It seems as if you're unaware that people in the same family, including twins, even, can and often do have completely different moral views. — Terrapin Station

Yes, and my brother and I are living proof of that. He hasn't thought this through properly at all.

I believe our sense of right and wrong come from the need to maximise pleasure and minimise pain both as individuals but more importantly, across a group/community. — Devans99

Well it doesn't. The pleasure machine thought experiment refutes that.

Essentially the same physiology yet two very different moral frameworks. Clearly, it is inadequate to say that the mind or limbic system is the source of morals because it cannot account for vast differences in moral frameworks.
— praxis

Great point. — Merkwurdichliebe

No, it's not a great point at all. It's just an ignorant denial.

So, you don't think that a person growing up in a cannibalistic culture, and a person growing up in our culture, would have any impact on our emotions regarding cannibalism? The clone example doesn't make any difference, because the conclusion is the same: they'd react with different emotions, meaning that their limbic systems would be operating in different ways. The suggestion that clones growing up in starkly different environments would have the same moral judgements is uninformed and illogical. That's the assumption that his argument is based on. It is not an assumption that I have made, and nothing in my argument implies it. He is missing the mark by a country mile.

First I'm not asking for what is right or wrong, rather were do our sense of right and wrong come from
— hachit

Long term > Short term

So Right is what is optimal for the long term (exercise, healthy diet, helping others)

Wrong is what is optimal for the short term (sweets, laziness, harming others) — Devans99

Is this a joke? Did you not read what he just said?

a very different culture — praxis

So then obviously they would have two very different experiences.

yet cloned baby S is cool with eating people and you, we assume, find it immoral. — praxis

Yes, obviously. And their brains would most probably respond in different ways in response to this. They would react with different emotions.

Cloned baby S would adopt whatever conceptual order or abstract principles, or whatever mysterious extra-mental phenomenon that exists in that culture. — praxis

Would you just give up trying to distort my meaning in an attempt to refute what I said? It won't work. Of course there'd be external factors which influence our moral judgement. I never denied this. Why would you think that I was suggesting that our brains don't respond to external stimuli?

Depends on the (supposed) injustice, but I don't believe there's any injustice here (obviously). — Terrapin Station

Well there is.

Reference to Scrubs. :meh:

Apparently, that's just your interpretation and can neither be right nor wrong :smirk: :razz: — NKBJ

Ah-hem. More importantly, who gave your permission to use my smirk? And don't you even think of responding with a smirk, or I'll...

I'll...

Go grab another beer!

Thanks. :up: — Pattern-chaser

You're welcome, buddy! :smile: :up: :flower: :party:

And you should cover your back with Lorem Ipsum — Merkwurdichliebe

:rofl::victory:

I'm actually going to do this one day.

Disagree, of course! But saying we had no arguments is a bit much! :brow: — NKBJ

Alright, alright. Bad arguments. (Probably. I don't know, I haven't read them. But I'm usually right. Right?).

I don't have a problem with there being a "men's rights" movement, but at present, it seems kind of dumb to have one. — Terrapin Station

Yes, it does seem kind of dumb, I agree. That's probably most people's initial reaction. It was certainly mine. But then I began to really think about it. Is this reaction a good thing? If there's an injustice which needs redressing, isn't it a good thing to call attention to it?

But really, I agree with others who have made the point that identity politics is not the best approach. If equality is the goal, then let's approach this with that aim, and with the method of looking at all issues, not women's issues over others, not men's issues over others. Let's be fair. Let's turn the spotlight where it's needed, and not discriminate unfairly.

And "feminism" really isn't the best name for this seeking of equality. It also has now gained a bad reputation, and has become something of a dirty word. The excesses of modern far left politics have fucked things up and given the opposition plenty of ammunition. People like Ben Shapiro then come along and exploit this quite effectively. He has wide appeal.

Dr. Dan? Dr. Cox would've been funnier.

It's called the philosophy forums. — Merkwurdichliebe

It's not plural.

And that doesn't answer any of my questions. If you're suggesting that preaching to the choir and straw men are just part of doing philosophy, then yes, unfortunately so, but it's not good philosophy, is it?

Don't be so agitated. — Merkwurdichliebe

Then submit better replies. If I seem agitated, that usually means that you're doing something wrong.

Ethical orientations aren't a matter of taste. They are based on deep convictions. — Merkwurdichliebe

Why do people do this? Seriously? What is this? Preaching to the choir or straw man?

The short answer to the titular question is that it does and it is called Feminism. — Banno

A misnomer then.

For example, the Muslim-world doesn't really treat women that well and could call our attention, more than it does now. — ritikew

They don't treat gay men that well, either. Or gay women. Or Christians. Or atheists. Or Westerners.

pole — Merkwurdichliebe

:gasp:

I disagree. We are soon to see either the rise of either a gulag or concentration system. Radicalism means doom for everyone. — Merkwurdichliebe

Well, Stalin gets my vote over Hitler. He has a better moustache.

You have a sort of Nietchzean spirit. Ever read about eternal return? — Merkwurdichliebe

Yes. I have "Amor fati" tattooed on my wrist. It serves as a reminder.

On my other wrist, I have "Cheese on toast". (I don't, it actually says "Carpe Diem", but that would be funny. Maybe that'll be my next tattoo).

But that is what happens when the right and left drift to their extremes. — Merkwurdichliebe

I don't predict Gulags on the horizon.

Tell that to the survivors the Soviet g.u.l.a.g. — Merkwurdichliebe

Another hyperbolic remark. Funnily enough, by "more radical left", I didn't mean so extremely radical that Gulags are back on the table.

I see the left and right drifting apart at an exponential rate. Before we know it, it will be too late, and they will be radically charged. And that's a dangerous prospect, especially given the tyranny of the deep state. — Merkwurdichliebe

It's only a dangerous prospect because of the risk of the more radical right gaining power. The more radical left would make changes that would be of benefit to people like us and our interests. And, as has been rightly pointed out, as things stand, the only realistic chance of getting closer to your actual interests, now, and in the foreseeable future, is not to waste your vote, but to vote for the leftist party which has the best chance of gaining power.

Basically, if Clinton wasn't left enough for you, and Sanders was knocked out, then tough shit. Clinton would've been better than Trump, and no, that's nothing like a choice between Stalin and Hitler.

You seem to be the whiny complaining sort that you objected to earlier. You haven't actually made a single criticism of any of Clinton's proposals. You've just expressed cynicism, in the modern sense, to an unreasonable excess. Instead of doing something sensible about it, you just whine and demonise and make hyperbolic remarks.

More like you interpreted the way it went predictably. — Janus

I suppose I could be wrong. Maybe I'll check out the "arguments" for why Hamlet is supposedly better than Transformers in an objective sense.

Look what they've done to my thread, Ma... — Banno

:rofl:

I totally agree with you on that: I certainly don't advocate following the mob. We can look after our own lives and position ourselves as best we are able to weather the coming storm. — Janus

I don't know how you'd reconcile that with other comments of yours.

Point is, there isn't a problem to solve. So the more one tries to solve it, the further one gets from the answer... so to speak. — Banno

I think I get where you're coming from, but I disagree. It's sort of like, there's only a problem if we make it a problem. I make it a problem when I fight on behalf of bringing philosophy back down to earth, instead of walking away and making some cheese on toast.

I guess we’ll never know your accounting. :sad: — praxis

No, speak for yourself. Others are probably capable enough not to be struggling with the problem in understanding that you're having, and I've explained that this problem of yours is due to your own misunderstanding of what my explanation does and doesn't do.

I've already said it as simply and as clearly as possible: "we often feel differently and judge moral matters differently". And then I've explained that this can be explained through neuroscience. The only problem here would be if you were to weirdly assume that we all have identical brains which work in identical ways in the same sort of circumstances, which is so obviously false that it is hardly worth dealing with, and yet I'm generously wasting my own valuable time in doing so, only for you to respond with comments like the above, which just reinforce your own misunderstanding without really lifting a finger to help yourself.

Why don't you just apply some common sense and use the internet to educate yourself? Why don't you just not make a frankly silly assumption, like that we're all clones, and then try to push the faux-problem of explaining why we're not onto me?

Not denying that a movement towards a third party isn't possible or isn't desirable. It's just not viable at this current time and you're naive to think otherwise. The 2018 midterm election alone has enabled national conversation around progressive ideas thanks to notable progressives winning primaries against establishment Democrats. If progressive want to enact immediate political change, and shift the overton window leftward, the most practical way of doing so is through the established organon of the Democratic Party. There is also the danger of fragmenting the liberal/Left voting bloc, and enabling a united Right voting bloc to win elections. — Maw

Yeah, you're right. The left has shifted further to the left, and Sanders, Corbyn, Mélenchon, and Haddad are examples of this. They're in a battle against a right that has shifted further to the right, exampled by Trump, Johnson, Rhys-Mogg, Le Pen, and Bolsonaro. Any leftist wasting their vote in this battle really isn't helping.

"I'm not asking for what is right or wrong". — hachit

Some people here have real difficulty with that one. We've already had mention of liberty, the sacredness of life, cooperation, and murder. In another discussion, a harmonious community kept being mentioned.

Now, I wonder what these things have in common...

The answer is that they're all examples of things judged to be good or bad. And these are moral judgements founded in emotion. That's what our conscience is for, it is our sense of right and wrong. That comes from emotion, which comes from our brain, and the study of the brain is neuroscience, so that's what you need to know about to know in detail about this stuff. One can learn through a quick google search that the limbic system significantly relates to emotion.

I focus on emotion because it is the fundamental connection to morality, to what's right and wrong. And what's right and wrong only makes sense in relation to our moral judgement. Reason is just a tool to order thought, and it is driven in ethical matters by our emotions first and foremost. Reason alone can't make morality what it is. Emotionless robots aren't moral agents. They wouldn't truly be able to understand morality or make moral judgements.

Reason has pride of place in logic, where emotions have no place. But with ethics, reason is but a slave to the passions. Ethics is very much a matter of emotion. If you don't appeal to emotion in ethics, then you're doing it wrong.

I began by showing the inadequacy of your explanation which, to reiterate, is its inability to account for divergent moral frameworks. — praxis

But you haven't actually done that, you just think you have. There is nothing whatsoever in my explanation which can't account for divergent moral frameworks. That's just your misunderstanding based on some faulty assumptions you have about my position. It's illogical to reason that my explanation doesn't account for what you say it doesn't, just because I don't grant your tangent about liberty, the sacredness of life, cooperation, etc.

You haven't even begun to argue against me, logically speaking. But at least you have Tim for company.

Myself and others have explained why your straw men are straw men a million times, but for whatever reason, whether a lack of intelligence or a deliberate intent to misrepresent, you repeat them. I refuse to be drawn further into your bullshit, so I will try to make this my last reply to you on the matter.

Yes, definitely. And it effectively already does exist on more specific issues, like Fathers For Justice. And there are some male focused issues which really need more attention, like the issues surrounding male victims of rape. It's actually pretty damn harmful and offensive when people unthinkingly talk about rape as a problem where the victim is female and the perpetrator is male. It's not much different in structure than, say, witnessing bad driving and then complaining about women drivers.

Oh, and also, Frank has demonstrated highly questionable judgement on this subject, so I wouldn't give too much credence to whatever he has said here. He is of the sort that thinks that if a woman is being emotional, then you can't say that she's being emotional, because she's a woman, and women need to be treated patronisingly as an exception which we must be super sensitive around. Apparently, even if a woman is literally and furiously screaming in your face, for example, you can't say that she's being emotional (even though that would obviously be true in this example) because she's a she and not a he, and because some idiot might jump to a conclusion about a stereotype. He automatically assumes that, in this situation, the man is sexist and the woman needs defending, which is itself horribly sexist.

The 'mysterious extra-mental phenomenon' in the specific case that I mentioned involves concepts such as liberty (freedom to choose), and I guess the sacred (sacredness of human life). Though our moral intuitions may start out relatively the same, the culture we grow up in imbues us with concepts and divergent moral frameworks, like conservatism or liberalism.

Our ability to cooperate on a large scale is more dependent on our ability to form concepts like liberty and sacredness than it is to inherent moral intuitions. Can any other species of mammal, for example, cooperate on the scale that we can? No, and what do we have to thank or curse for that? Mysterious extra-mental phenomenon. — praxis

No, that's not an explanation about the source of morality at all, that's just bringing up something which you judge to be good, namely liberty, and making a value judgement about human life, namely that it's sacred. That's a complete confusion of the subject matter. We're not supposed to be doing that. The opening post made that clear.

That people have a variety of different ethical or political stances, whether influenced by the community or otherwise, ultimately stems back to human biology. Just what exactly do you think it is that's being influenced? It is us, and that obviously has to do with our brains, especially the limbic system which significantly relates to emotion.

Explanations one, two, or ten steps away from the source of morality aren't particularly helpful. Nor is an explanation about, for example, what our ability to cooperate on a large scale depends upon, because you'd just be talking about something else. You think it's good to cooperate, so you're going off topic to explain why humans cooperate? But why? And obviously I acknowledge things like evolution and our planet and a whole bunch of other things that aren't mental phenomena, but that's getting at an explanation of an explanation. Like I said, that's just doing something like science or metaphysics. It's not close enough to morality to be as relevant as the kind of explanation that myself and Terrapin are presenting. Morality is about right and wrong, which is about our emotions, otherwise right and wrong are meaningless. Our emotions, in turn, have an explanation in terms of our biology, and our brains in particular, and the limbic system in particular. Of course, you could go off track in all kind of ways about why this is. You could talk about cosmology or physics or chemistry. If our planet didn't orbit the sun, we couldn't judge right from wrong. Is that the source of morality? No.

That doesn't explain, for instance, how some people can be pro-life and others pro-choice.
— praxis

"Evolution doesn't work so as to produce a bunch of clones in this regard." — Terrapin Station

Exactly.

There must be some "mysterious extra-mental phenomenon," at work too. — praxis

No, that doesn't follow, unless you add some false premise along the lines of what Terrapin has said or what I suspect would be some other unfounded notion. I suppose if you want to explore this further, present a full valid argument, rather than one with one or more missing premises, so we don't have to guess your reasoning.

Why call it magical? Do you not understand or dispute the explanation, or some aspect of it?

Yes, that's a much better explanation than others. It's not God, or reason, or some abstract principle, or some mysterious extra-mental phenomenon. It's the limbic system.

Transformers came long afterwards so it is likely to be a highly mutated derivation. — Merkwurdichliebe

To transform or not to transform? That is the question.

We argued this one for 15 pages (art and the elitism of opinion) and no one on your side had a much better answer than "of course Hamlet is better than Transformers" - pure sophistry (I am not even saying Hamlet is worse, but surely if obviously true, there should be some evidence/reasoning). — ZhouBoTong

I haven't read that discussion, but it seems it went as I would've predicted.

I like your irony, illegal not to do illegal drugs. Lol — Merkwurdichliebe

That'd get my vote! We need a world leader who speaks up for the ironic drug taking community.

Most of what they promise is set up for the sole purpose of u-turning, they don't represent the electorate. — Merkwurdichliebe

Some cynicism is justified. I'd say that that's too cynical.

Obama made a bunch of idealistic promises too and delivered nothing. Hilldawg is way more entrenched in the establishment, probably deeper than Obama has ever been. Did you really believe her. — Merkwurdichliebe

I didn't have complete trust in her, no. Far from it. But she said all that stuff in public, so anything she would've u-turned on could be used against her.

She likely would have followed through on enough of it, or some comprise near enough to it, to make it worth the vote.