:up: Similiarly, in Spinozist terms, I think of modes as "existing" and substance as "being" (or, in Epicurean terms, atoms "exist" and void "is"). It was Kitarō Nishida (& Alexis Meinong) who had driven home this conceptual distinction for me years before I'd thoroughly studied either Spinoza or Epicurus (or, for that matter, Heidegger & co).

As I understand it, Democritus said that all the exists are atoms and the void. (which was also in Lucretius.) In essence, it means that the atom is entirely existent and the void is entirely empty. (See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Democritus)

Buddhist logicians disputed the concept of atoms by saying that, if they were truly dimensionless points then they could never come into contact with one another, because they would have no sides (a side being a part, and the atom being partless. Of course the ancients didn't possess the concept of the electromagnetic field, but in their day this argument was cogent.)

But beyond that, I don't think 'the unmanifest' or 'the unconditioned' should be equated with the Democritean void. The meaning of Śūnyatā, the Buddhist 'emptiness', is notoriously elusive, but suffice to note that Buddhists of all schools strongly refute its equation with nothingness (which was the common charge levelled at them by the Brahmins.) Thanissaro Bhikkhu says 'Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them.' That is why @Astrophel correctly pointed out the convergence of Buddhism with Husserl's epoché.

As for Spinoza, he says that the problem is that people normally desire “perishable things” which “can be reduced to these three headings: riches, honour, and sensual pleasure” (Treatiste on the Emendation of the intellect: para.3&9). As these things are “perishable”, they cannot afford lasting happiness; in reality they worsen our situation, since their acquisition more often than not requires compromising behaviour and their consumptions makes us even more dependent on perishable goods. “But love towards a thing eternal and infinite feeds the mind with joy alone, unmixed with any sadness.”(para.10) Finally, in the Ethics, Spinoza conveys his vision of the single “Substance” (Subject or Being) underlying manifest existence. His non-dualistic understanding of this vision is clearly articulated when he says that “[t]he mind’s intellectual love of God is the very love of God by which God loves himself” (Ethics, Part 5, Prop. 36).'

I see Spinoza as an exponent of the perennial philosophy - a lot of what is written in the Emendation of the Intellect could be transposed with little adjustment to a Buddhist or Hindu treatise on the attainment of tranquility. I think the reason for Spinoza's expulsion by the Jewish community was because his philosophy bypassed the need for the traditional religious authorities by teaching a 'direct path' type of approach.

How can we say what ethics is and what the basis of obligation is if we don't understand what it is about a person that makes ethics even possible?
A fair question, and then some. — Astrophel

As I have said, for me ethics is what happens when we try to cope with living with others. Ethics is only possible with others. We can't go any deeper without making stuff up or drawing from presuppositional theology or some other suspect meta-narrative. Because we have different wold-views you don't accept my answer. That's fine. Ditto. I simply don't see that there is any merit trying to 'understand' ethics from the perspective of the pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic - which is where you seem to be heading. By definition there is nothing to say.

So perhaps you can use your preferred method of enquiry and suggest an answer?

:monkey: :sweat:

As I have said, for me ethics is what happens when we try to cope with living with others. Ethics is only possible with others. — Tom Storm

:100:

I think the reason for Spinoza's expulsion by the Jewish community was because his philosophy bypassed the need for the traditional religious authorities by teaching a 'direct path' type of approach. — Wayfarer

There is an "indirectness" that also led to that expulsion. Arguing that the Unnamable One is not an agent we could gain or lose favor for our purposes through pleasing that agent through our petitions was the real kicker. The notion that our circumstances would improve if we weren't so stupid was recognized as something we could not explain by direct causal explanations must certainly have been annoying. But not as annoying as that first part.

After all, the lessons of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes was that one should not get too big in the britches explaining events.

As I have said, for me ethics is what happens when we try to cope with living with others. Ethics is only possible with others. We can't go any deeper without making stuff up or drawing from presuppositional theology or some other suspect meta-narrative — Tom Storm

I thought I would butt in here to clarify some things. Would you agree with the following? Our ability to act ethically with others evolves as a function of cultural development. To use an analogy, not too long ago it was assumed that animals had no emotions or cognition and did not feel pain. It s hard to act ‘ethically’ toward a creature when you dont see them as having any of these capabilities. Another example : we used to think that infants were a blooming, buzzing confusion. Now we know that they have all sorts of perceptual and recognition skills, including being able to empathize with others. Again, without such an appreciation of the infant’s perspective, ethical treatment of them is limited. I would argue the entire history of culture involves the growth of insights into how others unlike ourselves think and feel.

So there is a depth to coping with living with others in the sense of a base of understanding that evolves over time.

As I understand him, this is different from what Astrophel has in mind. He is looking for an affective basis for ethical behavior that goes beyond ( in that it is prior to) what we learn through pragmatic interaction. He follows approaches that hold onto a religious metaphysics, albeit of a progressive and heretical kind.

He follows approaches that hold onto a religious metaphysics, albeit of a progressive and heretical kind. — Joshs

Hi Joshs - I appreciate your replies. Yes, I already suggested this to A as a point of difference.

Now we know that they have all sorts of perceptual and recognition skills, including being able to empathize with others. Again, without such an appreciation of the infant’s perspective, ethical treatment of them is limited. I would argue the entire history of culture involves the growth of insights into how others unlike ourselves think and feel. — Joshs

I think this provides a bit more substance to the matter. I particularly like your last sentence.

I guess I am in the 'pragmatic interaction' camp and anything outside of that is for specialists and likely to be as speculative as some of the ideas generated by quantum physics.

:up: When I was studying in Comparative Religion, people sometimes asked me if I was studying Divinity, to which I used to reply, no, I’m enrolled in the Department of Mysticism and Heresy.

1.) The true object is not in the same system as affectivity and its structure. The true object is an effect on the system such that the system is affected by it. The true object is external to the system it affects. — Mww

I don't think this is true. I am not here defending some set of ideas conceived by continental philosophers. The argument has Dewey and Rorty. There is Dewey's "experience". I take a great deal if insight from John Mackie's book "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong". He helped me frame the argument. So did Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Lecture on Ethics, and "Culture and Value". I am also indebted to the East (fine points omitted). Husserl gave me the phenomenological reduction....and on and on.

It is not, however, an exercise in the history of philosophy (which I frankly could not pull off at all. People who do this are really good with details). The things I try to defend are pretty intuitive. Most thinking people are inclined to lay over what is given here with what they already know, and therein lies trouble.

1.) The true object is not in the same system as affectivity and its structure. The true object is an effect on the system such that the system is affected by it. The true object is external to the system it affects.
2.) It is implied that the true object and the qualified existent are indistinguishable. While it may be necessary that a true object is an existent, it remains that there are no conditions under which its qualities are given from its mere existence. — Mww

I don't deal in "effects on the system" talk, for causal accounts of any kind are off the table. There I am, sprained ankle, in agony. Agony? What is this? Even if there were an exhaustive account of all that brought the agony to consciousness, it would not having any bearing on the phenomenon of agony. You may even ground the agony in a temporal displacement dynamic (Joshs explained Heidegger like this), but this changes nothing (I argue). The true object is there, the agonizing ankle, I am observing. It may be that there are nerves and brain activity (but then, this would be the brain's observation of brain activity! A very important point) but this still is outside the "issue" I am raising.

You may object: one cannot "talk" about agony qua agony. And I would reply, exactly. Then move on to implications

3.) Phenomena are the affects of true objects on the system of sensibility in humans. If it is the case that no qualities are given from a mere existence, and mere existence is necessary for phenomena as affects of those true objects, then it follows that qualities do not belong to phenomena. — Mww

This kind of thinking is alien to what is being defended here. I don't really understand "mere existence" very well. Affect is not effect. Affect refers to the qualities of caring, broadly conceived. To despise something, or savor something, along with that which is the object of these, the taste of food, the sound of music, and so on. As far as affect goes, there is nothing more, I would argue, that can be a phenomenon than affect, for a mood, an aesthetic feeling, is most immanently "present", that is, intuitively apprehended. it is not that there is a violin causing vibrations in the air that excite the ear drums and so forth. The joy of, say, being love, QUA joy, not as anything else that might be part of its explanatory contexts, which are many, is the pure phenomenon. This idea of something pure is debated alot, and you might be familiar with Dennett's paper on qualia in which he denies qualia to be meaningful, and he is right If, as he does, you exclude the eidetic (the ideas that are inherent in the "presence" of a thing) dimension, then it is impossible to talk about, say, the color yellow. Yellow qua yellow does not "speak" yellow. We, in the way we take things AS yellow and smooth and what have you, and talk about it in different contexts, make the designation "yellow" possible. But affect, the emotion we might experience in the presence of yellow, this, sans any eidetic part at all, does truly, I argue, "speak".
What is "says" comes later.

4.) Because qualities are determinable, but cannot belong to phenomena as an element in a system of sensibility, it follows that qualities are determinable by a method in a system which is itself affected by phenomena. — Mww

Qualities ARE phenomena. This cup is red, and the red predicated of the cup is the quality, and it has, arguably, intuitive presence, and AS presence, there is nothing more "real". Husserl went Cartesian on this. He thought the the world out there of facts and science and the naturalistic attitude were a kind of second order of reals, for these issued from a foundation of intuitions, and these intuitions were absolute, unassailable, as say, something Descartes evil genius might try. You know how Descartes found the external world doubtable to our res cogitans sego. What is NOT doubtable? Husserl says its the phenomenon, the intuitive presence of what is there that is then taken up by science and everydayness.

5.) Deliciousness does not belong to, is not a quality of, phenomena. The true object that effects, and the qualified existent that is an affect, are in fact distinguishable. Deliciousness, and all qualities, cannot be determined from a given object by sensibility, but must arise from a system incorporating a method capable of it, such that qualities can be determinable as relating to an object. — Mww

So you see, as this goes, the object is not a res extensa thing, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson might tell us. We are in, literally, another order of perceptual awareness. The landscape of things and their qualities are acknoweldged for their "thereness", their appearance. The logic can be simple: One has never ever witnessed anything else. Talk about what has not been encountered is just bad metaphysics. Empirical science taken an ontology is just bad metaphysics.
Deliciousness, then, is taken as a direct intuition. It may be associated with apple eating, but saying apples are delicious is not something you find at this level of description. Nor do you find Jupiter being a larger mass than Saturn, or my shoes being untied. these are facts. Phenomenology is interested what underlies these facts as a facts' predispositions.
Think of how Kant (the "grandfather" of phenomenology?) analyzed reason. He wasn't interested in Jupiter either, but only the form of propositions and judgments that could be about Jupiter. These forms are what underlie presuppositionally familiar talk about things. His was an phenomenological analysis of reason.

Might it be that the entirety of phenomenal possibilities we classify as valuable serve as essence of ethics? In which case, consequentialism holds. But if we classify something as valuable, value is then a contingent assignment, and cannot be existential in that to which we assign the value, so consequentialism fails. — Mww

This is a rather good way to look at this, because arguments that deny moral realism often look simply at the differences in the way likes and dislikes are distributed. Differences can be radical. But the case for moral realism doesn't care about this, for the relativity in judgments about value is only intersubjective difference. But value as a phenomenon is very different, for the assessment of the value something has is allowed to be judged for what it is, not what it compares to.

There is the objection that even when value is "observed" as a phenomenon, it is still entangled, compared and so forth, for the mind is not a rigidly determined world. True, and this can confuse whether somethin is good or bad. But when something is deemed good in a relatively uncompromised sense, like this pizza, the goodness as goodness is unassailable. Fall in love? Unassailable, and by this I mean, it is not a prima facie case of being good. It is, rather, indefeasable, apodictically good. The pain of being axed in the groin is apodictically bad, and while the moral principle that would condemn axing another person thusly does not change or become fashioned differently because pain is apodictically bad, it does take on a dimension of meaning that is otherwise not there.

An impossible thesis: because pain (and joy and all the rest) is apodictically bad, our moral world has the gravitas of Old Testament stone tablets. Of course, there are no stone tablets, but one has to imagine what our moral affairs would be like if there were.

I argue for this.

When there are a myriad of reasons for any of those existential matters of fact.....how is it possible to assign value merely because of an immediate observation? If the kids were lactose intolerant, if the whole family had just left the house they were in the process of remodeling, if nothing on the menu suited their tastes......all sufficiently explain what I observed, but do not necessarily explain why I paid for the dining occasion.

Nahhhh.....my ethical contribution was the consequence of my having already assigned the value of “deserving” as an aesthetic judgement, which may have been an affect of my observations, but cannot thereby be predicated on them alone. I judged them as deserving because I related that value in that instance, to another in which it was absent. It follows that the observation, the phenomenal experience, was valuable, in that it elicited an assignable value to my ethical act, but contained no predicate value in itself.

Again, the consequentialist ethics was given in the act; the cause of it was not. — Mww

I don't have any problem with utilitarian thinking at all. Only it does not always yield proper results.

And to assigning value to the immediate observation: It is not that these are not important to naking a decision. The phenomenological examination of the case is at a different order of analysis. Think again what Kant did in the CPR: individual cases are set aside, for he was trying to discover their rational essence, an analysis of what is presupposed by normal judgment. Phenomenological analysis does this with everything, the world that is there logically prior to it begin taken up in this way or that.
I argue that in all experiences in the world, there is this apodicticity that is found in the affectivity, the value. this means that in all we do and say there is this value essence that is non contingent. The world "speaks" at the foundation of our moral affairs, and all of our affairs.

I expect the worst.......

I think I see what you are talking about, although these things are not so real to me, living in a totally different society than yours. Anyway, to stick to our subject of ethics and well-beingness, I could say that each country thinks more about its own good than the good of the world, even if Unions of countries are created for supporting each other. For example, I don't think that Germany as a state thinks more about the good of the EU than about its own. And I also think it's not the only one. This is what I call "lack of ethics". In other words, we cannot talki about ethics on a social plane. Ethics is a personal think. — Alkis Piskas

But there is a line that refuses to be drawn, so we are always redrawing it. Look at it at a more local level. I have ethical concerns about lots of people and their situations, and I feel the tug of obligation everywhere. But I cannot prosecute all of this; in fact, I have to ignore most of it. One cannot live a life like this, as if unless the world is morally leveled out, I can't do anything for my self and family. And we get into the habit of ignoring others, so busy living and breathing. and to be a professional, an artist, a philosopher, and so on, this takes a lot of ignoring.
Where does the ethical call to duty draw its line? People who do great things are utterly absorbed. I don't know. Tough call.

I think this has been said before, but I'll say it again if only as a reminder.

First off, it's clear that the foundations of ethics (the OP's target) is rather weak/shaky/even nonexistent. It's vital to get to the bottom of ethics of course but meanwhile...we can ask a better/more pragmatic question: is ethics useful? It sure is, right?

As I have said, for me ethics is what happens when we try to cope with living with others. Ethics is only possible with others.
— Tom Storm
:100: — 180 Proof

The Golden Rule: Treat others like you would like to be treated. Others, yes, but only in terms of you.

One cannot live a life like this, as if unless the world is morally leveled out — Astrophel

I don't think that the world will ever be morally leveled out ... At least, this what the trends show. Besides, how can it be? The main force and drive of morality comes from religion. However, all the dogmatic religions, including Christianity, have evidently failed. At least "in numbers". No other institution is responsible for inspiring and promoting morality. What remains is the morality that is innate in humans. And this is obviously theatened more and more by all sorts of immoral forces or factors. Immorality is generally much stronger than morality. A single criminal or bad-intended act can destroy, in a very short time, what hundreds of commendable or well-intended acts have created in years.

I can't do anything for my self and family. — Astrophel

Why's that? I believe that you can do a lot for yourself and your family.

And we get into the habit of ignoring others ... — Astrophel

I can't see why, either ... I don't think we should, anyway.

Where does the ethical call to duty draw its line? — Astrophel

I don't think we can draw such line. Also, I don't think that etchics are especially connected to duty. Doing our duty can be the result of inherent ethics, but also of being forced to for various reasons. The bottom line is that an ethical behaviour benefits everyone, ouselves and others. Independently of what happens in our environment. External consitions should not dictate ethical behaviour.
In dicussions about life and the world beiing unfair, my answer has alwayse been: "Just be fair and true to yourself". This is what later I called "personal integrity". It is what makes us feel good, have a clear conscience, have a solid reality, be self-confident and a lot of other very desirable things. It is also reflected to and affects others in a positiive way.

(All this may sound as "moral talking", but it really isn't. It's rational thinking! :smile:)

The Golden Rule: Treat others like you would like to be treated. Others, yes, but only in terms of you. — Agent Smith

My understanding of the golden rule is not to read it in concrete terms. It is not saying that you need to assume people share your preferences exactly. It is saying treat others with the consideration you would appreciate - honour their preferences as you would want them to honour yours. That and in general terms almost all people do not want to be stolen from, lied to, framed or murdered - so there is that.

not to read it in concrete terms. — Tom Storm

Explain

1. The Golden rule (concrete).

2. The Golden rule (abstract).

Qualities ARE phenomena. This cup is red, and the red predicated of the cup is the quality, and it has, arguably, intuitive presence, and AS presence, there is nothing more "real". Husserl went Cartesian on this. He thought the the world out there of facts and science and the naturalistic attitude were a kind of second order of reals, for these issued from a foundation of intuitions, and these intuitions were absolute, unassailable, as say, something Descartes evil genius might try — Astrophel

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

Husserl did not go ‘Cartesian’ unless you are 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 that is in fact flowingly changing.

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).



“The consciousness of its [the object's] existence is here a belief in act; by virtue of the accord in which the perceptive appearances flow off in original presentation, retention, and protention, an accord of continuous self-affirmation, belief is continuous certainty of belief, which has its certainty in this originality of the object in its living being-present.”

The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.”(Husserl 1973)

“ Every temporal being "appears" in one or another continually changing mode of running-off, and the "Object in the mode of running-of" is in this change always something other, even though we still say that the Object and every point of its time and this time itself are one and the same.”(Husserl 1964)

In describing an unchanging enduring tone, for instance, Husserl emphasizes “…the incessantly changing mode of givenness of this duration.” “However, …through a continual coinciding of sense a unity of the objective sense can be formed and be maintained through the alteration of lived experiences.”

It would be a mistake to think the temporality of sense data lacks duration because it is instantaneous, momentary or extremely brief. Instantaneity presupposes objective time. Rather, the primordial now returns to itself moment to moment as qualitatively altered. Husserl asserts that the intentional ‘belief' in self-identicality constitutes an empirical object out of what are in fact changing senses. So there is nothing ‘absolute’ about these intuitions other than that they are absolutely contingent and relative.

Yes. WE.....are. Not another thing not us. It is we alone that is affected and exhibit affectivity. All else is merely occasion for it. — Mww

Res affectus: I don't think it's possible to talk about other things like this. The "otherness" of the thing as a thing apart from all the ways I give it meaning is impossible, for the moment you bring a thing to mind at all, it is already my world.

Yes. WE.....are. Not another thing not us. It is we alone that is affected and exhibit affectivity. All else is merely occasion for it. — Mww

I mean to say, res affectus considered apart from a thing is just as impossible as thinking of it apart from any properties or from rational categories. Of course, I could be emotionally numb, appetitively numb, and so on, but, I would argue, I would no longer be a person and the furniture of the world would fail to be things. I think the existence of a thing, that default sense that things ARE, is inherently affective.

Do you have any reservations about this vocabulary — that we classify something as valuable or assign it value? — Srap Tasmaner

I have no reservations, no, but the vocabulary is reserved for representing the conceptions of speculative metaphysics, in order to separate value as a quality from value as a purpose.

Tip of the pointy hat to .....made me flash on something:



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 for 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.

I have no reservations, no, but the vocabulary is reserved for representing the conceptions of speculative metaphysics, in order to separate value as a quality from value as a purpose. — Mww

Mmmm. I think that’s a good answer, even though I’m not sure what you mean.

I’ll say this much: I am weary of the answer to every question being “it’s purpose-relative”. First, I am wary of the feeling that comes along with this that there is something arbitrary about the relation between the individual and the purpose they pursue, the feeling that we ought generally to think of purposes as choices or preferences. That feels weak to me. Oxygen is useful and valuable relative to the purpose of the respiratory system, which is in turn useful and valuable relative to the purpose of remaining a going concern. Swell. But that’s not a choice or a preference in any simplistic way. (And I want to say that, the fact that we can choose to prevent ourselves from breathing, doesn’t mean that each moment we don’t we must have chosen to continue. Bollocks.)

What’s more, even supposing you have some analytically arbitrary purpose — based in a free choice or a preference/passion — then you don’t also choose to value things relative to that purpose: it’s automatic. Given your purpose, the world presents itself to you a certain way, things announce their suitability or insuitability to your purpose, or occasionally, but not universally, as ambiguous, requiring reflection.

(As above, at the modeling level, as they say, there’s no doubt something classificatory going on — we imagine this like a Terminator’s heads-up-display, identifying objects in the immediate environment one after another and running them through a “writing-implement-recognition protocol” or something, but of course it’s ridiculous to imagine that every time we need a pen we do a brute-force search through all the objects in sight — nope, bowl; nope, book; nope, spoon, though that’s ‘closer’ in shape; nope, glasses; ... — and at any rate, above that level of the “biological interface”, this is not at all how we experience “looking for a pen”.)

On the one hand, I could simply note that a human life doesn’t start over again from scratch, from moment to moment, but is always layered with ongoing purposes, passions, and interests; thus the “raw” unvalued world never really gets a chance to present itself to us. (Or better: it is normal for it not to, and perhaps there are practices that can peel off some of those layers, as art students learn to overcome the biases of color constancy and finally see something more like the actual colors presented to the eye rather than the simplified version we’re accustomed to.) But I also wonder if there isn’t a regress lurking: choose your purpose; now choose how to achieve it; now choose to follow that process; now choose how to follow that process, ad infinitum. At some point, the world and the things in it must be understood in a certain way, things presenting themselves as what we want or not, etc.

, I am wary of the feeling that comes along with this that there is something arbitrary about the relation between the individual and the purpose they pursue, the feeling that we ought generally to think of purposes as choices or preferences. That feels weak to me. Oxygen is useful and valuable relative to the purpose of the respiratory system, which is in turn useful and valuable relative to the purpose of remaining a going concern. Swell. But that’s not a choice or a preference in any simplistic way. (And I want to say that, the fact that we can choose to prevent ourselves from breathing, doesn’t mean that each moment we don’t we must have chosen to continue. Bollocks.) — Srap Tasmaner

Living systems self-organize in a functionally unified manner, which means that they behave in ways that are normatively structured. So, yes, respiration, digesting, reproduction are useful with respect to the whole functioning of the organism, but they are also tied together such that each subcomponent affects and is interaffected by the others for the sake of a unified direction of functioning. When an ant crawls over a carpet, it doesn’t just make use of a pre-programmed set of reflexes, it adapts itself to a surface it has never experienced before. It makes choices in how it navigates the carpet, and this behavior draws upon all of the subsystems and causes them to adjust themselves in turn accordingly to the needs of the main activity.


Organisms anticipate into their environment, shaping it according to their needs, purposes, preferences This has been referred to as a kind of proto-cogntition. While the range of variation in physiological behavior is sharply constrained by inherited factors compared to actual cognition, they share the basic feature of normative goal-orientation. At the level of human cognition, choice and preference is constrained by a prior history of integrated habits of understanding, which is interwoven with social practices and conventions. So to say that’s human behavior is purpose-relative is to say that we are sense-making, goal-driven creatures whose choices are intricately constrained by a network of pre-established channels
of intelligibility.

:point: ... What you find harmful, do not do to anyone. :fire:

As I have said, for me ethics is what happens when we try to cope with living with others. Ethics is only possible with others. — Tom Storm

But this doesn't say anything about the content of this ethics.

My understanding of the golden rule is not to read it in concrete terms. It is not saying that you need to assume people share your preferences exactly. It is saying treat others with the consideration you would appreciate - honour their preferences as you would want them to honour yours. That and in general terms almost all people do not want to be stolen from, lied to, framed or murdered - so there is that. — Tom Storm

The "Golden Rule" is far too easy to exploit for it to be of any relevance, other than merely rhetorical.

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?

I thought I would butt in here to clarify some things. Would you agree with the following? Our ability to act ethically with others evolves as a function of cultural development. To use an analogy, not too long ago it was assumed that animals had no emotions or cognition and did not feel pain. It s hard to act ‘ethically’ toward a creature when you dont see them as having any of these capabilities. Another example : we used to think that infants were a blooming, buzzing confusion. Now we know that they have all sorts of perceptual and recognition skills, including being able to empathize with others. Again, without such an appreciation of the infant’s perspective, ethical treatment of them is limited. I would argue the entire history of culture involves the growth of insights into how others unlike ourselves think and feel. — Joshs

A day-old infant has very limited cognition skills. So, by your logic, ethical treatment of very young infants should likewise be limited.

Reductive ethics is scary.

↪Agent Smith :point: ↪180 Proof ... What you find harmful, do not do to anyone. :fire: — 180 Proof

:smile: :clap:

A day-old infant has very limited cognition skills. So, by your logic, ethical treatment of very young infants should likewise be limited — SophistiCat

The examples I gave dealt with limitations on ethical treatment of others resulting from lack of insight into their capabilities. As to the question of the relation between ethical valuation and capability in general I would only say that there is a direct correlation between ethical valuation and either present capability or potential for future capability. We dont presently accord rights to stones, insects or mollusks, but that could change in accord with our knowledge concerning their capabilities.

I am weary of the answer to every question being “it’s purpose-relative”. — Srap Tasmaner

For every question, absolutely, certainly with respect to that which occurs naturally in the world of things. Those things we ourselves invent or create, I think the value, meaning and purpose are generally presupposed in them. Otherwise, there’s no reason for them, or, what’s worse, the creation and the purpose conflict with each other, the existence of the thing becomes irrelevant, which in turn negates its value. Some questions about these things could be purpose-relative, as, which hammers for which nails.

Given your purpose, the world presents itself to you a certain way, things announce their suitability or insuitability to your purpose, or occasionally, but not universally, as ambiguous, requiring reflection. — Srap Tasmaner

I dunno about that. The world presents itself, sure, but I get to decide suitability of things for a purpose. Should I fail in according to a purpose because I chose improperly, it can’t be the thing’s fault. You probably mean “announce” is a loose sense; things just kinda sit there, doing not much of anything on their own.

At some point, the world and the things in it must be understood in a certain way — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, which helps alleviate the ad infinitum process between having and accomplishing a purpose. Because we are human, the certain way of understanding anything at all, is the human way. We don’t know how that works, so the only way we can talk about it, is from speculative metaphysical theory.
Which is where the reservations in vocabulary enters the stage.

I think the existence of a thing, that default sense that things ARE, is inherently affective. — Astrophel

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

Explain

1. The Golden rule (concrete).

2. The Golden rule (abstract). — Agent Smith

Agent, Thought I explained this in my post. If it is unclear, forget it. :razz: I'm just suggesting that there is a spirit of interpretation - an intent - not a narrow, literalist interpretation.