but any joy they got during that vast age was a part of something good they did. — Barkon

No, I'm sayign precisely the opposite.

if they were to perform bad in any of those endeavours, they would have produced nothing or the opposite.

Well, are our current theories wrong now, and just not understood as such? Or are they "true" now and will become false at some point in the future? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I guess it depends on the nature of the claim, right? As a rule, I don’t think things are “true” in themselves, they’re just not false. Water freezes at 0 °C (32 °F) at standard atmospheric pressure, but if the Earth were to die of heat death, that fact would become irrelevant and effectively vanish. In the meantime, we can safely accept it and it has utility. (Mind you it's a truth that's contingent on practices. Saying “water freezes at 0 °C” is true within the context of our measurement practices, definitions of temperature, and shared scientific methods. It’s not “true in itself” outside that framework. But I think you find probably this tricksy and limiting? )

Was the Earth truly flat when dominant practices and beliefs affirmed it as such? If not, the truth of the Earth's roundness cannot have been dependent upon those practices. Indeed, if the reality (truth) of things just is whatever the dominant practice/culture says they are, how could beliefs ever fail to be "pragmatic" and why would they ever change? We are always omniscient in that case, just so long as we don't disagree. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I woudl imagine our ideas change when the ways we talk about and interact with the world change, which is why beliefs shift over time. We’re never omniscient; we just get better at describing the world in ways that work for us. Truth, in that sense, isn’t about matching reality, it’s about what proves useful in our ongoing conversations. Humans are meaning-making creatures and are chronically dissatisfied with what we believe. That dissatisfaction drives us to keep revisiting and reshaping our models of reality, but I don’t think those models ever truly match reality.

But you write as if this is a vast problem: -

if the reality (truth) of things just is whatever the dominant practice/culture says they are — Count Timothy von Icarus

That frames it in a harsh light. It’s not 'whatever' the dominant practice happens to be, as if this were random or irrational. It’s generally based on our best efforts and practices and our sense making impulses.

Since there are no facts outside of practice and language, it follows that there can be no prior facts that determine practice and language themselves. And, since there are no facts outside of current belief and practice, no facts can explain how or why beliefs and practices change and evolve. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see why we need outside facts. Practices and beliefs evolve because people try new ways of talking and acting, and some ways work better than others. Change may come from our restlessness and experimentation, not from some external truth. It’s all part of our ongoing dialogue with each other and the world.

the solution of making truth dependent on man leads to some bizarre conclusions, especially if man is considered to be contingent. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t think it’s bizarre. This isn’t the same as saying 'anything goes'. Our models and approaches always makes sense within the context of culture, language, and conventions, all of which evolve.

(Edited for clarity)

if they were to perform bad in any of those endeavours, they would have produced nothing or the opposite. — Barkon

The point is you said this:

You won't sell a product if it's created bad. You won't survive if you do bad to your health. You won't create paradise that lasts if you're not good by nature. — Barkon

I responded with reasoning why this is inaccurate.

it's not necessarily performing bad if you aimed to trick people into buying a false cure. If he had performed bad in that very endeavour he would have produced nothing or the opposite. It's bad for other people. If other people were aware of him they would probably revolt. Which is where a moral power play ensues.

Someone can knowingly sell cigarettes or cancer causing products and be very successful and live a very happy life. Period.

If other people were aware of him they would probably revolt — Barkon

No. Gangsters, autocrats, thugs and CEOs may continue unopposed despite everyone being aware of who they are and what they do,

We’re never omniscient; we just get better at describing the world in ways that work for us. — Tom Storm

If truth only exists inside the context of human practices—is indeed dependent on them—what truths could we possibly be missing such that we are not omniscient? Wouldn't our (collective) lack of possession of all truths itself show that all truths aren't actually dependent on us and our practices, for how could they exist without our knowing of them if our practices make them true?

You didn't answer any of the questions directly, but I think they demonstrate the problem here. Did the Earth lack a shape prior to man and his practices? Or did it have a shape but it wasn't true that it had that shape? If man once again began to believe the Earth is flat would it "become flat again?" And if it wasn't round before man decided it was round, in virtue of what did evidence suggesting the Earth was round exist?

Truth, in that sense, isn’t about matching reality, it’s about what proves useful in our ongoing conversations. — Tom Storm

So, the fact that one cannot raise livestock to live on by mating males to males or sheep to pigs is a result of our "conversations?" But why would such a conversation arise if it wasn't already the case that one cannot mate males to males or sheep to pigs (or their precursor wild ancestors)? Why would people find it "useful" to formulate such truths if they weren't already the case, and why does it seem prima facie ludicrous that it "would be true that sheeps and pigs could produce offspring just in case everyone found it 'useful' to affirm this?" This is the problem with the dependence claim.

More generally, it seems to make 'usefulness' a metaphysical primitive. If there are no facts prior to usefulness, because usefulness is what generates all facts, then in virtue of what are some things deemed useful and not others? Yet surely what seems useful has prior causes, and there are facts about those prior causes. For instance, the reason it never seemed 'useful' to mate boars to wild goats is because it was already true that they cannot produce offspring because they are different species.

Further, what is actually, truly "useful" on this account seems to be "whatever is currently said/believed to be 'useful'" since there does not seem to be any possible facts about usefulness that are external to current belief and practice. But this straightforwardly collapses any appearance/reality distinction.

And since the vast majority of people don't believe this (they don't find it useful to affirm this theory as true), wouldn't it be false according to its own definition (a sort of self-refutation through the appeal to current practice)? Rorty famously said "truth is what our peers let us get away with saying," but his own theory (which is similar) wasn't embraced by his peers, unless his "peers" are not other humans, or fellow philosophers, but just a small parochial clique of philosophers, in which case it doesn't seem to have been "true" even in its own loose terms.

but if the Earth were to die of heat death, that fact would become irrelevant and effectively vanish — Tom Storm

If all men died out it would cease to be true that man ever existed? So likewise, if we carry out a successful genocide and people come to forget about it or don't find it "useful" to bring up, it ceases to have ever occured?

f truth only exists inside the context of human practices—is indeed dependent on them—what truths could we possibly be missing such that we are not omniscient? Wouldn't our (collective) lack of possession of all truths itself show that all truths aren't actually dependent on us and our practices, for how could they exist without our knowing of them if our practices make them true? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Are you saying that if truth only depends on us, then we should already know all truths, but since we don’t, truth must exist independently of human practices?

Huh? All I’m suggesting is that we interact with our environment and build stories, models and conversations to explain things. What we call truth emerges for a process. This is in constant flux and never reaches capital-T Truth. But many different models will be useful for certain purposes.

Did the Earth lack a shape prior to man and his practices? Or did it have a shape but it wasn't true that it had that shape? If man once again began to believe the Earth is flat would it "become flat again?" And if it wasn't round before man decided it was round, in virtue of what did evidence suggesting the Earth was round exist? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Saying the world was flat made sense in the context of what we knew at the time. Now it makes sense to say it is a sphere. Today most of us obviously prefer the latter, and it's more justifiable. But where will we be in 1000 years? Will we still think of the world as a material entity, or might we come to see it as a product of consciousness, rather than a physical object? I note also that there is an emerging community of flat earthers and globe deniers. Is Trump one of these? :wink:

If all men died out it would cease to be true that man ever existed? So likewise, if we carry out a successful genocide and people come to forget about it or don't find it "useful" to bring up, it ceases to have ever occured? — Count Timothy von Icarus

If people forget, it doesn’t make events vanish from some independent reality; it just makes them irrelevant in our ongoing conversation. Saying they 'never occurred' I would say is framing this wrongly.

Why would people find it "useful" to formulate such truths if they weren't already the case, and why does it seem prima facie ludicrous that it "would be true that sheeps and pigs could produce offspring just in case everyone found it 'useful' to affirm this?" This is the problem with the dependence claim. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’d say this misunderstands what “truth depending on humans” means. It’s not that anything could be true just because we say it is. Things in the world still constrain what we can do. Our conversations and practices are built around those constraints. We find some statements “useful” precisely because they help us navigate reality as it seems to behave. Saying that truth depends on humans doesn’t deny the existence of a world, physics, or animal copulation, it just means that what we call “true” comes from the ways we describe and make sense of our world.

Of course, I could be totally wrong about all this. It's my current preferred frame.

I will take the claim to be:

X is right = I have a positive attitude towards X.

I think this view of 'right' is incorrect (and the same for 'wrong'). When discussing ethics, that simply does not seem to be what is meant by the terms.

For instance, it makes sense to hold the thought "I think death penalty is right, but is it right?" Under the view above, this would translate to: "I think I have a positive attitude towards the death penalty, but do I have a positive attitude towards it?" This makes ethical reflection seem trivial, when it does not seem to be trivial. So that is a problem for the theory. — GazingGecko

I think emotivism can meet the open question challenge. A straightforward response would be to cache it out in terms of degrees of belief. That is to say, one can have a strong, dubious or indifferent attitude towards a moral proposition. In any event, one can be humble (as you yourself advise) and keep an open mind. "I am strongly opposed to the death penalty, but I might be persuaded to change my attitude, or perhaps some future life event could effect such a change."

If you object that this is not what the question is asking, that you want to know whether it is "really" right or wrong, then you are begging the question against the anti-realist.

It also fails to handle disagreement. If I disagreed with the previous speaker, and said: "No, the death penalty is definitely wrong", it seems like I tried to contradict them. However, this would not be the case if I'm just reporting my own attitude. To illustrate:

A:"I have a positive attitude towards the death penalty!"

B:"No, I have a negative attitude towards the death penalty!"

A and B are not making contradictory propositions. Both can be true simultaneously. But in these exchanges, we are often trying to contradict the other person. So there is something problematic with the subjectivist theory. — GazingGecko

Most moral propositions are more-or-less universalizing. When I say "I oppose the death penalty," I am not just talking about my own value judgment. To hold a moral proposition is to believe that everyone ought to hold it as well. Accordingly, an emotivist will hold concurrent attitudes towards moral agreement (positive) and disagreement (negative).

If other people were aware of him they would probably revolt. Which is where a moral power play ensues. — Barkon

Someone can knowingly sell cigarettes or cancer causing products and be very successful and live a very happy life. Period. — Tom Storm

Tom's post is eerily true. No mass revolts on the street against tobacco and cigarette when the surgeon general put the warning on the cigarette.

That’s a beautifully put reflection. I think you’ve touched the heart of the matter: suffering is not merely a social construct or a linguistic convention, but a fundamental experience that resists reduction. When we ask, “What is bad about suffering?” the most honest answer might be that it needs no further justification - it reveals its badness in the very act of being endured.

Language and culture may frame or contextualize suffering, but the raw experience of agony, despair, or anguish is prior to those frames. That’s why so many ethical systems, despite their diversity, converge on minimizing suffering and promoting well-being. They are built on the foundation that suffering is not an arbitrary preference but an undeniable reality, and well-being is its natural counterweight.

In that sense, good and evil are not metaphysical mysteries but responses to the lived fact of suffering and flourishing.
— Truth Seeker

Yes, prior, logically prior, meaning if this dimension of our existence were to be removed, then the very concept of ethics becomes meaningless. So here, one has to step out of language andlogic entirely for the logical ground to be what it is. Now, the same canbe said for science, I mean, remove, well, the world, and science vanishes, but science only cares about quantifications and causal connections and works entirely within the structure of thought of its paradigms. It doesn't ask about the nature of scientific observation, say, because it doesn't care since this kindopf thing; it doesn't have to. After all, the color red, say, just sits there. It is nothing without the language that discusses it analytically. The phenomenon itself has no qualities that are not reducible to the categories of language contexts.
But that sprained ankle, not like a color (as such) at all. The very salient feature of its pain is the very essence of the category! This empirical science cannot deal with this, and analytic philosophy simply runs away, because to admit this is ,like admitting an actual absolute. Like admitting divine existence in their eyes.
But are they wrong? After all, this IS the essence of religion: an absolute in the metaethical analysis. — Constance

That’s very well put. I think you’re right that suffering is not like the color red, which only becomes “red” in relation to our perceptual and linguistic frameworks. The sting of pain is not dependent on cultural categories - it is what it is in a way that forces itself upon us prior to analysis.

That doesn’t mean it becomes some kind of metaphysical deity, though. It simply means that suffering is an undeniable experiential absolute in our lives, much like gravity is a physical absolute in our environment. We don’t need religion to acknowledge it; we only need to pay attention to lived experience.

From there, ethics is built not on arbitrary rules but on responding to this reality: suffering is intrinsically bad to the one who endures it, and well-being is intrinsically good. Ethical systems differ in how they propose to minimize suffering and maximize well-being, but they converge on this foundation because it is pre-linguistic and universal.

In my view, recognizing suffering as fundamental doesn’t point us to the divine, but to the very real ground of our shared experiences, such as pain, pleasure, fear, love, hate, grief, sadness, rage, happiness, compassion and so on.

A bad for everyone can become contaminate and control the people. Thing is, those people didn't too overly bad to their health otherwise they'd be dead. They didn't do bad at ordering their stuff, otherwise it would have all went to waste. The bad they did do was sell a false cure to everyone, and everyone probably would revolt but does the improbable and doesn't because of the power of the people involved. However, as said, these people have some good balance and the fact that the people could be tricked gave an opportunity for a good criminal performance.

But that sprained ankle, not like a color (as such) at all. The very salient feature of its pain is the very essence of the category! This empirical science cannot deal with this, and analytic philosophy simply runs away, because to admit this is ,like admitting an actual absolute. Like admitting divine existence in their eyes.
But are they wrong? After all, this IS the essence of religion: an absolute in the metaethical analysis.
— Constance

That’s very well put. I think you’re right that suffering is not like the color red, which only becomes “red” in relation to our perceptual and linguistic frameworks. The sting of pain is not dependent on cultural categories - it is what it is in a way that forces itself upon us prior to analysis. — Truth Seeker

@Constance @Truth Seeker Pain is not the same as suffering. One might say that pain is the alarm system of the body's damage control function. Sometimes the alarm can go off because there is a fault in the system.

Suffering is a response; an attitude one takes to pain or to other experience; a judgement. One can suffer from guilt, from ennui, from despair, as well as from pain.

So the essence of suffering is the negative judgement of the sufferer. Thus the endurance athlete has to learn to withhold that negative judgement and thus overcome the 'pain barrier' that would otherwise limit their performance.

But this means that suffering is totally in the experience of the sufferer, and it makes no sense to say, therefore, that suffering is good, because suffering is constituted by the judgement that it is bad.

I can still say, though, that your suffering is good for me, if I find it amusing or consoling, or gratifying in some way, but it is not the suffering that you feel, but the idea thatI have (of you suffering) that I am gratified by.

3) Talk therapy for managing pain.
Psychotherapy includes different methods to help you understand and change unhealthy feelings. It also helps you to understand unhealthy thoughts and actions. It can help you manage or change how you feel the pain.

https://nursesgroup.co.uk/pain-management-in-nursing

Are you saying that if truth only depends on us, then we should already know all truths, but since we don’t, truth must exist independently of human practices? — Tom Storm

Sure, that would seem to be one consequence of the idea that truth only exists (is created by/dependent upon) human practices and language. How could an unspoken, unacknowledged truth exist?

All I’m suggesting is that we interact with our environment and build stories, models and conversations to explain things. What we call truth emerges for a process. This is in constant flux and never reaches capital-T Truth. But many different models will be useful for certain purposes. — Tom Storm

Might I suggest that this seems to be conflating two different things? One idea is fallibilism, the idea that we never know everything, or know something exhaustively. To know something exhaustively is, in a sense, to understand all its causes and its entire context, which is arguably to know everything. Nonetheless, this is not normally taken to mean that one must know absolutely everything to know anything at all.

But the other idea is that truth is actually generated by and dependent on "stories and conversations," which are themselves driven by "usefulness" (and so too, apparently any truth about usefulness itself) . It's this latter thesis that I am objecting to. The former has a long pedigree. The latter only seems to show up as a position for Plato to make jokes about and then millennia later as an "ironic" post-modern position.

Saying the world was flat made sense in the context of what we knew at the time. Now it makes sense to say it is a sphere. Today most of us obviously prefer the latter, and it's more justifiable. But where will we be in 1000 years? Will we still think of the world as a material entity, or might we come to see it as a product of consciousness, rather than a physical object? I note also that there is an emerging community of flat earthers and globe deniers. Is Trump one of these? :wink: — Tom Storm

Well, my confusion is that "makes sense in the context of," is not normally taken to be a synonym for "is true." Is the idea that these are the same thing? Perhaps it "made sense" to sacrifice people to make sure the sun didn't disappear in the context of Aztec civilization, but surely it wasn't true that the continued shining of the sun was dependent on cutting victims' hearts out on an alter.

Yet the idea that our conversations and practices and generative of all truths would suggest just this. That "makes sense to" is synonymous with "is true."

It’s not that anything could be true just because we say it is. Things in the world still constrain what we can do. Our conversations and practices are built around those constraints. We find some statements “useful” precisely because they help us navigate reality as it seems to behave. — Tom Storm

Ok, did reality truly behave this way before we found it useful to say it is so? Either it did, and there was a truth about these "constraints" that lies prior to, and is, in fact, the true cause of, human practices (i.e., these constraints were actually, really the case, that is, truly the case) or else it was our own sense of "usefulness" that made the constraints truly exist in the first place. Or, did these constraints which shape practice and conversations actually exist, but it wasn't true that they existed (which is an odd thing to say)?

If practices are necessary for truth you cannot posit constraints that lie prior to practices as the cause of those practices without denying the truth of those constraints it would seem. For they only become truly existent when declared so in practice.

And as noted earlier, there are the two other difficulties:

A. If there is no fact about what is truly useful, then "usefulness" is just whatever appears useful. Cutting out the hearts of sacrificial victims once seemed useful, and so apparently it was,.for instance. But since usefulness determines truth, truth is simply determined by appearances.

B. Since such a position isn't popular, it is false on its own terms.

Pain is not the same as suffering. One might say that pain is the alarm system of the body's damage control function. Sometimes the alarm can go off because there is a fault in the system.

Suffering is a response; an attitude one takes to pain or to other experience; a judgement. One can suffer from guilt, from ennui, from despair, as well as from pain.

So the essence of suffering is the negative judgement of the sufferer. Thus the endurance athlete has to learn to withhold that negative judgement and thus overcome the 'pain barrier' that would otherwise limit their performance.

But this means that suffering is totally in the experience of the sufferer, and it makes no sense to say, therefore, that suffering is good, because suffering is constituted by the judgement that it is bad.

I can still say, though, that your suffering is good for me, if I find it amusing or consoling, or gratifying in some way, but it is not the suffering that you feel, but the idea thatI have (of you suffering) that I am gratified by.

3) Talk therapy for managing pain.
Psychotherapy includes different methods to help you understand and change unhealthy feelings. It also helps you to understand unhealthy thoughts and actions. It can help you manage or change how you feel the pain.
https://nursesgroup.co.uk/pain-management-in-nursing — unenlightened

That’s an interesting distinction. I agree that pain and suffering aren’t identical - pain can be a biological signal, while suffering often involves the added layer of how consciousness registers and appraises the unpleasantness. But that doesn’t make suffering reducible to “just a judgment.”

The endurance athlete shows that mindset can modulate the degree of suffering, but the fact that it takes so much training to endure pain without suffering suggests that suffering is not simply optional. And in cases like torture or sadism, we see why: the deliberate infliction of suffering is universally condemned, precisely because suffering is intrinsically bad for the one who endures it, regardless of whether someone else finds it gratifying.

So therapy and mindfulness can help people manage suffering, but they don’t show that suffering is illusory. They show it’s real enough that both ethics and whole fields of medicine and psychology are devoted to alleviating it.

I think there are advantages to occasionally looking at the world through an amoral lens. Judgment and understanding stand in opposition. The more you judge something or someone, the less you understand, because once the judgement is made (that was evil!), there's no reason to look further. Understanding requires putting judgment on the shelf. For instance, if you think about the most aggressive, toxic person in your life, consider that angry, aggressive people usually feel weak and afraid. People who try to manipulate others feel like they have no control. People are contradictory. People who are in pain sometimes lash out to cause others pain. Plus causing pain can be a form of self medication because it feels good to stomp downward. It makes you feel powerful, and a dopamine burst is apt to accompany it, producing a feeling of accomplishment. In other words, the question ethics doesn't spend much time on is: why does the abuse exist? Step away from ethics into nihilism, and you can see how so many people are trapped in a web of grief and rage, most born into that web. Instead of lamenting it, see the way this web shapes identities and grand dramas that play out over generations. — frank

Absolutely. Such is the way things are, one crisis after the next. I take it that looking through an amoral lens is exactly what necessitates a foundational morality. It is really not an argument anymore, but a kind of seeing (phenomenology is, after all, essentially descriptive): being is thrust into existence 14 or so billion years ago, so to speak, and then simply starts torturing itself. I can't speak for all, but when I let this intuitively settle in my mind, I see it as impossible as contradicting modus ponens.

But that doesn’t make suffering reducible to “just a judgment.” — Truth Seeker

No, I certainly didn't intend that reduction, especially the 'just'. Pain is real, and judgements are real, and suffering is real. The point I want to emphasise though is that the idea that suffering is not bad is contradictory, and thus that the reduction of suffering gives a necessary and real foundation of morality.

And compare this to my earlier suggestion, in relation to communication:

Consider the proposition, "Falsehood is better than truth."
If it were true, then it would be better to believe that truth is better than falsehood.
If it were false, then it would be better to believe that truth is better than falsehood.
'Therefore, 'truth is better than falsehood' is the only tenable moral position on truth. — unenlightened

To be alive as a human, is to make judgements of oneself and of the world, between edible and poisonous, true and false, friend and foe, and so on. And though one can be mistaken, one cannot actually prefer foes to friends, falsehood to truth, poison to food, or suffering to comfort.

I take it that looking through an amoral lens is exactly what necessitates a foundational morality. — Constance

How so?

For instance, if you think about the most aggressive, toxic person in your life, consider that angry, aggressive people usually feel weak and afraid. People who try to manipulate others feel like they have no control. People are contradictory. People who are in pain sometimes lash out to cause others pain. Plus causing pain can be a form of self medication because it feels good to stomp downward. It makes you feel powerful, and a dopamine burst is apt to accompany it, producing a feeling of accomplishment. In other words, the question ethics doesn't spend much time on is: why does the abuse exist? Step away from ethics into nihilism, and you can see how so many people are trapped in a web of grief and rage, most born into that web. Instead of lamenting it, see the way this web shapes identities and grand dramas that play out over generations.

IDK, terms like "aggressive," "weak," "afraid," "pain," "toxic," "grief," "rage," "powerful," etc. all seem to be value-laden in a way that would make it quite difficult to approach them sans value. Without a particular end in mind, nothing can be labeled "toxic" or "maladaptive."

Wouldn't the very idea that the one can understand best when suspending all evaluative judgements itself presuppose that the truth of human activity and happiness doesn't need to be understood in terms of values and ends? I'd also question whether such a state of dispassioned reason ever exists (if it is even desirable), and even if it does exist it isn't clear that it is easily achievable without practice. I don't think the problem of "bad judgement" and of one's own propensity for error, or lack of epistemic virtues, is necessarily fixed by simply suspending judgement.

For instance, the question of why abuse and toxic behavior exists is one of the foundational questions of ethics. It is clear that what it apparently good (what people seek) isn't what is truly best, hence the need for a study of ends in the first place. It is analogous to the question of error in epistemology. To be sure, some sorts of modern ethics focuses solely on deducing "rules" and "laws," but they do this precisely because they have assumed that "dispassioned description" is superior to judgement (generally in a desire to ape the sciences). But the problem there is more a lack of judgement than a surplus. The quest for "rules all rational agents should agree to in virtue of rationality," itself presupposes a certain view of rationality and agents that makes error mysterious.

Wouldn't the very idea that the one can understand best when suspending all evaluative judgements itself presuppose that the truth of human activity and happiness doesn't need to be understood in terms of values and ends? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think so. "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone." Compassion comes from suspending judgment long enough to truly see the sinner: to see that it's someone just like you. Jesus was a moral nihilist. The people who can't see that are the ones who need to throw the stone. They lust to see the sinner in pain. These people are locked in a cycle that Jesus encouraged people to find their way out of. The way out is through forgiveness. You do it by the grace of God.

Jesus was a moral nihilist. — frank

:meh:

Compassion comes from suspending judgment — frank

Compassion is value-laden, it comes from judging a person against what is truly good for them. If there is no better or worse way for a person to be then there is nothing to feel pity about and no need for mercy.

The people who can't see that are the ones who need to throw the stone. They lust to see the sinner in pain. — frank

You are conflating a recognition of sin with a desire to personally extract justice, as if the two were inseparable. In fact, forgiveness presupposes judgement that there be anything that is recognized as warranting forgiveness. Forgiveness is not apathy either. The point is proper authority. "Vengeance is mine, I shall repay" ( Deuteronomy 32:35; Romans 12:19).

These people are locked in a cycle that Jesus encouraged people to find their way out of. The way out is through forgiveness — frank

If nihilism is true then there is no sin to forgive and if "nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so," then throwing the rock can hardly be bad if one thinks it good.

In fact, forgiveness presupposes judgement — Count Timothy von Icarus

Obviously. Judgment is the foundation of action. To understand, judgment must be suspended, but the need to act is always there. Judgment and understanding go hand in hand.

Sorry, I'm not going to read all of that. I read through some, and it occurred to me that it was excessive. — Constance

Then I'm going to take your disagreements with a bit less value. If you didn't read it, you probably don't understand it.

But existence qua existence syas nothing about this. OTOH, there IS no existence qua existence; this is just an abstraction from what there, in the givenness of the world. — Constance

Correct. But it is a reasonable foundation based on the logic of the argument. If you wish to point out why the argument doesn't work, I would be happy to discuss.

one has to move toward inclusiveness, that is, including everything that IS, and this means all of what is usually excluded, human subjectivity. — Constance

Then you do not understand the argument. Existence is everything that is, including subjectivity.

constitutes a view of existence which has no place for your thesis. — Constance

I'm not sure it does. If existence is everything, including subjective thought, how does my argument not work specifically? If you're not addressing the terms and argument used, then this is a 'straw man' fallacy. In other words you've built up and assumed I am claiming one thing that I am not, then saying its wrong.

You thesis amounts to a world where divinity subsumes existence. — Constance

No, I don't see this either.

One final point, if you can't take the time to read and understand the whole argument, but instead make a snap judgement based on the intro, why would I think you have the capability to be a proper critic of it? Something to consider with other posters going forward.

I'm a little unclear what it would mean for something like Germany to not be objective. Does this mean it is not an objective fact that German surrendered in WWII? Is it not an objective fact that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July, 4th, 1776? Are there objective rules to chess? What about objective truths of arithmetic (which is often considered a "game" like chess)?

I apologize for being difficult to understand. No, it is an objective fact that Germany surrendered in WWII. However, all nations, including the nation of Germany (what I specifically spoke of) do not exist objectively. They exist through mutual agreement between very large groups of humans. If those humans no longer agree that a nation exists, it doesn't. Try traveling to the USSR. Similarly, while it is an objective fact that murder is illegal essentially everywhere and is against the moral code of most humans, this fact is an amalgamation of many individual subjective viewpoints of a large group of humans.

But that doesn’t make suffering reducible to “just a judgment.”
— Truth Seeker

No, I certainly didn't intend that reduction, especially the 'just'. Pain is real, and judgements are real, and suffering is real. The point I want to emphasise though is that the idea that suffering is not bad is contradictory, and thus that the reduction of suffering gives a necessary and real foundation of morality.

And compare this to my earlier suggestion, in relation to communication:

Consider the proposition, "Falsehood is better than truth."
If it were true, then it would be better to believe that truth is better than falsehood.
If it were false, then it would be better to believe that truth is better than falsehood.
'Therefore, 'truth is better than falsehood' is the only tenable moral position on truth.
— unenlightened

To be alive as a human, is to make judgements of oneself and of the world, between edible and poisonous, true and false, friend and foe, and so on. And though one can be mistaken, one cannot actually prefer foes to friends, falsehood to truth, poison to food, or suffering to comfort. — unenlightened

That’s beautifully argued. I like how you’ve shown that some values are not arbitrary but built into what it means to be human. Just as “truth is better than falsehood” cannot be coherently denied, the same seems true of “suffering is bad and reducing it is good.”

To exist as humans is indeed to make judgments - about nourishment, danger, truth, comfort, trust and so on. These aren’t optional preferences, but conditions of survival and flourishing. The contradiction comes when someone tries to deny them while still living within them.

So morality, at its root, doesn’t need to be imported from outside - whether from religion or abstract metaphysics. It arises from the unavoidable reality that suffering presses itself upon us as bad, and well-being presses itself upon us as good. Ethical systems differ in details, but they converge here because this is the ground we all stand on.

Well, my confusion is that "makes sense in the context of," is not normally taken to be a synonym for "is true." Is the idea that these are the same thing? Perhaps it "made sense" to sacrifice people to make sure the sun didn't disappear in the context of Aztec civilization, but surely it wasn't true that the continued shining of the sun was dependent on cutting victims' hearts out on an alter.

Yet the idea that our conversations and practices and generative of all truths would suggest just this. That "makes sense to" is synonymous with "is true." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, that’s my position. What we call true is what makes sense or works in a given context. Does truth exist as a separate property outside us by which we can measure other civilization's truths? I don't think so. We just have different models we use to make sense of the world. But that's no small thing.

Ok, did reality truly behave this way before we found it useful to say it is so? Either it did, and there was a truth about these "constraints" that lies prior to, and is, in fact, the true cause of, human practices (i.e., these constraints were actually, really the case, that is, truly the case) or else it was our own sense of "usefulness" that made the constraints truly exist in the first place. Or, did these constraints which shape practice and conversations actually exist, but it wasn't true that they existed (which is an odd thing to say)?

If practices are necessary for truth you cannot posit constraints that lie prior to practices as the cause of those practices without denying the truth of those constraints it would seem. For they only become truly existent when declared so in practice. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t see what this gets you. To talk about a constraint before us is to say nothing intrinsically meaningful about it. To say that there are things in the world that limit us ( but not always or forever) also says nothing about truth as such. It’s just a contingency, a product of our interactions with a world. Not arguing that the world doesn't exist. What we consider true comes from our experiences and the conversations we have, which are always changing.

I feel that perhaps our conversation has wandered and become too diffuse. The original question was soemthign like: to what extent can we claim that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ exist independently of contingent human values and pragmatic frameworks? Could you offer a brief response in three or four sentences, even if it only gestures toward your own perspective?

Could you offer a brief response in three or four sentences, even if it only gestures toward your own perspective? — Tom Storm

Or take a blow gun and shoot less than three darts in the general direction of what you think?

Could you offer a brief response in three or four sentences, even if it only gestures toward your own perspective? — Tom Storm

The Count is known for his magniloquence. He expresses himself, when he wishes to express himself, wherever he wishes to express himself, exactly as he expresses himself. His wisdom shall not be guided, nay, limited, by a mere questioner. His time is very valuable. You should be lucky to even have a chance to glean wisdom from him.

In my view, recognizing suffering as fundamental doesn’t point us to the divine, but to the very real ground of our shared experiences, such as pain, pleasure, fear, love, hate, grief, sadness, rage, happiness, compassion and so on. — Truth Seeker

Don't know how well this will come off:

Everything I say is derivative, of course. I am what I read. I put things together as I see fit, here and there, but the body of thought is Kant through postmodern thinkers like Derrida's essentially apophatic approach, and beyond to Jean Luc Marion, Emanuel Levinaas, Michel Henry who affirm....in the midst of indeterminacy.

Consider: At the most basic level, at the metaethical level where we encounter non formal value-in-ethics (Scheler), ethics insists on a foundation. It is apodictic insisting, like logic insists. But like logic, it can't tell you what it is for logic is in the matrix of understanding that would approach understanding itself, and thus one would have to stand outside logic to really "see" it, but this would require another perspective, a third one, and it, too, would seek aground for its existence, and the same reasoning begins anew. Logic can only show you what it is, and this is done in language, but language is not apodictic, but contingent, I mean, it issues fromt he ages: ages of a generation of signifiers, as Derrida would say (borrowing from Saussure), words (gestures, etc.) that "represent" a world, and all meanings flow through language, ARE language (a tough distinction). So in ordr tp get to the essence of logic, one has to take on the language that casts its existence, and thus, as with all things, logic becomes lost in indeterminacy. I know its structure cannot gainsaid, but I cannot "talk" about this.

Ethics is the same. One can't say what it is apart from its manifestation, so the point of talking about an "essence" of ethics is to get at what is there apart from all the incidental details, nto unlike what Kant did with pure reason: here the question is about the dimension of a given ethical problem that makes its ethicality what it IS, and this is value, non formal value (Scheler's term. See his Formalism in Ethics and Nonformalism in Ethics and Values), what you agree to above. The good and the bad in ethicsare, for this conversation, really just analytic terms, or metaanalytic, for what is IN the manifestation of the world, "meta" because there really is no good or bad, like Platonic forms might be. These are metaphsyical terms, but this is the "good" metaphysics, not the absurdities of ancient religious theology. Metaphysics here is what lies outside of the totality of language because it is not language at all, like being in love or being tortured. The whole world is, essentially, metaphysics, or transcendental. BUT: all that is manifest is given IN this totality, and so finitude and "the infinite" are one.

Long story. I am reading Michel Henry's doctoral thesis, the Manifestation of Essence, and you can see the language I use comes from this. But then divinity: What lies out side of languge is metaphysical, but nothing "lies outside" of language: metaphysical "essences" (definitions, "what something is") lies with language; this is ontology, to "say" what something IS). Being, otoh, is the manifestation, the givenness of the world, and this stands both IN language and out of it. Being is a threshold concept (different philosophers say different things about this), and the aches, pains, terrors, loves, delights, and all that constitutes the Being of an ethical matterare here. This "Other" of the other side is a fascinating concept here. Henry, borrowing as well, holds that Being is utterly seamless, a monolithic "presence," and this has a rather spooky intuition about it, for we have significantly (never altogether; this is impossible) slipped the bonds of language to acknowledge this. We stand in wrold delivered from its compulsory common sense, and ethics IS now something other than the mundane description. That is, the Being of pain and its abhorrent nature, and the Being of joy and its to-be-strived-for and sought out belongs to absolute reality.

This is essentially what religion is. God is just an embodiment of the Other of the good of being in love, of music: aesthetics (recalling Wittgenstein famously said ethics and aesthetics were the same. He was right: these are value terms, and value is essentially bound the this Other. When the analytic smoke clears, divinity is this struggle for the good, away from the bad (remember, there really are no such "things"; these are analytic terms only), only all of this is conceived in metaphysics (what is there, staring back at you in the ordinary world). So now, what is love, the walking six inches off the ground, head over heals for the "face that launched a thousand ships"? Now it is divinity.