The focus on "values" doesn't really fit with philosophy prior to the 19th century. In its current usage, it's a term coming down from economics. Nietzsche seems to have been big in popularizing it, and I honestly think he uses the shift to "values" as a way to beg the question a bit in the Genealogy (to the extent that it assumes that the meaning of "good" has to do with valuation as opposed to ends). I'd agree that the idea of something being "valuable in-itself," is a little strange, since "value" itself already implies something of the marketplace, of a relative transaction or exchange. At the very least, it seems to conflate esteem with goodness, which essentially begs the question on reducing goodness to subjective taste — Count Timothy von Icarus

The good for Nietzsche has to be understood not in terms of individual values but in terms of an organized system of values. A scientific theory is one such organized system of
values, with the meanings of the concepts being employed referring to each other on the basis of an overarching gestalt of meaning. Within such value systems , or worldviews, what is true and false can be agreed on, both in terms of moral and empirical issues. When the value system changes, so too do the criteria for marksman’s empirical truth. But one is never i ln a situation where there is normative structure at all within which to navigate such issues. Is there an overall evolution of truth from one worldview to another? I think one can argue this without violating the intent of Nietzsche’s thinking, but it would not be some kind of Popperian progress through falsification.

Presumably, Goodness, at least as the target of practical reasoning, has to have something to do with what people desire. However, to simply claim that Goodness is equivalent with whatever people happen to desire is to deny any reality/appearance distinction as respects the Good, which in turn entails that no one can ever be wrong about what is good for oneself — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am one of those who argue that desire is equivalent to goodness , if one defines desire in terms of anticipatory sense-making. One can never be wrong about the aim of desire to expand options and dimensions of understanding the flow of events. One can only be wrong about the consequences of one’s queries of the world. We construe things people a certain way and they end up invalidating our expectations. But this doesn’t invalidate the desire to know.

Intellectually speaking we can see that the Other is always radically alterior, and as such my own elemental projections of what the psyche is aren't always going to apply. The intellectual achievement is in coming to be able to distinguish between self and other (collectively?) and realizing that Alterity, Otherness, is not the same as badness -- it's discomforting, but a mature, moral sense of self emerges from recognition of this alterity and giving it moral weight in our deliberations — Moliere

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Shaun Gallagher has recently written some interesting things on reconciling self and other in human and animal ethics.

Gallagher links justice with the enactivist concepts of relational autonomy and affordance.

“Play involves action and interaction and the ability or possibility of the participants to continue in play. It's defined by a set of interactive affordances. When one animal starts to dominate in playful interaction, closing off the other's affordance space (or eliminating the autonomy of the other), the interaction and the play stops. Self-handicapping (e.g., not biting as hard as the dog can) is a response to the other's vulnerability as the action develops, based on an immediate sense of, or an attunement to what would or would not cause pain rather than on a rule. Role-reversal (where the dominant animal makes itself more vulnerable) creates an immediate affordance for the continuance of play. If in a friendly playful interaction one player gets hurt, becomes uncomfortable, or is pushed beyond her affective limits, this can generate an immediate feeling of distrust for the other. That would constitute a disruption of the friendship, a break in this very basic sense that is prior to measures of fairness, exchange, or retribution. Robert Solomon captures this idea at the right scale: “Justice presumes a personal concern for others. It is first of all a sense, not a rational or social construction, and I want to argue that this sense is, in an important sense, natural.”

“Justice, like autonomy, is relational. I cannot be just or unjust on my own. So an action is just or unjust only in the way it fits into the arrangements of intersubjective and social interactions.” “Justice consists in those arrangements that maximize compound, relational autonomy in our practices.” The autonomy of the interaction itself depends on maintaining the autonomy of both individuals. Justice (like friendship) involves fostering this plurality of autonomies (this compound autonomy); it is a positive arrangement that instantiates or maintains some degree of compound relational autonomy.”“Accordingly, although one can still talk of individuals who engage in the interaction, a full account of such interaction is not reducible to mechanisms at work in the individuals qua individuals.”

“ As the enactivist approach makes clear, a participant in interaction with another person is called to respond if the interaction is to continue. My response to the other, in the primary instance, just is my engaging in interaction with her—by responding positively or negatively with action to her action. Although research on primary intersubjectivity provides a detailed model of elementary responsivity, it may also be useful to consider Levinas's analysis of the face-to-face relation in order to explicate what this research tells us.” “…according to Levinas, the face-to-face relation primarily registers in an ethical order: the other, in her alterity, is such that she makes an ethical demand on me, to which I am obligated to respond…In contrast to Heidegger who might speak about a system of involvements that consti tute the pragmatic world (characteristic of secondary intersubjectivity), Levinas describes a direct embodied encounter with the other.…the failure to enact that transcendence [recognizing the alterity of the other], as when we simply objectify or reify the other person, is also a possibility of relational contingency.

If everyone is doing the best they can at each moment of their life then no one is responsible for anything, and therefore it is entirely backwards to say that humans are responsible because they are always doing the best they can. — Leontiskos

If we are always doing the best we can, this means no one is responsible for immorality. But one is responsible for rethinking one’s premises when things go badly, and one is responsible for audaciously envisioning new vistas of thought even when things are going well. Being responsible means we are never the victims of circumstances. The reason I say we are not responsible for immorality is because I believe that equating moral harm with intention conflates the positive, productive nature of choice, desire, want, preference, decision, agency, response, intention with the negative nature of the sufferings, harms and deprivations that we are used to associating with the immoral.

Let me elaborate. I believe there is a positive and a negative freedom that characterizes human experience. Positive freedom is the freedom to produce new options of understanding and of action, it is the freedom of new insight, of finding new connections, relations, unities, patterns where previously these were not seen. Positive freedom always moves in the direction of greater intimacy of relation with ourselves and others. We never just desire things. Desire is always directed toward as far reaching an anticipation of events to come as we can manage. Furthermore, because our psychic system is functionally unified at a superordinate level , even the most trivial day to day choices are authorized and guided by our most super ordinate concerns , which always have to do with our core sense of our relations with others, where we see ourselves fitting into larger webs of social dynamics. So even the most trivial choices are aimed at deepening the intimacy of our anticipatory understandings within the social groups that matter to us. Emotions are not separate from these aims. Rather, emotions are the barometers that inform us of how well or badly our efforts are working out. Emotions are not physiological reinforcers, randomly assigning reward to certain actions and punishment to others. Pain and pleasure don’t motivate us in this extrinsic , reflexively causal way. What motivates us, what produces pleasure or pain, is the success or failure of our efforts to make sense of the world.

This is where negative freedom comes in. Negative emotions like guilt, anger, anxiety and despair alert us to the fact that such anticipatory efforts have failed, and we are about to be plunged into the fog and confusion of anxiety, anger and guilt. Negative freedom is the freedom of the flow of events as we perceive them to violate our expectations, to disappoint us, to leave us groping for firm footing. Negative freedom is not much of a freedom at all, because it is only the freedom to experience unproductive chaos. When we find ourselves plunged into this kind of freedom, we can’t go forward or backwards.

It seems to me that you see two kinds of positive freedom, the freedom to do what is morally good and the freedom not to do so. And that these two kinds of positive freedom appear simultaneously in the same decision. For instance, we desire to torture someone. In this instance , my intention is at the same time the cause of my own pleasure and my awareness that I desire to be the cause of the other person’s pain. I think you would consider this a paradigm example of ‘not doing the best I can’. You may also be able to see that from my vantage, desire is never primarily about hording as many pleasurable morsels as I possibly can within a fortress-like self and having to learn to share my things with others. Rather , it is expansive and world-oriented. This doesnt mean we are naturally selfless and altruistic rather than selfish. Both ways of thinking utterly miss the point , which is that there is no hedonic self. It is not selfishness but self-consistency that motivates us.
We want to greedily assimilate the world into ourselves in terms of anticipating events within an ordered system, as we expand ever outward into that world. The choice of doing for self versus doing for others only comes up when others put up barriers to our ability to integrate them consistently within our self-understanding.

The suffering other can only be acknowledged if they can first be identified and made sense of as a suffering other. What matters to us, what we care about, whose suffering we empathize with, is dependent in the first place on what is intelligible to us from our vantage. We can only intend to recognize and welcome the Other who saves us from chaos; we intend to reject the Other who offers the oppression of incommensurability. Freedom from incoherence implies a sense of liberation, freedom from the order of intelligibility and intimacy a sense of subjection. We always have intended to welcome, sacrifice ourselves for the intelligible Other, and always disliked, `chose against' the incommensurate Other. What is repressive to us is what we cannot establish harmonious relation with.

In sum, I would argue that one of the two forms of positive freedom you formulate , the freedom to desire the other’s suffering , or to not care about their suffering, is adding a freedom which is really an enslavement , the freedom to be confused, to decide with blinders on. It seems to me that what you have done is to borrow from negative freedom, the bad things that happen despite our best intent, and attach it to intention itself ( I WANTED to be callous, insensitive, cruel, immoral). This reduces the real positive freedom of desire, intention and choice by compromising its creative, expansive novelty. Because for you there is always the threat that the intent itself is corrupted, positive freedom is partially unfree, and this is just as much the case when we are ‘doing our best’ as when we supposedly are not. It is only because the criterion of ‘doing our best’ is tethered to norms that restrict positive freedom to imagine new realities that the idea of corruption of intent makes any sense.

But you literally captured the post-blame conception in popular culture, i.e., "Leave him alone, he's doing his best!"
I think you yourself will end up sneaking blame in through the back door as well, unless you yield to (psychological) determinism — Leontiskos

What do you want to tell the person who I say is doing their best? Try harder? What’s the difference between the person you praise and the one you blame other than the difference in the result you’re looking for? Are you judging their motives based on your disappointment? How can you tell the difference between the one who is doing their best and the one who isn’t? Or are you arguing that no one is ever doing their best? If I say that a decision always represents the best one can do given the circumstances, I am not saying that the decision is nothing but the effect of a cause , I’m saying that the decision is formed by the circumstances but always transcends it. Any choice must be defined by a background, or else it isn’t a choice at all, but is only the freedom of utter meaningless chaos.

To say that someone could have done better is to miss that what they did choose already leapt beyond the conditions that formed their background. Can anyone know in the instant of that choice what its consequences will be? Because the choice is utterly new, so are the consequences, and only the unfolding of events will tell whether it will be validated or invalidated. A choice is an experiment, the venturing of a bet that one hopes will pay off. Are you to judge its success based on what new consequences it puts into effect for them, or on the basis of an old standard? In either case, who are you to judge what must be their own decision, based on their vantage, and how can you judge the necessity or wisdom of the decision based on its originally unforeseen outcome rather than how things seemed to the person at the time they chose? Isnt this 20/20 hindsight?

And that's when ethics becomes an interesting endeavor: Suddenly I have deliberations and choices not just about what I want, but also others' desires (including different moral sentiments — Moliere

What’s the difference between ‘I’ and ‘other’? Is the ‘I’ a single thing or a community unto itself? Perhaps the difference between self and other is an arbitrary distinction we fabricated , and it’s really a matter of degree? In other worlds, the notion of selfishness is incoherent, because it isn’t a unitary ego we are protecting, but the ability to coordinate the myriad bits within the community of self that makes up our psyche so that an overall coherence of meaning emerges. the sense of a unified self is an achievement of a community , not a given. Whether we do things for ‘ourselves’ or for ‘others’ , the same motive applies, the need to maintain integration and consistency of meaning. None of us can become altruistic, generous, selfless, sharing unless we can find a way to integrate the alien other into ourselves. This isnt a moral achievement , but an intellectual one.

By age three, it actually matters whether his mother takes care of him because she loves him, or just because she has to. It begins to matter what she wants. He can "be good for Mommy" if he tries. By six, he often offers to do something he doesn't really want to, just to please her. (Remember, she's already done 5000 things she didn't really want to, just to please him. He's figuring that out. Now, we have a loving relationship between two individuals - a whole new dynamic of balancing wants — Vera Mont

Why do you think the younger child is not able to figure out what the older child does concerning the balancing of wants? Is it as simple as selfish needs being primary, or is the dichotomy between ‘self’ and ‘other’ too simplistic a way of treating the nature of motivation?

When I hear someone say that we need to get rid of blame (and anger et al.), it seems to me that they don't usually recognize that to rid the world of blame would also be to rid the world of praise, for both are premised on the idea that human beings are responsible for that which they cause. Or simpler, that human beings can cause things, and they can do so in better and worse ways.

As an example, if a soccer game comes down to penalty kicks then the person who scores will be praised and the person who misses the net altogether will be blamed, and it is not really possible to praise the first without blaming the second. Both acts flow out of the same anthropological realities. If I can do well, then I can do poorly. And if my activity can be good or bad, then it can also be appraised as good or bad, and this appraisal can be communicated to me — Leontiskos

Human beings are responsible. But that just means that they do the best they can given the limitations of their framework of understanding at any given point in time. Because their efforts change this background system of appraisals, their future isnt determined by those limitations in a causal manner proceeding linearly from past to present to future. Our past is reconfigured by how we can change our future in the present. But this doesn’t authorize the superstitious belief in the magic of ‘willpower’ , as though some mysterious , divinely inspired force wells up in us to inspire us to do the right thing, or to push us beyond what we thought was humanly possible (how miraculous!) in order to score that goal. The ideology of blame tells us that this strange power is what separates the men from the boys, the heroes from the cowards , the good from the evil.
This completely misses the fact that it is impossible to perform such feats of will as long as there isn’t an adequate cogntive structure in place to make sense of the circumstances we find ourselves in. Our ability to deal with each other without violence and brutality evolves over the course of human history in direct parallel with the evolution of cognitive structure. In a word, the smarter we get, the more peaceful we are capable of being, and the closer we get to a post-blame form of thinking.

I find your position to be very popular, albeit not at an academic level. Where I grew up your position is baked into the culture in a way that creates many, many unexpected problems. My cousin and I used to joke that it was a wonder that the people in our town even kept score at all when playing games such as volleyball, because the logical conclusion of this philosophy would be a ban on score-keeping altogether. I think this has become more common elsewhere via the psychological/therapeutic culture — Leontiskos

I recently wrote a paper on the history of blame in philosophy and psychology . I couldn't find a single example of a post-blame thinking in pre-modern, modern. or postmodern Western philosophy, nor in non-Western traditions. Reductive determinism doesn’t count, because as I argued in an earlier post, they just shift the locus of blame from a free willing person to material causes. This is not at all what I mean by post-blame. No philosophical or psychological approach makes the claim to have entirely eliminated the need for anger and blame. On the contrary, a certain conception of blameful anger is at the very heart of both modern and postmodern philosophical foundations. As a careful analysis will show, this is true even for those philosophical and psychological arguments that pop up from time to time extolling the virtues of moving beyond blame and anger.

I’d like you to give me some examples of what you consider to be post-blame approaches, and I’ll demonstrate the ways in which they sneak blame in through the back door.

We aren't rational by default, but grow into those roles through our communal stories of what a rational individual does. — Moliere

Sense-making is more fundamental than abstract logic or formal rationality, which are just secondary derivatives of it. We dont grow into sense-making, and dont have to be taught by a culture how to do it. We begin as sense-makers, construing events along dimensions of similarity and difference with respect to previous experience, creating channels of interpretation in order to recognize meaningful patterns out of the flux of changing events. Our culture provides us sources of validational evidence but doesn’t dictate the rightness or wrongness of our construals of the world, since no two persons will construe things the same way.

So, if what you want is against a law, you probably shouldn't do it because you can anticipate formal retribution of some kind. If what you want is against a moral precept, whether you should do it or not depends on how much you need the community's support. If what you want conflicts with the desires of a neighbour, you should weigh the foreseeable consequences against the immediate satisfaction. If what you want is a matter of indifference to most of your fellow citizens, go ahead and do it. — Vera Mont

An even more effective e approach is to anticipate how your actions are likely to be misunderstood by others so that you can ‘fly under the radar’ and get what you want without causing others to be threatened by what they don’t understand.

Guilt can be elicited through these stories due to our cultural rituals surrounding acts being blameworthy or priaseworthy, but the story that comes from the guilt isn't the guilt. Our culture invokes guilt in particular circumstances as a means for teaching people to be good (or obedient, or whatever) and the stories arise from that basic manipulation. The particular circumstances of ones own guilt is the narrative, but guilt is an emotional response from an attachment of some kind (the attachment could be as simple as "See clouds:Feel guilt:Explain guilt" -- it needn't make rational sense for the guilt to be there. — Moliere

I’m not inclined to separate guilt as physiological arousal
or somatic sensation from guilt as cognitive assessment. I think the former are meaningless without understanding their basis in the latter. If guilt , or emotion in general is irrational, then rationality itself is irrational. I believe the basis of affect is the assessments that come from our attempts at sensemaking, the extent to which we are able to experience events as intelligible, recognizable, coherent with our aims. Emotion is the barometer that indicates whether we are falling into hole of confusion or confidently assimilating events. Whether a culture invokes guilt or not, an individual will not experience guilt unless they perceive their actions to violate their standards for themselves, regardless of whether this conforms to society’s expectations and norms. Guilt is a crisis of identity that is triggered whenever we discover that our actions dont conform to what we consider our values to be. Guilt is an emotion reflecting the growing pains of personal transformation. To make any significant change in one’s outlook is to risk feelings of guilt.

Guilt need not be so narratively driven -- it can be triggered by any number of events and memories, and need not make any kind of sense. I can feel my guilt is unjustified, because I know that the person guilt-tripping me is eliciting a response -- I still feel the guilt, but that doesn't mean I'm really sorry or think of myself as not-good or needing-to-be-good. — Moliere

My favorite psychologist, George Kelly, defined guilt as the perception of one's apparent dislodgment from one's core role structure. Whatever one does in the light of their understanding of others' outlooks may be regarded as their role. In guilt, our falling away from another we care for could be spoken of as an alienation of oneself from oneself. When we feel we have failed another, we mourn our mysterious dislocation from a competence or value which we associated ourselves with. One feels as if “having fallen below the standards [one has] erected for himself”

It follows from this that any thinking of guilt as a `should have, could have' blamefulness deals in a notion of dislocation and distance, of a mysterious discrepancy within intended meaning, separating who we were from who we are in its teasing gnawing abyss.
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↪Joshs - You can multiply examples of misused blame and judgment all day, just as I can multiple examples of misused knives all day. Neither one of us would be showing that blame or knives are inherently evil.

Do you think praise can exist without blame?

(Note that the example of being "too pre-emptive" is an example of misused blame, or on your account, its antecedent.) — Leontiskos

I don’t think praise can exist without disappointment, which is of course different from blame. We blame when we try our best to understand the motives of another in such a way that we can see those motives as morally justified. In an ideal scenario, it is only after we exhaust all possible generous ascriptions of their acts that we throw up our hands and reluctantly blame them. I am very sympathetic to the enormous difficulty of making sense of the often mysterious behavior of others. All I can tell you is that I’ve never met an immoral, evil, blameworthy or unjust person. It is not that I’ve never felt anger and the initial impulse to blame, but when I undergo the process of trying to make intelligible their motives I am always able to arrive at an explanation that allows me to avoid blame and the need for forgiveness. Furthermore, there is a fundamental philosophical basis for what I assert is the case that it is always possible to arrive at such a non-blameful explanation that can withstand the most robust tests in the real world. Having said that, I’m aware that my view is a fringe one. I only know of one other theorist who has come up with a similar perspective. I’m also aware that my view will be seen as dangerously naive.

On intrinsic nature.

The temptation to say "I see it like this", pointing to the same thing for "it" and "this". Always get rid of the idea of the private intrinsic nature in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you. — Banno

I don’t want to speak for TClark, but the way inner nature, or Buddha nature, is understood within a variety of contemporary philosophical perspectives is via the concept of no-self, a cognitive system with no homuncular ‘I’ driving it. As Varela explains "...lots of simple agents having simple properties may be brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole".

The ethical significance of the realization of no-self is that “when there are no more boundaries between myself and the other – when I am the other and the other is me – there can be no animosity, hatred, or anxiety between us. This is the crux of St. Augustine's famous saying: Ama, et fac quod vis (Love, and do what you will). Love – understood in terms of the Christian selfless love (agape), analogous to Buddhist compassion (karuna) – is the cohesive force of interbeing, the (groundless) ground of genuine peace and co-existence. “(Sebastian Voros)

The question is whether T Clark sides with Buddhists like Menscius, who asserts that the Good is tied up with natural kinds of innate dispositions, or with a no-self notion of inner virtue.

Shaun Gallagher writes:

If we ask where precisely is the notion of the good in
Varela’s work, the answer is the Buddhist conception of compassion. The good is what compassion means, the good is to eliminate suffering. So for Varela and for Buddhist theories this is closely tied to the conception of or the elimination of the self as a source of suffering. In
some Buddha traditions, the notion of self is associated with suffering, the notion of compassion is directed towards suffering in the sense that we are trying to reduce suffering, not only of oneself, but also of others. One can conceive of this selflessness in terms of skilled effortful
coping which is associated with the Taoist idea of what is called not doing. When one is the action, no residue of self-consciousness remains to observe the action externally.
In the Buddhist practice of self deconstruction, to forget one self is to realize ones emptiness , to realize that one’s every characteristic is conditioned and conditional. so it’s this appeal to this notion of a selfless type of phenomenon that for Varela really constitutes the sort of core of the notion of goodness, since in fact by eliminating the self one eliminates suffering, and one acts
compassionately.

When you or Joshs talk about guilt this way it is much the same as claiming that a tool such as a knife is inherently evil, and imputing bad motives to everyone who uses knives. The problem is that predications of guilt and use of knives are not inherently evil acts. For example, if you get rid of knives then you get rid of a great deal of nutritious cooking, and if you get rid of guilt then you also get rid of praise and merit. Like a knife, the idea of guilt can be used for good or evil. There is no reason to believe that it is inherently evil — Leontiskos

I would rather compare the knife to our ability to place constructions on events as a tool for cutting reality at its joints. If we are too pre-emptive in how we set up our discriminations, then the intentions of others can appear as a peculiar, disordered chaos, which, measured against the relative coherence of our original assessment of their relation to us makes them appear to us now as irrational, preposterous, stubborn, lazy, malevolent, at the mercy of mysterious impulses, failing to live up to our expectations of them. Our blamefulness judfent, then, is an attempt to salvage predictive value from the only ordered construction available to us to make sense of an aspect of the other person's thinking. Despite this construction having proved unreliable, attempting to get the wayward other to conform to the original expectations (knock some sense back into them, get them to admit their guilt) is the elaborative choice we must make when the alternative is dealing with a person whose behavior in a sphere of social life that is of vital concern to us we can no longer make sense of at all.

Beyond everything that's been written here, I don't think a system that "revolves around anger and blame" is the most effective way of addressing social conflicts. — T Clark

Maybe you and I should start a movement.

If they undergo as much change as the terms for water , then isn’t a phrase like actual physical referent linguistically self-referential, belonging to the hermeneutic circle along with our changing terms for water, rather than sitting outside of it?
— Joshs
Yes. Terms like "actual physical referent" or "materialism" are increasingly difficult to use in philosophical discussion. That's one reason for doubting how useful the concept of a hermeneutic circle is. Language constantly seems to refer beyond itself, and our practices do not find it difficult to use those terms. Isn't that as good as it gets for defining an outside? — Ludwig V

I’m not sure we’re understanding ‘hermeneutic circle’ the same way. The circle of discursive practice is not closed in on itself such that it is sealed off from the empirical world. On the contrary, language expresses material practices. For hermeneuticists like Gadamer, the circle indicates that we are neither spinning our wheels in a conceptual void nor at the behest of an independent empirical outside, but involved in a back and forth between lingustic conceptualization and a world that talks back to our concepts within the language that we use , and according to the questions we ask in to make sense of it.’ As Wittgenstein showed, words only have meaning in their actual use , exposed to and altered by fresh contexts of intersubjective situations.

To understand all is to forgive all? I doubt it.
And I take exception to 'lockstep' applied to willing participation in a community, or adherence to a culture. All cultures have some leeway for individual variation - the more militaristic and authoritarian ones, less than the liberal, egalitarian ones, but always some.
Humans have never lacked the ability to understand one another's motives or tolerate one another's peculiarities. — Vera Mont

To understand all is not to need to forgive in the first place. Forgiveness requires a prior assessment of moral blame and culpability. As far as your assertion that humans have never lacked the ability to understand one another's motives or tolerate one another's peculiarities, the question is where and to what extent you see that understanding and tolerance as breaking down. I am admittedly on the fringe on this issue. I happen to believe that every time one become angry and feels the need to admonish another , or to forgive them, one is failing to understand things from the other’s vantage. Our culture and justice system revolve around anger and blame. Even those of us who believe there are profound flaws in our legal system would defend the need to point out malevolent intent and irrational thinking in themselves and others.

I think what I mean by "will" is what Heidegger calls being ahead of myself. Not sure about that. It is possible to act without getting ahead of oneself — T Clark

I can go with that.

But isn't there a great deal of pleasure and exhilaration derived from such judging and punishing? You might as well try to stop people from having sex. — Tom Storm

Speaking of sex, one could raise the question of the motivation behind sadism and masochism. Where does the pleasure from causing others or oneself pain come from? Looking at self-harm, normally pain gets in the way of achieving goals. In itself, pain is the loss of personhood, a kind of confusion. But acts of self-harm like cutting involve using pain as a means to an end which is self-affirming. But what about pleasure from harming others? The more we relate to an other as being like ourselves , the more we care about them , the more likely we are to treat their pain as our pain. The pleasure from the desire to judge and punish is bound up with our feelings toward those who we do not relate to, or used to but not anymore, those we are alienated from. In such cases punishment protects us from their alienating influence. It reinforces our sense that we are on the ‘right track’, and perhaps reduces our urge to try those things we are punishing the other for, the very things
we have been tempted by but didn’t have the nerve to go through with.

Where a group has consensus in its needs, self-image and values, the moral structure doesn't have to be enforced; it's taught to the young by example and taken for granted. — Vera Mont

My favorite psychologist, George Kelly, made a distinction from. between aspects of social organization, the situation of sharing common ways or values, and understating each others motives.
Kelly says:

While a common or similar cultural background tends to make people see things alike and to behave alike, it does not guarantee cultural progress. It does not even guarantee social harmony. The warriors who sprang up from the dragon’s teeth sown by Jason had much in common but, misconstruing each other’s motives, they failed to share in a constructive enterprise and soon destroyed each other. For people to be able to understand each other it takes more than a similarity or commonality in their thinking. In order for people to get along harmoniously with each other, each must have some understanding of the other.

This is different from saying that each must understand things in the same way as the other. In order to play a constructive role in relation to another person one must not only, in some measure, see eye to eye with him but must, in some measure, have an acceptance of him and of his way of seeing things. We say it in another way: the person who is to play a constructive role in a social process with another person need not so much construe things as the other person does as he must effectively construe the other person's outlook

What most think of as a moral structure is only needed to the extent that people fail to see eye to eye on the interpretation of each others motives. It doesnt matter how closely individuals try to keep in lockstep with the larger society’s expressed values. They can never take for granted that they will avoid the need to morally blame and punish others if those values don’t include a means of understanding why other deviate from the normative expectations.

I'm not talking about nirvana or nothingness. Application of will is not the only way to act in the world. Looking at my own behavior, I can see that much of what I do I do without any kind of self-consciousness or intention. Taoism has a term, "wu wei." It means, roughly, acting without acting. Acting from our deepest nature. If you don't like that, you can just say conscience, although that's not exactly the same thing. — T Clark

Willing, wanting, choosing, desiring don’t have to be thought of as volunteristic, as choosing in advance what we will. I would argue that we find ourselves choosing; we are compelled by the contextual circumstances we are thrown into to want and desire in specific directions prior to any reflection or consciousness. Self-conscious reflection occurs as a later and derivative mode of willing. This is the difference between unreflective mindful coping and abstract conceptual rationality. The latter is a derivative of the former, which is the fundamental way we engage with the world. Heidegger wrote:

One cannot construct being-in-the-world from willing, wishing, urge, and propensity as psychical acts.The desire for this conversation is determined by the task I have before me. This is the motive, the "for the sake of which". The determining factor is not an urge or a drive, driving and urging me from behind, but something standing before me, a task I am involved in, something I am charged with. This, in turn—this relation to something I am charged with—is possible only if I am "ahead" of myself.

As far as the notion of deepest nature, I would say that any desire or choice focals and gathers together a background of intricately connected thoughts and feelings that comprises our remembered history. It expresses and carries forward this whole intricate mesh of meanings. Willing is intentional in the sense that it arises as a relevant elaboration of our deeply integrated goals and expectations, despite the fact that we find ourselves choosing and willing before conscious reflection. This is what Francisco Varela calls ethical know-how.

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In a modern, diverse, dysfunctional society, those conflicts between personal and social standards arise several times a day. Mostly in minor matters, where the individual can either get away with an infraction or compromise his own principles.
Either choice, multiplied by millions of people in millions of instances, can bring down a civilization. — Vera Mont

Many may argue that it is moral structures that prevent civilizations from unraveling. Perhaps T Clark’s point is that the reliance on moral principles may keep cultures from becoming more civilized, by fostering reliance on the violence of authoritarianism, punishment and social repression.

. I guess this sounds a bit like Nietzsche’s ubermensch. Although I haven’t looked into his philosophy deeply, I don’t think it is. Taoism is a profoundly humble philosophy. It doesn’t suggest a celebration of the will but rather a surrender of it. — T Clark

What does one surrender the will to but another will? The will to nirvana, to nothingness, to surrender is still a willing. To stop willing is to cease to experience difference and becoming, since desire is just another word for difference.

What's interesting is that the bolded is true in two senses. First, there is etymological analysis, looking at old texts to determine how some term came to mean what it does. But second, there is looking into the actual physical referents of words to see what they are. So for instance, we know a lot of things about water that we didn't know in 1700. Even grade school kids know that water is H2O. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And what about the etymology of terms like ‘actual’ and ‘physical’? If they undergo as much change as the terms for water , then isn’t a phrase like actual physical referent linguistically self-referential, belonging to the hermeneutic circle along with our changing terms for water, rather than sitting outside of it?

You can do possible things. You cannot do impossible things.

You cannot point to something that is outside the universe.

You are part of the universe. Your thoughts are part of the universe. Language is part of the universe.

You cannot reference not-universe in any way. It is flat out, unequivocally, impossible. — Treatid

The universe is not a box with furniture in it (whether understood as individual bits or relationally and linguistically) which it is our job as scientists to describe. It is a continually changing development, and we change along with it. Thanks to the unidirectional arrow of time, the universe is continually outside itself, continually overcoming its former states. Freedom is built into the real, and the past doesn’t determine the future, it only provides constraints and affordances.

Everything humans have achieved is what is possible. Aligning our expectations with reality will be orders of magnitude more productive than the alternative. — Treatid

Reality is a moving target. Knowledge is praxis, a way of changing how we interact with our world in ways that are useful to us. The changes we make in our interactions with the world feed back into our understanding to further change our knowledge. There is no limit to the variety of ways we can scientifically construe our world. A multitude of competing accounts can all be ‘true’, that is, can work perfectly well for what we wish to do with them. Some ways will be found to be more useful others.

The ‘why’ is bound up with the qualitative structure of the theory which explains and organizes the observation. As one theoretical explanation is overthrown for another, the ‘why’ changes along with it.
— Joshs

Except that can't be correct.

"Because I said so." "Because God decreed it." "Because it does."

Physics runs into the same infinite recursion as asking what caused the universe. At each stage there is still the question "what caused that cause?". — Treatid

The model of mechanical causation may not be the best way to understand the historical development of scientific theories. Efficient cause is itself a theoretical perspective, one which only emerged at a particular point in the history of science and has undergone numerous modifications. It was developed for , and is most useful for dealing with the behavior of non-living phenomena, but runs into trouble when we try to explain living systems this way. Over the course of your life you have likely formed and changed overarching perspectives or worldviews a number of times. Do you want to understand each new perspective as caused by the previous in the way the behavior of billiards balls are caused by each other, or is there a more useful way of understanding the development of ideas in persons and cultures? Complex dynamical systems theory is one alternative to linear causation that can be applied to ‘why’ questions without the risk of infinite regress. Since they function via the principles of non-linearity, they dont run into the problems of linear causation models. Put simply, in a dynamical system, the effect is not the mere product of a pre-assigned cause, but modifies the cause. Cause and effect are reciprocally affected by each other.

As chatgpt says

Complex dynamical systems exhibit nonlinear effects and a type of causality called causal spread, which is different from efficient causality. The interactions and connectivity required for complex systems to self-organize are best understood through context-sensitive constraints

You obviously understand that full knowledge (truth) requires all the contexts.

This is my proposal. This is where I think we can make progress as philosophers and as humans. This is where the pursuit of knowledge lies. This is the path to all possible understanding. True, we can't reach the limit - but we can approach that limit. — Treatid

I’m wondering how far you’re willing to push the role of context in relation to the progress of knowledge. I’d like to we you push it to the limit. That means socorro’s g he idea that knowledge is the matching of our concepts to a world independent of our schemes. Context is critical because both we and our world are in continual motion. We have a system of constructs that are organized hierarchically into subordinate and superordinate aspects such that most new events are easily subsumed by our system without causing any crisis of inconsistency. When we embrace new events by effectively anticipating them, our system doesn’t remain unchanged but is subtly changed as a whole by the novel aspects of what it encounters. The world as I perceive it is already shaped by my construct system, so it is not the same objective world for everybody. What appears consistent or inconsistent, true false , harmonious or contradictory, is not the result of a conversation between subjects and a recalcitrant, independent reality, but a reciprocation in which the subjective and the objective poles are inextricably responsive to, and mutually dependent on each other.

The better we understand a given concept, the better we understand every other concept. — Treatid

Are you familiar with Saussurian linguistics? It’s the same idea, drawing from a movement within philosophy and the social sciences called structuralism. Gestalt psychology is another example ( the whole precede the parts). With the later Wittgenstein and the structuralists, however, the focus is shifted to the way the use of a word concept changes the nature of the whole chain of meanings.

The true nature of the universe of mathematical facts makes lots of people uncomfortable.

Imagine that we had a copy of the theory of everything?

It would allow us to mathematically prove things about the physical universe. It would be the best possible knowledge that we could have about the physical universe. We would finally have found the holy grail of science.

What would the impact be?

Well, instead of being able to predict just 0.1% of the facts in the physical universe, this would improve to something like 0.3%; and not much more. — Tarskian

The most powerful implication of chaos theory , and complex dynamical systems theory, is that phenomena that appeared within previous frameworks to be merely random are in fact intricately ordered. This is a deterministic order , but it can’t be discovered by using a linear causal form of description. It is a concept of chaos as a special sort of order, not something in opposition to it, as the title of the OP seems to suggest. It is necessary to understand how recursivity and non-linearity function to produce complex global behavior that cannot be reduced to a linear determinism. I think the lesson here is that the most vital aspect of scientific understanding is not search for certainty but patterned relationality. A much richer and more useful form of anticipatory predictiveness becomes available to us once we give up the goal of certainty. The universe isn’t certain in a mathematical sense because it is constantly changing with respect to itself, but it is changing in ways that we can come to understand more and more powerfully.

I’m much less interested in how many decimal places
one can add to a particular mathematical depiction of a scientific theory than I am in how that theory organizes the phenomena that it attempts to mathematize. The sacrifice of that precision for the sake of an alternate theory which organizes events in a more intricate way is well worth the loss of precision.

It is very convincing, because it sounds scientific, and because it insists that it is scientific, and especially because you will get burned at the Pfizer antivaxxer stake if you refuse to memorize this sacred fragment from the scripture of scientific truth for your scientific gender studies exam.

As you can see, everybody who craves credibility insists on sailing under the flag of scientism and redirect the worship and adulation of the masses for the omnipotent powers of science to themselves and their narrative. — Tarskian

I’m detecting a distinct political slant here. Is it Libertarianism? Trumpism? Anarchism? Would I be right to surmise that you are not a backer of climate change science?

All of the reasons for or against suicide (including "moral" reasons) come up short against the opacity of death. That is, we don't know what happens when we die. Those who have a strong stance on suicide almost necessarily have a strong stance on what happens when we die. The only caveat is that someone who is suffering may believe that anything is better than their current suffering, and hence they may wish to commit suicide regardless of what happens when we die. — Leontiskos

:up:

The rational observer can usually see both sides and explain why they are different.
I am asking respondents to be that observer — Vera Mont

The ‘rational observer’ who believes that different rational perspectives can be subsumed within one overarching notion of rationality which unites them will be at risk of explaining the difference between perspectives by blaming one of them for being irrational or poorly thought out.

So you would have 'don't care' mapped to unknown? — Tom Storm

Or ‘none of the above’.

For suicide to be rational, one would have to believe that the destruction of sentience brings with it the relief of suffering. That might seem to be obvious , but one might instead surmise that death has no effect on current suffering, precisely because it can’t be experienced.

The world of mathematical truth does not look like most people believe it does. It is not orderly. It is fundamentally unpredictable. It is highly chaotic — Tarskian

I’m not sure what ‘true’ as ineffability is supposed to mean here in the context of chaos and unpredictability. Could you say a little more about what makes an unprovable mathematical proposition true? I’m sure you wouldnt want to argue that the infinite task of ensconcing smaller axiomatic systems within more encompassing axiomatic systems involves a qualitative change of sense of meaning that prevents us from attributing all these systems to the same truth, and therefore one is not in fact dealing with an already defined infinity, but with a finite task whose sense is continually shifting . This would be Wittgenstein’s view, which i agree with. But I am guessing you would argue alongside Godel and Yanofsky that every iterative subsuming of axiomatic system within axiomatic system belongs to the same ‘truth’.

"This is what we observe" is in no way equivalent to "this is why we observe...." — Treatid

The ‘why’ is bound up with the qualitative structure of the theory which explains and organizes the observation. As one theoretical explanation is overthrown for another, the ‘why’ changes along with it.

Do you think the Hard Problem has been solved?
— RogueAI
It's a pseudo-problem .Scientifically, I think, embodied cognition explains much better the phenomenal subject (e.g. T. Metzinger, R.S. Bakker, A. Damasio, D. Dennett) than phenomenology itself does. — 180 Proof

The only problem with that is you have the wrong theorists in mind. 4ea ( embodied, enactive, extended , embedded and affective cognition) is a melding of phenomenology, hermeneutics and cognitive science. I’d hardly call Metzinger and Dennett embodied cognitivists. Try Shaun Gallagher , Francisco Varela , Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Thomas Fuchs, Dan Zahavi , Hanne De Jaegher and Jan Slaby instead.

. This is an abstract, Platonic reality and not the physical reality, but regardless, truth is still based on correspondence — Tarskian

Could you provide your own critique of Platonic explanations of the mathematics, lie that of Goedel, or the correspondence theory of truth? This might shed more light on where you think Wittgenstein went wrong.

g. The other’s ‘stuckness’ only provokes our anger when it involves their deliberate, intentional choice...
— Joshs

Sure, but I am not sure that you are appreciating the relation of choice to free will. To deny the ability to do otherwise is to deny choice and fault, and the onus is on you to show how a deterministic paradigm could provide for the ability to do otherwise. — Leontiskos

I’m all for free will. My claims about determinism weren’t an attempt to privilege them over freedom-based positions, but to show that they share a limitation with many such approaches. What most free will based perspectives have in common with deterministic ones is making fault and blame a necessary consequence of choice and freedom, the latter simply displacing the focal point of freedom to a ‘pre-subjective’ domain. I believe we are free, within the looose constraints set by our contingent schemes of understanding, to reconstrue the meaning of events. Determinations of culpability, fault and blame tend to prematurely end that process of re-interpretation and questioning.

You do at least appreciate that a system that can compute at a vastly higher rate than us on endless tasks will beat us to the finish line though — I like sushi

The AI doesnt know what a finish line is in relation to other potential games , only we know that. That knowledge allows us to abandon the game when it no longer suits our purposes. AI doesn’t know why it is important to get to the finish line , what it means to do so in relation to overarching goals that themselves are changed by reaching the finish line, and how reaching the goal means different things to different people. It doesn’t realize that the essence of progress in human knowing involves continually changing the game , and with it the criterion of ‘finish line’. Any AI we invent is stuck within the same game, even though it uses statistical randomness to adjust its strategy.

True, we provide the tasks. What we do not do is tell it HOW to complete the tasks — I like sushi

Yes, we do tell it how to complete the tasks. The statistical randomness we program into it involves the choice of a particular method of generating such randomness. In other words, we invent the method by which it can ‘surprise’ us.
When we opt for a different method, it will surprise us according to that new method. The bottom like is that if the surprising behavior of a machine depends on a method that we concoct, then it is only limited novelty within a predictable frame. Any system which is expert at belching out endless variations of a theme will be left in the dust when we decide on a better, more useful theme.