If morality is dependent on how you feel, and if feelings are notoriously illogical, does it make sense for your flavor of anti-realism to use logical reasoning to arrive at an emotional conclusion?

True, however in many (or most) normative ethical debates, there are appeals to things outside of our minds, like states of affairs or persons or whatnot. How do cognitivist anti-realists decide what interpretation of the data is right without pretending there is value in the external world?

To put it another way: moral realists' data is the world outside of our minds, in which the semantic content of our normative expressions is the same kind as that of regular old expressions. Correspondence to some actual moral property which makes the statements truth-apt. Yet anti-realism denies the existence of morals independent of our minds - there is no correspondence to some actual moral property. So how are anti-realist statements ever truth apt? If there is no correspondence to some actual moral property in the world external to our minds, the what does the statement correspond to which could make it true or false?

That is why I said anti-realist normative debates would seem to require some element of fiction or as if discussion. Debate morality as if it actually exists outside of our minds. Which would unfortunately put many positions on the frying pan, as any anti-realist could just deny the reality of whatever someone is claiming and that's that.

At its heart lies the claim that some bloke living in relative comfort somewhere in the West is in a better position to know whether a couple in Mali or Malaysia or Madagascar should have a child than they are. Claims like this baffle me. — mcdoodle

Why should it? I don't see how this changes anything. Does the addition of another person in the world make the world go better or worse or stay the same? You're implying that this debate is irrelevant to whether or not someone should have children and I think that is begging the question.

T R I G G E R E D

Been reading an interesting dissertation on this: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/13064981/Frick_gsas.harvard.inactive_0084L_11842.pdf?sequence=1

It's difficult to summarize as I don't fully grasp the entire argument, especially since much of it is geared towards rejecting other theories and pointing out their flaws, whether that be totalist consequentialism or some other conception.

However the basic gist is that the population Asymmetry exists because we have a standard that exists if we are to procreate. Abstaining from procreation results in no obligation, since no standard exists. But as soon as we contemplate whether or not we should have children, we are put into the mind-set of a standard: if we have children, then we must provide x for the child in order to meet this standard. If we cannot reach this standard then we have a clear-cut reason to not have a child. Thus, the author explicitly defends the thesis that population has little to no relevance here, and that our obligations are to people, not statistics or net-gross populations.

I'm not sure if this is entirely satisfactory, and I'm wondering how he escapes a comparison of populations. Perhaps this also falls under the standard - if we have to choose a population, then we must choose the larger population of happy people. But again I'm still working through the argument and will probably post a more detailed summary/response after I have digested the argument.

I'm interested in your account of the times we aren't uncertain of the consequences. I think of them as nil, which is one reason I'm not a consequentialist. — mcdoodle

I think we can be uncertain but still lean towards some option. Granted, this is still uncertainty. But we can presumably approach/estimate certainty within a certain threshold.

In any case, the value of a state of affairs is independent of the intentions and epistemic conditions of the agents within. Uncertainty may be a legal excuse but isn't a moral excuse, especially when we have the means to resolve uncertainty to within an acceptable amount.

I'm not a consequentialist. I'm interested to know what are the circumstances in which anyone knows for certain what the consequences of a certain act will be, before undertaking it. Your remark makes those circumstances sound frequent. — mcdoodle

Certainty is not required for action. Epistemic vagueness is independent of the value of a state of affairs.

Indeed I think this might actually be a good argument against any affirmative second-order morality in general: we can't be ethical due to our existential and epistemic position in the world.

If the dangerous consequences of intervention are often invisible, so are the benefits.
It is often difficult to identify the connection between action/inaction and consequence.

I'm still a consequentialist, but sometimes we have to guess, estimate, assume--certainly not know-- what the consequences are. — Bitter Crank

Very true, good point. As long as we're consequentialists then we also need to take into account ignorance and uncertainty in certain situations in regards to our own abilities to successfully intervene.

From this, I think it's fairly easy to obtain a theory of responsibility: to act based upon what you know and your abilities. I cannot be held responsible for 9/11. I was barely a child when that happened. I neither knew what was going on and had no way of preventing it from happening. But if today I saw a person getting mugged, I would have not only direct knowledge of the event but also the means (ability) to intervene. Similarly, I have indirect knowledge of the suffering of people afar (I have direct knowledge of their suffering in the abstract), and I have the means of helping them (by donating money, for example).

Thus, the effective altruism pushes the idea that we should try to maximize our utility by becoming knowledgeable of global affairs and pursuing a job that we not only enjoy but also gives us money to donate. Indeed that was what Aristotle recommended (right before he taught the ruthless conqueror Alexander the Great...was Aristotle partly responsible for the ensuing carnage?): to do good by taking care of yourself.

I'm (one of) the best. I think this haunts just about any public performance of what one regards as virtue. — Hoo

Agreed. It seems to me to be profoundly egotistical.

I think this is why I particularly am fond of Buddhism: it is an inner-worldly asceticism, better described as "Spartan" - maintain what you need to survive, refuse excess. It's not any of this wishy-washy transcendental other-worldlyness, which inevitably places attachment on the ascetic lifestyle to begin with.

But in general I think people like the idea of a transcendental escape more than they actually like putting this into practice. It's a way of pretending you're making progress, by identifying a goal that you'll "eventually" reach. When really what's going on is the procrastination of action.

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”

-Emil Cioran

Well in fact that scientific image produces pain-killers, and hip operations, and cognitive therapies, and other stuff which can change the content of that phenomenological experience. — apokrisis

And this changes...what, exactly? This only confirms what I had been saying earlier - phenomenological experiences are the subject of ethical priority. Your entropic ethics is missing what makes something moral - it's failing to resolve Moore's open-ended question.

Did the lamb express a preference? Is it capable of having one? Again you are having to support your position by talking nonsense. — apokrisis

Does it have a preference? It sure seems as though it does.

I'm not ducking your question as much as you are apologizing for murder.

Does an autistic child have preferences? Is it okay to murder them? Is it okay to have slaves, just because everyone else has slaves?

No.

Do you have a preference about lamb-eating? Might I have a different preference? Now we are talking. What general ground decides the issue morally when preferences are in conflict like this? — apokrisis

Empathy, compassion, etc. Pointing out the reality of certain preferences and decisions and honestly assessing what our reactions are to these realities. Intuitive responses are prima facie evidence for something being of value, because value depends on people who exist.

In any case, there are more important preferences at stake here than your appetite - namely, the lamb's preference to continue living. Are you really going to make equivalent your appetite with the inherent desire to live another day?

The exact same issue arises when a man rapes a woman. There's a violation of preferences here - which is more important, the man's lust or the woman's liberty?

Your entire position essentially boils down to might=right. I'm intellectually superior, therefore I get to make the rules. And this goes entirely against any modern egalitarian ideal. It's barbaric.

Either the sentience of animals is identical or so close to identical as makes no difference to that of humans in which case they should be afforded the identical moral and legal protection or it is not and there can be no rational objection to their being treated as the food that nature made them. — Barry Etheridge

Or sentience exists on a spectrum, and we can't play dice with other people's lives.

Where and how do you draw the line? — Barry Etheridge

Admittedly there is no precise line. We can say for sure that rocks, bacteria and fungi do not suffer. We can say for sure that mammals do. We can't say for sure whether or not insects, fish, or amphibians suffer - we have to take into account the benefit of the doubt and assume they can until substantial evidence shows they cannot.

The moral argument for vegetarianism ends up effectively proposing that it it is better to starve to death than eat meat (doubly so for vegans), sociopathy by any other name. Doesn't exactly scream 'morally superior' to me! — Barry Etheridge

Straw man. If you are starving to death, you have no choice in the matter, you have to eat something. This is why self-defense is acceptable moral behavior - killing someone for no reason is immoral, defending yourself is not.

Luckily for most of us we don't depend on meat to survive, so there's really no excuse.

You know I've explained my view of the role of pleasure and pain as signals which make biological "common-sense". Just as humans are also wired to value their social interactions in terms of empathy and antipathy.

The difference is that while I do ground these feelings in something measurably real, you seem to want to treat them as cosmically-free floating - just feelings that exist in some abstracted fashion with no connection to anything in particular and thus absolute in their solipsistic force. — apokrisis

No. I am not claiming that these feeling are just floating around somewhere. But neither am I going to deny the appearance, the "projectedness", the transparency of these experiences. Identifying pain as C-fibers firing (an outdated neuroscientific model) doesn't change the fact that pain hurts. Telling someone that their fear is only a chemical reaction doesn't help them. Identifying the cause of our morality (empathy, sympathy, compassion) and identifying the cause of these as well does not change how we experience them.

In other words, the content of our phenomenological experiences does not change with the introduction of a new scientific image of man. You need to take into account this.

All you are saying is that you have discovered that you are constrained to think in certain ways about events or choices in life. And while you also know that this is due to some ancestral history (both a biological and cultural one), right there your analysis stops. You just accept whatever it is that you have ended up being without further questions. — apokrisis

Because that's all that's needed. A further anthropological analysis of what makes me tick won't change how I act, although there is some sketchy data which claims to show that moral realists are, all things considered, more likely to act "morally" than anti-realists.

If you want to go into meta-ethics, by all means go ahead. But keep in mind that you're doing meta-ethics, and not normative ethics.

If the lamb that ends up on my plate involves no suffering, where is the issue with me enjoying my dinner? It cannot be any issue to do with suffering, can it? — apokrisis

If the person that ends up in the cemetery involves no conscious suffering (perhaps you 360 no-scoped them), where is the issue with this murder?

The issue is that someone's preferences were violated. Suffering isn't just the violation of a preference - that's much too empty. But suffering is, all things considered, the most prioritized of experiences.

But they are not preferences any more in the sense of being a moral choice when you are saying you have no choice but to respect your own discovered feelings on these matters. — apokrisis

This is sort of where Levinas comes into play with his idea of the persecution of ethics. We feel compelled to act ethically. Ethics is not egoistic, ethics do not necessarily align with our preferences. Only in the "virtuous" man does this occur.

I am saying we can instead understand the actual moral codes of societies - which are general pretty enthusiastic about hunting and meat-eating - as natural preferences because they encode the kind of balancing acts that make for a flourishing society. — apokrisis

Oh, sure, they're natural, but again personal preferences are not necessarily normative. What you want to do is not necessarily moral. The satisfaction of preferences can be moral in the abstract sense, but just because we have preferences doesn't mean their contents are moral.

You are speaking up here only for your own very personal minority view of what feels right when it comes to being a member of the tribe, Homo carnivorius. So either you have special privileged knowledge the rest of the world doesn't share, or you are just speaking to some particular quirk of your own psycho-developmental history. — apokrisis

Or, to be less dichotomous about all this, it's that I recognize that humans have a surplus of intellectual ability that is able to reflect upon our ingrained preferences and reject them. This goes right back to Zapffe again. We're not comfortable in the world anymore, we're not complacent. We've seen too much.

This is not at all unrealistic. Software programs have bugs that persist simply because the conditions around them allow them too. They don't belong, but the nevertheless are there. Change the programming, the bug disappears. The same applies to the human psyche. For some crazy reason human consciousness exists when a toned down version would have sufficed. Perhaps this is a product of the agricultural revolution in Mesopotamia all those centuries ago.

We evolved in a relatively thermodynamically-stable environment. We had no concept of entropy. And yet entropy, the same thing you're arguing is moral, is going to stab us in the back.

So while you waffle on about all right-thinking dudes knowing instinctively that eating animals is inherently bad form, pretty much the entire human race plainly just does not believe you. — apokrisis

Are you seriously going to argue that population dictates moral righteousness? Really?!

Clearly the majority of civilizations two thousand years ago wouldn't have thought slavery was wrong.

Like I said before, moral conventionalism all the way. It's an ad hoc meta-ethical theory.

But as you say, your position doesn't rely on such facts. The only thing that matters in all existence is your preferences on some issue. If we want to understand morality, we must come to you - learn about how self-deluding we all are. — apokrisis

I wouldn't be so smug about it, but, yes, I think with the proper education and a little bit of honesty, people can see the errors of their ways. This applies universally.

I'm sure I could explain it a million more times and you still wouldn't twig what is meant by "constraints".

I will simply repeat that constraints are what make possibilities actually possible. Limits give choice meaningful shape (such that some action could be regarded as actually moral vs immoral). — apokrisis

What I see to be the fundamental problem with your view is that you aren't taking into account the phenomenology of ethics.

I won't disagree with you that entropy rules in the end. I won't disagree with you that our normative intuitions came about via entropic constraints.

What I will disagree with you on is the phenomenal motivation we have for acting ethically. Any entropic constraint that made our intuitions what they are, are ancestral. I don't step in to prevent a rape because I'm worried about maximizing entropy, or because if I step in it will help keep society stable and ultimately increase our entropic footprint. I step in because I care about the person getting raped. I have placed the fundamental value on persons. My intentions are, ultimately, towards people regardless of how these intentions have evolved in the past.

So you now admit your argument based on suffering has no bearing here. We can remove that from the discussion. — apokrisis

No we can't. And no, suffering has inherent bearing in here because suffering is partly the violation of preferences (i.e. why masochists can feel some pain but not suffer - they have a preference for pain).

Now we instead have something truly ethereal - preferences. Why should I have to share yours? Where is the argument for that? — apokrisis

Indeed, why should I have to share your preference for entropy maximization, hmm?

Like you would say, our preferences are a result of the environment. And no, preferences are not ethereal - we have preferences after all. You're saying anything that isn't a major force in the holistic global scene is ethereal? Hardly.

I have to say is only flimsily supported at best by science — Barry Etheridge

Absolutely not. Science is on my side on this one. Humans are not the only ones who have sentience.

Calling other people out who eat meat as "speciesists" is perfectly acceptable if I think this is accurate. If you disagree with this label, tell me why. It is perfectly accurate. Killing other animals is disregarding them as sentient, feeling beings - and if you're going to be moral to humans, you had better have a good reason for being moral to human exclusively without begging the question.

Now I'm guessing you are thinking that if something is "simply pragmatic" or "simply a result of nature", then it isn't "moral" because morality ought to involve some kind of transcending human choice. You have the Romantic conviction that humans are above "mere nature" in being "closer to God", or "closer to goodness, truth and beauty", or whatever other traditional morality tale has been part of your up-bringing. — apokrisis

Not really. I just don't equivocate tendencies with normativity.

And science now supports that position rigorously. — apokrisis

Does it really?

All systems persist by striking a fruitful entropic balance. They need global coherence (physical laws, genetic programmes, ethical codes) as their organising constraints, and also local action (material degrees of freedom, evolutionary competition, individual initiative) as the dissipative flow of events that sustains the whole. — apokrisis

Anchoring your morality in what is prevents you from wondering what could be. What could be better, what is not the case, possibilities. It keeps you from exploring other options. Once you remove this veil you're able to go about finding new paths.

Is it moral to kill a person so that society will continue to progress and entropify? No. Here we have a direct contradiction in what the universe "wants" and what we think is moral. You may argue that such action would undermine the societal structure - but we need only look at the past several thousand years to understand how that hasn't done anything to the system. Murdering people hasn't brought humanity to its doom.

Sorry. Remind me which those are again? Are we talking patents for perpetual motion machines? — apokrisis

No, we're talking vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, public maintenance, art, etc. The use of entropy to curb other entropic expansion. Would it be immoral, according to you, to have a nuclear bomb and not drop it somewhere? Such entropy!

If we cannot fail to entropify, then this means there is no prescription for action, and your ethics is empty. Prescribing maximum entropification also disregards sentients for a more abstract entropy.

LOL. This is quite simply atheistic divine command theory. — apokrisis

How so? Keep in mind I'm a moral anti-realist.

OK. But I ask again, where do you stand if the husbandry was perfect and the lamb had the happiest life, a painless death? — apokrisis

You still killed another animal. That's murder.

Applying your own calculus of suffering, how would it be immoral to eat the lamb? — apokrisis

It's not just suffering, it's preferences as well. I don't get to decide who lives and who dies.

Murder is and always has been a forensic legal term with an exact definition which does not apply to any non-human (which for the purpose includes unborn foetuses, incidentally). No amount of propaganda will change that. — Barry Etheridge

LOL, why do you think we don't apply murder to non-humans...? So we can keep eating them, that's why!

Since when did we not have the right? It is assumed in all the major moral and religious codes in history and prohibited by none of the world's legal systems. — Barry Etheridge

Might =/= Right.

The hunt both benefits from and enhances intelligence. You impose this supposed duty on humans to benefit other species because they are like us yet fail to follow through the logic that if they are like us they should also be bound by the same duty. — Barry Etheridge

I am pointing out that, because of our intelligence, we are able to transcend beyond what our intelligence was originally meant for. We can recognize what it's all about and come to terms with it. Become the janitors of nature so to speak.

Other species are not capable of this. Other species are morally relevant but cannot necessarily be ascribed agency. Whereas humans are the only species whose members lead their lives (pace Heidegger), and are capable of agency.

If, by the way, you are cryptically arguing your way toward the moral superiority of vegetarianism, as it certainly seems, then I think it would be fairer to all if you exposed that to more focused scrutiny. — Barry Etheridge

Yes, I think carnivorous diets are morally unacceptable.

At the cosmological level, it is "morally good" to maximise entropy. (Although of course in attributing finality or purpose to the Universe, we would only be doing that in the weakest possible sense. And there is no reason why we can't do both those things.) — apokrisis

Cosmic tendencies are not equivalent to morality, though. Again, morality is only able to be ascribed to sentients. Any other ascriptions are merely equivocations - just as gravity is not the force of love but of a non-agential force. It would be wrong to say that two large options are in love and so they come together, just as it would be wrong to say that entropy is morally good because that's what the universe tends to.

A measure of the intelligence and foresight of a social system will be how good it is at making some right decision on the issue. — apokrisis

How do you evaluate a decision's right/wrongness? What makes the continuation of a society cosmologically right?

So yes. Morality can be built up from first principles in natural fashion. — apokrisis

But only after realizing that they correspond to the golden rule, as you said. Which isn't building from naturalistic first principles. Unless you consider the golden rule to be one of these first principles, which is rather ad hoc.

My argument is that a secure morality is one built from the ground up on natural principles. If we can see what nature wants of us, then we can tell in measurable fashion how close we are to what it says is good. That creates a context in which we can make actually meaningful and useful choices. — apokrisis

This is quite simply atheistic divine command theory. God wants us to not do something, therefore we don't do it. The universe wants us to entropify, therefore we entropify.

As you can tell, I have no problem with what is in fact actually natural. So natural=normal. And unnatural=questionable. — apokrisis

Nope. Natural is indeed what is normal, but the unnatural is what is not-normal. You jumped from the non-normative to the normative without justification. What makes it the case that the status quo is natural? Why can't morality go against the system?

Is what is natural also what satisfies our preferences? Not necessarily. Indeed satisfying preferences is "natural" but may go against the cosmic naturalness you're talking about here; see the various societal constructions meant to curb the triumph of entropy.

Again a degree of behavioural variety is also natural. So I don't have any fundamental objection to veganism. I would only want to see it "done right" - done as an actually healthy diet. — apokrisis

Sure. But previously you were making it seem as though hunting a deer is normal and therefore acceptable.

But I live somewhere where we buy meat over the counter after it has been humanely reared and humanely slaughtered. — apokrisis

"Humanely" is not compatible with "slaughtered". Indeed if we have an option of killing an animal vs eating a perfectly good slice of synthetic meat, we'd go with the synthetic meat. There would be no point in killing the animal. There is no justification for killing animals unless it's out of self-defense - and even then this is often caused by a violation of the animal's own territory, it's own "home".

And if indeed a lamb has a happy life in a paddock, safe from all the usual diseases and predation, then dies instantly and painlessly, could you still morally object to it ending up on my dinner plate? — apokrisis

Yes, because husbandry is not as perfect as you make it seem. It's absurdly easy to market one's meat as "humanely raised" by a couple easy fixes to the farm that doesn't help the animals much. Like I said before, if we have the choice between natural and synthetic meat, would you be able to come up with a reason why natural meat is so much better that it justifies killing another creature?

We inherently don't know what's going on in the minds of other people, other creatures. It's easy to fall into the trap of believing that only the human species members ought not to be murdered. That's exactly what killing other animals for no reason is: murder. Since when did we have the right to decide how long a creature lives? Since when did we have the right to own another sentient?

That's certainly a point of view. But that extreme subjective position - one that is only supported by naive realism and its implicit Cartesian dualism - is precisely what is the topic of discussion.

You are claiming subjectivity as the ontological basis for moral necessity. I am replying that morality is better understood in terms of "objective" reality - in terms of whatever general purposes or constraints nature might have in mind. — apokrisis

But why call this morality? It offers no clear guide as to how to act except in general rules, and places the emphasis on something other than people.

You claim that welfare-centered ethics is only supported by naive realism and its implicit Cartesianism and this is absolutely laughable. What was deontology all about, then? Certainly deontology respects people and isn't dependent on Cartesianism, because Kant! Certainly Mill cared more about suffering than he did entropy!

Instead of trying to make morality a global holistic thing, make it an isolated and domain-specific phenomenon. Morality is all about choices. You're making it so that it has nothing to do with the people making the choices.

Talking animals and philosophising hunters? Is this Narnia where our legitimate scenario takes place? — apokrisis

:-}

You don't seem very good at analyzing other people's positions charitably. It's not far fetched at all to think that other animals outside of our species have emotions, can feel pain, and can have future interests. And I don't see why philosophy is outside the realm of a hunter. Indeed this is exactly what Zapffe talked about with his example of the prehistoric man dying on the beaches when he realized how all life was connected as a family of suffering.

But if we grant this craziness, then what actually follows? A sensible animal - if it is indeed taking the hunter at face value - would suggest a way to provide the hunter with an even better meal to their mutual benefit. — apokrisis

Or, you know, it's more about inflicting harm on an animal that can't consent. You're basically justifying murder and/or torture simply because you can get away with it (the animal can't fight back, the animal can't offer alternatives - as if the animal's life should even be on the gambling table to begin with, might=right). Sensibility is not a requirement for moral value - the ability to suffer is. Innocent, senseless suffering.

Instead the animal is senselessly thrown into a situation that it could not consent to, cannot escape, and is forced to endure extreme pain and fear so you can have a snack. It's cannibalism and barbaric. You're arguing that the animal should have been sensible enough not to walk into the trap that we set, or have been sensible enough to run away from the gunshot in a zig-zag fashion. But it's somehow the animal's fault that it got trapped and eaten? We humans get off scotch free?

Being the most intelligent organisms on the planet, we ought to use this intelligence for the benefit of all sentients, not to subjugate them. Avoid speciesism.

You take life so seriously! Why do you object so strenuously when I put it in terms that you claim to support - framing it as an absurdity? — apokrisis

Because you're wanting to make this absurdity moral. Why, because it's naturally occurring? You're painting this picture to me that looks as if we all just entropified everything would be totally fine. Entropy is not moral. Experience is what makes morality in the first place.

Ah, dualism. Or are you finally going to define "mind" in objective and physicalist fashion here?

What limit to caring now marks your usual slippery slope metaphysics now we have introduced this sly boundary term of "sentience"? — apokrisis

Are you seriously going to argue that we ought to care about pebbles? There is a difference between things that have a mind and that which doesn't. We don't know this boundary, and it's probably a gradiance anyway. But things don't start mattering morally until they have the ability to have frustrated preferences, to be able to suffer. And so we must be reasonably cautious.

Yep, let's pose crazy scenarios as a last resort when our arguments are falling apart. — apokrisis

Yep, let's ignore legitimate scenarios because it threatens the cohesion of our worldview. :-}

Yep. Just turn everything I have said into something different. Chalk up another victory for yourself. Imagine the round of applause. — apokrisis

woooo go me :-}

Look! One of your oranges is a tangelo! Crikey, what now? Does the number three no longer exist? — apokrisis

:-}

But for "object" to be a meaningful term in a metaphysical discussion, it needs the reciprocal context of that which is its "other". — apokrisis

Not necessarily. Being-identical-to, existence, etc are no reciprocating properties. You can't have the property of non-existence...otherwise you'd exist. You can't be not-identical to yourself...otherwise you wouldn't even be.

You are stuck in your realism which is a dualist subjectivism - naive realism in other words. There just isn't a problem for you in dividing mind and world, observer and observables, in brute and unaccounted-for fashion. — apokrisis

How? You always tell other people they're dualists and that there's a problem with this but then never explain why it's problematic, only affirm that your position is right. Something something semiotics.

Pragmatism (of the Peircean kind) is all about bridging that gap by granting the ability to care to the whole of nature - even if we then wind up with "the Universe" which in fact seems to care about very little beyond arriving at its Heat Death. Bastard! — apokrisis

I might accuse you for being dualistic by separating the rest of the world from the agents that are part of the world. "The Universe doesn't care"...it does care in certain contexts when we're talking about sentients that are manifested by the Universe. Unless you want to claim that the manifest image is actually the scientific image.

You can't just dismiss the possibility of a soul, by saying it seems to be highly unlikely. You may be one who lives your life making decisions based on what "seems" to be the case, but this is philosophy, and we don't take "seems to me" as justification for any such assertion. — Metaphysician Undercover

From a more naturalistic point of view, I can. There is no being 100% sure (even about this claim). Truth is estimated by likelihood.

And in fact we do use "seems to me" to be a preliminary for something. It seems to you that my argument is wrong. It does not seem this way to me.

Huh? Isn't the number line continuous ... as an infinity of infinitesimals? — apokrisis

In bowl 1 you have 3 oranges. In bowl 2 you have 4 oranges. It is an objective fact that there are 2 bowls and 7 oranges, and an objective fact that the two bowl's contents are different in virtue of the discrete amount of oranges in them.

Properties don't just disappear just because they come from a more general source. The number 3 is still the number 3.

Or what they share is a state of individuation sufficient to achieve the general purpose of some actual boundary condition. They are X enough (in being sufficiently, self-groundingly, not not-X). — apokrisis

Wittgenstein all over again, man. You're talking about classes of things. But classes are identified by their essential properties. The properties that you must have to be an x, or, in the case of Wittgenstein, the properties you must have to be similar to a sufficiently large amount of objects that are already seen as a set.

We exist in a highly individuated state of being as a result of our rather particular thermal scale. We sit on a planet that orbits a star in the middle of a void which is nothing but a radiation bath 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. So a classical, reductionist, object-orientated approach to reality modelling can take a lot for granted. — apokrisis

But you're assuming that properties are like those you see on your office desk. When really there shouldn't be any kind of limit like that. 2.7 degrees above absolute zero is a property. We can identify it. Being a billion miles away is a property. We can predicate it. Being general is a property. We can understand what it means to be general.

Furthermore objects need not be limited to the boring office desk pens, papers, coffee mugs and staplers.

So vagueness is not-not vagueness. Or in other words, it is at the other end of the spectrum, as distant as it is physically possible to get, from the crisp. — apokrisis

At what point do properties no longer classify as properties? Properties (universals) are just the way things are. If something is general, say, the universe, the the universe is general. It is in a state. The state of affairs is always crisp. The objects and their parasitic properties within need not be.

But who cares about that level of individuation? (And in the systems view, you have to have an answer to that - you have to show there is some reason to care.) — apokrisis

Our disinterest in something doesn't make it not-true. You're more focused on pragmatics, I'm more focused on what's actually true in the correspondence sense. Not-caring about something doesn't make it go away.

Why would judgments of good or bad be relevant to my point of view? Surely my point is that morality - as it pragmatically exists in the real world - is beyond such obviously absolutist and subjective terminology. — apokrisis

Then it quite simply is not morality. Morality is a guide to action, based on what we ought and ought not do. Without absolutism you end up getting either arbitrary subjectivism or inertness (i.e. an inability to decide what to do - nevertheless an action in the objective sense).

Again, if I had to judge flourishing in terms of some universal and absolute telos, I would point to the Universe's thermodynamic imperative. Flourishing in the natural sense - the sense we can actually see and measure as what reality is all about - is the maximisation of entropification. — apokrisis

But this equivocates flourishing. Seems to me that people decide what is flourishing and what is not, not the universe at a cosmic scale. Indeed the addition of a mind to the world's inventory creates a sort of world-inside-of-a-world, in which a person can sit around all day and nevertheless flourish despite not creating as much entropy as he would if he were playing soccer or something like that. The mind, the ego, becomes a microcosm of the world.

So "goodness" would be defined by a system being good at that. And "badness" by a failure to degrade entropy gradients. — apokrisis

You're equivocating ability to perform an action, i.e. accomplishment, with normative good. This is why Mackie argued that moral properties probably don't exist outside of our minds, because they'd be "alien" to the rest of the world.

A hammer is good at hammering nails, but that doesn't make it morally good. A gun is good at killing people, but that doesn't make it morally good nor morally good to kill people. The point being made is that the mind, being a microcosm, has its own rules, its own system. It doesn't follow the same rules that a general model of the entire universe does. This is why non-natural properties ("subjective concepts") can exists in a mind but not in the rest of the world. They are endemic to a mind.

A fighter pilot - able to get through 14,000 gallons per hour once he kicks on the after-burners - must be the highest form of life that exists on the planet. No wonder they are our heroes. ;) — apokrisis

No offense but really you need to step down from this holistic picture for second and realize that nobody but yourself actually considers fighter pilots to be the highest form of life, and if they did, it would be for their apparent heroism (risk)/sacrifice and not for their entropification. You can't explain everything using your holistic metaphysical model. There exist pockets and corners in reality that don't quite match up with the rest of the world in the global sense, like a bug in a computer program. Separating yourself from this particular zone we call Earth in favor for a holistic picture ends up ignoring Earth entirely.

It's not too difficult to see how, despite what you claim, many or most of our commitments are explicitly fighting against entropy. The focus of morals is on sentient welfare, and to focus on something else is to completely lose sight of what morality even is.

But then plants have feelings too. And then why shouldn't we respect the rights of the minerals of the earth, the gases of the atmosphere? — apokrisis

What, no, plants don't have feelings, neither do minerals. I'm talking about sentient organisms, the only things of moral weight.

Say you're an animal that just got caught and is about to be roasted on a fire. You beg and plead to be let go, but in the end the hunter calmly tells you that what he is doing is perfectly acceptable, because he's increasing entropy. Furthermore he tells you that you ought to accept this and be glad you are being roasted alive.

It's what said elsewhere: if there exists any value independent of people, we shouldn't give a shit about it.

Yes, we progressives ought not only eliminate ourselves, but eliminate all animals (as they are barbaric consumers too), and even all plants (as they too show no respect for minerals and gases). — apokrisis

No, we ought to eliminate our dependency on cannibalism.

And yet it seems all a mite ... impractical? — apokrisis

So you're a moral conventionalist. Our abilities dictate our responsibilities. A great way to excuse immoral habitual behavior. History dictates value.

No thanks.

I don't really see how your process system view solves the riddle. Numbers seem to be digital: you have only a discrete amount of objects in a given set. Sure you can break the objects up, start talking in terms of fractions, change your positional number system, etc. But at the end of the day there's still only a certain amount of objects in a certain domain.

So if we are talking about a white thing - a thing that partakes in the property of "whiteness" - a systems view is that the real question here is "Is the thing white enough?". — apokrisis

This only means that there has to be a sufficient amount of qualities to be called "white" - Wittgenstein's family resemblance all over again. Things overlap. A is similar to B, but not similar to C. B is similar to both A and C. They aren't identical but neither are they totally different. They share qualities, i.e. universals

So conventional ontology is usefully simple - it treats the world as a collection of existents, a state of affairs, a collection of formed objects that thus only partake in predicate type logic arrangements.

But a holistic ontology talks instead about such existence as a state of self-regulating persistence. The whole is forming its parts - the very parts needed to compose that formative whole. Logically, it is a closed reciprocal deal where universals cause individuation and individuation contributes to there being the steady flow of particular events that results in the emergence of the regularities we call universals. — apokrisis

You deny conventional ontology yet retain predication by talking about a state of self-regulating persistence, wholes and parts\, etc. You're still referring to these as something that fills the subject in a predicative statement. These subjects have properties in themselves because they are of a certain state: a state is vague when it has no "crisp" as you like to say properties - yet vagueness would be a property itself. Any sort of adjective is going to either refer to a specific property or a collection of properties abstracted into a unified concept.

It's hard to consider something that doesn't make sense, sorry. You said that existents are properties, i.e. a bundle theory of objects. But this does not address the theory of universals at all, for it's a substratum/composition question. You argued that things are similar because they have some sort of putative relationship to each other that makes them similar (as I understood extensionality), without explaining why these things have these relationships in the first place. It's completely arbitrary.

In the example you give, for example, % one has a circle to the left of a slanted line as does %, — Terrapin Station

SInce both %s have a circle to the left of a slanted line, they both have circles, they both have slanted lines, and they both have a relationship between the circle and slanted lines. You just described universals.

Do you think that the flourishing of society is, in itself, good? i.e. no matter what the discontents think, they're wrong when they wonder if society maybe shouldn't keep going?

For example, a society may inevitably be based on the consumption of other animals - a carnivorous society. Being the progressives we are we might look down on such a society; such a society should be abandoned, eliminated, because its members eat other animals (organic cannibalism).

Russell said it better than I could.

When we identify two things as being of a certain quality, they are of a certain quality, that is, a numerically-distinct and unitary quality. One quality. The basis of adjectives.

Without universals, we're left with two white objects with no way to explain why they are white, or how we come to know that they are both white. It contradicts even our own language: the two things are white. They are under the category of "white". Members of the category are such because they instantiate a universal. Without universals there's no reason to be in a category. There's no reason why x is a square and y is a circle, or why they appear to be different. Difference requires a difference in composition which can only be done by property differences. Without universals, there is no way to differentiate between a white object and a black object, a square object or a circle object.

Those properties, which are identical to the materials/structures/processes are not numerically identical in two different things. — Terrapin Station

And this, I contend, it impossible to maintain if you also maintain that they are similar in some respects, for numerical identity between properties is necessary for a similarity to be. I don't understand how you go about explaining why and how things are able to be identified as being a certain universal concept, such as red, square, 1.346 g, etc, without believing that the reason we have these concepts in the first place is that the objects they correspond to have a certain ontological structure. How do we identify some two things as being red if they aren't both red, i.e. being a certain way, a duplicative way?

Glad you liked it.

Because by altering our perception we alter how we perceive. — saw038

Just as long as we don't delude ourselves. It's less about altering our perceptions and more about changing our response to the perceptions. Whether there is a difference between the two, I'm not sure. There doesn't seem to be any "right" way to react to the world, but certainly it does seem to be the case that many people limit their perceptions in order to limit the reactions they have. In these cases it seems as though a lifestyle is only compatible with certain beliefs or lack thereof - existential angst manifests as an inability to continue living as one has habitually in the past given what one now knows.

That's complete nonsense. The idea that either there's some abstractly existing, numerically identical property that's somehow instantiated in multiple things, or resemblance is "random" simply makes zero sense. — Terrapin Station

Re there being a "reason for the ways things are," that's the case with universals, too. No matter how many reasons you give behind something, no matter what it is, you get to a point where "it's just the way things are." You can't keep giving an infinity of reasons one step back and then another step back and then another step back, etc., right? — Terrapin Station

Right. The primitives do the work. But in this case you lack sufficient primitives. Relations are ad hoc, brute facts without any real reason. Whereas a unitary, single thing, a universal, explains this far better without being so ad hoc, since it's grounded in one single thing instead of trying to ground it in multiple totally different, yet somehow the same, tropes or classes or something.

What's incoherent is saying that they're not numerically different in terms of the quality or properties. And you have to be saying that the properties in questino are numerically identical or you're not talking about universals. You'd be a nominalist then instead. — Terrapin Station

No, properties are numerically identical because they're universals, transcendental or immanent, take your pick.

Objects are numerically different but qualitatively similar/different in virtue of the numerically-identical universals they share.

You don't need an explanation for that because no two properties are literally identical. Again, you'd simply be reifying type abstractions that we make. Reifying conceptual categories we create as individuals in our minds. — Terrapin Station

Well of course we don't have to say that every book instantiates the universal "book". But they are sufficiently similar to each other as to warrant us to call them books, i.e. their constitution is similar enough, i.e. their basic properties. There's scarce and abundant properties.

It couldn't be more simple. They both meet your criteria, you mental, conceptual abstraction, for calling them "round" things. — Terrapin Station

Are our own mental abstractions universals across humanity? Are we not all utilizing similar abstraction constructs? Are our mental ideas not in some sense universal, allowing language to flourish?

You've removed universals from the world, but only have relocated them in the mind as conceptual constructs.

If Jesus indeed was resurrected, then it wasn't Jesus. It was Jesus2.0. The definition of death is the ceasing of biological functions, and unless we posit the existence of a soul, which seems to me highly unlikely even in the Aristotelian sense of it, we're left with the view that Jesus was re-animated somehow, and a new set of consciousness created, one different from the previous versions. Jesus couldn't have been resurrected. If the story is even true (which I think it not), he was psychologically cloned.

The only thing with that is that "societies should flourish" or "it's better for societies to flourish" (or whatever similar formulation) isn't objective. — Terrapin Station

It's also so general as to be practically useless in terms of ascribing action, since what makes a society flourish will depend on who you're asking. And of course there's some who would deny that society should flourish - we call those people discontents, who have a morality of there own entirely dissimilar to that of everyone else's.

In the example you give, for example, % one has a circle to the left of a slanted line as does %, while that's not the case for and @. They're not numerically identical circles--obviously, which makes them not identical. It's simply (degree of) resemblance.

Why would you think that o and o are circles by instantiating a numerically identical property of circularity that exists who knows where and that obtains in those circles by who knows what means so that it's just ONE circularity property even though we're talking about two different things? That's just incoherent. It's reifying the fact that we make mental type abstractions. — Terrapin Station

Because without universals similarity or resemblance becomes arbitrary. There is no reason for the way things are - they just are. Brute fact. Language does not constrain reality, reality constrains our language.

There are indeed multiple different things - they are numerically different but not qualitatively different. When you say something is round, why is it round? Why is it a certain way? Without universals, there cannot be any explanation as to why two properties happen to be identical in nature. Two things are round - without universals there doesn't seem to be any way to explain why these two things are both identified as being round. There's no explanation as to why the one round trope is identical to another round trope. What makes them round tropes and not something else?

Without universals, the world becomes totally disorganized and messy. There's no structure to it all, no reason why anything can be reliably predicted or predicated on.

What stops us from committing suicide? — saw038

In most cases I would argue that what stops us form committing suicide is an inherent instinct to survive that overrides any higher-level thought processes. Humans are, as far as I know, the only species on Earth that has a rather high percentage of self-inflicted deaths, but this percentage is still rather low in comparison to other ways of dying or to those who continue to exist whether it is justified or not.

This may come across as rather harsh but I honestly think that most people, perhaps myself included, would be personally better off not living. It's not my call nor my responsibility to enact this, but nevertheless I think that if people were able to objectively and honestly evaluate their condition, a very large amount of people wouldn't see the use in continuing - they would realize that reality has little to offer them. This is where the whole "instinct" factor comes into play, in particular fear and anxiety, a form of motivation that appears from the void which control us, forcing us to consent to a raw deal.

If you believe there is a purpose to life then I can understand your reason for wanting to stay.

But for those that believe life has no purpose, or better yet, that it is something that is filled with continually suffering. Why continue? — saw038

Generally suicide is a difficult thing to accomplish. You have to be in the right mind-set to even consider ending your own life without having an uncontrollable aversion to the thought of annihilation. So the way I look at it is that life generally is not really worth it but death, in particular suicide, is something too difficult to accomplish to even consider as a legitimate option. We're all going to die anyway, dissolving into the infinite void in which we came.

But how to live in this mindset? In this case, I think there is a phenomenal difference between living and surviving. In both cases the system persists, but the latter involves some element of risk. In my opinion the authentic existential life is one filled with risks, dilemmas and perhaps even outright disregard for the well-being of the system itself. A chaotic life of rebellion and aesthetic expression, like a star going supernova. There's nothing more beautiful than a star that explodes in a brilliant light display, and there's nothing more authentic than a person who willingly exposes herself to danger, living on the edge, prepared to supernova at any given time.

At the same time, there's nothing more noble than a person who sacrifices themselves for the sake of others. The authentic person is not one who rains chaos around her, but one who brings order to the chaos by immersing herself in it. To be perpetually at war against the universe, to not play by the rules, to ignore the signals trying to force her to stop. To be an expression of pure power, manifesting as a deep concern for the well-being of others and a hatred of the oppressive environment.

We need not go around on our motorcycles and leather jackets, drinking diesel and fighting ISIS while high on cocaine to be authentic, although that certainly sounds pretty badass. All we need to do is not be complacent, to not accept the norm, to reject the constraints imposed on us, to not only live but to survive. We must go outside our comfort zone while maintaining our responsibility to others as an ethical priority - the best way of doing this, in my opinion, is to rebel primarily in the mind, for the mind is where the self is, and let our physical bodies (ignoring any dualistic/monistic metaphysical ideas for now) operate within the world by helping other people. The best way of surviving then is to have a mental rebellion that corresponds to our ethical duties - to help other people not only out of ethical duty but out of spite, rebellion, and desire.

We also should consider prioritizing our mental rebellion over physical rebellion because we'll never actually be able to free ourselves from the physical. We have to eat, sleep, drink, pay taxes, etc. Starving ourselves to death is not tenable even if it is rebellion. But mentally continuing to exist despite what the universe throws at you is. It's making do with what we have, rebelling as much as we can like a child does to its parent - never able to quite accomplish the overthrow but beautiful in any sense.

So there you have it - I have no environmental ("natural") reason to continue to exist. But I at least like to think that I have an existential, personal, and authentic reason to survive.

But what makes it the case that they are similar, other than the possession of identical properties? Is it just a brute fact? Why is @@ similar to @ @ but different to %%? How do you account for identity, if not by recognizing the attributes of things?

Just from wikipedia: "In logic, extensionality, or extensional equality, refers to principles that judge objects to be equal if they have the same external properties."

Are these properties not universals? How else should be interpret this as?

If it's a brute fact that things are similar in certain ways, then fine. But I think universals provide a much more useful and appealing theory, especially when it comes to causation.

1. involuntary: most of us like freedom, and dislike being harmed

2. subjective: (1) is not objective, and only has meaning in terms of us beings that dis/like things

3. morals: us liking freedom and disliking being harmed is relevant for morals

4. therefore morals are subjective (in part or whole) — jorndoe

I disagree with your analysis on 2. Certainly freedom and harm are not only personal matters but also abstract matters, that nevertheless depend on people to be instantiated. Freedom and harm, pleasure and pain, yada-yada, matter because people matter.

So in a sense, these values are person-dependent, but this does not necessarily etch out objectivity or realism. For we can still value a population of people who have these values, i.e. a state-of-affairs; classic totalist consequentialism.

The color green exists only within the minds of perceivers. There is no "green" floating around in the darkness of un-perceived space. And yet it would be wrong to deny that colors exist objectively - they exist but in a limited, constrained way. Similarly, value may be person-dependent but that need not make it subjective. We can just as easily say that if value exists, then people exist, just as if colors exist, then perceivers exist.

It's a common form of psychologism that is the placement of properties on objects that don't have them by themselves: sugar is sweet, the apple is red, pleasure is good, etc. And yet we would still say it's an objective fact that sugar is subjectively sweet, or that the apple is subjectively red, or that pleasure is subjectively good. This is why I think labeling anything mind-dependent as entirely subjective is too flimsy to be tenable. If we value pleasure, then it is an objective fact that we value pleasure. Therefore, it is an objective fact that pleasure is valuable in virtue of there being persons available for this. So long as there are people, pleasure is objectively valuable.

For those who live, Epictetus' recommendation is sensible--do the best with what you have and take the rest as it happens. — Ciceronianus the White

I read the Echiridion. There were some useful ideas in it but overall I was struck by how many "do's" and "do not's" there were, as if we had to jump through so many hoops just to maintain some element of virtue. The resolutions only seemed to illuminate the problems more.

My gut feeling is that we would all (men and women alike) rather be other-oppressed than be failed self-liberators. If we fail in our own liberation, we have no one to blame but ourselves. If we fail at overthrowing our oppressor, well, they were just too oppressive to beat. Not our fault! — Bitter Crank

But doesn't liberation require some sort of oppression? i.e. there would be no need for liberation if oppression was not the case?