Yet, to allow that we can be wrong about things—wrong about what is truly "useful"—seems to presuppose a truth of the matter that is prior, not posterior, to our beliefs about usefulness. And at any rate, the ubiquitous experience of regret seems to show that we can certainly be wrong about what is useful. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't thinkg ethics is grounded in pragmatics. Truth is hermeneutical, but there is something, as you say, prior, and this is the essential givenness of the world: appearance in the appearing. Touch a stone, and you stand in the midst of an absolute. This of course, is an issue.

I'm sorry, but I don't see how your post addresses the dilemma I pointed out. I am aware of how these thinkers frame truth. I pointed out why I think it contradicts itself. Your answer seems to be: "everything contradicts itself?" I just don't think that's true. Lots of philosophy avoids refuting itself in this sort of way.

At any rate, isn't the sort of defense you are giving simply absolutizing a particular metaphysics of language and philosophy of science? That is, "there is no absolute context, regardless of the context, practices, or beliefs," (which is, or course, itself an absolute, gnostic claim, and one that seems to contradict itself).

I can think of plenty of philosophers who would contradict some of those claims. So in virtue of what is this sort of take presumably "true" and the others false? Why are the "sociology all the way down," folks right about science, but the traditional realists and hard-nosed physicalists wrong? If truth is just about what is dominant in a culture, it would seem that realism still rules the roost amongst scientists and the general public, so wouldn't that make it "true?"

Truth traditionally understood is untenable, for traditionally, the object is conceived apart from the perceptual act, and this is impossible. One would literally have to stand outside of experience to affirm it. — Constance

I don't think that's an accurate description. Truth in the Western tradition is "the mind's adequacy to being," or "thought's grasp of being." That's as true across scholasticism as it is for Platonism, and the Indian philosophy I am familiar with is not that different in this regard. The idea that truth requires something like "stepping outside of experience" is largely a modern one, one that I don't even think came into its own until the early analytic period (and honestly, it's more of a caricature if expressed in those stark terms).

That's a theme in post-modern arguments though. The argument often looks something like:

A or B
Not-A
Therefore B

But this doesn't work if the first premise is a false dichotomy. The "mirror of nature" in modern, empiricist thought is not the "microcosm" of someone like Saint Bonaventure. You're not going to see being set over and against thought in Plotinus. Parmenides' "the same is for thinking as for being" holds for a great deal of thought before the modern era.

It's a pet peeve of mine because it seems like early analytic thought (or modern empiricism more broadly) often gets backwards projected onto the whole of Western philosophy, so that "all past thought" can be dismissed, which is a shame.

I appreciate the clarification, but it seems to me your reply doesn’t really answer the questions I raised. If “God” is simply another name for “the inescapability of ethics” or “the ground of value,” then my challenge about extinction, predation, and mass suffering still stands.

Because if God = metaethics, then this God is not protecting anyone, not reducing harm, not preventing injustice, and not promoting well-being. It seems indistinguishable from saying “ethics exists,” which is true, but doesn’t explain why harm, cruelty, and death dominate so much of life on Earth.

So I’m left wondering: does calling the ethical dimension “God” actually add anything beyond rebranding metaethics? And if so, what work is the word “God” doing that “ethics” or “value” cannot? Also, no dictionary defines the word "God" the way you have defined it. I don't think your definition is correct. — Truth Seeker

Well, if you are left wondering now, I think at the end of reading this, wonder will yield to either contempt or more wonder. It really depends on the kind of thinker you are.

Dictionaries give general accounts. They don't analyze. Here we want to go deeper. Religions of the world personify metaphysics, and have for millennia, and this kind of thing is grist for the mill for those who think religion is without meaning--atheists take naive theism and argue for nihilism. But religion and its God is essentially not this facile depiction conceived by overwrought ancient minds.

Protecting, reducing harm, and the like: what is this if not a redemptive concept that delivers us from suffering? See how Christians go on about redemption, but they drag this concept through dogma of theology. Christ the redeemer', and we are all guilty of sin, "original" or otherwise and it is sin we need to be redeemed of, and we have to have faith and God's grace comes to us through the church or through "the blood of Christ" ---and this kind of talk becomes saturated with irresponsible thinking, and by irresponsible I mean without evidential grounding. Such grounding requires observing before believing and what is it that religion is such that it can be observed? It is not an empirical science so it is not about empirical categories. It is apriori. Philosophy is an apriori study of the structure of our existence, and this goes to the presuppositional ground of what is observed in the everyday way. And HERE, I am arguing, one discovers the metaethical foundation of religion. Our existence is inherently meta-redemptive.

Religion is essentially about redemption and consummation. Your "extinction, predation, and mass suffering" is front and center. Now this line of thinking gets a bit weird. It has to be acknowledged that the world is far more alien to common sense that ever imagined IN common sense. I probably can't make things like this sound reasonable in a post. When it is realized that the world is given to us in a perceptual act, then all empirical concepts melt into air, for the perceptual act releases thoughts, feelings, anticipations, memories, resolutions and really, the entirety of what is human, INTO the object, and the object is no longer "objective" in the standard way science thinks. The object is now flooded with subjective content, and this gives all that we ARE, which has been sorely exluded from the scientific metaphysics that is the default disposition of most people these days, an ontological status in the world. Now this cup IS the anticipation prior to encountering, the memory and classifcation of cups, the feelings, the interest, the use value and purpose, the mood, and so on. The cup is now an event!

And what hs this todo with ethics and religion? The suffering you refer to above is released from empirical science and can now stand alone as what it IS, which is not empirical at all. It is decontextualized and can be seen purely, outside o f the interpretative matrix of everydayness. Suffering is no longer the deflated concept idle talk. Take a lighted match and apply it to the palm of your hand. Now you know the nature of the prima facie ethical injunction not to do this (to yourself or others). This is its essence, and this suffering is a stand alone phenomenon, outside of theory, social rules, reason; and this means the prima facie injunction, the "should not", too, stands outside these categorical reductions to the ordinary. If you can stand it, "the world" issues this injunction. And this the essence of God: An injunction to do and not to do bound to eternity (the world, after all, is not a round mass circling the sun, of course. It is Being).

If ethics issues from Being itself, there lies here the question of redemption: Thrown into a life of misery, but what does it mean for this misery to be, as I call it, meta-redeemed? A further inquiry for this.

Thank you for unpacking your view - I see now you’re drawing on a phenomenological line of thought where ethics arises directly from Being, not from rules or doctrines.

I think I understand your point that suffering itself is the ethical injunction (‘do not burn the hand’ precedes theory, rules, or society). And you’re saying this injunction is what you call ‘God.’ That’s clearer to me now.

Where I still struggle is with the word redemption. You describe existence as ‘meta-redeemed,’ but for the billions of animals in factory farms, or for children dying of preventable diseases, I don’t see how their suffering is redeemed simply because it issues an ethical command. Isn’t it just there - brute and tragic - unless someone actually relieves it?

So my lingering question is: if God is this eternal ethical injunction, does God do anything beyond obliging us? Or is it really up to us alone to respond, and the word ‘God’ is simply a way of naming the ultimacy of the demand?

I'm sorry, but I don't see how your post addresses the dilemma I pointed out. I am aware of how these thinkers frame truth. I pointed out why I think it contradicts itself. Your answer seems to be: "everything contradicts itself?" I just don't think that's true. Lots of philosophy avoids refuting itself in this sort of way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I say something simple, like, There is a sign post by the road. If anything is free of contradiction in ordinary affairs, I think it would be something like this. And in the situation where sign posts and sides of roads are taken for what they are unproblematically, agreement is enough: I see it, you see it, it's there by the road, and no issues emerge. But let's say I was being metaphorical, and I meant the sign post to be an augur of future events and the road meant to be the road of progressive living events. Or perhaps I was being ironic, referring to some blunder I made about sign posts earlier. The point is, for every meaning we can assign, we can imagine alternative ways the language can be taken, and in being taken differenly, the question of what it IS, has no final context, if you will, as if God were to declare once and for all that sign posts are just "this and only this". This "in and out" of identity undermines any thought of determinacy in what is being said. In the sentence, "There is a sign post by the road," I am now not referring to any actual sign post at all, but it is just the object language to my metalinguistic talk about the variability of language.
I am saying ALL language is like this. If contradictions are the gainsaying of what something IS, then contradictions are always already implicitly in the margins of whatever is said. They too, rise and fall, come and go. This is why nothing is sacrosanct, for the moment it is said,

At any rate, isn't the sort of defense you are giving simply absolutizing a particular metaphysics of language and philosophy of science? That is, "there is no absolute context, regardless of the context, practices, or beliefs," (which is, or course, itself an absolute, gnostic claim, and one that seems to contradict itself). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not absolutizing. Rather, Hermeneuticizing. Contradictions are confined to where they turn up.

They are just saying essentially two things: One, whatever is affirmed is spoken, written, gestured or otherwise affirmed in language. So it is a philosophically responsibility to give language analysis for the way meaning is handled. And two, the assumption that the world is received in some kind of mirror of nature of perception is, IF this assumption is grounded in naturalism or physicalism, demonstrably false. Brain's are not mirrors. But if this assumption is grounded in the phenomenon, the simple givenness of the what appears, then the "distance" between the perceiver and the perceived is already closed, and epistemology becomes a very different problem.

I can think of plenty of philosophers who would contradict some of those claims. So in virtue of what is this sort of take presumably "true" and the others false? Why are the "sociology all the way down," folks right about science, but the traditional realists and hard-nosed physicalists wrong? If truth is just about what is dominant in a culture, it would seem that realism still rules the roost amongst scientists and the general public, so wouldn't that make it "true?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

True in science, yes. But this truth is irrelevant in dry cleaning of knitting of bowling. A physicist can give a rigorous analysis using equations and specific language involved of knitting, perhaps, but this would require moving into another framework discussion. They are all right, and they are allowed to be: language never was some truth alignment between things and language that had nothing to do with the way the object is perceived, conceived, structured in the subjective setting that observes, cares, anticipates, assimilates, synthesizes, and on and on. Science works presuppositionally with this more fundamental ground, but it puts aside, say, the subjective temporal structure of the event in which an object's existence is acknowledged. This kind of analysis is presupposed by Einstein's spacetime.

There is no way around it that I can see: One cannot pry loose the object from perception. Such a thing could only occur if the object could be apprehended outside of experience, and this is among the least intelligible things I can think of. The only thing a person has ever witnessed is the phenomenon.

I don't think that's an accurate description. Truth in the Western tradition is "the mind's adequacy to being," or "thought's grasp of being." That's as true across scholasticism as it is for Platonism, and the Indian philosophy I am familiar with is not that different in this regard. The idea that truth requires something like "stepping outside of experience" is largely a modern one, one that I don't even think came into its own until the early analytic period (and honestly, it's more of a caricature if expressed in those stark terms).

That's a theme in post-modern arguments though. The argument often looks something like:

A or B
Not-A
Therefore B — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is not an either/or. Empirical science sits perfectly intact along side phenomenology.

And it doesn't matter when such a thing arose. It is simply there, before inquiry: how does one affirm the existence of something apart from the subjectivity that receives it? It simply asks if sense can be made of such a thing.

Like most philosophers, he [Rorty] understands arguments better than he understands the world. — Constance

:up:

Isn’t it [suffering] just there - brute and tragic - unless someone [temporarily] relieves it? — Truth Seeker

Yes.

What does this have to do with ethics? Thoughts about ethics are properly about the world. Are they IN the world, or simply In moods, attitudes, feelings (Mackie)? Rorty is just wrong on ethics, because he is doesn't understand the world. Like most philosophers, he understands arguments better than he understands the world. — Constance

Can you expand on this? Wouldn’t it be the case that all thoughts are IN the world - whether those about ethics or those about Harry Potter?

I guess what I'm curious about is what motivates you to look for a moral foundation. Once you have the foundation, then what? What will be different? — frank

Like asking what if Christianity were actually true. Nothing woudl change, one would still do one's laundry, cook dinner, go to work, but the whole thing would be deeply meaningful. Physical death would still be imminent, pending, inexorable. But then, a human being never was a physical thing...was it?

a human being never was a physical thing...was it? — Constance

Humans and all the other living things are physical things. We are all made of molecules. Our subjective experiences are produced by the physical activities of our brains.

Like asking what if Christianity were actually true. Nothing woudl change, one would still do one's laundry, cook dinner, go to work, but the whole thing would be deeply meaningful. Physical death would still be imminent, pending, inexorable. But then, a human being never was a physical thing...was it? — Constance

I'm all for that. I think guilt and condemnation are the central engine of emotion in human life. It's incredibly powerful stuff. If finding a moral foundation helps finding a way into it, good.