You can refrain from killing, raping, and pillaging, but none of this guarantees that others will not kill, not rape, or not pillage from you.
So now what? — baker

True. There are no guarantees in life, period. I think the GR mainly applies to the self as a guiding principle - I don't think anyone sees it as a magic charm that ushers in ethical behaviour all around. I've always understood it to be like a teaching tool setting forth a simple approach. People seem to love it or hate it.

:ok:

The golden rule (GR): "What you find harmful, do not do to anyone" - @180 Proof

There are 2 kinds of harm.

1. Psychological.

2. Physical.

If the GR is to work two conditions need to be met.

i) All of us should be physically similar/identical (the same things should hurt everyone and the same things should give everyone pleasure).

ii) All of us should be psychologically similar/identical (we should all have the same values is one requirement among others).

Complications:

a) Physical similarity/identity doesn't guarantee the efficacy of the GR as it can be modulated by psychology e.g. asceticism (a mindset) can transform what is normally physical discomfort/pain into something not.

b) Psychological similarity/identity we all know is a myth. Cultural differences in outlook can mean what's pleasurable to one people will be perceived as offensive to another people e.g. child marriage was acceptable in the middle east and south asia but is viewed as rape in the west.

To get right to the point, psychology has a major role and is the confounding factor in re the GR. It (psychology) precludes the universal applicability of the GR.

Nevertheless, there's a fair level/amount of similarity/identity physically and psychologically among humans for the GR to return the fewest errors when employed to guide conduct. How different can we be, right? We're on the same planet for pete's sake! :grin:

How different can we be, right? — Agent Smith

I think this is the nub of it. There are no different cultural interpretations I know of where murdering or thieving or lying are considered cool.

When kids misbehave to others there's a famous phrase parents tend to use - "How would you like it if they did that to you?" I've generally found kids get this formulation of the GR instantly. What I like about the GR is that it is an invitation to see the rights of others as inviolable.

Nevertheless I also think that with interpreting the GR, the old maxim to follow the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law holds true. In other words, a literal or more concrete interpretation may well be done against to the intent of the principle. If you keep kosher then you may need to understand that your neighbour keeps halal. The GR is therefore not asking you to expect your neighbour to accept kosher but to accept that they have their own observances...

:up:

It is saying treat others with the consideration you would appreciate - honour their preferences as you would want them to honour yours. — Tom Storm

Do that, and you will be perceived as a pansy, and exploited.

If you keep kosher then you may need to understand that your neighbour keeps halal. The GR is therefore not asking you to expect your neighbour to accept kosher but to accept that they have their own observances... — Tom Storm

So the GR is asking you, in the case where you're black and have a KKK neighbor, to accept his "observances"?

True. There are no guarantees in life, period. — Tom Storm

Then why bother with the GR?

I think the GR mainly applies to the self as a guiding principle

That's bizarre. Only the neurotic think before they act. The normal person is always sure they have done no wrong and can do no wrong.

When kids misbehave to others there's a famous phrase parents tend to use - "How would you like it if they did that to you?" I've generally found kids get this formulation of the GR instantly. — Tom Storm

Indeed. It makes them strive to grow up, grow strong, and make sure nobody can do to them what they can do to others.

What I like about the GR is that it is an invitation to see the rights of others as inviolable.

Provided those others are, to begin with, in accordance with one's preferences. If they're not, their "rights" deserve to be violated.
People who champion the Golden Rule always find a way around it.

The examples I gave dealt with limitations on ethical treatment of others resulting from lack of insight into their capabilities. — Joshs

But the problem with this is that when one lacks the insight into another's capabilities, one doesn't know thusly, one doesn't know one lacks said insight. Instead, one is convinced that one already has the right insight into another's capabilities..

"You are inferior, and therefore, I can beat you, I can take from you, I can kill you, and you must let me do so".

It's an approach to ethics that externalizes the standard of ethical behavior, making it the responsibility of the other for how others treat them. It says, "You are responsible for how I treat you. If you want to be treated better, you need to prove to me that you deserve it."

It is saying treat others with the consideration you would appreciate - honour their preferences as you would want them to honour yours.
— Tom Storm

Do that, and you will be perceived as a pansy, and exploited.

If you keep kosher then you may need to understand that your neighbour keeps halal. The GR is therefore not asking you to expect your neighbour to accept kosher but to accept that they have their own observances...
— Tom Storm

So the GR is asking you, in the case where you're black and have a KKK neighbor, to accept his "observances"?

True. There are no guarantees in life, period.
— Tom Storm

Then why bother with the GR?

I think the GR mainly applies to the self as a guiding principle

That's bizarre. Only the neurotic think before they act. The normal person is always sure they have done no wrong and can do no wrong.

When kids misbehave to others there's a famous phrase parents tend to use - "How would you like it if they did that to you?" I've generally found kids get this formulation of the GR instantly.
— Tom Storm

Indeed. It makes them strive to grow up, grow strong, and make sure nobody can do to them what they can do to others.

What I like about the GR is that it is an invitation to see the rights of others as inviolable.

Provided those others are, to begin with, in accordance with one's preferences. If they're not, their "rights" deserve to be violated.
People who champion the Golden Rule always find a way around it. — baker

:rofl:

Gosh Baker, those comments sound bitter.

So the GR is asking you, in the case where you're black and have a KKK neighbor, to accept his "observances"? — baker

What observances? Of course you can twist anything to make it sound strange, but let me twist this back for you. The GR can work perfectly well here to recast the racist's understanding of people's common humanity and the importance of seeing all people as worthy of respect. Can the GR end world bigotry and fuckwit behavior? Of course not. Neither can any religious code or ethical system. Are you looking for magic spells that will somehow compel ethical behavior?

Do that, and you will be perceived as a pansy, and exploited. — baker

Has that been your experience? In practice I have never encountered this reaction but I can't say it won't ever happen.

Then why bother with the GR? — baker

Absolutist thinking. If it isn't a 100% done deal it isn't worth doing? Strange.

That's bizarre. Only the neurotic think before they act. The normal person is always sure they have done no wrong and can do no wrong. — baker

Where the hell do you live? In my experience the normal person (whatever that means) has insight and often reflects on their behavior. And as people mature and grow they often reflect more and deeper. And, as for only neurotics thinking before they act, that's a fascinating frame and I would say it's wrong.

Indeed. It makes them strive to grow up, grow strong, and make sure nobody can do to them what they can do to others. — baker

That's a jaundiced view of human nature and, quite frankly, having seen many children grow up, I have yet to encounter this phenomenon unless a child was abused or neglected in some way.

Provided those others are, to begin with, in accordance with one's preferences. If they're not, their "rights" deserve to be violated. — baker

Bad day?

People who champion the Golden Rule always find a way around it. — baker

Always? What is the source of your information, apart from a jaundiced view of human behaviour?

The point is not that the GR will fix the world. The point is it can be a useful frame, a teaching aid, or a navigation point. And it is not compulsory...

when one lacks the insight into another's capabilities, one doesn't know thusly, one doesn't know one lacks said insight. Instead, one is convinced that one already has the right insight into another's capabilities..

"You are inferior, and therefore, I can beat you, I can take from you, I can kill you, and you must let me do so".

It's an approach to ethics that externalizes the standard of ethical behavior, making it the responsibility of the other for how others treat them. It says, "You are responsible for how I treat you. If you want to be treated better, you need to prove to me that you deserve it." — baker

No, it’s an approach to ethics that makes the ability to act ‘ethically’ a function of insight, and no internalization of standards will get around that fact, because it’s not a question of ethical intent but of insight. Wanting to do the right thing, and having all manner of rules and guidelines for dong the right thing, are worthless if the attributes within another that are to be valued are invisible to one.

Qualities are CHANGES, referential differentials, ways of likeness and difference with respect to what came before. They are transitions, transformations. — Joshs

But I'm not following Husserl regarding qualities as I am talking about them.

Husserl did not go ‘Cartesian’ unless you getting this from Dreyfus’s terrible misreading of him. Intuitions are instants of experiencing that never repeat themselves identically. That is why a real object is transcendent. Our belief in an enduring self-identical object is just that , a belief that makes us see continuing self-identity in a phenomenon test is in fact flowingly changing. — Joshs

"Going Cartesian" is simply lifted from the Cartesian Meditations. Referring to the basic inspiration behind the reduction:

The meditator keeps only himself, qua pure ego of his cogitationes, as having an absolutely
indubitable existence, as something that cannot be done away with, something that would exist even though this world were non-existent. Thus reduced, the ego carries on a kind of solipsistic philosophizing.

But he continues by saying

In this unhappy present, is not our situation similar to the one encountered by Descartes in his youth? If so, then is not this a fitting time to renew his radicalness, the radicalness of the beginning philosopher: to subject to a Cartesian overthrow the immense philosophical literature with its medley of great traditions....

This idea if the "beginning philosopher" seems at the center of what have always thought his move to a phenomenological ontology was about: an ontology that is defined as "immediately presentative intuition". Everything issues from this. I have wondered, why did Kant have to talk about noumena at all?
Such an irresponsible bit of metaphysics, but then, he really felt he had no choice. But here I leave Kant, and ask, assuming he is right, and that one cannot both be faithful to the "evidence" of worldly presence and ignore this metaphysical insistence, there must be something in the world that that does the insisting. Noumena is not some impossible "out there"; it is some impossible "in here", I mean, in our midst, and this line that Wittgenstein wanted to draw between sense and nonsense was simply a way of systematically reducing the world to sensible talk to the reasonable and familiar.

Husserl argues that the self-identical object on which duration and mathematical quantification is based is transcendent to what is actually experienced; it is an idealization , a synthesis pieced together from moments of experience that never reproduce their sense identically. Actual experience does not subsist, inhere or endure, and this does not produce countable instances.

“…it makes no sense to speak of something that endures. It is nonsensical to want to find something here that remains unchanged for even an instant during the course of its duration.”(Husserl 1964). — Joshs

But this deals with the object and its knowledge structure. I don't think the "presence" of affect in actuality has its meaning bound up in such an analysis. Pain, e.g., is intuited entirely outside of how time and its flow is construed, regarless of it being an event IN time. I would put it like this: there is no way to conceive the structure of time such that it has any bearing whatever on the immediate experience of affect. This is not true of what we say about pain. I say pain is awful, but what is this other than a verbal stand in for pain? Nor is there a context in which pain is somehow recast differently. Contexts are contingencies that gather around pain, and perhaps can have a psychologically mitigating effect, I admit, such effects are very often mitigating or augmenting, and this is the way it is with contingencies. It changes nothing with regard to the phenomenon of pain as such. And I appeal simply to the phenomenon of pain as such.

You're right to think I am influenced by others, and I have read Dreyfus' Being in the World, but I don't see the things I am trying to defend here in what others say. I frankly find the Christian content of Henry, Caputo and others off putting, and they really never get to the point, as I see it. If the idea is to confront "things themselves" then the epoche takes you to the intuitive givenness, and here contexts fall away, and the context of givenness qua givenness (and all the theoretical environments that makes this possible) remains, and this, as Dennett showed in his paper on qualia, has no meaning that remains. "Presence" simpliciter means nothing that I can see. But the affective (as I am saying, broadly conceived) dimension of an event is entirely different.

I claim, we don't know what ethical (absolute) "bad" is, and any attempt to claim otherwise is just bad metaphysics. But the injunction to do X or not to do X is very clear. It is an injunction that issues from existence itself, I hold, and once entangled, becomes relativized.

Are you saying the value of a thing is its purpose? That which has purpose has value, and that value is its affectivity? So an act, the purpose of which is to solve some ethical problem, obtains its value from that solution, and that’s what ethics is?

That works fo me, iff value is not taken to be a quality. If the value of the solution reduces to a relative quality, which is where I was coming from, we’re no better off than before. — Mww

The value of a solution begs the question: what good is even a maximal value FOR a solution? Or, what is it about a solution that makes it at all desirable? This goes to the manifestness of the quality.

I'm not saying at all value and purpose do not align, but then if someone has a purpose for something, then we can inquire about it, and inquiry can go on forever in a childish game of what and why. The point I would make is that such repetition of inquiry works annoyingly well because the purpose is set in a background of further questionable accounts. I want ot be an accountant? Why? What is an accountant? What is money? And this never ends (something Derrida points draws attention to. I have read some deconstructions that sound ridiculously childish as they do just this kind of thing).
But regarding the purpose, once the answer turns to value--- It makes someone feel good! then questions run out, for the "good" of the good feeling is unassailable.
Of course, questions can turn to other goods and bads that stand in competition, but the good of the feeling as such, cannot be defeated. One could ask, "are you sure it is a good feeling"; but this does not question goodness, but only the ambiguity in certain cases. Unambiguous cases of "the good" are indefeasibly good. Absolutes.

As an illustrative example, you find in Mahāyāna literature the frequent expression that 'everything that exists is subject to birth and death'. Nirvāṇa does not exist, but is the reality beyond the vicissitudes of birth and death. So, beyond (the vicissitudes of) existence.

I make this distinction because when you encounter the puzzling phrase 'beyond being', I think what you're really reading is 'beyond existence', where 'existence' means 'phenomenal existence'. — Wayfarer

It does present the question, what is being? So, when you walk into a room, there is this implicit "sense" of things being there. It is a kind of familiarity, isn't it? So I say (and of course, I am working with what others have said), and this account is not going to set well with everyone, along with Heidegger, that this general sense of things being there is utility they have. I see a desk and its "being" is the way I can approach it, sit, get up, straighten posture in it, and so on. the room is filled with this way of realting to things. Then there is the affect, that I care, have an interest, maybe I admire the form, appreciate the function. I follow Dewey on this: all pragmatic relations are inherently aesthetic. I think language itself is just this, after all, how did I come to know language if not through a process of associating sounds with things modeled by others, then, gettin it right and everyone is very pleased: Problem solved! Dewey called this consummatory, both knowing and feeling at once. This is being, call it that substratum of encountering things that you acknowledge "are".

But then, is this an exhaustive account? It is a simplified account, granted (pages and pages of philosophy reduced to a paragraph) But, I say, and I am not arguing for this, for an argument has to have presentable evidential premises, that there is something in the intuitive encounter that exceeds this. The affect (consummatory affect, as Dewey put it) is the ontological foundation of the affair: affect is not an abstraction. To love, hate, have pain or pleasure, I think not only are these real, but are what makes a relationship with objects in the world one that intimates the being real.

And it is the subject that issues this affect. so when I say this tree exists, it is not the tree's existence I am encountering. It is my own. Not that the tree is out there, beyond me, but that the existence I experience when I see the tree is my own.

Nirvana does not exist? well, it is beyond birth and death because it is NOT birth and death. Birth and death refer to conditions in the world, the circumstances in which we find nirvana. But nirvana has nothing to do with this as I can see. Nor does it have anything to do with sitting lotus style or having a good teacher. These are contexts.

Beyond the vicissitudes of existence, meaning beyond what exactly? How about the above (the Dewey, the Heidegger above)? Isn't existence about that intuited "sense" of things around us being there? It can't be about some unseen substrate qua existence, because this is not to be witnessed at at all. As in, one never sees substance; one only sees individual objects, not what "all things are" underneath.
I think of nirvana as the Hindus do: It is absolute affect. Defined as joy, happiness, bliss, or whatever terms we have that are, as terms, merely "stands ins". Is there such a thing? I think there is such a thing as a powerful experience of bliss that occurs when one reduces the world to its bare presence. Being in love intimates this. Being a child (n the Wordsworthian "Intimations of Immortality" sense) was like this (how do I know? I remember this) Talk fails us here for no other reason than we do not have shared experiences so that we can match vocabularies. Not that it is transcendence in some impossible concept. The fact that, as Levinas would put it, we look beyond the totalities of familiar categories, does not to me mean these "beyonds" are in some other realm of being. The atman is the brahman: we are already "there".

That's as misguided as saying "appetite, urinating, flatulence, defecating ..." is what metabolism is "all about". :roll: — 180 Proof

If you think of these as bodily functions, you might think like this. But there are many ways to contextualize this. Physics can give, in a limited way, a particle-physics description, evolution can discuss the historical structures of the brain, we could talk about how these fit in some social etiquette and how these differ in cultural systems. But more we step out of the familiar talk and head out into philosophy, we discover that what is familiar doesn't rest on something else that is so solidly there. Here is an interesting scienc-grounded question: What does it mean that existence exploded in being (putting aside any terminological distinctions one might think of) in some Big Bang and fourteen or so billion years later started torturing itself through the agency of humans, goats and chickens and so forth?

Of course, this is not a question about biological evolution. It is a question that is put to the qualitative nature of suffering.

...

I, on the other hand, think the default sense that things ARE, is inherently logical. — Mww

And right this is. But re. logic: I think of Hume. It is empty, formal. Meaning has no message here. When we say something is rational, we are talking about how content is structured, not how structure is structured.
And, we can say that logic is transcendental if one tries to inquire as to its nature, since such an inquiry is itself inherently rational. The same goes for affect. But as I see it, affect has manifest meaning which something that stands outside the categories that would attempt to possess it. That is, we can think of affect and contain it in our thoughts, but its "beyond" (logic has this "beyond, too. See what Wittgenstein says in Tractatus) has real presence, evidenced in the very foundation of our affairs. To observe dispassionately is to observe with, if you will, passion, for human existence has its way of being in caring--- and caring, which is part of my point, begs a question: caring about what? the reduced answer to this is affect. or value.

Ok. Thanks.

Times two.

Pity.

Pain, e.g., is intuited entirely outside of how time and its flow is construed, regarless of it being an event IN time. I would put it like this: there is no way to conceive the structure of time such that it has any bearing whatever on the immediate experience of affect. — Astrophel

Pain is no different than the intuited moments of sense that Husserl describes as flowingly changing.

From a recent paper of mine:

Husserl's grounding of affectivity in inner time consciousness is a transcendental grounding, not a naturalistic one. Underlying and founding all strata of bodily and interpersonal dynamics is the assimilative basis of temporal constitution as retention, primal impression and protention. This is Husserl's primordial pre-condition for any world , any being.

The subjective and objective sides of the structure of temporal synthesis are not separate entities but only poles of a single act of intentional sense. In this synthesis, both the subject and the object pole contribute their own quality of feeling to what ‘an object is for the subject' in its valuative , affective sense. The energetic dynamism of feeling isn't something added to a content of perception from outside of it, in causal relation with it as agent of conditioning. Meaning content implies its own affective force, the affective signature is intrinsic to the objective and subjective sides. This is what constitutes the ‘life' in what Husserl calls the living present. The affective qualities contributed by the objective pole (noema) are its vivacity. Husserl describes the affective allure contributed by the objective pole as “that varying vivacity of a lived experience, of a datum of consciousness.”(Passive and Active Synthesis, p.214)

And an affective signature is intrinsic to the subject, in the form of desires, tendencies, strivings, anticipations, aimed at the objective pole. As Husserl says, there are rays emanating from subjective side to the objective side and vice-versa. Both affects originating on the subjective side and those originating on the objective side are implied in all intentional meaning. The always present affective qualities of the object (beautiful, pleasurable, unpleasant) are not made thematic in objectivating acts (perceiving a spatial object), but they are in valuative acts. And one's affective, hedonic attitude toward the object of an intention (disappointed, depressed, elated, bored, frightened) may not be thematized in theoretical interest, but will appear in our practical attitude toward the world.

Natural bodily structures are not the basis of affect for Husserl. If one wants to still talk about a body, what remains of the body for Husserl once one has dug beneath all the sedimented layers of constituted meaning, would be the ‘body' of the retention-impression-protention triad of time consciousness. Husserl's starting point in time consciousness is already is already a self-othering, thus an exposure to the foreign from within the resources of subjectivity, prior to any configurational-corporeal constitution, prior to any empirically defined physiological or psychological structures, prior to human beings, but presupposed by them. Affect is not an evolutionary device, it is synonymous with entity, being, existence, object, subject. Being as the moment of experience is simultaneously the feeling of being affected and the feeling of anticipatory striving. These precede the notion of a body as biological organism, and instead is a pre-condition for being of any sort. Feeling, understood most primordially, is simply movement (not in empirical but subjective space), transition, becoming, time.

Husserl's model of inner time consciousness generates a primordial motivational principle in the guise of associative synthesis. Unlike naturalist causal forms of association, in which the bond between elements is externally conditioned, in Husserl's motivational model noetic anticipatory assimilation dominates the foreignness of the noematic object pole. That is to say, associative synthesis achieves a belongingness between the constituting and constituted poles as a unity of identification, homogeneity, similarity, likeness.

“Thus each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense. To the extent that there is givenness beforehand, there is such a transfer.“ (Cartesian Meditations, p.111) “ all immediate association is an association in accordance with similarity. Such association is essentially possible only by virtue of similarities, differing in degree in each case, up to the limit of complete likeness. Thus all original contrast also rests on association: the unlike comes to prominence on the basis of the common. Homogeneity and heterogeneity, therefore, are the result of two different and fundamental modes of associative unification.” (Experience and Judgement) “...consciousness is connected in the most general way to another consciousness by a commonality that is correlatively noetic and noematic; and all connection is connection through "commonality." through uniformity and similarity.”(Passive and Active Synth, p.485)

This means that the capacity of experiences to delight or disturb us, particularly when it comes to profoundly self-affecting valuative concerns, is much more a function of the relation of the event to our strivings and anticipations than it is to whatever qualitites of feeling (enticement, allure, vivacity) are contributed by the object pole in itself.

I've got Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness here. Let me read it and and see what I can say.

Ethics is the category of thought responsible for generating behaviors conducive to both individual and collective well-being, flourishing, health, happiness, creativity, productivity, and peace. How's that for a definition?

-G

is the category of thought responsible for generating behaviors conducive to both individual and collective well-being, flourishing, health, happiness, creativity, productivity, and peace. How's that for a definition? — Garrett Travers

Not sure what happiness is, really. The question is, how does such a thing bear up under scrutiny? I can say I am happy, but what is there in the world that makes this meaningful? Is happiness "good"? What is this? Is it like a good couch? But good couches are good for good reasons. What is the reason happiness is good?
I am not interested in a definition of ethics that moves forward without being clear about what it is at all to value something, to love, cherish, hate, detest, and so on., valuing something is the essence of all ethical issues. This takes the matter to agency: what makes for an ethical agency, one that is capable of being in relationships where something of value can be put at risk? This gets to the heart of the "existence" of ethics. You see how this goes: all the shoulds and shouldn'ts of an ethical nature presuppose this valuing nature which is IN the world. We made culture and its value institutions, but we did not make value as such. This issues from existence.
Valuing is the existential foundation of ethics, I say. The question that remains is, what does this tell us about our ethical affairs in terms of their nature, their essence?

Valuing is the existential foundation of ethics, I say. The question that remains is, what does this tell us about our ethical affairs in terms of their nature, their essence? — Astrophel

Values vary by culture and class, as Nietzsche pointed out.

If there's a foundation, it's the complex of human emotion that gets sorted post hoc in ethical terms.

Values vary by culture and class, as Nietzsche pointed out.

If there's a foundation, it's the complex of human emotion that gets sorted post hoc in ethical terms. — frank

A matter of perspective, eh? Then, what is it that is a matter of perspective? Is this raging pain in my kidney a matter of perspective?

You have a raging pain in your kidney? Are you peeing blood?

can go on forever in a childish game of what and why. — Astrophel

“....To know what questions we may reasonably propose is in itself a strong evidence of sagacity and intelligence. For if a question be in itself absurd and unsusceptible of a rational answer, it is attended with the danger—not to mention the shame that falls upon the person who proposes it—of seducing the unguarded listener into making absurd answers, and we are presented with the ridiculous spectacle of one (as the ancients said) "milking the he-goat, and the other holding a sieve.".....”

Digging a hole to discover what’s in the dirt is one thing. Digging a hole just to put the dirt in a different place, is quite something else.

You have a raging pain in your kidney? Are you peeing blood? — frank

A non sequitur, Frank. Perhaps you could restate.

Just don't want you to be typing stupid stuff on the internet when you should be in the hospital.

Digging a hole to discover what’s in the dirt is one thing. Digging a hole just to put the dirt in a different place, is quite something else. — Mww

A reference to deconstruction? The point that they are making is that all singular assertions defer to something else. I call myself accountant, but what is this, as it is assumed I know since I am one. I can answer this question easliy, but each answer I give "begs" other questions, and this without end.Even when matters turn sagacious, talk about, say, how accounting is intrinsically misaligned with meaningful values, the questions never find the foundational "referent" they seek. Deconstruction (and I am no expert) is not a childish game, for it is something like the period on the end of a very long sentence beginning with the pre socratics: to speak at all is to have a perspective and meaningful thought can never be free of this. All meaning is contingent. Not too far afield from affirming Heraclitus over Parmenides.

to see how this all plays out, you could do what I did: read Saussure's Semiotics, then Derrida, chapter two Of Grammatology.

For ethics, one has to see how extraordinary this is. At this terminal threshold where language is seen not as an avenue into the world of truths waiting to be discovered, but as a stand in for this world that is constructed out of the "difference" of meaningful play among other meanings. This looks a lot like ethical nihilism finding its rationalization, for if God is out of the picture, then all that is left for metaphysical affirmation of right and wrong is left in the hands of what can be said, and if what can be said (and I think very much of Wittgenstein here. He is, in the Tractatus, emphatically against making meaningful statements that step beyond the boundaries of the limits of language) cannot make sense of what is true outside of language, then language's limitations apply to ethics.

I try to argue that ethics has an absolute grounding that is evident in the anatomy of avgiven ethical case: value simpliciter is not deconstructable. What we say is, but the intuition of pain, say, is not, and this pain is the kind of thing that drives all ethical possibilities.

Just don't want you to be typing stupid stuff on the internet when you should be in the hospital. — frank

Stupid stuff, Frank?

Well, yeah. I said "Nietzsche." You said "perspective."