Rationality belongs to a biological entity with the capacity to reason by means of conceptions, in accordance with logical laws of his own invention, AND, willfully act in discord with them.

Find me a cat with those attributes, and we can talk. — Mww

What in the...? He was talking about sensory perception. Where did you get rationality from?

Was he (@creativesoul) not anthropomorphizing and, it might be said, reifying the cat's sensory perception as (prelinguistic) thought/belief?

Was he (@creativesoul) not anthropomorphizing and, it might be said, reifying the cat's sensory perception as (prelinguistic) thought/belief? — Janus

Yes, I think so. I wouldn't call that thought or belief, and I also don't agree with the part about perceiving a computer as a computer, because I wouldn't call that perception. I would just call perceiving the computer perception, and the other part sounds like identification.

There is much I don't agree with when it comes to him. I didn't agree with his earlier interpretation of pure reason, and I don't agree with his comments about Kant and Hume, and I despise his confused and awkward and extremely repetitive manner of speech and his peculiar pet theories. And I don't agree with any of his arguments against subjective moral relativism.

On reification:

There’s as much distance between reason and instinct, as there is between apperception (by the mind) and perception (by the senses).

If we never learned a language, would we still be able to think?

What would thought/belief devoid of all empirical content consist of?
— creativesoul

How the hell would I know? It’s your theory, maybe that parameter is.....you know, like......incoherent to you. — Mww

C'mon Mww. Surely you agree that pure reason consists of thought/belief.

Right?

Was he (@creativesoul) not anthropomorphizing and, it might be said, reifying the cat's sensory perception as (prelinguistic) thought/belief? — Janus

No. I was not. Cats are quite capable of thought/belief. The cat believed the prey went behind the computer without ever perceiving the computer as a computer. I've set this out more times than I can remember.

The point being made, however, was about the all too common notion of "perception"...

That which pure reason is thinking about always has emotional content.
— creativesoul

I reject that thesis as without sufficient warrant. It is patently obvious there are conditions where no feeling or emotion requires my attention. — Mww

That's irrelevant. I'm not claiming that every situation demands that we focus upon the emotional aspects.

The issue here is what all pre-reflective thought/belief consists in/of. What is the content? If it includes emotion, and it most certainly does, then thinking about it requires one to think about the emotional aspects of it. Pure reason is thinking about pre-existing thought/belief. A proper account would include all that that pre-existing thought/belief consists of.

Wait, how did we end up on this tangent? Why must every discussion be steered in this direction? What's the relevance to morality?

Shouldn't a discussion about perception, thought, belief, language, reason, and so on, be confined to a separate discussion?

The job of logic is to provide the conditions for truth, given the correct use of it, it is the means to an end. It is the form of correct reasoning, content be what it may. After truth is known, there is no need of logic to preserve it.

This is just plain wrong. Logic does not provide truth conditions. Logic presupposes truth. Truth is presupposed in premisses.

Do me a favor here...

Define the term "truth" in such a way that the reader could replace all your uses of it with it's definition and not suffer any loss of meaning and/or coherency. The last statement above makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to me...

The rules of logic most certainly need to preserve truth.

This is getting downright preposterous.

You're welcome to address where I left off...


"'X' is good according to person A" is not about the goodness of X.

Agree?

Like everyone else in the world I've given this some thought. For the most part, what we consider right and wrong is considered wrong for a reason. Many moral questions are surrounding the topic of sex, incest is considered immoral due to it corrupting the gene pool and homosexual relations are often deemed undesirable due to its inability to produce offspring, much like most Christian views on pornography, essentially any discharge not for the purpose of reproduction is considered wrong or a sin. Many other moral questions go fairly without saying such as not murdering your fellow man and not stealing. The way I see it, morality is a concept that exists to protect humanity from itself. Without morality and a sense of right and wrong, the human race would collapse in a matter of days.

Nice rough history...

Insert The Great Moustache at this point. His life is a fine example of the sheer difficulty one has in 'shedding' one's first worldview when it is grounded upon such deeply held belief such as one in the God of Abraham.

Good/Evil

Reward/Punishment

Unfortunately the church did not do us any favors. The baby is hard to find in an opaque tub. She's there though.

God may be dead, but that God had nothing to do with an admirable moral code.

There’s as much distance between reason and instinct, as there is between apperception (by the mind) and perception (by the senses). — Mww

Are these meant to name two distinct kinds(modes) of perception? If so, what do they both have in common that makes them what they are... examples of perception. Surely it's more than just because we say so. Right?

What is the criterion, which when met by some candidate or other, counts as being a kind of perception. Clearly the difference is 'by the mind' and/or 'by the senses'. What makes them both perception though?

What exactly is it that you're saying is 'by the mind' and 'by the senses'?

There are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism! So of course that doesn't follow. It is designed to avoid conflicting statements! You have it completely backwards with regard to conflicting statements and moral truth! No two moral objectivists can both be correct about the same thing in an ethical disagreement, but there is no correctness under subjective moral relativism except the relativist kind, so they're never talking about exactly the same thing in any ethical disagreement, due to the relativist structure.

Why don't some people ever seem to learn from their errors in understanding, and instead continue to persist in making the same errors over and again? — S

I laughed... ...quite heartily.

If there are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism, then it fails miserably as a means for taking proper account of the way things actually are.



That's what tends to occur when one throws truth out the window.

"'X' is good according to person A" is not about the goodness of X.

Agree? — creativesoul

No, obviously I don't agree. That's basically asserting without argument that moral relativism is not about right or wrong, and then asking a moral relativist if he agrees, which is extremely daft. You would have to be a fool to expect a different answer.

You need to support that without begging the question, which is a task that people like you seem to find impossible. You've had 57 pages to provide a sound argument, yet you've been unable to do so.

Like everyone else in the world I've given this some thought. For the most part, what we consider right and wrong is considered wrong for a reason. Many moral questions are surrounding the topic of sex, incest is considered immoral due to it corrupting the gene pool and homosexual relations are often deemed undesirable due to its inability to produce offspring, much like most Christian views on pornography, essentially any discharge not for the purpose of reproduction is considered wrong or a sin. Many other moral questions go fairly without saying such as not murdering your fellow man and not stealing. The way I see it, morality is a concept that exists to protect humanity from itself. Without morality and a sense of right and wrong, the human race would collapse in a matter of days. — nsmith

But none of that addresses the topic. The topic is about morality itself, making this discussion a meta-ethical discussion. What you said is consistent with both of the main positions in the debate. The topic is not about whether there is right or wrong, or what you judge to be right or wrong, or whether there is a sense of right or wrong. Your qualifications like "I consider" and "the way I see it" render your statements useless as an argument against subjective moral relativism, if that was your intention. Was your intention to have a stake in the debate, or to say nothing controversial at all?

I laughed... ...quite heartily.

If there are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism, then it fails miserably as a means for taking proper account of the way things actually are.



That's what tends to occur when one throws truth out the window. — creativesoul

Nope, that's still not even a valid argument. It's not as though you've had 57 pages to produce one or anything...

And once again, you succeed in demonstrating your lack of understanding of subjectivist moral relativism, which doesn't throw truth out of the window. On the contrary, it is a meta-ethical theory committed to moral truths, just like your meta-ethical theory is committed to moral truths, but there's a dispute over interpretation.

Once again, this is an example of the opposition naively assuming that they have dictatorship over the meaning of moral truth, and that anything that doesn't fit their own interpretation doesn't count. And he's predictably doing exactly the same thing with right and wrong. Anything that doesn't fit his interpretation doesn't count. Even though that's a clear example of begging the question, which is a logical fallacy. How far must your head be up your own backside to make that schoolboy error?

Learn the basic fallacies you're committing, and then come back when you're competent enough to stop committing them.

This is a philosophy forum, where the aim is to present reasonable arguments in support of a proper account of things, not merely to assert or assume that you're in possession of such an account, and that any one who disagrees with your account must be mistaken and "fail miserably". This is no place for empty rhetoric. It's either philosophical substance or don't waste your breath.

Anthropomorphism is indeed busily at work!

a concept that exists to protect humanity from itself. — nsmith

A judicial system can protect humanity from itself, as well. Can the judicial fully contain the moral, or does morality need to be a system of its own?

Surely you agree that pure reason consists of thought/belief. — creativesoul

Your proclivity of conjoining disparate conceptions is off-putting. I understand thought, I understand belief. I understand thought is possible without a belief attached to it, I understand no belief is possible without being thought. I don’t have any reason to suppose conjoining them with the implication they are the same thing, would serve a purpose they couldn’t serve just as well by treating them as different conceptions, and as having different relations within a rational procedure.

Pure reason is a procedure, the method of exercising our intrinsic rationality, so of course it consists of thought and beliefs. There is no place in the procedure for thought/belief as a singular notion.

That which pure reason is thinking about always has emotional content.
— creativesoul

I reject that thesis as without sufficient warrant. It is patently obvious there are conditions where no feeling or emotion requires my attention.
— Mww

That's irrelevant. I'm not claiming that every situation demands that we focus upon the emotional aspects. — creativesoul

Your irrelevancy is misplaced. I reject the thesis because reason doesn’t think. I do. I am the thinker. By means of reason, imbued in me as a condition of being human, I do my thinking. That is why I am certain there are conditions where no emotional content is involved, for the simple fact I don’t think about them.

Are you familiar with “Cartesian theater”? Your “thinking about thought/belief” as it seems to me, demands one, which both speculative philosophy and cognitive neuroscience shows as unnecessary on the one hand or implausible on the other.

What exactly is it that you're saying is 'by the mind' and 'by the senses'? — creativesoul

Quickly.......
Perception: real objects are passed through the senses in order that we understand we are being affected by something outside us;
Apperception: representation of objects are passed to understanding a priori, so we are enabled to think an object without it being outside us.

If we didn’t have that ability, we wouldn’t have a memory. Perception is the energized neural pathway, the empirical aspect, apperception is the feedback loop such that the pathway is maintained, the rational aspect.

In theory.......

You’re proclivity of conjoining disparate conceptions is off-putting. — Mww

And the award for understatement of the century goes to...

If there are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism, then it fails miserably as a means for taking proper account of the way things actually are.

No one is debating the way things actually are and anyway, that isn't a problem for ethics it's just hard science and observation of an indifferent world.

Purely observing the world never offers an answer as to how humanity should behave. That's all ethics is concerned with, how humanity behaves.

So if we strip human psyche of emotion we're left with a cold, hard robot in a cold, hard world. How would such a machine react to the question, "perform a morally right action"?... It wouldn't inherently know what a morally right action is. It would require context, a goal and a motive.

Within a moral construction context is clearly subjective; We need to know what scenario we're talking about. The motive is also subjective; we make actions to fulfill our emotional needs. There is not one emotion, there's infinite hues. This concludes that the goal will be subjective; Subjective to our situation and motive.

All of the above is subjective. You can't apply objectivity to action.

Define the term "truth" in such a way that the reader could replace all your uses of it with it's definition and not suffer any loss of meaning and/or coherency. — creativesoul

Nahhh....I ain’t doin’ that. No matter how I did it, somebody could take exception. Especially you, methinks. It’s a fine line between truth being out there waiting for us to find it, in which case logic preserves it, or truth doesn’t exist until we determine what is true, in which case logic makes it possible. Historically, empiricists use the former to denounce the latter, rationalists use the latter to denounce the former. And the beat goes on.....

Does it follow that morality is relative? Sure. Does it also follow that conflicting statements about what's good/bad can be true as a result? Surely not.

"Good according to your morality", isn't about being good. It's about what you think/believe is good. It's the difference between being called "good" and being so, and we can most certainly be mistaken in that regard. — creativesoul

I buy this. It makes sense, and makes sense of. It has the virtue of focus. It affirms the idea of the good, while allowing that one good might not apply to all possible places, times, circumstances. But that none of us live in "all possible places, times, circumstances." We all live in a here-and-now, within which relativity does not apply. How big is our here-and-now with respect to relativity? Where is the boundary on this side of which is right and wrong and the good; and on the other it's all relative? I think that depends on the good in question, and the age, maturity, experience, and circumstance of those asking.

And "focus" because focus implies a refined view for a reason, which adjustment is sought and maintained for clarity, the clarity the result of the focus, lost when the focus is knocked out of adjustment - out of focus.

Like everyone else in the world I've given this some thought. For the most part, what we consider right and wrong is considered wrong for a reason. Many moral questions are surrounding the topic of sex, incest is considered immoral due to it corrupting the gene pool and homosexual relations are often deemed undesirable due to its inability to produce offspring, much like most Christian views on pornography, essentially any discharge not for the purpose of reproduction is considered wrong or a sin. Many other moral questions go fairly without saying such as not murdering your fellow man and not stealing. The way I see it, morality is a concept that exists to protect humanity from itself. Without morality and a sense of right and wrong, the human race would collapse in a matter of days. — nsmith

At which point we ask, "Why is it (morally) wrong to corrupt the gene pool?" or "Why is it (morally) wrong to not have offspring?" etc.

Maybe people would also have answers to that, and then we'd ask "Why is it (morally) wrong to <whatever the reason was>?"

Before too long, they'd have to say, "Duh, it just is!" or "Duh, I just feel that way" or "Duh, it's just what I desire versus alternatives" or something like that.

It's the difference between being called "good" and being so, and we can most certainly be mistaken in that regard. — creativesoul

Could you give an example and explain how we'd be mistaken?

For example, maybe you'd want to say that someone saying "It's morally permissible to rape others" would be mistaken and would be getting something incorrect, where you're not just saying that you feel differently than they do. So could you explain how that would be the case? (Or you can use another example to explain if you prefer--it doesn't matter to me, I was just suggesting one.)

True, but I think nsmith was just pointing out the evolutionary development of perceived common morality. It certainly explains why some actions are near universally frowned upon.

How so?