I don't think "greater good" is entirely reducible to pain, value-qualia or something like a primordial actuality... it also has to do with the identity and meaning we give to our lives. This is I'd say what is missing in most of these account, we are also beings who live in societies, have certain roles to play, identities to assume, societal goals to reach etc... all of which give our lives meaning. And this is what determines morality for the most part. Ofcourse some of this bigger story will be determined by these value-qualia to some extend, but I don't think you can skip straight past this bigger picture from value-qualia to morality and still have something that would be remotely the same. — ChatteringMonkey

Frankly, I don't see your position on this. Do you think there is something of the "identity and meaning we give to our lives" that intervenes between you and the screaming pain? Do you think pain is an interpretative event?

How about injuries to one's body that are intended as part of the greater good? Think, for example, of that mountainhiker who fell into a crevice, got stuck, and cut off his arm in order to free himself and get out. — baker

Of course I know this case. And the greater good is certainly a moral priority. But the metaethical question is begged: What do you mean by "good"? For this, one has to go to the source, the primordial actuality, the "intuition" of pain or bliss and everything in between, the raw thereness, the value qualia--just take a hammer, bring it down hard on your kneecap and observe. You are not facing a fact, a caring, a negative judgment, an aversion, a denunciation, a condemnation, and so on. What is that there, in your midst, that screaming pain "itself"?

False. I think it's very clear that badness is contextual. Murder is bad, killing in self defense is not for example. Similarly, torturing a child is not bad, if they are a child of Satan. — khaled

Yes, I know. One does have to look more closely at the argument. I am not arguing that the judgment against the child isn't a contingent matter. I am arguing that such cases are not, qua ethical, analytically simpliciter. You may say that it is right to torture the child of Satan because s/he is a child of Satan, by definition evil, and therefore evil is what is deserved. But this has no place in these thoughts here.

Here, we are examining the anatomy of an ethical act, judgment. There are usual suspects, the contingencies that are complex and are responsible for much of the messiness of our world, and it is this that brings ethical ambiguity into our lives. But here, I am doing what Kant did with reason and judgment: Abstracting from the many convolutions of disagreements in our everyday lives and giving analysis to determine its basic structures and contents. So, put aside all that is there in the complexity of ethical problems, and ask, what makes this ethical at all? It is here that the metaethical makes an appearance. It is wrong to torture others for fun, say. But this "wrongness" looks to the nature of torture, the pain itself which is the basis of the ethical in actuality, apart from how it fits into the many complexities. THIS pain as such is an absolute in the what I will call "pure injunction" against inflicting it.

Is it more important to understand love or experience it? You will come to understand that love is quite understandable and acts in quite irrational ways. However, no matter how irrational it might seem, love will always confirm the perfection of life. — Thinking

But to understand is to deliver one from the nonsense that would otherwise define it. Look at the understanding as a kind of jnana yoga (as I do): is it first a pragmatic function that brings clarity, that prevents one from holding crazy beliefs and committing atrocities in the name of love. But there is also the Kantian insight: As integrated agencies, we are bound together by logic and language, keeping in mind that such things are in themselves transcendental: I use logic, a recall memories within the structures of logic and solve problems and even have a sense of self in logic, but the nature of logic is utterly alien to me. The nature of all things is transcendental.

Having said this, I agree with everything you said.

To the extent that I understand, I fully agree that the self is intimately tied to ethics as nowhere else is responsibility as central and as critical as in ethics and responsibility is all about the so-called self. — TheMadFool

I would add that ethics is a thing of parts. On the one hand, there are the entanglements of our affairs, which is all you might find in Wittgenstein's great book of facts (Lecture on Ethics); on the other, there are the concrete actualities that are in the middle to these entanglements, the pains and joys themselves, looked at phenomenologically, released from the many contingencies and contexts that might otherwise possess them.

The facts are not incidental to ethics, some are scientific, fixed and abstract, like the Earth being closer to the Sun than Mars, they also vary across the board between people, cultures, principles, and so on, as in the "fact" that marriage stabilizes relationships; however, they are incidental to metaethics: the reality, if you will, behind our ethical entanglements, our arguments about the shoulds and shouldn'ts in this or that situation, that which all the fuss is about, is value, and its "thing itself" dimension, metavalue: The badness of the "ouch!"

Of course, such bads and goods are an integral part of experience. Even as I type, I have interest, concern, there are worries in the background, and so on. This the reality of the self that "shows" itself through its "value qualia" and is the genuine object of inquiry into the nature of the self.

You can intellectualize all you want about love. But, you would still not understand it. To understand it you must experience it, hence it is termed "Mysticism" — Thinking

Experience it will not get you understanding. The understanding is not structured for this; it is rather a tool that has one function: to solve problems. Love is not the goal of the understanding, for the understanding cares about nothing. It is OUR goal, the extraordinary presence that beckons beyond the everydayness we are so invested in. Love is the desideratum that exceeds the desire. (You might want to check out Levinas's Totality and Infinity: an opaque, difficult thing to read, but once you are in it, it will destroy dogmas and orthodoxies.

Do either of you see a tension between "most of our engagements with the world are (prelinguistic)" and "I agree, and those engagements target statements"? — fdrake

One source of tension is rather obvious: Talk about what is prelinguistic is done IN language and logic, that is, is propositional, and what can logic and language "say" about things outside of logic and language? Didn't Wittgenstein warn us about this? But this tension has not at all gone unnoticed. Hermeneutics is the only recourse. It is the deferential nature of the meanings of terms, and this runs smack into Derrida, doesn't it?

It isn't spelled out in what makes an utterance true, it can only be spelled out in terms of its expected effects and motivations. — fdrake

Expected effects is what truth "really" is about? I think if you map out the lived landscape, insert that all that is there is a kind of, well, "thereING" rather than simply "there" then whatever you think about truth, knowledge, reality, ethics, aesthetics, mind is going to have to be reconstrued, for there is now a new foundational term in play: time. The pragmatists talked like this long ago (see Dewey, Peirce, James). Meaning is bound to doing, concepts are dynamic events, truth is, as you say, the expected effect.
So to say, "the contents of belief is propositional" puts the question to the basic assumptions about what a proposition is, and if a proposition is understood in terms of "consummatory events" (Dewey), i.e., the completion of a problem solving affair (See his Art As Experience: the organism approaches the obstacle, feels its way around, searching for a resolution, finds passage; then onward through, having the solution's details now incorporated into future possibilities) then herein lies the understanding! Of course, the content is full, rich, powerful: this goes to value, for value is the essence of caring about this. What is value? This is about metavalue, which I wont' go into unless you want to, but I say it moves the discussion to value because the content is, of course, not discussable. Presence qua presence cannot be spoken, and if the understanding is all about pragmatics, what we call reality, truth and the rest is really ready-to-hand instrumentality of Being in the world.
I read Rorty, Dewey and Heidegger as talking about essentially the same kind of analysis of knowledge, though Heidegger is much more interesting.

as with logic — Constance

Sorry, this should read: Just like it is with logic. the point being that Wittgenstein saw that certain themes in philosophy are simply pseudo themes, like metaethics or metalogic. The are off the grid.

Well, I'm not sure about that. From the perspective of someone who most of us would think is a selfish asshole, simply not being the kid in question renders their torture ethically neutral. But I'm a relativist, so I would say that. That's the contingent set of circumstances, the fact that I (i.e. selfish asshole bert1) could have been the kid, but phew!, I'm not. — bert1

But you are being called upon to remove your being the kid, not being the kid, being selfish, and so on. These are quite out of consideration, for the argument looks directly to, and only to, the pain simplciter. THAT pain is not diminished. If you don't care because you are, as you say, selfish, you are looking in the wrong place: Your regard for others doesn't matter. Consider this an argument about value qualia. Qualia is usually just easily dismissible (see Dennett, e.g.), note what qualia is supposed to be: the simpliciter "presence" of color or the sound, and nothing more. Here,. it is the same.

Of course there are. Especially if they’re religious. Those can mitigate the badness of anything. But thankfully I don’t agree with any of them and I hope no one here does either. — khaled

No, I say rather firmly on this. What is mitigated is not the inherent badness of the torture of the the one child: the thumbscrews still are equal in there pain production, and the pain production is not one whit diminished. It stands outside the ethical dilemma, as an independent, unalterable, for the badness in play is not contextual, does not depend on anything form its being bad. This is the point.

In a forum discussion long ago, someone proposed to have solved this problem by pointing out that ethics was originally a part of aesthetics, and that it was aesthetics that dictates what is ethical.
How do you feel about this? — baker

We know where this comes from, Wittgenstein in his Lecture on Ethics (Tractatus, too). Ethics and aesthetics are value themes, and at the center of value is what Witt thought has no place at all in discussion, which is Moore's non natural property. Mackie thinks like, is influenced by, Witt, and they are both wrong: In the proffered idea above, the one thing that stands out is this: take the extreme example of a finger put to flame and abstract from this the ethical, well, "badness", and I mean badness simpliciter. All that could be predicated of the event removed, the physical observables, the evolutionist's claim that pain is conducive to survival and reproduction, the possible ethical contexts, the regard one might have toward the event (all of which beg the question: Oh, you are averse to having your finger in the flame, you abhor it, denounce it, are disgusted by it, and so on...The question begged being about the unexamined value simpliciter: the literal horrible suffering event unnamed; or, the value qualia of pain, if you prefer). Remove all that falls safely within the boundaries of standard meaningful utterances, and there is the residual ethical; the metaethical, which isn't as "meta" as one thinks
Flaming fingers are not like the "facts of the world" as Witt noted regarding his great book of facts, facts like Mars being closer to the Sun than Jupiter or that my shoe is untied. All are equal, AS facts, according to Witt, and value never reveals itself sufficiently, as with logic, to discuss its nature, and thsi is true! BUT: It does reveal in its nature very explicitly, with the sharpest "presence" possible, the injunction not to do something (as well as to do something, on th e positive side of the metaethical).

And you arguing that belief content is a broader semantic category - I don't know what kind of things you throw in it, other than that it can be "pre-linguistic" - and so since not all of that content is even "linguistic" (presumably not all words or symbols, I don't know where you come from on this), not all of that content can be propositional; since propositions must be linguistic. — fdrake

I found this point about belief being a broader semantic category to be closer to the truth. Just make an observation of one's own, if you will, ready-to-hand "belief" that the cup is on the table. The semantics, that is, the meaning, of spontaneous, unreflected passive affirmation is not explicit at all. It is in the fluid affair of grabbing the cup while reading, adjusting the light, checking the time and so forth. One can hardly call this propositional, only dispositionally propositional; and even when attention turns towards the cup which, say, spills, the "the cup is on the table and it spilled" proposition is certainly not entertained at all. The entire event is a seamless, propositionless doing. I do think we are in a cat's world of prereflective engagement.

As to the content: mostly pragmatic, like walking down the street, each step assumes a secure landing, and the implicit "belief" that is dispositionally "behind" this, stands at the ready if one is called upon to speak, or if one commences to think things out. Language and its propositions stands apart from the execution.

Prelinguistic? Pragmatics is this, and most of our engagements in the world are like this.

Beliefs as mental states/dispositions with content vs beliefs as holding some statement to be true. Issues there might be: is a disposition towards a state of affairs the same as an attitude towards a statement? — fdrake

A disposition towards some state of affairs: this disposition presents itself as a conditional "if...then.." which is a pragmatic construction. Dispositions are anticipatory and language and logic merely formalizes this.

All such claims miss the point rather dramatically, which is to be expected from analytic philosophers. They hover over a problem on wings of categorial thinking (minimal moral realism??? you're kidding, right? I know you're not) having fun mingling logic and concepts, never touching the ground. Mackie and others needs to, perhaps, spend (well, he's no longer a living person) time in a Roman dungeon before he realizes that the world is, as Kierkegaard put it, qualitatively distinct from armchair theory.

Love is the primal essence of everythin — Thinking

Is this true? I wonder if you would put some meant on this. Not that I disagree, at all. But it is stated, not argued, that is, justified. I think for starters, one has to examine love. How is this an absolute?

I guess I don't understand this. The whole idea here rests with theism, but it is not open to a discussion to what this can meaningfully be about? Doesn't this trivialize the argument down to a simple logical play?

the world around us is physical, — Manuel

I have no idea what the term "physical" means. I take it to be a nonsense word, but a convenient place holder for as assumed stability.

But the easy problem has no merit in its explanatory explanatory basis. Such things do not touch ontology.

Metaethics? No more non existent than any given empirical concept. Indeed, more real than these.

Beliefs as mental states/dispositions with content vs beliefs as holding some statement to be true. Issues there might be: is a disposition towards a state of affairs the same as an attitude towards a statement? What role do t-sentences play in that account?

To me, the whole matter has to be reconstrued. Don't know if you will appreciate this. If not, then that's fine.

I abide by the pragmatist's hypothetical deductive account of belief: Prior to an affirmation, there is an predisposition to affirm. What is this if not a disposition towards a state of affairs, as you say? But does this stand clearer analysis? I affirm, after all, in time. Can the temporality of the affirmation's nature be analyzed? This goes not just to propositions, but to concepts, as all concepts are inherently propositional: so what is, say, nitroglycerin? We define this as a pragmatic, temporal structure of the conditional form: Nitro is, "If N is impacted with force F, then it will explode." Nitro is also, "If N is combined with chemical C, then result R will occur"; and so on, and so on.

All concepts have this form, and therefore all beliefs have this form. We live our everyday lives in the temporal dynamics of, to put it is Dewey's terms, the consummatory successes of problems solved. Language itself is constructed in a complex series of successful problem solving events whereby signifiers (sounds) and their signifieds (concepts) are matched with their objective counterparts which are achieved by hearing sounds, witnessing associations and assimilating models of language behavior in the environment.

But what does this do for belief being propositional? Well, it presents an understanding of beliefs and propositions that does not recognize the distinction. Propositional affirmations and beliefs are reduced consummations of problems solved. "My cat is on the rug" is true by virtue of a body of anticipations regarding rugs, cats, the copula 'is', the the ascription of properties, etc., which are themselves all confirmed in their repeatable behaviors. Knowledge that there is a sidewalk that will sustain my steps is a science experiment at every step, consummated, and this and a great number of other pragmatically based assumptions about sidewalks is what a sidewalk IS; this collective of pragmatic assumptions are the very definitions of Being.

Then why bother with a philosophy forum? There are plenty of science forums.

Because science isn't philosophy. Apples and oranges. The latter deals with an entirely distinct set of problems, those that are presupposed by the former. If you find yourself reading science to find your philosophical answers, then you are just asking science questions.

THE RADICAL EVIL OF DECONSTRUCTION: A REPLY TO JOHN CAPUTO

I will read this and get back to you.

Can an animal believe? Does my cat "believe" the open front door goes to the outside where the trees and squirrels are? Most definitely! Is it propositional belief? I think it is a proto-propositional belief. Consider the propositional structure of the conditional: If X opens the door, there will be Y that ensues. Note that my cats certainly gets this essential structure, but I while it is foolish to think her "getting it" is propositional, what is propositional cannot be wholly other than what actually goes through her mind (yes, mind). After all, our conditional logical form very likely is constructed on t he foundation that pragmatically "mirrors" the primitive, non symbolic cat knowing.

Nicely done, I thought.

Husserl takes one the threshold, and Fink's Sixth Meditation puts analysis to the generative threshold of "enworlding." I never got around to finishing this work, but my thanks for reminding me. It is quite a wonderland of extraordinary thinking that follows along with this. Caputo takes this up in his Radical Hermeneutics, but his Tears and Prayers of Jacque Derrida reveals, I believe, where this stain of though ends up inevitably: apophatic theology. Jean luc Marion's Being Given is a nice read on this. Existentialism cannot die, only evolve.

There is a way, HedoMinimalist, to make this "work": It would require a serious reconstrual of theism, not a popular frivolous one. It can be reasonably argued that religion's essence lies in material foundation from whence it springs, which is the moral dimension of existence. It is questions like, why are we born to suffer and die? and, what is the nature of the ethical good and bad? as opposed to contingent good and bad, as in, "My what a good couch" where in the goodness can be discussed, issues from context. Ethical good and bad (see Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics. He is right on this) turns to metaethical good and bad: the badness and goodness that issues directly from the pains and joys of Being. This latter, W says, cannot be discussed, metavalue cannot be discussed, for the rub lies in the nature of language and logic's delimitations. But this is the source of a defensible moral realism and it is, as well, the authentic basis of religion.

Dualism is a surviving vestige of a failed attempt, failed because it tries to divide Being into parts, while it is an entirely simpliciter concept, beyond predication: you say Being is such and such and you have already presupposed being.
And meditation, I do this and have found that what stands in the way of real progress is the unseen assumptions that normalize the world constantly in play keep in place a foundation our affairs. Meditation works to undo this foundation, this language and culture, but more deeply, (and this is where things get frankly beyond weird) it undoes, or intends to undo, the very fabric the world, and by world I refer to Heidegger's dasein, being in the world. Phenomenology is the ONLY way to make sense of meditation., and this puts the matter in the hands of an examination of the structures of the self for it is in the self that the world is bound to the familiar.

I am aware of how this might sound, for most do not read phenomenology: it is thick and hard and alien to common sense. In my view, it is the only, heh, heh, true view.

By genetic disposition you refer to, more generally, the imposition made upon decision making, bringing into play possibilities that are yours, that constitute the choices you can make. A world, so to speak. Genetic predispositions are only a part of this. These possibilities are there, at the moment of choice, and while they do define what choices are there for a self, they do not decide. Now, this is a rather iffy proposition, for it will be insisted that choice requires freedom, and this term is nonsense, given that the principle of sufficient cause is inviolable. But here, this principle is dduly noted, and dismissed" it is the critical existential withdrawal from habit and familiarity that defines freedom.

But therein lies the rub: Buddhists do not try to eradicate the self in order to achieve abstract nothingness. Beneath the self, so to speak, the empirically constructed self or memories, attachments, the "stream of consciousness", is joy, bliss unparalleled. There is nothing more palpable than this.

It is an argument that begins with an analysis of ethics and I will have to present it in pieces. First, ethicsd is a matter of parts, and are all things. There is, on the one hand, the "presence" of that which ethics fights over, the material presence of suffering, bliss and everything in between the referring this as "presence" is to reduce the material part to its phenomenological essence: the very clear and actual feelings of the deliciousness, the gladness, the the raw feel of the arm breaking, the tediousness of doing homework, and on and on. This is, of course, the existential basis of all ethical issues, for if there is no actuality of this nature in play, there is simply no ethics.

On the other hand, there is the entanglements in our engagements in the world, our politics, interpersonal contradictions and our principles, culture and the magnificent messiness of our lived lives. These conditions are in themselves ethically incidental, that is, they are the, as Wittgenstein put it, facts, and factual affairs are without ethical nature.

So the matter turns away from what to do and how make principles of good behavior in entangled conditions, and it turns to metaaethics: the GOOD. This is the beginning of the argument, pending your response thus far

I think what you are talking about really is what is called the ego by psychologists, and is the conscious entity which makes decisions. It could be called a self but the idea of a self has wider implications, encompassing deeper levels of consciousness which merge in and out of conscious awareness. — Jack Cummins

The ego, or, better, the egoic center to release this term from the grip of psychology. Deeper levels of consciousness? But the self is only revealed in the conscious unfolding of such things, and when they do arise, as with a good old fashion repression, they do not present the observing agency with a disclosure of the self, only a presentation TO the self. I, this self, am not the recollection of the trauma of my parents arguing.

That is the way of apophantic theology/philosophy (neti, neti in the East), and this is certainly does seem to be the "end" of philosophy, in both senses of the term. I am reading Caputo's Tears and Prayers of Jacque Derrida, and an epigraph is from Meister Eckhart: Oh God, deliver me from God!" Derrida infamously uncenters all thinking, revealing a kind of nihiism of semantics. But once there, Husserl's epoche, one might say, reaches its definitive juncture. I think this is essentially what the Eastern philosophies of liberation have been teaching for many centuries.

What you are looking for, Solarwind, is something that is not merely posited to make the ontological difference. You cannot insist that "who one is" constitutes a real basis for the distinction of being a singular "who"? Or, the singularity of "whoness" does not constitute the need for an ontological distinction.
OR DOES IT? They way to go is to examine this "I", the who in question. The matter turns to the self (and certainly not to physics). One has to make an examination of the self, and this is done via phenomenology: One begins the inquiry with the world itself, which constituted by the self, and therefore free of the nuisance of dualism (an absurd idea supposing that existence as presence is divisible), and one then faces the most authentic terms of analysis. The self becomes an altogether different concept, for it is not viewed through the lens empirical science but as it is presented in its most immediate describable features, and here, it is not ontology that rules, but meaning and ethics, and the self is first and foremost an agency of meaning. It is though this premise, the singularity, if you will, of meaning/value.

If you want to affirm the self, you cannot do this via trying to conceive of a different form of something that has absolutely no meaning to begin with, physical existence. A nonsense concept.