Syllogize your claim and you will see why it is an invalid inference. I'd do it for you, but I can't be bothered. — John

You believe X.
A's believe X.
Therefore you are A.
A's believe Q.
Therefore you believe Q
Q is false.
Therefore A's are wrong.
Therefore X is false.

I can't be bothered either.

Yes that was a point i might have responded to if you weren't so busy justifying your prejudice.

Yes tell that to the white, male professor who tried to get a university position and was denied - instead the black female lesbian was accepted. — Agustino

Huh? Does that relate in some way to This?

And in yet other Western countries, everything is pardonable to women - because they are women - this is again a very big problem. Because ideologists like unelightened run the place in those countries - that's why they are so unenlightened places! — Agustino

Is there some reason why a white male professor should be preferred? And if there has been an instance or even several instances of unfairness to men or to whites or both, does this then become the inversion of patriarchy, the inversion of all that history you are so fond of? Really, your scattergun approach that does not even attempt to address the arguments is too tiresome to me to continue this. Carry on making shit up and proving your points alone, or with someone more patient.

Love requires certain social policies... — Agustino

Indeed! Love requires freedom, because love that is coerced is not love but a reaction from fear. Love requires the absence of coercive policies, the absence of legal contracts, the absence above all of fear. So we agree that social policies are required to foster love, but we disagree about what those policies should be. You might have noticed that I have actually advocated a social policy. The policy you propose would serve to confine and thus rather than fostering love would foster fear resentment and hatred.

I don't know why you keep branding me as an ideologue as if what you propose is not based on an ideology. Nowhere have I said that anything, let alone everything is pardonable to women and not to men, nor do I live in a country where any view of the sort is currently widespread, in fact there is no such country. So if you are concerned with 'empirical truth', such claims need to be withdrawn.

Now as to my name; are you claiming to be enlightened? If not then frankly, you needn't bother with the snide innuendo, it is pretty unconvincing, and if you are I will bow to your supreme wisdom and argue no more.

As social policy - not as love. — Agustino

So all your arguments about the union of two as one, and about love are irrelevant. Your policy is not about promoting love at all, nor is it about preventing the harm of losing love.

When push comes to shove, it becomes about the children of loveless marriages and the social costs of childcare. Time to reformulate your argument.

You seem to ignore basic human natural preferences in favor of your ideology. — Agustino

No, that's you. Marriages break up because people do not want to continue with them. There is nothing natural about the preference for virginity; it is all about the maintenance of patrilineal inheritance.

Right - because love is a business transaction... — Agustino

You are the one wanting to enforce contracts, not I.

Yes, just like cancer can certainly be prevented by suicide >:O — Agustino

Back to your tried and failed analogy.

Those people who were never serious about marriage, shouldn't have got married in the first place. — Agustino

We agree about the 70%, then and the government could prevent them from marrying by preventing marriage. The presumed 30% of successful marriages will be unaffected, since those people want to remain together and need neither a contract nor the interference of government to do so.

This of course presumes that people who commit adultery were never serious about their relationship, which is obviously not so. People change; one changes and one's partner changes, and even without these changes, one discovers the other in a relationship and not prior to it. One obvious essential to making an informed lifetime commitment that you seem to favour is to have pre-marital sex. Try before you buy needs to be mandatory in the interest of informed consent. Sexual compatibility cannot be judged at arm's length.

Very well, if you don't, then you agree that maybe adultery should be legally punished in some form — Agustino

It does not follow at all. I have presented the alternative that adultery should be prevented by preventing folk from entering contracts that your own statistics show they in the majority do not wish to, or are unable to, honour.

For the ascetic himself, asceticism might be seen as a kind of personal salvation, but to everyone else, could it come across as obnoxious? Can we criticize the ascetic for this, or are they free of blame here? — darthbarracuda

Y'all may feel insulted by my failure, until now, to consider this thread worthy of my response. Indeed, if you don't, I feel insulted that you value my contributions so little. But I wouldn't blame you for your poor opinion, and if you are sufficiently sensitive and intelligent, you will be insulted by that too.

Not to be insulted by others is not to take them seriously, which is insulting. Get used to it.

Those two don't chime well together. They sound quite contradicting to me. — Agustino

My apologies, no doubt they are. I momentarily cast you in the role of hypothetical co-respondent.

I respect your feelings, but that's her free decision to make (and yes I would say that would be immoral for her - but the state has no business legislating that). — Agustino

I hesitate to offend your sensibilities, but in the interests of my love, I have to inform you that it was only in the act of adultery that she was awakened to the inadequacies of her relationship with me. But it is generous of you to accept that there are places the state has no business legislating. I would say that the bedroom is one of those places.

If all parents were saintly... — Sapientia

We wouldn't be discussing punishment.

She can do all this in a civilised, humane manner (not that it would be moral, but certainly it wouldn't be the state's business because she wouldn't be hurting you - the state must prevent people from hurting each other, not compel them to behave morally). — Agustino

Yes she would be hurting me. Do you think divorce is less painful than adultery? I assure you that the rejection is what hurts, not the mere breach of contract.

That's. Not. True. You can divorce in my land whenever you want. Your love can divorce you. But she can't cheat on you - there's a very big difference there. And neither can you cheat on her. You can't unlawfully harm each other. But if you no longer want to be together, nothing that the law can do about that, you are free people! — Agustino

But my love had no idea what she was missing 'til she met you.

I wouldn't want to live in your society then. It must be a very mean and nasty place. — Agustino

Yours is the mean and nasty place, that would punish my love if she no longer loves me.

Yes, when your analogy fails, find another that might work. But I do not have any desire to be one flesh with a robber.

. So love protects itself as best it can - in this case through the law. — Agustino

Yes indeed. And the best protection is not to carry on living with the cancer, but to get a divorce. Not much point in punishing the cancer though.

I never said it's rational for your partner to commit adultery. That's precisely the point! It's not rational. If they were acting rationally, then they wouldn't do that. If they did adopt the "if the other hurts, I hurt. If I hurt, the other hurts", then they would never do that. But they do it - that means they haven't adopted that - very simple. — Agustino

But I have adopted it. I am the injured party in this hypothetical, and you want to injure me further by punishing my other half. But more than that, if my partner shows that they do not want that unity with me, rationally or not, it is hurting myself to even demand that they should do so, and to institute punishment not only hurts me further, but invites us to live in a pretence of unity which does not exist and therefore cannot fulfill.

It's not about threat of punishment, etc. It's about protecting people from being intentionally harmed by others. — Agustino

The thread is about punishment for adultery. Punishment can only protect to the extent that it deters through fear.

But let us be clear. Punishment for adultery would protect me from the intentional harm caused me by person I want to be one with? And " If the other hurts, you hurt. But if you hurt, then the other also hurts ...", so you kindly instruct me. So the net effect is that I am to be hurt for hurting myself. Clearly I have gone wrong somewhere; I cannot believe you are advocating such abhorrent madness.

So unless you're advocating that all contracts freely entered into by both parties and sealed with the requisite consideration should be banned, which would make life infinitely more complicated and chaotic, I'm really not sure that your argument has any merit at all! — Barry Etheridge

No, I'm not advocating that at all. I'm saying that contracts are fine in a limited sphere, and so long as the terms are reasonable, and there are suitable provisions for exit and human rights are maintained. And these are the stipulations that are not fulfilled by marriage contracts. Unfair terms, such as extortionate interest rates on a loan can be 'freely' entered into by the desperate or thoughtless, but such unfair terms should not be, and often are not regarded in law as binding or legitimate. Even mortgages provide for early exit by paying the principal early.

Truly you bear your name — Agustino

Can't argue with that, I chose it myself. A strong argument that anything I say can be dismissed without argument.

First of all, sanctions for adultery have benefited women much more than men. This is a fact. Just look at the statistics. If marriage didn't exist, 1000 years ago, women would have been chattel. — Agustino

It is not a fact. Show me the statistics.

But your counterfactual declaration is simply a pronouncement that sexism, and slavery are the natural state of man; a Hobbesian argument in favour of the least worst option. My partner and I have been faithfully unmarried for 27 years during which we have brought up 4 children, one of which is my biological offspring. If one doesn't want to be separate, two people, then there is no difficulty in living as one. So you rather reinforce my point than attack it. Punishment, and the threat of punishment is a form of coercion that has no place in a mutual relationship, and can only have a negative impact, sustaining a loveless and divided relation through fear.

Ideologues like you, fail to see that you shall love your neighbour as yourself! You want to love your neighbor more than yourself - that's why you say it's selfishness to listen to your own desires. But this is false. Being one with someone means, that just like your liver does not forget its own needs while in collaboration with the rest of your body, so too, you do not forget your self in collaboration with others, whether in a love relationship, or in a community. It's about giving equal priority to yourself and to the other person. If the other hurts, you hurt. But if you hurt, then the other also hurts - which you seem to forget. — Agustino

I tell you what, why don't you make shit up about me and what people like me think, and argue with that instead of addressing my post? Oh, you already did.

Marriage should be banned.

It is a form of enslavement, which the emphasis here given to adultery illustrates. It institutionalises the ownership of another, and has its roots in the male desire to support only the fruit of his own loins. Thus it encourages selfishness. is radically sexist, and treats women and children as chattels.

No one has the right to be loved cherished and obeyed for a lifetime, and such a clause in any other contract would be stuck down as unfair and unreasonable.

But love cannot anyway be subject to contract any more than a gift can be part of a trade. It is a nonsense that belittles the free relationship of people caring for each other.

I don't really care about money and for all I care I can live in debt but be happy doing something I like doing as well as being edifying to other people. — Question

Become a philosophy moderator; you get to be penniless, do philosophy, and be edifying. Or if you are really selfless, any of the caring professions will give you the same except for the philosophy.

But as Carbon indicates, academic philosophy is not edifying. Psychology is not a cure either, though. Having studied both, I became a cleaner, which is the most edifying job in the world.

If ought (pre/proscriptive propositions) cannot be derived from is (descriptive propositions), then it seems we start out with ought (independently of is)? — jorndoe

If will-be propositions) cannot be derived from is propositions, then it seems we start out with will-be (independently of is)?
Well not exactly independent. Perhaps one can depend without derivation.

I've said this before at greater length: there is nothing objective about self-interest. To hang morality on self interest is to hang it on nothing more substantial than other interest.

Fortunately, one can conceive of a brick without having an actual brick in one's head. Recite this mantra whenever such problems rear their befuddling heads:

"The word is not the thing."

Perhaps I am out of date; my recollection is that laws of nature are derived from observations of regularities. Where there are no regularities, such as radioactive decay, or the behaviour of gases, laws can only be statistical.

But even if it were otherwise, it seems a stretch to use laws derived from nature to prove the universal determinism of nature. My hammer is efficacious, therefore everything is a nail.

Choice (or if you insist, "choice") determines and is itself determined under determinism by initial conditions. At the end of the road I have a choice to go left to the promenade, or right to the headland. Which way I go is determined by my choice, which is itself determined by my reasoning about whether I want to pass the shop and buy some milk, or get some exercise going up the hill, and various other factors.

God may know what I will choose tomorrow, but that does not mean I won't choose, because if I don't choose I'll be left standing at the end of the road forever. By contrast, I have no choice about where the roads lead, because my thinking does not change geography.

So even under determinism, one can distinguish having a choice from having no choice. One can similarly distinguish having a free choice from a coerced choice. The mad axeman slaughtering everyone who turns for the promenade coerces me to head for the headland rather than lose my head.

And what one can distinguish has meaning. My having a determined choice means that my choosing determines the event, and having no choice means that my choosing has no effect.

One concern that comes up when speaking about relativism is that it doesn't allow us to condemn Nazi Germany. — shmik

I don't think it disallows anything, it merely allows that while I condemn them as bloodthirsty, racist bigots, they also condemn me a a weak-willed degenerate defender of parasites.

And of course all of us like to claim that God, evolution, science, common sense, justice, motherhood and apple pie are on our side, though these things do not generally express an opinion.

Amongst the questions seldom asked by philosophers is, "what are tools for?"
One does not expect much of an answer beyond "tools are for doing things."

Art is for feeling things.

A hammer is for hitting things, and various hammers are for hitting particular things. But nothing prevents one from using a rock hammer on a nail with more or less success.

One of the operational principles of music in particular is to draw the attention away from the inner monologue. This makes it particularly fruitless to bang on about what it is doing and how clever or idiotic one is for being affected.

Just 'cause I miss the old bastard. — Mongrel

The old bastard has been appraised of your missing.

Can I ask you to clarify something?

If it is sensible to say that an act is good or bad, 'eating babies is morally wrong', say, then beliefs that lead to eating babies are on the face of it also morally wrong. This seems inescapable, and hardly worth a long discussion.

So the question you seem to be asking is not that? Is it rather a question of culpability? Am I culpable for my morally wrong beliefs and the morally wrong acts that flow from them?

If that is the question, one needs to consider that beliefs are formed socially, and accepted more or less uncritically. So the poor benighted cannibal is minimally culpable for his beliefs (and for the eating of babies that he indulges in), until the missionaries turn up and explain that God has written this book and says not to. And once those ideas have gained currency, then the cannibal ought to know better.

So I think it goes, that one is more responsible (for good or ill), for one's beliefs the more they are at variance with social norms.

Indeed, I meant you too. I like to share the insults around.

Wow, did you really say that unenlightened?

Btw, if so, which offensive fuckers were you referring to? — hunterkf5732

I was referring to myself. But as this clarification indicates, I wrongly assumed that someone who is fucking offensive is an offensive fucker. You can put this schoolboy error down to drinking if you like, or to my usual dictatorial tone, or to some other failing, I really don't mind.

So, I don't know if Un was drinking when he wrote this, but no one was called an offensive fucker. I told him he didn't need to be fucking offensive, referring to the dictatorial tone he had just taken with another poster. — Mongrel

It was unnecessary and it was the kind of comment I've seen from you many times. — Mongrel

You've seen it many times, because I consider it necessary from time to time, and not unnecessary. Moderators are here doing quite tricky, and necessarily judgemental work for no pay, to make this a great place to discuss. They are entitled to the support and gratitude of the community, but they very rarely get it. Instead they get accused of being blinkered, totalitarian, uncaring, and worse things that I will not repeat.
These things must be tolerated by them in feedback for the sake of openness, but they do not have to like it or be impressed by it, any more than you have to like my tone in responding to such nonsense.

I see that comment as unnecessary. There's no need to set that tone or create a clear divide between posters and mods. — shmik

I didn't create that divide, its set up by the forum software. Moderators have powers of editing and areas of discussion that are not available to ordinary members. This is completely standard throughout the internet; the more people see it as unnecessary or offensive, the more needful I see it to make it explicit. Forums work this way because without such a divide, chaos usually ensues, and chaos is boring.

The radical democracy of the internet consists of the endless frontier, which allows anyone who doesn't like the regime of one site to set up a new one, as was the case with this site. And if people like the new regime or lack of regime, they will flock to it.

So while there is a deal of sense in discussing a particular moderating decision, a particular moderator, or the exact wording of a guideline in relation to the site as a whole and the feelings of members, it makes no sense at all to question the whole team, or the general direction of the guidelines or the whole notion of moderation, because that is simply what the site is.

It is curious, given that I have made not a single edit, deletion, move, or ban, that my statement of fact is being called offensive, totalitarian, unnecessary, and so on.

I would like to see Un endorse your statement that the moderators are interested in how the whole community thinks and feels. — Mongrel

I am very interested in how the community thinks and feels, but I have learned to be very tolerant of how individuals feel about me personally. Nobody likes their own pearls disregarded, but almost everyone likes other peoples shit shovelled out of the way.

As it goes, I don't really do any moderating here, as I've had enough of it at the old site. So my impatience with the endless demands for total freedom from folks that would not like it if other people were free have very little impact except to annoy the 'right to opinion, no one can judge' brigade.

No need to be fucking offensive, un. — Mongrel

There is need for clarity. This is how the site works. The owner sets it up, recruits some folks he has some regard for to help him, and other folks vote with their presence or absence. It's not a democracy, and while we all like to argue about rules and principles, decisions are made by the aforementioned offensive fuckers according to the kind of stuff they like and don't like to see. The guidelines give a general indication of what that is, and those that don't understand them or don't wish to abide by them are probably going to have problems with the site.

The internet is too big and people are too ridiculous to be able to operate without blinkers and get even part way round the course.

Who gets to decide whether something counts as a rational account/justification? — Terrapin Station

Moderators and admins and site owners.

Dancing-on-a-rooftop-with-bells-on... — StreetlightX

I'm not sure how the Morris is relevant here, but it's part of my heritage, so I'll join the dance.

It seems to me that to be self-aware is to be aware of (or to make) a distinction, self/not-self in experience. In which case, to be aware but not self-aware consists of not making that distinction, rather than not having one side or the other as experiences.

So a new-born has an instinctive reaction to a brush on the cheek of turning their head to that side and attempting to suck. It experiences, I think it is sensible to say, both the brush on the cheek, and the turning of the head, but does not distinguish one as external stimulus and the other as internal response.

... all feeling is a feeling of oneself. — The Great Whatever

So I agree with this in a certain sense, (it is the cheek that feels brushed, the head that turns) but it misleads, because if all feeling is a feeling of oneself, then one is simply not making the distinction that allows one to say it.