Marx on levelling down:

Crude communism is only the culmination of such envy and levelling-down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. How little this abolition of private property represents a genuine appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the whole world of culture and civilization, and the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless individual who has not only not surpassed private property but has not yet even attained to it. The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal capitalist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed universality; labor as a condition in which everyone is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community. — Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

What are people's views on Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique? As I understand it, there is no home key in that form.
At the time (1920s) plenty of people protested that it was not music. I think the majority of musicians these days accept it as music. — andrewk

I like some twelve-tone music, such as Berio and Boulez. The claim that it's not music is not one I take seriously.

However, I think its important influence was an expansion of the tools available to composers in terms of technique and expressive range, so that composers now feel free to switch between tonality and atonality even within the same work. Examples might be Nørgård and Penderecki. Certainly, many contemporary composers make great use of atonality or unusual modal structures in a way that is deeply indebted to the twelve-tone movement.

I don't think the technique was all it was cracked up to be, and I can't imagine that music will ever dispense with tonal centres entirely, as some of those composers liked to imagine.

The fool!

Scrutiny here I guess would consist of looking at the practice and nature of atonal music to see if it has anything to do with that of music as such. And it obviously does. The only point of defining music more strictly that I can discern is to exclude music one doesn't like. The thing is, the concept of music will carry on regardless of personal pet definitions; it's not a matter of opinion.

It's a matter of opinion whether atonal music is good or bad music (I believe in objective standards), but to say that it is simply not music at all seems to be just a casual way of speaking. It's a figure of speech, as in, "Call that a sausage? No, this is a sausage."

If you don't even have a key signature, or harmony, then what you're producing isn't music. — Wayfarer

This is probably irrelevant to the discussion, but what you say here is not true, unless you want to say that atonal music and unpitched percussion music are not music and that you cannot play music with an unaccompanied non-chordal instrument.

EDIT: I see that you described "abstract modernism" as "just noise", so I guess you would indeed say that atonal music is not music. I don't think that withstands scrutiny, but I won't pursue it.

I agree. Forcing women to dress a particular way is no way to uphold the principle that nobody should force women to dress a particular way. Ridiculous, indeed. French secularism is getting rather unhinged.

I agree with all or very nearly all of that, but it's a more nuanced point than you were making before. In putting your case too strongly I think you went wrong.

EDIT: actually I don't agree that analytic-synthetic is a spectrum, although I'm sympathetic to the idea that a priori-empirical is a spectrum.

@John Actually, I do think it's important to understand that for something to be empirical does not imply the exclusion of language, symbolic meaning, concepts, and all that.

Okay, I get you, I think. I agree that knowledge is about more than bare sensation, but then I'm not sure there is such a thing anyway.

@John We find the reports of others in experience. I think you just have an eccentrically narrow notion of the empirical. Also we can look at this Kantianly: empirical knowledge may yet depend on a priori concepts of the understanding.

What is quasi-analytic? My first thought is that any sentence that is true only partly by definition is merely non, rather than quasi.

Maybe I wouldn't like it so much today. I hadn't read anything else at the time and it seemed like I'd found a genuinely new truth, or at least a stunning clarification.

That's cheating, John. Anyway, bachelors will always be unmarried men, even if "bachelor" changes meaning and refers to something else. Kripke sorts this out nicely.

N&N was actually the first real philosophy book I read. Odd place to start but I liked it.

What I have claimed is that I know that Paris must be the capital of France right now, and that it was the capital in the past, unless it is the case that there has been a massive deception about the historical capitalhood, and/or in regard to its present capitalhood another city has been designated as capital since I last heard. I have also claimed that I don't need to go out into the world to do any empirical checking to know these things, so they are, to that degree at least, analytical — John

If it's possible you could be deceived about it, as you admit it is, and it's possible that the capital of France might change in the future, as you also admit, then 'Paris is the capital of France' is not analytic to any degree at all--though I think I do see where you're coming from now.

Whereas if I said New York is the capital of France, you don't have to do any empirical checking to know that is wrong do you? — John

This is just because he already knows it's not true, not because it's analytic or a priori. If he didn't know, he could check.

"merely looking"? What does it matter?

Yes, butter too. I have a whole spreadsheet here exhaustively and comprehensively listing the essential and inessential properties of France.

Not only is that distinction quite slippery, but I don't quite see its relevance.

Paris as the capital is inessential, baguettes are essential. Simple.

But if being a capital did consist in "nothing other than people calling it the capital or saying it is," it could still be an empirical fact that Paris is the capital of France. Similarly, 'The mayor of Paris is called Anne' can be empirically confirmed.

I don't really understand the question to be honest. You're saying that because Paris is the capital of France merely by decree, it is somehow less an empirical fact than that the sun is currently not shining on Paris?

Well I think others here are equally astonished at your position.

So as you say, 'Paris is the capital of France' cannot be false given that Paris is the capital of France, but what is given here is a matter of fact that could have been otherwise.

the statement 'Paris is the capital of France' cannot possibly be false right now if nothing has changed regarding the designated status of Paris . — John

In other words, 'Paris is the capital of France' cannot be false given that Paris is the capital of France.

He's got another definition of analytic: a truth whose negation is a contradiction. Note that the question of how to define 'analytic' has been addressed by many philosophers. It is not just assumed to be obvious--although I think it does point at an intuitive distinction.

EDIT: But yes, fair point: I misread you. I agree that France as it now is, having Paris as its capital, cannot not have Paris as its capital. But as has been said already, that's not what is at issue here. — jamalrob

I don't really understand the question, and I'm not sure I want to get into it right now anyway, as TG has hit the nail already. Plus I'm on a crappy iPad keyboard.

EDIT: But yes, fair point: I misread you. I agree that France as it now is, having Paris as its capital, cannot not have Paris as its capital. But as has been said already, that's not what is at issue here.

Are you seriously suggesting that France could have a capital other than Paris? — John

:D

Sorry John, but this made me laugh heartily. France could have had another capital, just as the US could have had a different president. TG is right. If that's not empirical, then nothing is.

Cool, so we end up with this:

She intends to live in harmony with others.
To live in harmony with others you have to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.
Therefore she ought to treat others as she would wish to be treated herself.

Some will question whether it's characteristic of a human being to want to live in harmony with others, so that the argument is seen to come down to her own personal desire. And this is probably just a different way of putting the objection that the derivation concerns merely instrumental oughts and not moral obligations. This is the sticking point.

All right. Ought from is, second attempt:

She intends to be a firefighter.
To be a fighter you have to get training at firefighters' school.
Therefore she ought to get training at firefighters' school.

Clue: it has been addressed by someone in the discussion already.

The problem here is that the intent of ethics is not to maintain the status quo. It is not to maintain the human form. Ethics is all about improvement, that's why it is concerned with what ought to be, rather than what is. Therefore any such naturalist ethics, which derives what one ought to do, from a principle of what the human form is, misses the mark, and should be rejected because it has no provisions for improvement of the human species. And when we move to produce the premise of what the human form ought to be, there is an issue of objectivity. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree this looks like a problem, but as we're in the realm of virtue ethics here, we probably shouldn't ignore the basic distinctions in Aristotle between potential and actual, and between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-should-be. In a nutshell, the telos. What the human happens to be and what the human can become can conceivably be contained in the concept of the human form of life. That is, the what is can be either statically and mechanistically conceived, or conceived more holistically--in that oughts are not cast out of the realm of is's--and thus teleologically.

Of course, that probably just shifts the problem by a step, because the question may come back: what about a distinction between human-telos-as-it-is and human-telos-as-it-should-or-could-be? My feeling is that insofar as human is a legitimate category, and insofar as humanism is the right attitude, and insofar as some sort of humanist naturalism accommodates the endless creativity of history, you can draw a line somewhere without thereby foreclosing on future change.

Having said that, it takes some work to get all this from virtue ethics. There's no doubt that Aristotle's normative ethics are concerned with maintaining the status quo in important ways. And I'm not sure how contemporary ethical naturalism like Thompson's fares against these objections.

It's in After Virtue. There are reasonable summaries of the argument here on Wikipedia and here on the IEP.

I'm a bit wary of psychological explanations especially when they're used to explain away positions that I don't agree with (they often appear more convincing then they should be). — shmik

I think that's wise, not only with psychological explanations but also with historical explanations (whether the latter reduce to the former, as you imply, I won't attempt to address). For example, we could explain Descartes' Meditations as a response to the insecure standing of natural science in his lifetime, and can further say that science turned out not to need absolutely certain foundations anyway, so it doesn't really matter. But hyperbolic doubt and the cogito still remain standing as important philosophical challenges and insights. I think we can synthesize these attitudes and say that the best philosophers are those who best bring out the problems particular to their milieus.

But the question of historicism, similar to the question of psychologism, is one I'm still thinking about.

I said a bit more about all this recently in this post in the "moral facts" discussion.

Well, the significant shift I was referring to began in the Enlightenment and came to full fruition in the early twentieth century, so I don't think there's a generational difference that maps to the relevant cultural shift. I think it's that people, philosophers included, are still unwilling to allow ethics to be entirely contingent and relative (if they think about it), at the same time as they find it difficult to justify this. MacIntyre's historical analysis is an attempt to untangle this mess. One thing to notice is that although you can't get an ought from an is, this is just because we're using the post 17th century understanding of "ought", which is of an imperative detached from real desires and goals. You can get what is now called an 'instrumental ought' from an is--but not a 'moral obligation'.

In my experience, when people say "I am lying" they mean something more like "What I just said was a lie". I don't think anyone says that language can be reduced to logic, but we still have to deal with the paradoxes that come up when we take a part of language and formalize it.

It's actually an example that MacIntyre uses in After Virtue to make the point about function (he uses a sea captain). I'll have to read that bit again to see what he gets from it, but I seem to remember it was kind of in passing.

8-)

Saying that I would also say that moral realism could still be argued for using your approach. But I think that by pursuing the ought/is distinction you'd also be handicapping your account. Working from memory here I thought that was exactly what was so strong about After Virtue; he was calling into question the whole distinction by means of going back to Aristotle and pointing out that our concepts don't need to have this distinction, that it is, after all, a distinction (as opposed to a reality).

One could almost say that we understand "fact" in relation to our understanding of "value" -- that the latter defines the former, and the former the latter. So to speak of moral facts is to smash these together, but by using the language of the very distinction which is being put into question. — Moliere

Yes. I was just playing with the is-ought thing to see what happened.

And your example seems to have force because we do not define firefighters functionally. I have fought a fire, but I have never been a firefighter, because that is a matter of uniform, training, qualification, etc. And because one can wear the uniform and ride on the fire-engine and not do what one ought to do, the conclusion has moral force and does not follow from the premise. — unenlightened

Yeah, I guess it only works insofar as the ought is understood non-morally.

Rather than a telos which governs what a firefighter is meant to do, there is an ethic which the world and the firefighter expresses. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Empty rhetoric. The firefighter may be said to express her telos.

Ought from is:

She is a firefighter.
Therefore she ought to do whatever a firefighter ought to do.

This works because a firefighter is defined functionally. There is a function characteristic of a firefighter, and this is what it is to be a firefighter (telos and nature are one).

Or does it work? Discuss...

Aristotle treats moral value as ideal — TheWillowOfDarkness

No, he doesn't.

It is something "we are meant to be" separate to our actions in the world — TheWillowOfDarkness

No, it isn't.