Do you talk to yourself? If yes then you are reflexive, if not then how do you do that? — Cavacava

I do of course talk to myself in deliberation. At the moment of decision-making, I'm not so sure. For some reason I imagine people who are still thinking that way at the point of action as duplicitous swine - like Cassius about to assassinate or Iago plotting behind an arras.

a Virtue Ethics perspective — andrewk

Thanks, that's the perspective I seem to have found myself looking from. The Aristotelian formulation would be that you train yourself, or are trained, to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons, on order to make the good happen. In this sense one condones murky acts done for a greater good. I think for instance of LBJ making dirty deals behind the scenes with racist politicians in order to get civil rights legislation passed. Those are the sorts of deals I used to disapprove of strongly, but nowadays I think - LBJ did indeed, on this particular issue, have the greater good in mind, and in his dirty deals he did a marvellous thing.

the course of action chosen is one that I would not expect, before the event, to regret later on [the word 'expect' is critical there] — andrewk

I'm not so sure of this, especially in tragic areas that a benign thinker like Aristotle doesn't touch upon, and for which I feel I learn from Sophocles or Euripides rather than Ari. Take Agamemnon at Ephesus. Either he does as the gods wish and sacrifices his own daughter, or the fleet remains becalmed and the war is lost. He faces future regret whatever he does.

The impression one would get from some media is that nothing is happening. Not true. — Bitter Crank

That interests me too. Among the UK Tories, for instance, there's a lot of anti-renewables rhetoric. No windfarms here, sort of thing. And yet in their period of power 2010-17 they've promoted a big programme of offshore windfarming.

...green politics... — Wayfarer

I don't know quite why 'identity politics' is regarded as Green, but one general thing is that if you think about the implications of 'environmental' policy, they go well beyond the environment and you end up with a wider political critique. For instance, I believe in aiming for no-growth (on average, over the course of an economic cycle), because it's the assumption that we must seek economic growth - which actually has weak reasoning behind it other than that it's become normative - which fuels the over-use of natural resources. So you end up as a Green - well I do - arguing for a basic income for all, because you have to face the consequences of no growth, and growth in liberal social democracies (including the USA) is generally put forward as needed because a rising tide raises all ships, and the poor will get richer as a result.

Definitely worth pondering Mcdoodle's take because it's a thoughtful greenness. Couple of questions:

1. Why is a small approach better? How about nuclear power?

2. You talk about an "excuse for apathy." I think this points again to the need for a centralized and large scale approach. Don't you agree that if the troops are lined up and disciplined, apathy is less of a problem? Which is more important: freedom or environmentalism?

3. Archer makes the point that North American coal reserves are so large that it's a load of CO2 that will significantly impact the final outcome. But those reserves probably won't be mined and burned until sometime in the next century. Does this factor into your view? Or not? — Mongrel

Thanks for the thread :) Last night I sang at a gig where the guest of our choir (the hosts) sang five of his agreed four numbers, so I suppose it's fair enough that 'a couple' becomes three :)

1. As BC and Wayfarer speak, so I too was deeply affected by E F Schumacher, whom I heard speak in the 1970's. 'Small is beautiful' was the title of his book. It's an approach to technology that argues for the most appropriate technical solution to a problem, not the largest and most exciting. My former partner, for instance, worked in I.T. consultancy, and large clients constantly wanted Bright New Systems to meet their every need - when the sensible solution was usually to bolt together existing sub-systems that were already proven to work.

I think the problem of nuclear waste fundamentally rules out nuclear power. After 60 years we have no idea how to deal with it. My brother was a high-level civil servant whose last big job was in assessing a nuclear waste storage repository, and what he told me convinced me of this. It's an old question about risk: the risk of a problem is small in each particular case, but the consequences of a small problem are enormous.

2. There has to be a large-scale approach. I think anyone who thinks about green issues is then on the horns of a dilemma. I suspect without knowing the details that the Aus Greens 'scuppered' earlier proposals for the very reasons your David Archer and jamalrob's mate Lomborg put forward against various levels of energy action: that the proposals didn't go far enough.

3. If I were in charge of policy, we wouldn't 'mine and burn' the remaining reserves in the next century.

So what do you think? Is a word a skill you learn? Or is it just another piece of propositional knowledge? — Srap Tasmaner

I've been writing a piece for Academe about 'the familiar' so I've been thinking about this too. It does seem to me that in developing our first language we do indeed find words coming to us when we need them. When we first hear them or read them we may ask what they 'mean', or look them up, but often much of our 'knowledge' here is of the contexts in which we learnt them, and, as andrewk points out, in the continuing contexts where their meanings shift.

If you're interested in the analytic academic side of this, here's a paper that's actually still a draft, but is publicly available, due in a forthcoming book about 'acquaintance' : https://www.academia.edu/33085495/What_Acquaintance_Teaches

They put it technically as 'objectual knowledge by acquaintance is an example of a non-propositional, intentional state'. They spend a lot of time on Mary and her colours, but the ideas bear on your issue, particularly in claiming there can be such 'non-propositional' knowledge. I don't think words and shapes of word-formations are 'intentional' myself but that would take some unravelling to work out. I don't think words/word-formations can be *just* in a tool-box. Often they float freely to us as if they're just part of us, built into how we feel or want to express how we feel or what we think.

Hey, thanks for that. I didn't know the Waits song (which I think is co-written by Kathleen Brennan). Maybe one of them half-remembered the Randy Newman song from twenty years before. Or maybe Cain is always slaying Abel somewhere in someone's imagination :)

Observing a shared behavior of all members of a species would imply that this behavior is instinctive. — Harry Hindu

Well, I believe you've used this phrase 'would imply' before. It seems to me unsatisfactory in an explanation. I remain, as you say, a broken record. I don't think what you call an instinct is in this case an instinct. Your explanation for this supposed instinct is that you believe you have observed a certain behaviour, therefore it must be universal and an instinct. That seems a tad weak to me.

You said 'We all instinctively seek to eliminate our subjective view in favour of an objective one...'

I don't accept this.

What is the scientufic, and/or naturalist, case for this instinct. On what evidence does it rest?

I wonder if poets might be a better guide.

Rawls, called Justice as Fairness — Question

I think Rawls and virtue ethics are two very different tracks and I don't go down the Rawls track for many reasons which would take another thread. But the key issue about value is that Rawls seems to answer the question you were posing in your OP. You just have to value 'fairness' and 'social justice', get back to the original position, draw the veil of ignorance and everything falls into place, on Rawls's account. How does your agreement with Rawls square with your search for an account of 'value'?

A leftie like me has common ground with many people to the right of the quintessentially liberal Rawlsian account. I'm not a liberal, I'm a socialist (though in 'virtue ethics' the two may find plenty of common ground). Only the other day someone in the Shoutbox was quoting the phrase 'social justice tribunals' derisively: the very terms Rawls uses as anchors are contested. Nor - to my mind - is 'social contract' the right basis for an ethics of the polis. I'm not a contractarian. The very notion of a contract is likewise contestable.

So...I go back to the subtler, in my view, account of ethics that comes from virtue, contextualised by socio-political understanding.

As of recent, I started valuing 'nihilism' for being so elegant and exact. It's hard to value anything when you realize that truth is the only thing worth valuing, and there seems to be an abundance of truth in nihilism and its derivative absurdism. I guess I'm taking a sociological and Nietzschean turn as of recent. — Question

I'm the opposite, though. I like virtue ethics, because that seems to be how people are: we value clusters of attributes or characteristics - virtues - and we disvalue other clusters - vices. Ethical judgment involves weighing them in any given situation, in a shared society. The shared society has many shared values, or it wouldn't function as well as it does. I'm an eco-leftie, but out in civil society I'm an active person with others of very different political persuasions, and part of this is just because we share a valuation of dialogue, working with others, enjoying arty or intellectual play and getting stuff done. And then in everyday transactions with any human fellows, much of our valuation is shared, or we'd keep coming to blows, or be unable to run organisations together.

Nihilism seems systematic, to me, and therefore not at all absurdist - the fact that Beckett is funny for instance constantly lifts him, for me, from nihilism, because he values the entertainment and release of laughter, as well as the theatrical/artistic experience. People who believe in an 'ism' usually find it hard, in my experience, to laugh at mockery of their ism because they don't see the absurd side of it.

The scientific evidence is plain to see. Look right in front of you at what you are reading as virtually every member on this forum, in every thread, make numerous attempts to share their beliefs and positions as they attempt to get others to agree with them. — Harry Hindu

I quite agree belief and position-sharing is what I read. I'm amazed you would suggest that this being 'plain to see' is 'scientific evidence' for an 'instinct' of any kind. I would expect papers, hypotheses and evidence. You're an advocate for naturalism, surely that's what you'd expect too?

I don't understand how meaning isn't objective being that we all instinctively seek to eliminate our subjective view in favor of a more objective one - one where we all have the same meanings for the same observations - where we all test the hypotheses of others' to find if we find the same causes to what we observe. — Harry Hindu

I wonder if you could point us to the scientific evidence for this 'instinct'.

As a former contemporary dancer, I can actually understand this, but I hardly think the philosophical world would. — TimeLine

I think you're maybe unaware of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's 'The primacy of movement'. She's a dancer who became a philosopher and argues very cogently for a philosophical approach to humanity based on our ways of moving. I move therefore I am. It's very stimulating to read.

TO value something, one discriminates against an infinitude of other things.
and,
Nihilism trumps value by asserting that everything has equal value, and thus makes the assignment of value a subjective assertion/judgment. — Question

To value some property (attribute, thing) is not to disvalue all other properties of that type. I value (for example) kindness, my beloved, philosophy, good art, much scientific knowledge, Leeds United.

I've been reading Joseph Raz but find it hard to build a theory out of the sorts of thing I value, or the process that seems to be involved. Have you had any luck?

I'm an atheist for the same reasons as Terrapin. I like some religious people, but doubt they understand atheism well enough to classify sub-divisions of it meaningfully. I accept certain sorts of experience as religious experience.

Weirdly, there are Christian Communists in Russia. — Mongrel

It seems Jesus was the world's first Communist. Report on al-jazeera

Elsewhere there has always been a movement of Christian Socialists, though, taking different forms in different countries.

I'm saying that we can have a term "X" that is defined as "referring to a state of affairs that actually obtains" and a term "Y" that is defined as "referring to a state of affairs that doesn't actually obtain". — Michael

But don't the interlocutors have to agree on criteria for what it means for something to obtain?

...to try to keep things simple via a different question, if person A believes in human caused global warming and person B believes that global warming is a hoax, will the future of this planet be different for the grandchildren of person A and person B … this at the same time? If (objective) reality (as compared to the intersubjective realities of cultures, etc.) is relative to beliefs and feelings, how does this resulting absurdity not obtain? — javra

What we will have in the future are descriptions of states of affairs. These descriptions are going to vary depending on the overall beliefs and feelings of the people concerned. If the ostrich somehow survived alive, and miraculously received the gift of speech in the shock, it is going to have a different account of itself than the accounts of the people who advised it to run.

I think there's a good example in the thread across the way about Putin, where I claimed that the Soviet Union fell in 1991, and Agustino claimed it didn't. There are various facts about what happened to the former Soviet Union in 1991 and subsequently, but they don't resolve themselves into a simple 'future of this Russian-dominated bit of the planet' as far as human discourse goes. Actually, humans rarely bother over much about the outcome of forecasting, because we're largely terrible at it on any scale. it's amazing we've achieved such precision on smaller scales under controlled conditions.

I too, from a political standpoint, think there are a lot of ostriches with their heads in the sand about anthropogenic climate change. But in 150 years' time if, say, New York and London have been flooded and Bangladesh destroyed in the meantime, there will be some people who will say, 'It remains to be proved that anthropogenic climate change did this.' They will host chat shows and have followers. Just you wait and see.

What do we call this type of proposition? — Michael

To me part of the relevance of relativism is to call into question the persistent use of 'we' in talk like this.It is a rhetorical device often used to imply that all us right-minded people will think the same way; but do we?

a reborn Communist Party — Bitter Crank

Obviously I share your reaction to Agustino's question, but just to add, although the Soviet Communist party was banned by Yeltsin in 1991, since 1993 there has been a Communist Party in Russia with half a million members and a modest but significant share of the vote, 17% in the 2012 presidential election.

My wife spent a year in Russia in 1992-3. I can assure you, the Soviet Union had fallen. I have lately spent some time in Estonia. It is not really part of Russia. You are misusing words as pseudo-descriptions to back up your ideological bluster about politics being a bloody arena where Real Men slug it out.

It'll be a Chinese version of the Marshall Plan. Hey, maybe it's already under way :)

I am struggling to recall the 'bloody arena' in which the Soviet Union fell.

I'm in another part of the relativistic wood from ts.

I think that the facticity of Usa's withdrawal from the Paris accord is related to some powerful peoples beliefs. Michael Bloomberg for instance has already said that the Usa through its cities and citizenry will meet its Paris obligations. So we might arrive at a point where the de facto position is different from the official one. But generally, facts are established by good practice, as demonstrated by the steps Facebook has taken to employ fact-checkers to diminish or identify as fake fake news. The disbelief of most biologists, for instance, in the factuality of certain reported findings would convince me. Reports by newspapers of record that the usa has quit the Paris accord convince me of the formal position.

Your remarks about predictions for the future, i didn't understand. There can't be facts about future anthropogenic global warming. I think most scientists think it's likely to be true, and that on the precautionary principle the best bet is to assume they're right.

Britain and France were economically shattered, though. But maybe we are just at a turning point.

Apparently Trump thinks he committed some offense, but what? — Mongrel

I think there must be an offense at the heart of it. Maybe it's as (relatively innocuous as) accepting Russian money to bail him out at a vital moment.

I started off a bit sceptical about the anti-Trumpism a lot of people were proclaiming. What was so great about Hilary Clinton? I thought. I thought, an old socialist like me has seen Reagan and George W Bush come and go and still the USA has been largely a source of stability in a relatively peaceful and prosperous Western world. I dissented, from Vietnam to Iraq, but I still had that underlying pro-American feeling.

Now however it begins to look as if the USA has seriously abdicated. China and the EU under Merkel may be deciding they can steer the ship. Can there really be 3 1/2 years of US political paralysis ahead of us? Or isolationism which even the old poodle Great Britain can't say Woof to?

For a country to develop at a very quick rate it must encourage entrepreneurship, and let the economy run freely and openly. Russia isn't doing this. There's a few people who have been allowed to own a lot of resources, but small businesses have a hard time (especially small producers). — Agustino

I have heard people say this about Russia a lot. How is South Korea, for instance, so economically successful? What is so different about China?

if nothing of these is absolute, then what grounds them? One answer: their absolute presuppositions - their unarticulated, unexplicated fundamental axioms — tim wood

This is an interesting point to reach. R G Collingwood's view of metaphysics (thanks to a poster on the old forum for ever pointing me in that direction some years ago now) was that it involved asking a series of questions of any philosopher. Whenever their work answers a question, you ask a deeper question of their work. Finally you reach some sort of bedrock: the answer that provokes no questions. These answers for him are that philosopher's metaphysics: their absolute presuppositions, rooted in their historical situation and their personal outlook. Oddly enough Collingwood held such a relativist view and yet remained a practising Anglican.

Nazi practices were based on beliefs; do you think they and similar beliefs are irrefutable? (Without attempting to hang too much on the hook of irrefutability - that's why I think most argument is of limited value, and that it take an especially strong argument to make people change.) I think they must be refutable. If not, then the Holocaust becomes "reasonable," — tim wood

Nazi practices were purportedly based on certain beliefs. It seems to me always open (a) to question rationally whether certain beliefs really do underpin the relevant practices; and (b) to burrow into the core of a belief rather than take it at face value.

Eugenics, for instance, was a shared belief among Nazi and some Western intellectuals at a certain time, and I have seen it alleged that we have returned to it in a different form, in genetically manipulating offspring. There are excellent reasoned arguments for it, even though we might find it repugnant.

I don't think, for instance, you can 'refute' the idea that one 'race' or 'people' is inferior to another. You can critically undermine the terms, and demonstrate that what might be left of the idea lacks evidence in its favour. Then you can commit - the existential moment - to anti-racism, as lots of people do. But that's not going to amount to a 'refutation' that would be likely to prevail against a broad sincerely-held belief.

At our backs stand a lot of generations of people who put in many shifts of hard work and protest so that any old person could vote. The apathetic get the government they deserve.

I'm intrigued by the earlier implication that smart, well-informed people vote the right way. Part of the joy of democracy is the possibility that they are wrong.

As others have said, moral relativism is different from relativism about knowledge.

I don't think we refute such relativism, but instead we make it part of a set of agreed practices. What I think of as good moral practice happens within well-founded institutions, robust but flexible, with a strong justice system. That's because I'm a virtue man, and virtues require a sound polis or political structure.

Your list of abhorrent practices is interesting. What exactly is wrong with cannibalism? Why would moral rectitude rest on prohibitions rather than on maxims of good and bad behaviour?

If relativism holds, then you and I are both right (because each of us claims to be, QED). Anyone is right who claims to be right. If everyone is right, no one is. The notion of right loses its substance — tim wood

I think the difficulty with summarising 'relativism' that way is that it's a strawman. Obviously such a relativism is bollocks.

But take the study of history. History can be studied, told and disputed from as many viewpoints as there are people in the world. The way we talk to each other about it, however, enables us to do this with as much science as can be brought into the arena. We agree certain standards that underpin our disagreements. The imperialist and the Marxist can inhabit the same common room or bar room and, for a start, accept certain 'facts' and certain criteria for 'facts'. They can also agree certain evidential standards for testimony and written records.

If you start from that sort of point - what are our conversational or disputational norms? - then to me relativism make reasonable sense. For example, I've been reading about placebos and that's made me think, there is no non-relativistic way of studying the effect of pharmaceutical products on human beings, because there is no way that the effects of the beliefs of both the 'patients' and the medical practitioners can be discounted. All the same, we can arrive at reliable enough assessments of the effects of pharamaceuticals, as long as scientists and their employers are transparent with the information they have, because we have established norms that satisfy any thinking critic.

Now, in the physical, chemical and biological arenas, maybe we can discount the effect of experimenters sufficiently that knowledge is in some sense 'absolute'. But if that were easy, Meillassoux wouldn't have had to tie himself up in knots (in my opinion) trying to demonstrate that to be the case. Even here, if you accept what Popper has to say, or something like it, we stand with only provisional knowledge, relative to an imagined future which might overturn our paradigms.

I'm an old arty-fart, I quite agree the forum looks ok as it is, and it won't put me out if nothing changes, but I dislike this Facebook-like conformity.

YOu didn't read what I said very carefully. I'm going to vote Green. As I always do. I decided a while ago I was going to vote for what I believed in, and not be swayed by all this stuff about 'keeping X out'.

BC. I'm not a labourite or Corbynite. But believe I see his appeal and dis-appeal. He's quite an old-fashioned socialist, genuinely decent bloke, like all such in politics has attack dogs (his side I mean) lurking in the shadows. Agin: he's against the New Labour project, the right of Labour believe he's unelectable and that in some possible world they are. My Green angle: no perspective on climate change or renewables, still infatuated with economic growth.

Hegel seems to be the only prominent philosopher that utilizes the man made concept about 'the future' in his work, with great finesse. — Question

Well, the German tradition carries on, and those who do and don't descend from Hegel are also fascinated by our attitude towards the future.

Heidegger had an anti-technology view that you would perhaps dislike, but he saw our, Dasein's attitude toward the future as central. It is both to face one's own death, the death of all one's comrades, and yet to plunge into the consequences of what we are doing. There's a difference then between merely 'expecting' and resolutely 'anticipating'. To anticipate, or 'run ahead' - translation is a tricky thing here - is to encounter the possibility of the authentic life. Here's where Heidegger leads to Sartre, at least in my head: to act towards and into the future is to choose, and one can quiescently opt into the learned pattern of things, or choose the authentic, with all its angst and facing up to stuff.

I quoted Eliot because I think he has an interesting, if eventually a rather mystical and conservative, view towards the future. Living itself is living-towards, every moment is poised on the edge of a future. Apo's naturalistic philosophy and my own would for instance agree on that, and I think it's philosophically interesting to reflect on that area.

But to speculate about humans' future relation to technology is for me just a popular sport, without clear meaning: I don't know what criteria makes one person's opinion more pertinent than another, as forecasts are usually crap. I gather Harari has written a futuristic how-we-will-be-cyborgs book, forgotten its title; I liked his 'Sapiens' as an opinionated piece of populism, maybe he has something useful to say?

Your question sent me to T S Eliot's 'Burnt Norton' rather than a philosopher.

The whole poem.

Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? — Eliot

I don't know what's come over me, but on this occasion I agree with Agustino. I liked 180 Proof's quirkiness. The triumph of Facebook over MySpace, for example, is partly a triumph of a melancholy uniformity over lively self-styling. I think some user control over font, colour and so forth is an enhancement. Mess is not always A Bad Thing..

I may have to go and lie down.

Hey, I feel like I opened a door! :)