No.

Only if we make it so.

No. — Tom Storm

Quite succinct, and non-polemical. But I was hoping for some why or why-not discussion, that I could learn from. You could take your pick of a few comments or quotes that will illustrate a philosophical position or principle. For example, "No" could be construed as Nihilist. But is that just an emotional feeling, or a reasoned philosophical position, or a theory of how the world works? Please notice that I omitted a heavenly element from consideration. :smile:

Fair and just are human terms, subject to some criteria of value. Just which criteria would one use in order to determine if the world we appear to inhabit is fair and just?

A brief look around showcases a reality which does not offer the same predictable experince to every creature. It seems to be chaos on which we try to project a sense of order. It's daily painful death to countless children, heroes get cancer, a world based on predation and the immense suffering on a constant basis of billions of creatures who are eaten alive slowly by other creatures, etc.

I have encountered no good reason to superimpose a philosphy or religion upon this in order to make it seem less appalling.

Although I'm not comforted by scriptural assurances that "all things work together for good", I do infer a kind of Logic to the chain of Cause & Effect in the physical world --- and an overall proportional parity between positive & negative effects. Of course, that mathematical & thermodynamic symmetry may not always apply to the personal & cultural aspects of reality : to people's feelings about those effects. I won't attempt to prove that vague belief in balance, but it seems that philosophers have always been divided on the question of a Just World — Gnomon

First up, logic does say that balance is what emerges from the very possibility of a dichotomy or symmmetry breaking. If you have a dividing, this in itself brings the further thing of a mixing. There has to be a unity of opposites as the final result. The action going both its way has to arrive at its own equilibrium average state.

So forget good and evil for a moment. This just is the logic where a symmetry-breaking must play itself out to become a symmetry-equilibrating. The wrinkle then is that the equilibrium balance is then itself a new ground of symmetry – now raised a level – that can once again be broken and equilibrated.

Hierarchies of structure can arise in openly growing fashion as each level of symmetry-breaking below it becomes some closed and stable balancing act.

This is a tricky kind of causality to contemplate. It is not the reductionism of "cause and effect". But it was already where metaphysics started with Anaximander and his pre-socratic cosmology.

So there is a general metaphysical model of division and its balancing. And then the further possibility of stacking up these "phase changes" on top of each other in hierarchically complexified fashion. A rich cosmos can emerge from its simple dichotomous origins.

And then we get to the vexed issue of good and evil. Which is problematic because it replaces the complex systems causality of the natural world with the polarised story of a cause and effect world. A mechanistic viewpoint. Instead of a pair of actions that are complementary – as in a dichotomy or symmetry breaking – we have just a single arrow from a here to a there. There is a high and a low, a good and a bad, a wonderful and an awful. There is a place to leave behind and a place to approach.

So we have now the reductionist causality that seeks to encode reality in terms of a one-way traffic system. If you discover that two directions exist, one of the ways has to be the correct way, the other thus the opposite of the correct.

But the systems approach says the only way anything is caused to exist is by it going in both its directions in a symmetry-breaking fashion, and the place that this dichotomising "leaving behind" then approaches is the symmetry-equibrating thing of its overall dynamical balance. A holistic state of globalised order ... which then can be the ground of departure for yet another rung of hierarchical complexity in the form of dichotomising~rebalancing.

So in terms of human moral social order, good and bad would be arrows pointing between some lower level and some next step level of stabilised equilibrium balance. The arrows wouldn't be the simple and brutal monotonic ones of reductionism. One path mandated and the other path forbidden. The arrows would point the way from one state of naturalistic balance to the next more complexified state that might be attained.

The lower level isn't intrinsically bad as it has proven itself to be a stable platform for some kind of higher aspirations. But the goal is to break it as symmetry so as to step up to some higher equilibrium state – that likewise is good to the degree it can prove itself a stable platform for steps even beyond that.

So in that organic or thermodynamic context – which moral discussions can at least dimly grasp in terms of a Maslovian hierarchy of needs – good is to be building community to a degree of stability that creates the potential of further steps, and evil is the back-sliding destabilisation of the teetering house of cards that already exists as the relatively stabilised platform on which we stand.

Good~evil is tarred jargon as it does speak to the simplicities of reductionist models of causality. But we can sort of get what the terms are getting at from a systems perspective and its ecosystem style, richness constructing, hierarchical complexity.

There is no need to climb an endless ladder of complexity or goodness of course. But for a natural system that must exist in an uncertain and destabilising world, there is a value in maintaining a potential for taking next steps as situations demand. We have to be able to step up because there is a reserve to spend.

This trade-off between stability and plasticity in organisms that live and act is certainly yet a further wrinkle in the whole causality deal. But who says metaphysics has to be simpler than it actually is?

I have encountered no reason to superimpose a philosphy or religion upon this in order to make its seem less appalling. — Tom Storm

Isn't that what philosophers have always done : to superimpose a reasoned worldview upon the myriad & contradictory details of the world we are "thrown" into? To make sense of what we sense ; to justify what seems unjust? To catch what is thrown at us, and throw it back with intention? To make choices that are not imposed upon us? :cool:

Isn't that what philosophers have always done — Gnomon

Not just philosophers - everyone.

I'm a non-philosopher and a minimalist, so I'm not particularly reflective, nor am I a searcher.

I superimpose interpretative values on everything like anyone else. I just haven't reached for a prepackaged system or someone else's complex thinking. And yes, of course, we all inherit values from language and culture. Everything is contingent upon these.

This is a tricky kind of causality to contemplate. It is not the reductionism of "cause and effect". But it was already where metaphysics started with Anaximander and his pre-socratic cosmology. . . . .
And then we get to the vexed issue of good and evil. Which is problematic because it replaces the complex systems causality of the natural world with the polarised story of a cause and effect world. A mechanistic viewpoint. Instead of a pair of actions that are complementary – as in a dichotomy or symmetry breaking – we have just a single arrow from a here to a there. There is a high and a low, a good and a bad, a wonderful and an awful. There is a place to leave behind and a place to approach. — apokrisis

Yes. If we wake-up one day and find ourselves in a world of simple positives & negatives --- warm milk vs warm urine --- as helpless babies all we can do is cry that "this wet diaper is appalling". But over time, we learn to take the ups & downs of life with self-help philosophical equanimity. The mature world is no longer Good vs Evil, but a nuanced environment that can be managed by rational actors into a worldview where we can look forward to waking up tomorrow in a familiar place with new challenges to manage. "A place to leave behind, and a place to approach". :smile:

The mature world is no longer Good vs Evil, but a nuanced environment that can be managed by rational actors into a worldview where we can look forward to waking up tomorrow in a familiar place with new challenges to manage. — Gnomon

Yep. This is the general structure of cognition. The balance that is the rearview mirror of accumulated wise habit and the forward view of creative possibility. Automatism vs conscious deliberation.

Neither of these is inherently bad and thus "not-good". And the balance that is then "the good" is the arrow of action that arises out of the ability to flip from acting out of habit to acting out of attention.

Habits are the accumulation of simplicities. Attention is the exploration of complexities. And the "arrow of causality" points to the feedback balancing act where today's destabilising complexity is being turned into tomorrow's stabilising simplicities. We move along the gradient of cognition that pragmaticallyt assimilates the world to our model of the world.

NO
and it never can be, but we could be fair to one another is we wanted to.

Is the real world fair and just? — Gnomon

Yes; however, we h. sapiens have not been "fair and just" enough – too often not at all – to one another for the last several (recorded) millennia at least.

Yes. We humans, however, are too often not "fair and just". — 180 Proof

But does every individual have to be fair and just or should we build a social system that is on average fair and just?

To expect individuals to construct their world all from their own "goodness" is rather an unrealistic ask. Instead what works is for the world to impose its own "good balance" – in the familiar form of a state, a justice system, a democracy, even a religious code – that stabilises the individual actor in some "fair to all" fashion.

For goodness (or evil) to be a system property, it has to be embodied in the dynamical balance between the top down constraints and bottom-up freedoms of the collective organism.

It is notable – particular from Fukuyama's trilogy on world political history – that all stable societies have had to invent some transcendent principle that can stand even above its hierarchical rulers so as to close the system in a fair and just fashion. You have a people, a management, and a vision.

The King is the attentional focus dealing with the short-term and immediate. An army paid by taxes is what underpins that.

Then a God or some philosophical creed stands for the accumulation of long-run habit. The disembodied wisdom of generations of "the people" distilled into some kind of transcendent structure of belief.

Kings come unstuck when societies get too large and entropic for a person to actually both dispense justice and speak for the collective transcendental ancestor. Executive power has to be divided from priestly power so as to better organise the reciprocal things of immediate choices and long-term habits.

It takes a lot of political engineering to recreate the brain's dynamical balancing act at the level of a nation state able to act with the rationality of a self-aware people's collective. (And we already need to do that at the level of a whole planet, now that nation states are past their sell-bys.)

The mature world is no longer Good vs Evil, but a nuanced environment that can be managed by rational actors into a worldview where we can look forward to waking up tomorrow in a familiar place with new challenges to manage.
— Gnomon

Yep. — apokrisis

I agree too. But would you also agree with what follows:

That leaves three things - the good, the evil, and the nuance in between.

To have mature, reasoned nuance, and create a familiar, balanced starting point to make the simplicities and complexities out of the past and the future, even if nothing in the nuanced middle demonstrates anything that is absolute, we have to know good in itself (as best we can), evil in itself (as best we can), in order to claim some character to the nuance. The nuance can’t now be absent the good and the bad.

We still have to define or assume the form of the “good” and “evil” to fill the form of the “nuanced” to be a mix (a third thing). So there are three parts to this explanation of how to live.

What I am trying to say is that. if we live in a world of nuance, we don’t just live in a world of nuance; a world of nuance can only be so nuanced with it’s good and bad, and so these two are NOT nuanced but absolute.

And we can replace “good” and “evil” with “reality” and “appearance” (not that reality is good and appearance is evil, but utterly displacing “good” and “evil” such that reality is neither good nor evil, and appearance is neither good nor evil).

So we can say:
if we live in a world of nuance, we don’t only live with nuance; a world of nuance can only be so nuanced with its reality and appearance.

Always needing logic to make these simplicities and complexities unified in the nuance.

We can’t have the nuance without the absolute. Just as we can’t have the absolute because of all the nuance.

To have either nuance, or absolutes, we have both.

Both is a third thing. This third thing is a paradox.

So is the world fair and just? We have to find that in some senses the world is fair and just, and in other senss it is not, and we have to find what “fair” means and what “just” means (which I don’t address here in the hopes of keeping up with the conversation).

The world is fair and just if you detach everything into individuals, and then reattach them to the whole again (detach to examine and reattach to let them be them). This is a physicalist, scientific, currently predominant worldview - it is just for steel to cut flesh, for the moon to orbit the earth, as it is for the electron to orbit the proton; all is fair and just, following along as if in perfect willingness to follow every law to the letter. You cannot detach any one thing from the law. Motion and its effects can never, so will never, be denied, for any motion, against any motion, all is unfolding as it must, or all is behaving justly as each is necessarily treated fairly.

But the world is NOT fair and just if you focus on what is “fairness” and “what is justice” first. Now we set impossible (absolute) standards first and value “this one is good” and “that one is not” - and with reason and conceptualized versions of “fair” and “just” in hand, we secondly see how our reasons apply to the world of acts and mixed nuances of moving things. If we impose judgement and value on the things, the world is clearly full of injustice and unfairness. Our idealizations of “good” and “bad” are used to make our ideals of “fair” and “just”, and only now (secondly) can we see the INjustice of a particular act, or its UNfairness.

If we try to take the world first, physicalism says yes, all is just as it must be for all the same. Similar to fair, justice.

If we take the fair and the just first, this conceptualism (idealism) says no, NOT all is just, and for some, unfair portions of this injustice are born.

AND, to have this second view (where one can see the necessities of the world as unjust), one must have the three things in hand, these being absolute good, absolute bad and nuance.

In other words, we can’t even get to the question “Is the world fair and just” without there being fairness, justice, unfairness, injustice, the world, and the judge (agent), or the particular act in the world.

It’s all there in the nuances.

Is the real world fair and just?
— Gnomon
Yes. Humans, however, are too often not "fair and just". — 180 Proof

In a way, that reflects what I was saying. In a physicalist sense, yes, the world is fair and just. (In this sense you don’t really need the words fair and just anymore.)

But humans, we construct good and bad, fair and unfair, just and unjust, and act back in the same world that was otherwise beyond these constructions, and so we now add to the mix unfairness in the world, injustice in the world, goodness in the world, justice in the world, etc.

But does every individual have to be fair and just or should we build a social system that is on average fair and just? — apokrisis

It seems to me that every (human) "individual" is a (eu/anti)social being first and foremost.

That leaves three things - the good, the evil, and the nuance in between. — Fire Ologist

It leaves three things. But in a fundamental sense, the systems view talks about balances that are complementary and thus "good" in that their contradictions (woo, bad!) are in fact the oppositions that can lead to the resolution or synthesis of a dynamical balance (hey, good!).

Are pleasure and pain the psychological equivalent of good and evil? Well pleasure is the signal to approach and pain is the signal to avoid. And between these two, we get steered towards the security of the safe harbour of a mental equilbrium.

Now feeling safe and sound – neither overly pleasured or pain – seems rather middling. But that is where our evolved neurocognition is channeling us towards. A mild and prolonged contentment ... which we know is going to get interrupted by perturbations from the world beyond anyway.

So having a baseline of a middling balance is what is "good". And being able to feel which way to go when we get jolted out of that – to approach or avoid – is also "good". Even it we don't say pain feels good, we know it is a most valuable and necessary part of the overall equilibrium-producing part of the cognitive equation.

What I am trying to say is that. if we live in a world of nuance, we don’t just live in a world of nuance; a world of nuance can only be so nuanced with it’s good and bad, and so these two are NOT nuanced but absolute. — Fire Ologist

The middling state of things being generally OK is just a whole bunch of tiny nuance. It is the feeling of not really knowing your are even happy or disturbed. There is a poised restlessness in both of these positions. We feel just OK. And that is a feeling that is vague.

Then pain and pleasure can kick in as oppositions that extremitise our mind towards the opposing limits of action. Absolute approach or absolute avoidance.

Good~evil takes this kind of natural dichotomy and politicises it in a religiously transcendent form. It indeed gets made an absolute constraint on individual behaviour – which may have been of use in the age of kings but doesn't make so much sense in the age of self-aware democracy.

Why seek to attack or defend an ancient jargon that has anyway outlived its value as social construct? It is a debate now passed into history.

Both is a third thing. This third thing is a paradox. — Fire Ologist

Nope. The synthesis is the resolution of the paradox – or rather the equilibration of that which has been dichotomised. It is the fact that the division is complementary that gets proven by the synergy of the resulting coming back together at a higher level of organisation.

This is a physicalist, scientific, currently predominant worldview - it is just for steel to cut flesh, for the moon to orbit the earth, as it is for the electron to orbit the proton; all is fair and just, following along as if in perfect willingness to follow every law to the letter. — Fire Ologist

But this is speaking from the reductionist paradigm – the rather religious view that the Church took of the scientific revolution and the need to maintain some separation of powers between an all-powerful God and an all-mechanical realm of material being.

Look into even Newton's laws of motion and you find the triadic structure of its three laws where the holism lies in the third law of action~reaction. To be a motion could only be measured in terms of the world that stood in resistance to that motion. A force could be impressed if a world was there to press back. The third law just axiomatised the fact this had to be a stable balance as its outcome.

And physics has since – with general relativity and quantum field theory – become explicitly holistic in this fashion. The cosmos emerges from the dynamical balance that is its complementary actions of expanding and cooling. It persists by doubling its distances and halving its energy density in a way that can run down the gradient of time for pretty much "forever".

So yes to triadic structure. But exactly where things go wrong is when you allow the physical to become separated from the ideal.

Aristotle is the saint of systems thinkers because he got this with his doctrine of hylomorphic form. Material potential and formal constraint are the two complementary limits that between them allow the rich and hierarchically complexfied "nuance" that is the kind of world fit for us to evolve within.

Each (human) "individual" is a (eu)social being first and foremost. — 180 Proof

Eusocial doesn't quite cover it as that applies to a social organism and hive mind at the level of ants and bees.

Humans have their biology – the eusociality of a chimp troop – but then also the further levels of semiosis that result from language and logic. So it is this further level that arguably is first and foremost these days. Well it was language until logic started to take over once science could harness fossil fuels through technology.

So the question of political organisation – what constitutes the fair and just – has ramped up through some actual sweeping transitions. We have evolved from ape troops to agricultural empires to free trade/fossil fuel economic networks.

Good and bad, fair and just, are terms that take some redefining as we move on up this hierarchy of dissipative order.

baseline of a middling balance is what is "good". — apokrisis

How can you say “middling” if you place something at the far ends of the middle (where good is not evil and evil is not good), in the middle? The nuanced middle is not the same as either extreme at the ends; it’s a third thing of them both (paradox).

If good versus evil become good in the resolved middle, then what happened to evil? Why isn’t the middle just as evil as it is good? In which case good and evil have no meaning and there never was a paradox to resolve?

We don’t resolve paradoxes. If we could, they wouldn’t arise in the first place.

If good versus evil become good in the resolved middle, then what happened to evil? — Fire Ologist

I wasn’t accepting good and evil as a useful set of terms in a discussion of moral extremes. I was saying good as a direction in which to move makes more sense as the return towards the balancing middle.

Evil drops right out of the vocabulary at that point.

I would side with the whole Logos position from a morally sceptical standpoint.

I do actually find it REALLY hard to figure out what kind of question you are asking as I am not exactly a big believer in the terms 'justice' or 'fairness' in the world. What is, is. The world is what it is.

In terms of societal norms and such - not The World - I can say with some conviction that many people do not want justice or fairness. The reason for this being self-interest. This can present itself as someone acting to gain whilst disregarding others, or someone simply avoid the weight of responsibility.

A problem with the terms justice and fairness is many equate them with ideas like equality and human rights. These have inbuilt problems when faced with the reality of existence. Then what it boils down to is people expressing feelings and attitudes rather than presenting factual claims.

a discussion of moral extremes — apokrisis

Then what are we in the middle of? How is it a “middle”? Between extremes?

towards the balancing middle — apokrisis

Middle? Middle of what?

You can’t say “middle” anymore without saying more than the middle, and you wouldn’t say “mid” if not in between two others. Three things where there is a middle. You need them all to have one or the vocabulary you are using has no sense.

You can live in the middle, and never attend the extremes, but without the extremes you can’t call it a “middle”.

If evil drops out, so does the good.

Yeah, nah.

Just using your words.

“build a social system that is on average fair and just?”
— apokrisis

Three things: fair/just, unfair/unjust, and on average.

Without any one of these, all three drop out. That’s what average is built of, and what the extremes build.

The resolution is not a new unity that dissolves the others. Its paradox, that is the impossible that is actual.

Heraclitus’ Logos did not resolve the paradoxes; it simply related them to each other. Identity, truth, the one/many, motion/stillness - these paradoxes relate to each other as spoken in a Logos. The logos can’t resolve the paradoxes (nor would he seek to resolve them.) “It rests with change” mean what it means without redefining “rest” or “change” - the opposites remain. The rest comes after change AND the change comes after rest (unchanging stillness). If we resolve this, we lose both and have said nothing, provided nothing for the Logos to speak of.

Yeah, nah. — apokrisis

Too extreme?

religious and spiritual beliefs promote the assumption that the universe is fair — Gnomon

Across successive lives, life is fair.

If you suffer today, you did something sinful earlier in this life or in an earlier life. If you do something sinful today, you will suffer later in this life or in a later life.

It only adds up if you are patient enough. Patience is a virtue, especially in metaphysics.

There is no pure-reason explanation for suffering.

If you insist anyway, you will fight against the absurd until you give up and call the suicide prevention hotline.

No. Those adjectives are unsuitable to something like The World. Only particular people are fair and just.

The level of fairness and justice increases and decreases according to the amount of fair and just people, by sheer force of addition and subtraction. Further, since he cannot improve society by any other means, the best one can do to bring about a fair and just world is to be fair and just, to present a fair and just unit.

Heraclitus’ Logos did not resolve the paradoxes — Fire Ologist

Is a river not a good example of a balancing of stability and plasticity? Is reality not in general a balance of logos and flux?

I think Heraclitus got it. But still not many get Heraclitus.

Although I'm quite surprised by this, in a pleasant manner I'll add, I here fully endorse Banno's laconic answer (thought doubtless we'll differ on the ontological details):

Only if we make it so. — Banno

Yup.

balancing of stability and plasticity? — apokrisis

Yes he got it. Nothing was dropped out of the vocabulary. The river and the not-river both are, or neither are.

reality not in general a balance of logos and flux — apokrisis

Flux contains the paradoxes. The Logos is not within it, the Logos is about the paradoxes flux brings.

... a social system that is on average fair and just? — apokrisis

A post-scarcity, demarchic social system is as "fair and just" as I can imagine.

Flux contains the paradoxes. The Logos is not within it, the Logos is about the paradoxes flux brings. — Fire Ologist

Flux is material chance. Logos is structural necessity. The hylomorphic formula.