but we live in a state of denial and rationalize what we are doing so we can do it even though we know it is bad. — Athena

I don't think this is remotely true, for most people. Ignorance is the more likely culprit. But more than this, I think most people are negotiating with their future self/selves. Most morality isn't considering self-regarding anyway, but that aside, most people make decisions in a negotiation. Not many people are 100% principled and most of those people end up on the losing end of most things because they refuse to adapt. Hence 'negotiation' being a bit of a default.

Is it not more reasonable to say that bad comes in degrees, as does good. We can muck with the ratios.. but at some stage, everyone has a ratio they cannot stomach (killing one, for one other vs killing one for 10 others should illustrate what I mean).

This is entirely out of step with what's going on between us. I am saying that pain is not 'bad' because you're conflating suffering with pain. I am pointing out that problem.

Pain does not equal suffering.

I don't know what you want me to get from this.. .

I don't know, because that's not the case. Almost impossible to know if I would 'love the burn' as they say, if it lead nowhere but its certainly plausible. It's a fun type of pain. I just cannot tell whether its fun because of some underlying expectation.

Pain without a moral claim: change this to pain without a moral dimension or possibility, and now you have a contradiction. Claims can be made or not, and they are often complicated, but what it is for something to BE pain at all, that is, IN the analytic unpacking of the term, carries in it the moral possibility, and since it is impossible to conceive of pain without agency, any pain at all is a moral actuality, putting aside the ambiguity of what pain IS in entanglements and involvements, for pain, it has to be kept in mind, as a concept is an abstraction from actuality. — Astrophel

Perhaps I'm missing something, but this seems a perfect "non-sense" paragraph. It says nothing to me at all. What I can respond to is the bolded. There are plenty of scenarios without this, like random bodily malfunction or pain from sources unknown. The facts are that there is pain. That's all. The person can then react how they react and that has a moral dimension to it, i suppose (though, realistically, if the person isn't affecting anyone else there's an argument that's till not a moral dimension).

Does much pain have a moral aspect? Yep. But its not in the pain. Other than these comments, I do not think the above says much that can be talked about. The point I made, and i still make, is that pain is a sensation which we can all agree is "x" when described adequately. It involves (or need not involve) any claim to good bad, moral immoral or anything of the kind. Causing pain would fall into your bucket, at any time.

That does cut to the chase. — Astrophel

You seem to have now moved into the causing pain discussion. Unfair play, but I agree with your points. They say nothing for the above, though.

for surely you are not objecting to calling pain bad — Astrophel

That is precisely what I am saying. Some kind of pain can be bad. "Pain" is just a thing that can obtain. It isn't moral. It is just is. I cannot see that you're addressing this beyond trying to curtail the discussion into human reactions to pain - but even there, you're on shaky ground as plenty of pain is not considered bad.

How bad is it? she screams bloody murder in your face for asking such a silly question. You are saying, with Mackie, that yes, you understand all of this, but in a very special analytic of pain, a philosophical analytic, the term "bad" has no place at all, for it carries with it a moral dimension that cannot be evidentially grounded in actual conditions like screaming agony ( I am assuming you are willing to allow there to be screaming agony). — Astrophel

You are very, very much not talking about the right things here. Pain isn't agential. It has no moral valence (take this, just for now). "she" being in pain is bad, because I dislike seeing people in pain (usually). The pain itself is the cause of her behaviour which is bad, to me (awkward wording, but yeah). The pain, itself, is bad to her in this instance. There will have been plenty of pains she did not consider bad in her past. You cannot design scenarios which are emotionally bad and claim we are talking about 'pain'. We are not. We are talking about human reactions to pain, as above noted. If you feel these cannot be extricated, so be it. I do, and I cannot see why not.

But what is evidentially absent from the agony, which is so profoundly manifest? — Astrophel

This is not the question. You're talking about agony - a human emotion - not pain, a physical sensation presumably felt by all sufficiently ccomplex conscious entities.

I think you want to regard the agony just what you would regard the sun shining — Astrophel

As above, exactly not what is being said. Please take heed.

it is simply classificatory for things that are intersubjectively "taken as" good and bad. — Astrophel

This is precisely what labeling things good and bad is. It isn't referring to any higher order reasoning, it doesn't draw on some objective measure, it simply tells me what you think. You've done quite a bit of it here, without giving me anything more than exactly that.

Facts are facts, and moral affairs are really just facts, called moral affairs in preanalytical contexts — Astrophel

This seems totally senseless. Facts are facts. "moral affairs" doesn't really mean anything. Morality is literally the dispositions of humans about facts (including what to do about them). You haven't presented anything to the contrary.

Call them moral facts, if you like: Moral facts are qualitatively distinct from "mere" facts. — Astrophel

They don't even obtain, so no (on my view. They aren't even distinct from nonsense.

e may intersubjectively agree that, yes, there is agony, and we have a good idea what it is. — Astrophel

Again, you are not talking about pain. You are talking about agony. They are without doubt different things which come apart. I cannot understand most of what you're saying because of this confusion.

This makes for an error in category for this discussion. — Astrophel

The irony is quite strong here, and I am having an extremely hard time not quipping becuase of how intensely obviously, from line one, the reverse of this was. You have made the category error, and consistently interchanged "agony" for "pain". Agony is pain with a negative moral valence. You have baked in a winning argument, but about somehting I am not talking.

ust to be clear, you did say agreement is all that constitutes pain? — Astrophel

Nope. I said agreement leads to us labeling pain. The agreement is about a description, which we can all recognize. It does not constitute anything but the narrative under the word 'pain' which (as clearly noted, and is not really in question) does not require any moral evaluation at all (beside, perhaps, mentioning that sometimes pain causes suffering, and sometimes it does not where suffering is clear a moral term). This, again, seems a total misunderstanding of what's going on both in this discussion and with "pain" in general. The reason I've used to the term "constitutes pain to a human" is because the word "pain" must be constituted by something, and its construction involves only that agreement aforementioned. I should have scare-quoted the word 'pain' there, but hopefully you now understand what you've missed: We wouldn't know how to use the word 'pain' or what to apply it to unless we had that agreement underling it. To be brutally clear: The use of the word pain, and what pain is are clearly different things which require different treatments in discussion. You have picked up two separate points and run them together - reasonable, as I was imprecise, but please understand it is not what was being said.

So, are you saying screaming agony in its essence is entirely exhaustible in the analysis of what is SAID about it? — Astrophel

To some degree, but that's far less interesting and nuanced that what I'm getting at. Various descriptions of pain (not our reactions to it, but it - stinging, dull, major, minor, niggling and them comparisons with other sensations (too hot, v just hot enough)) can be amalgamated to represent a category of sensation which includes much variation, but generally speaking (with grey areas) distinguishes it from other sensations. Is it the case that these sensations have a tendency to cause certain reactions in us? Yep. And those reactions are moral. The pain (inarguably, now) is not the same and (almost inarguably) is not liable to those same considerations without adding the reactions.

It stands unrefuted — Astrophel

If this is your position, I cannot understand why you're here doing this, or the vast majority of what you've said in this reply. It is, as best I can tell, patently, obviously and demonstrably (as I feel I have done) wrong. "the bad" is nothing more than something you think everyone else agrees on, apparently. They don't and there is no criteria for "the bad". Even if there were, "pain" would not be liable to it's confines. So, yeah. I shall leave htis here given that response.

I've given you one. In the morning when I put my body through hell to achieve a better body (inter alia, to be sure. I'm not a pure narcissist).

It entirely depends on the scenario, and whether you want me to admit to enjoying it tout court or as an indirect indicator of some other positive (i.e, the pain of healing from a surgery is almost always "a good" in some sense, but may not be pleasant). I do not enjoy arbitrary suffering.

Its better to answer this in reverse:

No, it wouldn't be better. I would have no reason to expect a positive outcome, as to my goals.

It is the pain i enjoy. I am also an old-school self-harmer. I enjoyed the pain.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/no-evidence-depression-caused-low-serotonin-levels-finds-comprehensive-review
Interesting, but something I had anticipated based on my prior knowledge of how shoddy the work had been leading to these conclusions.

tl;dr: best evidence through a comprehensive academic review shows nothing to link chemical imbalance with depression.

At this stage, all you have done is denied reality. No one (and this clear from your responses) takes your points seriously - we have all provided proof positive of the opposite of your position.

If I stand infront of a fire and tell you it's not hot, what do you do? laugh? Probably.

Luckily for me you're responding to my posts. Which is proof in itself.

Odd things you say, I think. Are their facts about logical principles? Is it a fact the sun shines today, when it does? — Astrophel

Yes.

how is it that pain as such is not bad? — Astrophel

Pain 'as such' is simply a sensation. There is no moral valence without human deliberative judgement going on. PLenty of examples, but one I gave elsewhere was the pain I put my body through each morning to achieve a better body. I enjoy this (mostly).

the matter is not about how agreements differ, but of the pain as it IS in privately experienced, as only pain can be. — Astrophel

I agree. But we all agree about pain without a moral claim. When moral claims come in, we start having to 'make points'.

This question is logically PRIOR to anything that can occur in Intersubjective agreement — Astrophel

Perhaps. But it is not about good or bad. It is quite hard to see that you've tried to tie them together here, even, beyond hte initial (lets call it incredulous) question.

Then the matter has to be made public for others to agree, and agreement simply means there is shared content, but it being shared begs the same question, what is shared? — Astrophel

Descriptions (though, it may be more 'accurate' to say 'sense of sensation' which is awkward, but hopefully makes the point hehe). Then we intersubjectively agree that our descriptions match. That is what we then label pain. Again, no moral claim to be made (though, i understand most will want to make one here if asked).

agreement rests with whether or not one's descriptive account aligns with others — Astrophel

And that is all that constitutes 'pain' to a human. Otherwise, we wouldn't know what to call it when we feel pain. Again, 'obviousness' is a truly terrible line to take here.

My end stands unrefuted, because the bad is as clear as day, more clear than the principle of the excluded middle or De Morgan's theorem. It locality doesn't enter into it, nor does agreement. — Astrophel

This is just patently false, and supported by nothing that you've said. I'm unsure what to do with that... You have an emotional reaction to cigars. That's up to you. That doesn't make it 'bad'. I can think it's bad that you don't like cigars, if I were disposed to. I don't, though. It would have been more interesting to bring forth the question whether you think your disgust is bad or not. But in every one of these cases, it is just your personal thoughts involved and nothing more. There is no fact other than about your reaction or disposition depending on how you approach it - and these are empirical, post-hoc considerations. They tell us nothing.

This does not address anything I've said, unfortunately.

I think I should have used the word "like" instead of "enjoy" to avoid confusion: There are plenty of people who like evil, such as masochists. — MoK

This doesn't solve the issue. If Evil is as you describe, no amount of enjoyment is acceptable under that category. That's a serious problem here.

I already illustrated in the OP what I mean by good and evil and what I mean by good and evil creatures. — MoK

And you have not used htem consistently, as noted here and prior. That's the entire point of these replies. The inconsistency is, I believe, leading you claim things you don't hold true.

by a good person I mean that you prefer pleasure instead of suffering. You expressed that you don't like pain in your first post in this thread. Therefore, you could not be an evil creature. — MoK

1. No i didn't. At all. And the post is right there. Here's the post:

Do you want to maybe qualify this? I suffer every morning when I put my body under immense pressure to achieve a better body. — AmadeusD

That's the entire post. So, either you're lying or thinking of something else. I am unsure whether you're having some trouble, or you just forgot what thread you were in?

2. That concept of a Good person is a non sequitur. As noted.

3. That doesn't fit with either your conception, or general conceptions. If you 'like' pain, then you enjoy it and prefer pleasure to suffering (you have confused suffering and pain here, to be sure).

Non sequiturs all the way down, it seems.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah fair enough - didn't quite grok the subtext, sorry. I do now.

So now that you’ve added your weasel words you have admitted the corollary that words sometimes cannot persuade someone. In those instances, where have the causal powers of your words disappeared to? — NOS4A2

Oh my God. It may be that your determination to ignore the fact of persuasion is due to your inability to read?

The emprical evidence supports (3). The laymen and the psychologists and the neuroscientists who talk about persuasion are not engaging in superstition or magical thinking. It is nothing like ghosts or goblins or gods. — Michael

Guess what (3) is??

3. Words can persuade, and sometimes do — Michael

This has been proved, empirically, time and time and time and time again. In this thread, through examples, and in your own life (obviously. Otherwise you'd not be replying here). Your refusal is just your stupidity being writ large. There are no versions of this than can be boiled down to an argument. You are ignorant. Plain and simple.

an event is impactful if it has a counterfactual effect — Leontiskos

This is how the concept is used in law. It's a bit more complicated than this, but essentially its the "if but for..." rule.

If but for y then the crime, x, would not have happened. Therefore, y is, in some sense, culpable. Whether this means reducing the actor's culpability, or introducing a third party to either share of just diminish the culpability, it's a well-understood concept.

And thanks - i didn't even think to bring that up. Seems far too... childish... to be putting to an assumed adult.

Please forgive me, but it seems to me you have overreacted to something you haven't quite understood.

I believe BC's point is that you cannot run this argument to an end. It ends with the points he's put forward. These are the facts of the matter: x happened in y circumstances. No policy is going to justify the killing of civilians without first accepting some war theory, as he's explained. This is not his belief.

It may be worth remembering that philosophy is often a matter of picking at stitches and getting under skin to test our intuitions. It is not a game of who's belief is better.

It seems pretty obvious that being maimed and extreme suffering is, at least ceteris paribus, bad for animals. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Many things seem certain ways, but when you press, they aren't that way.

This, for instance, entirely begs the question of what 'bad' is, and how to put things in that box. It presumes plenty of things. This might be taken as some kind of entire scepticism, but it's really not - there are no facts about good and bad. Just intersubjective agreements. And these regularly butt into each other. There is also the fact that most people have a 'bad for me' and a different 'bad for you' set of beliefs. The murder, if tortured, isn't undergoing something 'bad' even though it is 'bad' for them.

This should be fairly clear now, that 'obviousness' isn't a good way to run this particular issue's arguments. Unless we want to invoke either relativity, or emotivism (both seems reasonable to me). But i take it those making this argument are wanting to escape them.

No. There's no such thing, in this context. We're all people doing shit. That's all really. THe rest is window dressing (window dressing I enjoy, to be sure).

Too bad it went sour, because it would otherwise be a useful word, to describe the necessary set of ideas and ideals one needs to organize one's life. — BC

Really? It seems, and always has, across all eras of my life, to describe something undesirable: inflexibility of belief.

There are plenty of people who enjoy evil, such as masochists. — MoK

but this violates your use of 'evil' as that would not be suffering.

I don't think so. Do you mind elaborating after reading this post? — MoK

I cannot see a reason beyond 'it's unpleasant' to label any given x 'evil'. It doesn't work for most examples I can think of, other than as an arbitrary label for 'unpleasant' which we alreayd have and use.

Depending on the person you are, you are a good person, you only enjoy/like good experiences. I don't know why you are suffering. — MoK

This seems non sequitur.

It is not merely other-regarding. — hypericin

It is. All the follow-on speaks to this. It's just other-regarding. No reason to call it moral (further, but less interestingly, I reject some of those claims anyway).

What is commonly regarded as "moral progress" consists in a widening of the in-group circle — hypericin

It is also commonly not regarded as progress. This is just a perspectival restriction. No reason to think that group is 'right' any more than the one who wants to restrict the circle of care.

As a reasoning animal, I conclude that many of the delimitations defining in-groups are culturally bound, and largely arbitrary — hypericin

I conclude the exact opposite. C'est la vie??

Tell that to a woman or to a descendent of a slave. — hypericin

Setting aside the clear and precisely manipulative intent of such a statement, I routinely mention this to women who tend to agree with me. Descendants of slaves have nothing to say. There is more slavery now. Not owning other people is progress in some ways, and a clawing-back from con-gress in some ways. It is not 'progress' unfettered. This, also, evidence by the extant slavery giving us sound reason to reject universality of "no slaves = morally good".

As to women, you're just not playing the game. Women largely agree: males aren't women and shouldn't be regarded so and afforded the rights of women. C'est la vie??

and who is that?

an invariant moral principle — Showmee

This is highly variable and context-dependent, though. That's why it's clear 'facts' aren't in the area to me. All of these types of statements are obviously no invariant, or universal. Then or now.

I see this has been gone over, though. Just want to add that something being admittedly "bad" is not a good reason to not do it as far as justifications go.

"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him" - Ender Wiggin, Ender's Game(Orson Scott Card)

Enemy could simply be the person doing the wrong, not your enemy.

then human's and ostriches both have legs in the same manner. — Bob Ross

They do certainly seem to. As with chairs.

Well, the standard would be sales, currently. We are pressed to think the 'best' music is the music that the most people enjoy. If we set aside the issue of like, Pink Floyd being available to many, many, many more people than Billie Eilish (in the sense that several generations have lived with PF and only about half of one has lived with Eilish) we see that this is not a standard to do with good it has only to do with preference (sales/charts I mean). That says to me that 'good' and 'I prefer' come apart in some sense - the modern charts giving us a pretty stark insight into this.

Another is the obvious daylight between critic and audience scores for films (generally).

This all to say that things like marketing (propaganda), access, appearance, in-group considerations and many other things contribute to what seems like an objective standard of "This many people enjoy this artist".

That seems to run against the definition, and practical use of 'evil'. It seems a descriptor for that which is particularly unpleasant in an arbitrary manner.

Could you outline how you're using 'evil' here? I don't think many would recognize it.

Yes, some of these ideas were things I had in mind - particularly your final thought.

It's just a temporal agreement, but in order for a standard to function we'd both have to understand and agree to it. — Moliere

Ok, so a formalizing of what I had i suggested. Interesting. That seems an institutional type argument. I'm unsure where the agreements would lie otherwise..

Is this an institutional argument like Danto?
I'm not trying to crap on your admittedly semi-glib notions. I'm trying to understand how we could have a standard, rather than an amorphous, temporal agreement about what's good without naming it... So, the standard would just be the actual reactions, in aggregate, of listeners.

That said, I see all the problems with this when it comes to modern music and how it's sold.

Oh, well yeah, totally my bad.

So in a philosophy forum like this one it would be more suitable... to take a philosophical approach about political debates, take a step back and resist the temptation to... reason in terms of what is right or wrong...but in terms of what one wants and what on can get in a way that equally applies to ALL ideological conflicting views at hand — neomac

Setting side some extremely weak responses about how the conversations actually run, yeah, 100%. Probably my least-enjoyed aspect of this place is the clear ideological capture plenty of posters are under.

something is evil when the person is suffering — MoK

Do you want to maybe qualify this? I suffer every morning when I put my body under immense pressure to achieve a better body.

One problem I see, is that people vote for what's on the table. Not what they want. It's almost assured that any vote does not give us actual public opinion. Therefore, lawmakers have to be quite reticent, in lieu of a binding referendum, to give a piss about it.

Notice you've not invoked a standard. You've used the word 'good' but fail to define it. It actually seems as if you accept that you cannot?

hen how is it — Showmee

This is just word use. It's not an argument for cognitivism. It just shows us that its logically possible that an objective ethic could exist. Practically, though, there is no reason to think this, on my view. I have never seen an argument that even starts the car. They all stop at "sentences make sense, and we can have sentences that proclaim moral fact". That's simply not an argument for the state of affairs in the claim.

why does the conclusion still seem logically valid in the above argument? — Showmee

This isn't worth answering, in this context. It makes sense because words are designed to fit together, where they have coherence. It's also coherent to say

unicorns exist
Dan is a Unicorn
Therefore, Dan exists.

But that's totally confused as should be obvious. This is also true in your example, given that "is wrong" means nothing as a bare assertion, on my view.

it wouldn’t make for a valid argument to say something like: — Showmee

No. But it would make entire sense to say

Boo! Johnny is stealing (notice there must be a speaker here - this isn't a bare argument of logic anymore)
Johnny is stealing.
Therefore i think Johnny is doing something wrong.

This is actually, on my view, the 'correct' way to make moral claims, given our lack of any reason to think there's something objective about that final statement. We just don't have a logical framework to ascertain any moral facts. Given that "fact", it seems fruitless to pretend we still have them.

“I would approve of x” is a factual claim, which is either true or false, not a non-cognitive utterance. — Micheal Huemer

But notice that claim isn't moral anymore. The non-cognitivist has not made any claim they cannot empirically support, which has no moral weight ("I believe this Unicorn is not Johnny" would be the same). I enjoy Heumer, but this is probably his least interesting area.

latter sentence obviously entails the first — Micheal Huemer

No, it doesn't, unless he's reading the same meaning into both uses of 'right'. In which case, non-cognitivism goes through. This just as inane as any other argument of the kind, unfortunately.

Why not? — Banno

I could only surmise that this is a reaction the admitted absurdity of "infinitely better" or the absence of the concept 'optimal' in place of best, given it would need to be about outcomes and optimizing outcomes seems reasonably plausible.
Still, I don't see any real issue with an open-ended, primitive spectrum of value or best-fit. Sort like metaphysics :P

It seems there are plenty on this website who mope, and do not understand what this is. Justifications abound, but actions to address one's situation seem lacking.

I wonder why that is.....

This isn't even apt to be a 'lie'. Misunderstanding perhaps, but that's not happening either - evidenced by everyone but you being on the same page.

There's something in that, for sure. When Country music only relates to rural lives, it's too niche (though, obviously, sustainable given how many peopleare actually in that category). When it transcends the typical subject matter, it gets through. Think that's true of all genres really.

Music has always moved me pretty intensely. I have seen much of a change, just an expansion of what can do it.

You're still simply not addressing any of hte points put to you. Once again,

Your rejections of reality are just not taken seriously, and perhaps that's hurtful. So be it. We do this with anyone who is purporting to claim something which is demonstrably false (the earth is flat, for instance). — AmadeusD

Apart from that, I did. Explicitly. You didn't provide what you're claiming. That is factual.

I will not continually repeat myself when it is clear to everyone but you. The situation is clear as day.