's a lot of "given" that goes into formulating something in predicate logic; the symbols are interpreted in some way, the predicates are interpreted in some way, and if we wanted to apply it to something in real life we'd need to represent the aspect of real life in a manner that conformed with the standards of predicate logic. As an example on how artificial this can be, in predicate logic "X is red" and "X is coloured" have distinct predicate symbols, the implication that "X is red => X is coloured" then needs to be included as an argument premise to conclude from "X is red" that "X is coloured" validly. But in order to do that, we must have a skilful understanding of how the concepts are to be represented as statements of predicate logic. In that example, we leverage our understanding that if something is red that means that it is coloured to represent that extra-logical fact as an entailment. "If something is red, it is coloured" is not by itself a theorem of predicate logic. This comes down to leveraging a knowledge of how words are used to describe and relate the properties of entities - in Heidegger's terms, leveraging an understanding of the being of entities (for representational purposes in predicate logic).

Imagine if we assumed that the entities in question - red things like apples - were fully determined by how they were represented in predicate logic, this would equate every characteristic of a being with the being of its representation - and we would have the strict identity between the represented and the representation. That is the nature of the "reduction" I alluded to. The being of entities apprehended representationally is always present at hand - a know that - but the means of apprehension is different - a know how or a formation of it. This is not to say we can't have declarative knowledge regarding know how - but that strictly equating the represented with the representation is a metaphysical/ontological error.

Now, if we say that our knowledge of how red things are always coloured things is represented by the implication that red things are always coloured by including that as an argument premise, there is the question of the means of that representation and how it is is enabled through the "given" practical competences we leverage.

Heidegger situates his ontology in the "given" revealed by that gap between representations (outputs of representational behaviour) and the means of representation's leverage of know how. If you follow Dreyfus' take on Heidegger's Critique of Descartes, it isn't that present at hand is bad or wrong, it's that it's only part of the account of the being of entities which is over emphasised. One means of understanding them - as in there are others, and they are important. If you're familiar with Wittgenstein, it's a similar brand of error to using a word outside of its context without noticing the violence done to its meaning ("language running idle") - the error here being one of apprehension/theorising style, taking a present at hand mode of apprehension outside of its intended context and not noticing the violence done to its topics of concern (similar to hyper reflection in Merleau Ponty maybe).

Personally, I've been mostly separate from Heidegger study for a few years, and while I think the jargon can be stultifying the critique of Descartes he has is one of those ladders Wittgenstein spoke of. It should be climbed, but discarded after.

Edit: I should've mentioned, he has a book on logic, "Logic: The Question of Truth".

I've probably confused things a bit by talking about intentions. I'm trying to avoid the word 'ought' because it seems to beg the question. — Isaac

I think it's pretty close to question begging too. Moral imperatives show up as part of social contexts. Maybe one way of phrasing it is that function of social contexts comes along with a moral component - of commitments, responsibilities, duties, pledges, plans and attempts to change toward better functioning. If we look in an entirely external realm to social contexts for a validation procedure for our moral conduct, we're no longer attending to the nature of moral conduct.

Maybe inverting Heidegger is useful here (from SEP Heidegger article):

The second distinction between different kinds of inquiry, drawn within the category of the ontological, is between regional ontology and fundamental ontology, where the former is concerned with the ontologies of particular domains, say biology or banking, and the latter is concerned with the a priori, transcendental conditions that make possible particular modes of Being (i.e., particular regional ontologies).

Looking to an entirely external realm from social conduct for a validation procedure for our actions actually does violence to the very intelligibility of moral conduct, since it is social! In other words, moral conduct is part of the regional ontology of social life. Thus we should not go looking for moral values beyond this (rather vast) territory. Or expect that looking "beneath the hood" of the regional ontology of moral values into nature will sanctify any prescriptions based on accounts that come from looking beneath the hood.

I still think there is an intersection between our "indifferent nature" and moral conduct. If we didn't need food, we wouldn't have social means of resource access+distribution that are more or less adequate for our food/health needs, and we would not evaluate that adequacy based on morally inspired criteria. Negotiating those criteria is a moral+political problem.

I can definately go along with this, but only with the huge caveat that social facts also massively underdetermine. There is a huge quantity of moral dilemmas the resolution of which do not have existing social facts regarding them. My concern with moral realism is a political one really, a leveraging of the authority 'facts' carries to enforce socially novel, ideological moves. — Isaac

I think that underdetermination is radically anti-authoritarian, no? A social fact might engender that a person or institution acts in some way, but by itself it does not make that act satisfy any criteria other than those included within the behavioural commitments of the person or institution involved in the act. IE: "I did what I had to do because I thought it was right" always comes along with the possibility of critique. The question of identity between the social fact and the standard of moral evaluation that says the behavioural commitments that come with that social fact are always right will always be open since the sheer contextuality blocks the equivalence between what I did and what was "objectively" right; there will always be contextual defeaters that block the equation of what I did and The Good.

Which is why I was focusing on doing better; it's much easier to establish flaws and improvements to attempt than whether what one did was The Best Possible Thing in context. It will always be true that I can do better regardless of the context. Moral realism through trying to be less wrong.

What I'm trying to get at is whether a reached agreement is anything more than just a state if two parties having the same idea about what course of action will be tried next. — Isaac

I don't think that a course of action is specified in the agreement above. In my experience, whenever I should improve my conduct or avoid doing something based off of an agreement, the details of what to do are always left up to me. The agreement doesn't commit me to a specific course of action, just that I try something relevant and be more mindful.

he mere fact that you both agree about your intentions doesn't make those intentions objective, the just happen to coincide at that time. I may be missing the point, but it seems you might want to makevthe 'ought' objective by saying it's a property of the agreement (which is a state of the world) — Isaac

If you want to think of it as a property of the agreement, I think my point in that framing translates to it's a property of the agreement without which the agreement could not be understood. An agreement necessitates that it be followed. If the moral imperative to try and satisfy it wasn't a property of the agreement, it would not have been an agreement.

But it seems to me that that agreement is about the state of each other's minds (where the 'ought' resides), and so is only a temporary symmetry in an otherwise fluid landscape of mental states. — Isaac

The agreement isn't about her mind or my mind, it concerns how I treat her. Whether what I do succeeds or fails to satisfy the agreement (and brings about an improved relation between us) does not succeed or fail based upon my intentions or thoughts, it succeeds or fails based upon my change of conduct. The mind states don't suffice. Consider:

Partner: "You said you'd not take a bad day at work out on me any more."
Me: "Oh, I thought I was succeeding at that"
Partner: "You weren't."
Me: "No, you misunderstand, because I thought I was, I was."
Partner: "..."
Me: "If I think I'm not mistreating you, then I'm not mistreating you"
Partner: "You were very prickly just now."
Me: "So if you think I'm taking my day out on you, I am taking my day out on you. But if I think I'm not taking my day out on you, I still am taking my day out on you?"
Partner: "..."

The fluidity of that landscape requires that it is under-determined by the mental states of both me and my partner; it really depends upon a lot of contextual factors. We'd have to assess the situation, I'd have to trust that I was prickly, and maybe there's some factor that explains my partner's sensitivity on that day.

I think the broader point I'm making is that moral imperatives aren't mysterious things carved in stone tablets, nor are they properties of an indifferent nature, they're part of our social fabric. If we're willing to deflate morals into social facts, then we should treat them like social facts.

How does "my partner and I agree I should try to be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work" differ from "my partner and I agree I ought to try to be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work", and thus render the entailment a tautology? — Isaac

A reached agreement should be followed? Otherwise it's not an agreement.

As with other empirical knowledge, knowing facts about the way people make moral evaluations can help you anticipate moral attitudes and predict moral conduct in other people and even in yourself, but that knowledge cannot tell you what you ought to do - not without some bridge principles or intuitions. — SophistiCat

And you find it unpersuasive that the event corresponding to "my partner and I agree I should try to be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work" entails that I ought to try and satisfy the agreement? I think the bridge from what we do to what we ought to try is already operative within what we do as implicature. What would (A) "my partner and I agree I should try and be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work" mean if it did not entail (as implicature) that (B) I ought to try and be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work? I suggest that the use of (A) requires moral commitments like (B), on pain of (A) not meaning the same thing as it does. What more is required?

The main point for an objectivist (and I hope and think most of us are objectivists) is that nothing is ever right just because someone thinks it is right. — Congau

I mean only what's also called "moral universalism", which is just the claim that, for any particular event, in its full context, there is some moral evaluation of that event in that context that it is correct for everyone to make, i.e. that the correct moral evaluation doesn't change depending on who is making it. — Pfhorrest

Broad agreement with those things. Will have a go at saying what I think about ethics and meta-ethics in general.

There is an argument that goes; (1) moral evaluations depend upon minds and mind derived structures, therefore (2) there are no objective imperatives. I agree with the premise and the conclusion (with some qualifications), but think the implication from (1)=>(2) is false.

Regarding the premise: I find the observation that moral evaluations vary with culture and upbringing persuasive - so I'd agree that moral evaluations depend upon social facts. But that dependence strongly underdetermines moral conduct.

By moral conduct, I mean actions undertaken by agents which have intelligible proximate consequences for self and others that depend upon both what the act is and how the act is done. By moral evaluations, I mean any judgement concerning the adequacy of moral conduct by any standard. In that vocabulary. I believe culture is a strong influence on the distal causes of moral evaluation but not on the proximate consequences of the moral conduct those evaluations concern. For example, a religion might tell you abortion is wrong, but it won't force your hand into disowning your daughter for having one. There are always relevant contextual factors that shape moral evaluations that are not fully specified by the culture the moral conduct is embedded within. In other words culture facilitates standards of evaluation, rather than fully specifying any instance of evaluation. The standard is a mere part of judgement.

It is also worth lingering a minute on the impersonal character of social facts. The existence of Amazon the company existentially depends upon the collective action of humans, but it does not depend existentially upon the individual action of individual humans. It does not disappear if an individual ceases to have it in mind, it does not cease to exist when unwatched. It only ceases to exist if it ceases to function as an institution. That old Philip K. Dick quote about reality applies to institutions as much as it applies to nature; "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.". Emphasis on the "you".

So I characterize the dependence of moral evaluations upon minds as really being the dependence of moral evaluations on social facts. So I agree with premise (1) in this aspect. Another caveat I have is that social facts; like institutions; can be moral agents. This because their agents' aggregate actions have intelligible proximate consequences for themselves and others; their conduct is moral conduct as previously defined. If something's conduct is moral conduct, I believe it should be characterised as an agent and vice versa.

Because social facts; like institutions; partake in and structure the terrain of moral conduct, there is no problem of bridging the "is" of the universe's indifference + social mores to the "oughts" of what we do. Is and ought already intermingle when normativity is involved. In other words, since moral conduct's character depends upon social facts, we and our evaluations already operate on one side of the split. A stone tablet does not need to care about the commandments installed upon it, only we do. And we do. That we evaluate conduct in a manner constrained by social facts short circuits the need for a Platonic Good to sanctify our evaluations using an indifferent nature in the same breath as it undermines the relevance of the non-social to our conduct; which is always already social insofar as it can be subject to moral evaluation. All human conduct is the terrain to which moral evaluation is applied, and moral evaluation is part of that terrain. ("It is wrong to consider abortion wrong!")

There is then the question of the nature of this underdetermination of moral evaluation by social facts; what remains after stipulating that the social circumstance has an average shape. Fixing the social ontology we inhabit still leaves a broad domain of variation which we navigate in day to day life. An example; a shit day at work might make me prickly with my partner when I return home, but the facts of the shit day don't determine the specifics of how I treat her. And those specifics are, for the most part, what we live in.

When we go sufficiently fine grained that we've fixed societal structure, cultural structure, and even the antecedent/proximate events of our conduct - there is still moral evaluation to be done. If I call my partner names and take my day out on her, I would regret it. We would both agree that I could have treated her better. That is, it is a fact that I could've treated her better. So I would try to. So I agree with (2) insofar as it concerns purported context invariant "oughts" that apply to actions, but only because doing better is both contextual and a matter of an agent's skill. Objectivity in that sense sets the bar much higher than the demands that require us to do better.

Unfortunately, the resources available to us for such problems are rather limited; we can't discern The Optimal Way to act from the suite of apprehensions, misapprehensions, errors and cognitive blindspots we bring with us into everyday life. But that doesn't make "I could've done better" any less true; just makes doing better a difficult matter of improvisation, bodging, checking and negotiation.

That invites a problematic of moral character; how can one live so as to make that process of failing forward more adapted to the needs of those whom the moral conduct proximally effects? Which is simultaneously an intellectual endeavour - you gotta know what you need to try next and for who - and an empirical one - you gotta find out how and why you fail. What I will do depends on how I think, but those thoughts do not brand what I do as an improvement with necessity (given sufficient fixing of context). That connection between thought and improvement of moral conduct is a matter of moral character. Which is learnable, since it consists in the execution of skills; knowing how to read a situation, knowing what's relevant and irrelevant to improving your conduct, knowing how to enact the improvements so thought. Kairos is always matter of the right thing at the right time in the context, and "universalising" such a thing makes it about the agent (character) than the act (conduct). We cannot and should not expect the right thing at the right time to be the right thing for all time and all contexts.

The inherently contextual nature of moral conduct gives moral evaluation constraints to remain within the same context while evaluating - you have to ensure you're dealing with the problem on its own terms. Evaluating something's moral conduct can only be done while retaining enough of the context's social ontology to make failure and success states meaningful. "Should Mechanical Turk have some kind of labour protections?" should not be answered with "But what if Amazon never existed?"; the social facts and antecedent that make the evaluation make sense cannot be varied arbitrarily without making a nonsense of any moral evaluation. It is required that we think sufficiently proximately for the conduct in question, though there is a lot of leeway in that. "Should Mechanical Turk have some kind of labour protections?" may be answered with "No labour protections should be required for any job in a private business, outside of what is agreed in contract with the employers" and "Yes, but labour protections would undermine the very operation of Mechanical Turk - its business model requires that contractors be compensated at well below poverty rates". Similar to Anscombe's examples regarding owing someone money in a shop; it is true that one ought to pay the cashier (given the context's social facts). I doubt there can be a complete classification for what parts of the social ontology can be varied without making category errors for arbitrary conduct, but I believe it is a reasonable principle regardless.

I didn't! I get scared when racist demagogues who've recently sent federal troops to suppress protests start talking about postponing elections...

Oh god.

From time to time someone asks something about math or logic without good math background about an issue that he or she is obviously interested, but doesn't have much knowledge about the subject. Many times, and I would say luckily, there is someone on the Forum who reads thoroughly the OP, shows what is wrong in the thinking if there is indeed something wrong. And again luckily, this response is better than just "You are wrong, learn math." Naturally as this is the internet, the person doesn't understand that he or she is talking to some assistant professor or masters degree student in math who knows the subject, and will likely get angry and not believe he or she has made any mistake and will strawman something to "win" the debate. But that hardly matters. The main point is that the person has gotten a well thought answer as this community would also point out if the counterargument has holes in the argumentation too. Hence if someone puts out an OP about math or logic and gets replies that don't refute it, I can gather then that person has made some valid point. (Of course if there are zero replies, that tells something...) — ssu

The deck is really stacked in mathematics+logics' favour when comparing it to politics. There's a background that fixes the meaning of terms, common associations of concepts and even the flow of argument in mathematics and logic. Even the common errors made are well understood (see @jorndoe's recent thread on 0.999...=1). That shared background which can be presumed given competence makes discussion regarding it more structured, and errors show up as errors upon that background. The discussion is (usually) about one topic with a definite character - the fixity of mathematical meaning (given competence) shows up in the talk about it as a common departure point (given competence).

Now a topic like politics is surely totally different, yet if someone takes the effort to really show why he or she disagrees with something someone has written, explains just why he or she opposes the view or conclusion, it really isn't futile if the someone doesn't make the other to change their views. The importance is that a counterargument has been made and each member reading the thread can then come to their own conclusions. We won't likely change each others views, but we can show what the issue is about. — ssu

Contrast politics. There's much less shared background like in the above talk. A shared background fixes the meaning of terms and common associations, but the really important contrast (I think) with maths chat above is that the shared background in mathematics talk fixes the distinctions between the terms and concepts, politics doesn't have that. Here's an example.

If you're one of the forum's hard leftists, you probably don't see much distinction between a conservative (Tory party or Republican) and a liberal (Labour party or Democract), to you the distinction doesn't make too much difference except maybe on cultural issues. They're both centrist ideologies, and get aggregated together as different species of liberal. This isn't a new pattern, Phil Ochs wrote a song about it some time in the 60's or 70's. If you're a centrist, you will see a massive difference between Republican or Tory style policies and Democrat or Labour style policies. Trump's a good contrast case - the hard left recognised his ur-fascist tendencies a long time ago, the liberal left has a similar narrative regarding him ("The extremists are the base now!" and moderate republicans keep supporting him out of party loyalty), but his supporters see him as an emblem that fights corruption ("drain the swamp!") and the deleterious effects of globalisation/immigration on Average Americans. They also believe he will remedy the encroachment of the state since the Obama years. Simultaneously, Make America Great again is a signifier of a return to threatened values (rugged individualism against state encroachment, cultural traditionalism against globalise+integrate).

But we don't do that if we just stop the discussion and declare someone a troll or if we stop reading if the person references person X. Not to give the reasoned answer is the way the discourse generates. Then the next stage is "Oh God, it's that fdrake again, nope, I won't even read what he says". — ssu

So then I guess we've gotta talk about the polarisation of discourse. I don't actually see it as a "bad thing" (TM), I think social media has made people much more responsive and aware of the structure+function of political ideology. To save you from reading the entire linked paper, here are the key thrusts of it:

(1) Political ideology is omnipresent.
(2) Political ideology is correlational/associational rather than syllogistic.
(3) Political ideology is a population level structure of clusters of opinion havers rather than an individual level one of opinion havers within those clusters.
(4) Economic opinion and cultural opinion correlate - they are not useful categories to bin opinion into for explanatory purposes when considering ideology.
(4a) The nature of this correlation is that "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" is not actually a thing on the population level; the desire for an authoritarian state correlates well with the desire for a freer market, the desire for a non-authoritarian state correlates well with a desire for state intervention in markets. If you don't believe me, please read the paper, it's strongly data driven, so it's not a priori speculation. The study was of people in the US, but I do think it generalizes to the UK and even here to Norway (the religious right party is authoritarian and anti-immigrant and wants less tax in the usual ways people on the right want less tax)

My take on how this relates to engagement in social media (including the forum) is that individuals approximate the value judgements of the population they're in; so when you consume political discussion on these media you're taking a sample of individual values without sampling the reasoning from one point to another. On the population level, what reasons a person has for linking their beliefs+values is simply a force of association between them - another species of correlation between held values in the population. It's not that they don't matter, it's that they matter much less than the association of values that frame someone's worldview, and we both agree that you're not gonna change someone's values through any "intervention of reason", like a forum post. That'd be changing the background. So when you engage you're sampling from the correlation structure of values over people rather than reasons within people. What shows up as "a lack of reasoning" and "the inability to debate" are actually symptoms of ideological differences that our engagement style has adapted to, and what shows up as the alleged inability to attend to anothers' arguments is actually the difference of the individual's views from the population as sampling noise on the background of the structure of ideology which everyone is intimately familiar with. No one is as distinct from their ideological milieu as we believe we are. @Madworld1's values show up as my dogwhistles, my values probably show up as their emotional triggered snowflake virtue signalling (judging by how it usually goes!). That condition is the background we share.

Edit: I think the ludicrous excesses of cancelling are that feeding back into itself; the expected signal from the background ideology gets propagated with information loss, people see the propagations and propagate with information loss... When it badly misfires, it trends to a outputting statements of that ideology's concept of opposition without any signal regarding the target's views.

So it's not a lack of awareness or skill or willingness, it's a good adaptation to the discursive structure of ideology. That all said, I don't really buy that political discussion is more polarised than it used to be, I think rather that what people attribute to "the polarisation of discourse" is better explained by a greater practical knowledge of the discursive structure of ideology I gestured to above. It isn't about reasons, it's about associations. An individual's political opinions are mostly leaves drifting in ideological streams. "us vs them" and "the degeneration of discourse" are whistles that signal to me naivety regarding the discursive structure of ideology - conflict's never been about reasons, and reasoning has never been enough. Now "us vs them" looks like political correctness to some, jingoism to others.

We could talk about why it's so bloody angry, but this post is already extremely long. Mark Blyth does a much better job of it than I could.

And if I have knee jerk reactions, why not make the case that I have here or there a knee jerk response and perhaps I should think it over. — ssu

What do you actually imagine is happening when you think about the degeneration of discourse?

Well you had offered an example of what I was talking about so I pointed it out. Im not backing down, like I said I think you were functioning that way in that instance. Sure, it could be me tomorrow. We must be vigilant against our monkey brains. — DingoJones

I don't think anything to do with human nature is a good explanation of why (allegedly) people have forgotten how to have Deep And Meaningful Conversations About Politics. This is because human nature has been constant for, conservatively, about 20,000 years and The Grand Degradation Of Political Discussion has occurred within the last 30. Variations over time with don't correlate with constants.

So I'm surely justified in reading what you're saying regarding human "tribal nature" as tangential; if it concerns fundamental aspects human nature it's a poor explanation for a post-internet development. Or alternatively it's allusive hyperbole.

My awareness of that is helpful to overcome it and sharing that awareness is intended to help discourse in general, or at least point out the problem others seem to fail to recognise. — DingoJones

If I understand you right, you are saying "BE MORE NUANCED FUCKERS, OVERCOME HUMAN NATURE".

I genuinely look forward to long thoughtful answers that I can learn something from. I've learnt much from people in this sight, so I do respect them. So I don't get your point. — ssu

Me too. That's why I use this forum so much and don't engage with social media much at all. But this forum effectively functions as a windbag's Youtube comment section in terms of the substantive content defended on political issues. It's a more academic form of the vampire castle, but add conservatives to the mix. I'm sure you agree that posters' politics as it manifests on the forum fits into the easy trope boxes for the most part, and we constantly play out that drama.

That great, then. Such self-criticism is good, because typically people see them as being the reasonable people and others being tribal. — ssu

That's how we reasonable people think about it eh?

It's funny you say that, given that your head seem so far up your ass it's coming out your mouth causing a paradox of implosion. You seem to be implying that you too argue like a "reasonable human being" - that's almost objectively laughable, by any standard. There aren't enough words in Latin and Ancient Greek combined to name the fallacies going on in this thread, let alone in your unintelligible rambles. Pointing out my own fallacious mishaps will add to this last point I’ll make in this filter bubble of a thread: — MadWorld1

So, why do you think the nuclear family is under threat?

It wasnt my intention to characterise you in general as a primitive “us vs them” person acting out biological tribalism, but rather to point out an instance of what I was talking about when I referenced the “minefield” of trigger words, ideas and opinions. — DingoJones

But what's the model of me in that? I'm quite happy to be seen as a stimulus->response machine of triggered by problematicness->woke signaling, you don't have to back down from the commitment because it's offensive. Maybe I really was functioning like that, maybe you are!

Anyway, I hope that clarifies things a bit. Im not saying you are a fool but I do think you responded to the phrase “us vs them” rather than the substance of what I said. (Which I admit, I could have been more clear about). — DingoJones

It's funny really, you expected me not to be responding to the substance of what you're saying, so you responded in kind. You were triggered by the expectation I was triggered! Whereas I believe I am responding to the substance of what you're saying, I just don't think you know how your speech functions in the context you're deriding. The mob mentality sub-discussion is a popular trope in the discourse you're deriding and really only makes sense in terms of it. As does the "both sides have good points, come together!" narrative @ssu favours. Both forms of a principle of sufficient talking which is symptomatic of the degeneration of discourse. I think you're underestimating how complicit and embedded in the discourse you're criticizing you are; to the extent you're making standard moves in it but still believe you're outside of it.

Well, I have a mostly pop-sci "knowledge" of QM, my college physics being too rusty to be of much use, but as far as I know the "pilot wave" of Bohmian mechanics would make measurements deterministic - except, of course, being hidden, it is not part of the measurement. And MWI says that the full wavefunction evolution is deterministic (as the Schrodinger equation shows), but we can only measure one of its eigenvalues at a time, since our subjective state in which the measurement outcome is recorded doesn't encompass the full quantum state. If you perform successive measurements on identically prepared systems, the branching wavefunction will leave a trail of random results in each individual branch, even though across all of the branches every set of measurement outcomes will be the same. — SophistiCat

AFAIK the Schrodinger equation's time evolution is deterministic, but that doesn't make the states deterministic. The states are samples from probability distributions . It might be that someone can declare some aspect of the randomness "unphysical" and salvage a global determinism (if only we had (blah) we'd determine the output states!). I don't really know enough about it.

I am saying that if it did, we wouldn't know it just from this one sampling. We might guess that it looks suspiciously like the digits of pi, for example (if we were lucky to sample from the already calculated range), but such numerology is perilous — SophistiCat

I'm reading this as a claim that there's some source that determines the observed quantum states deterministically, it's simply that we don't (or cannot) know the behaviour of the source? Analogously, Pi's digits pass tests for statistical randomness, but they're determined given a way to arbitrarily accurately evaluate Pi.

is born of the primitive tribalism evolution has equipped us with rather than for a good, rational reason — DingoJones

I think you underestimate people. Or mischaracterize them.

All I had to do was use a trigger phrase “us vs them” and you ignored whatever context I used in favour of this preconceived context of simplistic judgement to make a point about glass houses. — DingoJones

I did read the rest of your post. I just didn't understand that you were meaning literally a return to a mythical tribal mindset that allegedly facilitated inter-tribal war. I still suspect that you don't actually really believe we're returning to a warring tribal society fighting over exactly why Kanye is problematic, and that your meaning is mostly hyperbole by means of allusion.

My point is actually shown well with your response. All I had to do was use a trigger phrase “us vs them” and you ignored whatever context I used in favour of this preconceived context of simplistic judgement to make a point about glass houses. No glass house here. — DingoJones

So you're quite happy to characterize me based off of an alleged trigger response, when you could've asked what I actually thought. Instead of doing so, you have lumped me in with the people who follow the simplistic "us vs them" dynamic, and are making an example of me as one of those fools you're so much better than. Great! Now we're both on the same lowbrow page!

And is it just talk talk? Nothing is overcome just by talking but by real actions. Centrist views are viewed as a losing argument that "cave in" to the wrong side. As if people wouldn't have strong opinions. Or as some in another thread one PF member viewed with disgust the idea of consensus. . — ssu

For both of you, "us vs them" is a caricature - it's one of those floating signifiers with a nebulously defined referent. The predominant use of "us vs them" is to do precisely what you both are doing, declaring yourselves as paragons of courtly reason and measured opinion over and above those plebs like me who only have knee jerk reactions.

The problem with this being that "both sides" agree with you that there is a "tribal mindset" and a disastrous "us vs them" dynamic, and the entire point of using the "us vs them" group membership signifier is a total subversion of its meaning. You're both reasoning from on high, lamenting the degeneration of discourse, and if only everyone else agreed with you on how to conduct debate in less than 120 characters the world would be a much better place. It's THEM that need to accommodate YOU. You're both actually internal to this process, rather than outside of it. Distancing yourself from the reactionary nature of discourse through superficial reaction is part of its movement.

I think you've got a choice; acknowledge the degeneration of discourse you condemn and work within it - both sides allegedly say "the other side is unreasonable and won't compromise", so that strategy is out of the window. Or alternatively acknowledge that you're both moments of superficial reactionary discourse, only the bemoaning the superficial reactionary discourse flavour. (Psst, it tastes like over boiled vegetables)

Us, we who do not do the "us vs them", are so much better than them, those who do "us vs them".

Fdrake, for Americans their biggest threat is their antagonistic partisan ideologues dominating every sphere of policy discussion and hence crippling the ability to make drastic changes. — ssu

The biggest problem in American politics is that there is no political neutral ground...

Basically the whole thing is meant to divide the people, it is meant to be divisive. The objective is to turn you against each other, not to find the obvious common causes that people both on the left and the right would agree on, like that the political system is corrupt and geared for the extremely rich or that the health care system is hideously expensive. Or that excessive use of force by police is a problem and something ought to be done about it. — ssu

So let's talk about the neutral ground. Yes, there are political opportunities, but they are not discursive ones.

In other words; you acknowledge the pervasiveness of ideology and how powerful it is, but you simultaneously do not critique it and simply hope that people will be able to overcome it through sufficient talking. That "principle of sufficient talking" is ultimately just ideology too; who're we talking to and what will be done? Talk, just talk.

I think that many refer also to the economic environment, or with minorities incarceration rates etc. Marriage and getting children is a financial issue also. — ssu

Absolutely. But you're still thinking about it like a reasonable human being and not an ideologue. If you're on the right and supporting Trump and talking about the "threats to the nuclear family", are you going to think about social policy that removes stressors from (potential) households and provides resource access + stability, or are you condemning single mums for being horribly irresponsible welfare queens with one side of your mouth and railing on sexual degeneracy on the other? It's the latter.

I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and assume that it's code word for being against same-sex marriage and same-sex parents. — Michael

Yes. But also more. These conservative talking points don't function like actual policy suggestions, they're signifiers that condense and reaffirm a worldview. The nuclear family is under threat by sexually degenerate relationships between parents, but also single parenthood; and it's not because single parenthood correlates with poverty, it's that single parents are welfare queens and can't possibly transmit "our cultural values" to their children while being such scroungers.

They'll look at @ssu's graph about poverty and marriage and treat marriage, the individual choice of fidelity and commitment, as the causal factor to be manipulated in solving the problem. But no matter what you do, you're not gonna be able to make kids' welfare - dependent upon the functioning of parents' relationship - better by making people marry or stay married, it's the social problems that inflate the risk of trauma, relationship breakdown, single parenthood and poverty together. Keeping a contract signed between parents is just a bit of paper.

What makes it worse is that the sheer unreasonableness of this structure will be blamed on whoever points it out, rather than on the person who's using the stupid talking points as described. *sniff sniff* Pure ideology.

Basically the correlation between single parenthood and poverty. — ssu

I really really wish that was what was engendered by "the nuclear family is under threat", however it absolutely is not.

So what's the solution? MadWorld1, how would a President like Trump (rather than like Biden) help prevent single parenthood? Require single women to have abortions? Require fathers to marry their child's mother? — Michael

The obvious answer is that Trump is heavily committed towards taking funding from police and military budgets and creating social programs, good quality cheap housing and good quality education in poor communities + instituting or raising a living minimum wage.

Oh wait, no. That's absolutely not what he's about. Good question!

Kindergartens, schools, grandparents and the extended family is of course very typical. — ssu

Very typical because it's socially necessary. How's anyone expected to juggle kids and all the other responsibilities they have? Especially when you've gotta do those other responsibilities to take care of the kids.

Of course then being against alternative families is a bit different: just saying that nuclear families are important doesn't mean that you are against alternative families. — ssu

When someone believes the nuclear family is under threat, what threats do you think they're imagining? Hint: it's absolutely nothing to do with nurseries, schools and close friends + family helping out with raising kids. The "nuclear family" already requires alloparenting networks, one wonders if alloparenting isn't a threat (indeed, is socially necessary), what possibly could be...

It's about "family values", you don't want your kid becoming one of those degenerates. Or horrible virtue signalling (dog whistles) regarding "single mums" (old welfare queen shit).

:up:

The nuclear family is neither sufficient nor necessary for well adjusted adults.