I just find it odd that they try to get around justification. — Darkneos

Think of it as similar to the coherentist branch of the trilemma. What you're basically looking for is a complete set of beliefs that doesn't contain contradictions within itself. But rather than saying "this is a coherent set of beliefs, therefore it is true", as the justificationist coherentist does, a critical rationalist only says "this is a coherent set of beliefs, therefore it remains possible". Both agree that you rule out possibilities by showing them incoherent, but the important difference is the differentiation between justified as in "epistemically permissible" and justified as in "epistemically obligatory".

Do you personally know what it's like to be that "fence sitter"? — baker

I do. The "fence sitter" in the conversation elsewhere that inspired this thread reminds me of a younger me. It's for the sake of people like that that I'm even thinking about this topic. I don't want to see them treated as enemies, but as potential friends.

This is true. There is a strong, underlying normative tenor here. — Pantagruel

Because politics is a normative field. The questions at hand are what are the right or wrong things to do with our society. Anyone who thinks that nothing is actually right or wrong are just bowing out of that discussion. Anyone who is participating in that discussion is asserting something as right or wrong and acting as though some people (like themselves) are correct in their assessment of which is which and others are incorrect.

The topic of this thread isn't determining which is which, but just what's a good way to address people relative to their place on a spectrum of (dis)agreement about which is which. "A good way" both in the sense of a kind and respectful way, and also in the sense of a productive and effective way.

If some act causes suffering at the time, but the eventual outcome is the furtherment of happiness, teleologically speaking, do we consider this act to have negative ethical component — simeonz

I do. That doesn't necessarily mean that the person who did it is blameworthy per se, but it certainly would have been better if the good ends could have been reached without causing suffering along the way.

I think an important aspect of just means, in distinction to good ends, is making sure that people only get to make decisions to endure some suffering for a later good in the right contexts and circumstances, which basically means (on my full account) that they get to make such decisions about themselves but not about others. Alice can't decide that a little suffering for Bob now is worth it for the much greater pleasure that Charles will get later. Whether Bob's suffering is worth it is up to Bob to decide.

In theory I agree, but in practice I think it might only apply to a few cases where one is sure one's interlocutor is in the fourth group and not the fifth, otherwise one had better be sure they know that they are made one's enemy by holding such ideas. — Isaac

I agree here too. I was thinking specifically of cases where one knows the person in question and has seen them fall in with bad views in real time. I think of my parents in this category; I know from a lifetime of experience they are well-intentioned and loving (albeit severely flawed) people at heart, but they've also both been suckered in by whatever they're reading on the internet into believing stuff on the edges of Qanon territory. The person in the conversation elsewhere that inspired this thread was talking about a friend of his who he can now barely speak to because that friend has been suckered into Qanon too. These are people who weren't going around their whole lives throwing around the N-word and Nazi salutes or the like, but otherwise good people who somehow fell for some bad rhetoric.

I suspect that it's only the people who do know such people well enough to tell that they're in group 4 rather than 5 who have any chance of reaching them anyway, so it seems fine that the only people for whom the distinction can be made are also them, the only ones in a position to act on that distinction.

I asked because, even though your separation of ethical concerns into aspects resolves some of the contentions, it appears to me that a view of having scruples over the past (not due to understanding of its future consequences, but on its very own) and being interested only in the consequences are truly irreconcilable. — simeonz

I am definitely anti-consequentialist in my views, but that doesn't mean that consequences are irrelevant. As I said in my first post in this thread, I think that ends and means are both important, and neither can be neglected for the sake of the other. As consequentialists think only the ends matter, I disagree with them. But to whatever extent other classes of ethical theory may say ends don't matter at all, I disagree with those too.

It also occurred to me, that considering the entire timeline may not be consequentialist, but it would still be teleological in essence, shouldn't it? — simeonz

Inasmuch as teleological means concerned with ends at all, but not necessarily to the exclusion of all other concerns, sure. It seems to me a bit like asking whether science is ontological or epistemological; it's both, correctly describing what really exists is important, but having sound epistemological reason for saying the answer to that question is this rather than that is just as important.

treating an idea as a valid contribution to the 'marketplace of ideas' makes it seem more 'good', by inclusion at the big table than it might otherwise be.

So, what is it that prevents people in the third group from being facilitated in joining the last group by being convinced that the last group's ideas are just as valid and likely to be right as the first group's? — Isaac

I don't mean to suggest that we should treat the truly ridiculous ideas of the "other side" as legitimate like that, but only that we shouldn't treat the people as enemies merely for not having made up their minds about them, because that then frames us and the undecided as enemies, as so inclines them to whatever side is opposite ours. We should be clear in our view that those ideas are not worth consideration, but we should convey that in a way that's more like warning a stranger away from a path they may not have seen the dangers of, and less like attacking an enemy for daring to even consider going down that path.

Socialism is the political process of reallocating the proceeds. — synthesis

So is capitalism.

Distribution of ownership is all about how to allocate the proceeds. If the people broadly own the means of production (socialism) the proceeds of production are allocated to them broadly. If only a small fraction own everything (capitalism) then all the proceeds go to them and only further entrench their stranglehold on the market.

Capitalism is not a free market.

Carl Jung thought that solitude was a prerequisite for profound insight, for only outside of the circuitry of the self affirming values produced in a culture can one bring the whole affair to a halt. And the world can finally "speak". — Constance

Maybe being a friendless loner for most of my youth... and now most of my adulthood... basically every time besides my early 20s experiment in being a popular person... was actually good for me, then!

Self-reflection is good for you behaviorally, but often bad for you experientially.

When you reflect upon your thought patterns critically and assess whether they are the best they can be and if you see room for improvement dedicate yourself to making those improvements, then you become a better person, both for yourself and for the greater world you're a part of.

But that can also be a negative experience, to see oneself as an object in the world, as one must do in order to reflect upon oneself like that -- it can create thought loops, as it's literally a loop of thought, thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking ad nauseum -- and one can in doing so stop experiencing the world in a peaceful accepting way, and instead get caught up in this feedback loop.

Meditation is largely about letting go of the apprehension of oneself as an object in the world, and letting experiences flow through us, producing whatever behaviors, be they physical or mental, that they do, and just letting those happen and then be done, instead of thinking about thinking about ... thinking about thinking about them forever.

Like martial arts is not about always being in fast motion, but about effortlessly transitioning between stillness and fast motion, a well-honed mind can slip easily back and forth between self-reflective and "self-less" patterns of thought. In time, as the self-reflection refines one's automatic responses, and good thought and action become habitual and effortless, one can spend more time in the "self-less" pattern of just being and doing, only checking in with a bit of self-reflection now and then to make sure that everything is still operating correctly.

As children it's easy to be in that "self-less" mode of just being and doing, letting the world flow through you. Becoming a responsible adult is largely about cultivating self-reflection. But then learning how to be a happy mature adult is largely about not drowning in that self-reflection, and re-finding the ability to just be and do in a childlike way again, without losing the insights that the ability to self-reflect has given.

"Before one studies, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters."

One is only worn by a voluntary subset of religious practitioners, the other is sometimes mandated for all women. Choice is the difference.

There's a happy medium between strict authoritarianism and anarchism. — Kenosha Kid

A boring, unsexy thing called social liberalism — Ansiktsburk

I don't think that that's a "happy medium" in the sense that anarchism is too far in one direction, but it is a medium, and yeah, it's an alright one, a whole lot better than authoritarianism, or unchecked capitalism, which each collapse into each other.

A problem with some anarchists, which gives a big problem to all of anarchism's public image, is that they make perfect the enemy of good, and act like anything besides complete absolute freedom and equality is basically fascism. Pragmatic anarchists, like myself, or to name the first big name off the top of my head, Noam Chomsky, recognize that while fully functioning anarchism is the ideal, if we're not going to have that ideal it's better to have the next best thing than to say "fuck it" and give up completely; and if we can't have that next best thing, then the next best thing to that; etc.

So at the bottom end of the scale, you've got fascism, which as I've said is the industrial or post-agricultural face of feudalism, in both cases, the complete collusion of state and capital, state capitalism, maximal authority and hierarchy.

Various misguided political movements try to increase liberty from there in a way that ignores or excuses the continuing hierarchy, trending toward so-called anarcho-capitalism; or else to increase equality from there in a way that ignores or excuses the continued authority, trending toward state socialism. Neither is sustainable and both inevitably collapse back into state capitalism.

In between those two competing extremist "ideals" lies a perfect balance of liberty and equality, each maximized to the extent that they can possibly be stable, having government but no state, having free markets but no capitalism. This is the anarchic ideal. We could have even more liberty or even more equality than that, but not in a way that could possibly remain stable, and attempting to do so we would inevitably end up falling to one side or the other, state socialism or anarcho-capitalism, and from either of them back to state capitalism again.

But even that anarchic ideal is itself unstable, just not impossibly unstable. For all its flaws, state capitalism is very stable, very good at perpetuating itself. Maintaining distance from it takes constant work. And we're not usually great at keeping things going when they need constant work. So somewhere in between that state capitalism and the ideal anarchism, but not off to either side toward anarcho-capitalism or state socialism, are various other degrees of balanced liberty and equality, limited states with limited capitalism, even if neither is yet completely abolished. That's the liberal social democracy that's found in the best countries in the world today.

Actual anarchism would still be better than that. But actual anarchism is hard to maintain. And if we as a people aren't up to handling that yet, then liberal social democracy is an acceptable place to rest on our laurels. And as we recover and gather our energy, we can improve upon it, further limiting the state without getting rid of good governance, further limiting capitalism without getting rid of good free markets, and in doing so inching closer and closer to the abolition of both state and capital, which is anarchism.

Or y'know we could play some punk rock, throw molotovs through some windows, and then kick back as the fascists use that as an excuse to take over even further.

When you divide by zero, you can say that it is positive infinity. — thewonder

Why does the positive get priority?

If you do 1/-0.1 you get -10,
1/-0.01 you get -100,
1/-0.001 you get -1000
...
1/-0.0000000001 you get -10000000000
...
1/-0.000000000000000000000000000001 you get -1000000000000000000000000000000
...
clearly getting bigger and bigger negative numbers as the x in 1/x gets closer to 0
...
but then when the x in 1/x actually gets all the way down to 0, suddenly instead of being negative "almost infinity", at that last step it flips sign around to positive infinity? Why?

When you divide by positive or negative infinity, you can say that it is zero — thewonder

Setting aside the problem that you can only divide by numbers and infinity is definitionally bigger than any number and so not a number... given the above problem with dividing by zero to get infinity, you have the same problem in reverse with dividing by infinity to get zero. If 1/∞ = 0 and 1/-∞ = 0, then what's the reverse? 1/0 = ∞ or -∞?

is it selfish to want to be young again? — TiredThinker

In the sense that it's concerned with yourself, yes, but "selfish" is only a bad thing is it comes at the expense of others, when it means like "greedy", and wanting to restore youth is definitely not that. "Youth" in this context is basically synonymous with "health", so you're basically asking "is it greedy to want to be healthy?" No, definitely not.

It is not really any longer "my time" — TiredThinker

Times don't belong to anyone in particular. Any time that you're alive is "your time" as much as anyone else's, because it's a time that you're in.

but at the same time feels like I never had my time — TiredThinker

If this means what it sounds like to me, then I sympathize a lot. I'm not sure if you're currently 32 or somewhere older than that, but for reference I'm 38. As a teen I expected that as an adult I would go to college, get a good-paying job out of college, buy a house, get married, and live happily ever after by around 30. It ended up taking me until 25 to graduate college because of needing to work to support myself through it, then took another 5 years after that to get my career to a point that I could afford to stop renting just a bedroom in a house full of strangers, which was still just a tiny mobile home not big enough for two people, which is why I'm still not married despite being 8 years into a relationship now (and which was a major contributing factor to the end of a previous 4 year relationship).

So I feel like I'm still waiting for my "adult life" proper to begin... and yet, at the same time, approaching 40, it feels like I'm now well past the period where I would expect to be living the adventure of young adulthood that I looked forward to as a kid. Like I'm simultaneously too "young" in terms of life progress, I'm still "just a kid"... but at the same time I'm just about to head over the hill. Both too young and too old... too little, too late. Feels like the story of my life really.

From what I've read, statistically, this is just the fate of most of my (our?) generation. We just don't get to have the kind of adult economic independence that our parents did, so either we're stupid enough to try to take on adult responsibilities like home ownership, marriage, family, etc, even though we can't afford to, and fuck ourselves over in the process... or else we're smart about that fact, and end up spending our whole lives waiting to be in a position that it's responsible to do those things.

I’m not trying to make an argument against religion here, though in another context I’d be happy to e.g. dispute your claim about its role in coordinating early societies.

I’m just answering your question about who would be politically opposed to a science party as factually as I can. The people that I see in real life opposing science in the political arena are a subset of religious people (not all religious people), and in addition to that, people with weird fringe beliefs contrary to scientific evidence (“kooks, cranks, and quacks”), who are not necessarily the same people as the religious ones. (Though I do think those kind of phenomena fit into the same category as religious belief, socio-epistemologically speaking).

So if someone were to form a political party opposing some kind of Science Party, I expect it would be them.

Any positive number divided by x approaches infinity as x approaches zero (negative numbers instead make it approach negative infinity), and anything divided by x approaches zero as x approaches either infinity or negative infinity.

But when x equals exactly zero, you can’t say whether the ratio equals positive infinity or negative infinity, since it depends on what direction you approached from, therefore division by exactly zero is undefined.

And your x can never reach either positive or negative infinity, because those aren’t actually numbers, so the ratio will never end up equaling exactly zero either.

Lots of the advice here is good, and a lot of it connects to general advice for learning: we remember things best when they connect to other things we already know or think are important. So find connections between philosophy and other things and that should help you absorb it.

And there are many connections to many things, which is largely why it interests me to begin with: it’s sort of at the hub of all fields, language, math, art, physics, psychology, sociology, economics, politics, all kinds of stuff.

I'm not saying that anyone ought to be against freedom of thought and speech even when it comes to religion, but rather, that the people who would be opposed to a science party would be the heavily religious, and people involved in movements that aren't called religious but might as well be: basically anyone who's upset by science proving them wrong, and who insists that the world should conform to their beliefs even though they can be shown wrong.

Do you think that some of them consider the entire timeline while others emphasize the future? — simeonz

Consequentialism definitely only seems to consider the future; that's the whole point of ends justifying means, only the ends count, doesn't matter what you have to go through to get there, in their view.

And because the ethical standards need to be established without knowledge of the consequences, it appears to me that the different systems will use different predictive methods in this regard. Consequentialism prefers rational, analytic means, virtue ethics relies on human instincts for right and wrong, deontology relies on tradition, and pragmatic ethics on experience. Those will fuse eventually, but the emphasis is probably different. — simeonz

I don't think that characterization is entirely accurate. (I'm also not a fan of treating "pragmatic ethics" as its own school of thought on par with the other three, as it's basically just a "not ideologically committed to any of those schools, mix and match them however works best" category.)

I think if anything, consequentialism and pragmatic ethics are both more empirical in their methodology, while both virtue ethics and deontology are more "rational" in the sense opposed to empirical (a priori vs a posteriori, basically).

The core aretaic tradition, the Aristotelian one, basically concludes that the highest virtue is reason, and other classical virtues like courage or temperance are just reason prevailing over irrational things like fear or desire. So characterizing that as human instinct isn't very accurate.

The core deontological tradition meanwhile, the Kantian one, likewise concludes that the single overriding duty is to do what is logically consistent to universalize of your will (or rather, to do whatever doesn't result in a contradiction of your will if you universalized it, i.e. don't do something you want to do that you wouldn't want everyone else to do too). So likewise characterizing that as based on tradition isn't very accurate.

Both of these emphasize a priori reasoning primarily, over a posteriori experience or anything else. Consequentialists on the other hand generally turn to empirical evidence for their determination of what actions are more likely to result in good consequences. And pragmatists are generally empiricists about most everything, and so rely on experience to judge what has or hasn't been working, and thus what is likely to work or not in the future.

Who sits opposite and why? — counterpunch

Religious fundamentalists primarily, plus all manner of kooks, cranks, and quacks who have their own little proto-religions they follow in defiance of scientific evidence.

whether events from the past should be used to determine the effectiveness of the ethics. Does the unhappiness of the population during the industrial revolution detract from the achieved prosperity after the fact — simeonz

I'd say yes, but that doesn't mean that the industrial revolution shouldn't have happened. It just means that it was done wrongly in some ways, and should have happened differently.

@simeonz is correct that your "intensionalism" sounds like it's basically virtue ethics.

I think that these different approaches to normative ethics can be better developed and reconciled with each other if they are instead viewed not as competing answers to the same normative ethical question, but as complimentary answers to the different questions within meta-ethics.

The primary divide within normative ethics is between consequentialist (or teleological) models, which hold that acts are good or bad only on account of the consequences that they bring about, and deontological models, which hold that acts are good or bad in and of themselves and the consequences of them cannot change that.

The decision between them is precisely the decision as to whether the ends justify the means, with consequentialist models saying yes they do, and deontological theories saying no they don't. I hold that that is a strictly speaking false dilemma, between the two types of normative ethical model, although the strict answer I would give to whether the ends justify the means is "no". But that is because I view the separation of ends and means as itself a false dilemma, in that every means is itself an end, and every end is a means to something more.

This is similar to how the my views on ontology and epistemology entail a kind of direct realism in which there is no distinction between representations of reality and reality itself, there is only the incomplete but direct comprehension of small parts of reality that we have, distinguished from the completeness of reality itself that is always at least partially beyond our comprehension. We aren't trying to figure out what is really real from possibly-fallible representations of reality, we're undertaking a fallible process of trying to piece together our direct sensation of small bits of reality and extrapolate the rest of it from them.

Likewise, to behave morally, we aren't just aiming to use possibly-fallible means to indirectly achieve some ends, we're undertaking a process of directly causing ends with each and every behavior, and fallibly attempting to piece all of those together into a greater good.

Perhaps more clearly than that analogy, the dissolution of the dichotomy between ends and means that I mean to articulate here is like how a sound argument cannot merely be a valid argument, and cannot merely have true conclusions, but it must be valid – every step of the argument must be a justified inference from previous ones – and it must have a true conclusion, which requires also that it begin from true premises.

If a valid argument leads to a false conclusion, that tells you that the premises of the argument must have been false, because by definition valid inferences from true premises must lead to true conclusions; that's what makes them valid. If the premises were true and the inferences in the argument still lead to a false conclusion, that tells you that the inferences were not valid. But likewise, if an invalid argument happens to have a true conclusion, that's no credit to the argument; the conclusion is true, sure, but the argument is still a bad one, invalid.

I hold that a similar relationship holds between means and ends: means are like inferences, the steps you take to reach an end, which is like a conclusion. Just means must be "good-preserving" in the same way that valid inferences are truth-preserving: just means exercised out of good prior circumstances definitionally must lead to good consequences; just means must introduce no badness, or as Hippocrates wrote in his famous physicians' oath, they must "first, do no harm".

If something bad happens as a consequence of some means, then that tells you either that something about those means were unjust, or that there was something already bad in the prior circumstances that those means simply have not alleviated (which failure to alleviate does not make them therefore unjust). But likewise, if something good happens as a consequence of unjust means, that's no credit to those means; the consequences are good, sure, but the means are still bad ones, unjust.

Moral action requires using just means to achieve good ends, and if either of those is neglected, morality has been failed; bad consequences of genuinely just actions means some preexisting badness has still yet to be addressed (or else is a sign that the actions were not genuinely just), and good consequences of unjust actions do not thereby justify those actions.

Consequentialist models of normative ethics concern themselves primarily with defining what is a good state of affairs, and then say that bringing about those states of affairs is what defines a good action. Deontological models of normative ethics concern themselves primarily with defining what makes an action itself intrinsically good, or just, regardless of further consequences of the action.

I think that these are both important questions, and they are the moral analogues to questions about ontology and epistemology.

In addition to consequentialist and deontological normative ethical models, there is a third common type, called aretaic or virtue ethics, which holds that morality is about the character, the internal mental states, of the person doing the action, rather than about the action itself or its consequences. I hold that that is also an important question to consider, and that that question is wrapped up with the question of what it means to have free will.

And lastly, though it's not usually studied as a philosophical division of normative ethics, there are plenty of views across history that hold that morality lies in doing what the correct authority commands, whether that be a supernatural authority (as in divine command theory) or a more mundane authority (as in some varieties of legalism). That concern is of course wrapped up in the question of who if anyone is the correct authority and what gives their commands any moral weight, which is the central concern of political philosophy.

So rather than addressing normative ethics as its own field, I prefer approaching those four questions corresponding to four kinds of normative ethical theories as equally important fields: teleology (dealing with the objects of morality, the intended ends), deontology (dealing with the methods of justice, what the rules should be), the philosophy of will (dealing with the subjects of morality, who does the intending), and the philosophy of politics (dealing with the institutions of justice, who should enforce the rules).

LaVeyan Satanism and Nietzsche are both overreactions to overbearing Christian moralism. They are great in their criticisms of the faults of the latter, but then develop faults just as egregious in the other direction themselves.

The true path is to reject the bad faith of dogma and the bad objectivity of transcendentalism, without sacrificing the good faith of freedom and the good objectivity of universalism; equivalently, to avoid falling into bad, cynical skepticism, and bad, relativistic, subjectivism, but rightly adopting good, critical skepticism, and good, phenomenal subjectivism.

Part of the universe being important to you is for its ability to help you enjoy it in other ways.

But another part of it being important to you is for its informing of your understanding of it, and yourself.

One way you can be important to the rest of the universe is to do good things for it, to help others to enjoy living.

And another way is to be a source of information, to help others understand it, and themselves.

So you might flesh all of this out, a bit poetically, as that the meaning of life is to learn, to teach, to love, and to be loved: for both truths and goods to flow through you from as far and wide as possible to as far and wide as possible. — Pfhorrest

I’m thinking that I’d like to rephrase that “love and be loved” part in a way that’s a little more parallel to “learn and teach”: I’m looking for some verb that means to receive good things, something in the vein of “to earn” or “to win” (Spanish “ganar” seems in the ballpark, but I’m looking for English), and then another verb meaning to give good things, maybe to help or to aid? Any suggestions?

But a trader who owns the means of production and who successfully aggregates wealth by those means doesn't strike me as a corruption of the market, just an undesirable possibility of the market. Owning one's means of production, having workers... these are as old as markets themselves, surely. — Kenosha Kid

True, which is why I’m not against markets, nor against privately owned means of products per se, but against concentration of the means of production into few hands, such that some people own more than they themselves use, and others own none and instead use the unused excess that others own; and against things that lead toward rather than away from that kind of situation, such as legitimating contracts that charge for the mere temporary use of something, rather than a trade of goods or services (where a service involves actually doing something, not just allowing someone else to do something).

That separation of people into non-owning workers and non-working owners, laborers and capitalists, is the defining feature of capitalism. All the stuff about markets and private ownership and workplaces is only relevant because it’s thought bu someone or other to be either a cause of or an effect of capital ownership being thus concentrated.

Capitalism is a disruption of the market. — Pfhorrest

In its current guise, certainly. Divorcing the fate of the company from the date of the trader has corrupted it immensely. When it can be in the trader's interest to destroy his own company, market forces are rather irrelevant. — Kenosha Kid

I was thinking more of how it being possible for rich people to extract money from poor people by owning the things they need to use and charging them for that use creates incentives for the rich to buy even more of the things that the poor need, which distorts the market, making those things even more expensive and so more profitable for an ever-shrinking set of rich and unattainable for an ever-growing set of poor.

It's disruption of the market - not the existence of it. — counterpunch

Capitalism is a disruption of the market.

Correct; it is also known as Agrippa's trilemma.

Today, there are around 8 billion people on earth. Which is to say, by your numbers, that capitalism feeds 7.91bn people adequately, and you call that a failure? I call it a miracle. — counterpunch

The existence of agricultural technology is independent of the ownership of it.

It is the technology that feeds the billions of people on earth today, and it actually produces enough food to feed EVERYONE. There is no practical reason why anyone in the world today has to starve. We have the means to feed them all.

It is the distribution of ownership of that technology, and that land it is applied to, etc — which is what’s different between capitalism and its alternatives, who owns what — that results in millions of people starving to death every year DESPITE that overabundance of food.

Communism has failed every country that ever adopted it — counterpunch

And capitalism hasn't?

Over 9 million people starve to death every year, in a world that is pretty much entirely capitalist nowadays. Why is that not a failure of capitalism?

Anarchism isn’t lack of governance, so there could be methods in place to track down those roving antisocials in an anarchic society.

I won’t derail this whole thread with it but if you’re curious how I think that would work:

http://www.geekofalltrades.org/codex/politics

Is there an actual purpose or point to life or living? — Mtl4life098

A purpose is just what something is good for, so the question is "is living good for anything?"

That hinges on what in general is good. Whatever is good, if life furthers that, then life is good for that, and that's the purpose of life.

I'd argue that what is good is basically enjoyment, so life is good for the enjoyment of it, and so the purpose of life is to enjoy it.

I'd argue further that the highest form of enjoyment is a feeling of meaningfulness, of importance, both of the universe being important to you, and of you being important to the universe.

Part of the universe being important to you is for its ability to help you enjoy it in other ways.

But another part of it being important to you is for its informing of your understanding of it, and yourself.

One way you can be important to the rest of the universe is to do good things for it, to help others to enjoy living.

And another way is to be a source of information, to help others understand it, and themselves.

So you might flesh all of this out, a bit poetically, as that the meaning of life is to learn, to teach, to love, and to be loved: for both truths and goods to flow through you from as far and wide as possible to as far and wide as possible.

Both absurdity and contradiction are senses which you personally might have of two propositions and which others might disagree with. — Isaac

Are you suggesting that logical contradiction or consistency is only a matter of subjective opinion? Or merely that people can sometimes wrongly assess whether or not something is contradictory? Many of your responses across this forum seem to rest on implicitly conflating those two kinds of things: "You might be wrong, therefore there are no correct answers at all".

Yes, people can be wrong. (And yes, I am a person... complete the syllogism in your head, we all get your obvious point.) People can even add up numbers incorrectly. That doesn't mean that there is no correct answer to the question of what is the sum of two numbers, or that everything else that depends upon the sum of two numbers is completely subjective too.

Things either are contradictory or they're not. People can assess whether they are or not incorrectly, but "you might be doing it wrong" is the most inane argument against anything that I can imagine. Get back when you can point out a specific thing someone's doing wrong. Meanwhile, the mere possibility of doing it wrong doesn't make the entire endeavor pointless or futile.

If, for example, I wanted to harm a person X but I do that employing only good deeds, the good deeds are usually not part of the formula that determines my moral standing; in other words, if my behavior towards X matches 2 above, I'm considered a bad person. — TheMadFool

If your actions cause harm to a person, then those are not good deeds, at least not on my account.

It is still possible that you do only good deeds and yet that something bad nevertheless happens to someone. That is, I think the real "case 2" in your quadrilemma.

I say that that's akin to making a valid argument that nevertheless has a false conclusion.

What you can infer from getting a false conclusion from a valid argument is that the premises you started from were false, and need to be corrected in order to get true conclusions from valid arguments.

Similarly, bad things happening despite you doing only good deeds indicates that there was something already bad in the prior circumstances that needs to be fixed in order to get good ends by good means.

Then why did you direct me to a Wiki definition in which the first paragraph states reductio ad absurdum to be "the form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absurdity or contradiction"? I've bolded the 'or'. One or the other, not that the two are being treated as technically the same thing. — Isaac

I directed you to a Google search, as a rhetorical device indicating that you should understand these things already if you're going to take the high horse that you always do.

But to follow up on the very first reference in that Wiki article that is the top result:

Proof by Contradiction

An indirect method of proof that attempts to prove a claim by proving that the opposite will lead to a contradiction. For that reason, the method is also known as “reductio ad absurdum” — or “reduction to absurdity” in Latin. — The Definitive Glossary of Higher Mathematical Jargon

Yeah, it is sometimes used more loosely than that (as the second reference in the Wiki article states), but it should be clear from context to anyone fluent in English who isn't looking to maliciously misinterpret me that I'm meaning the sense equivalent with proof by contradiction, because I'm explicitly talking about contradictions.

If you want to use that BA of yours to teach me something about the technical meaning of philosophical terms, then it would help if you directed me toward definitions which actually support the claim you're making.

See above, but also: I'm not really trying to teach you anything here, I'm trying to disengage from conversation with you, because you've long since demonstrated that you're not interested in an honest and charitable conversation but in scoring some kind of imaginary internet debate points.

But I can't resist one last snip:

No. You think your positions are ones that much better-credentialed people than you also support. — Isaac

One of the aforementioned people, Hans Albert, is the originator of the trilemma that is the topic of this thread, and he introduced it specifically as an argument for critical rationalism. In arguing for critical rationalism here, I'm pretty much just explaining what the point of the argument the OP is talking about is.

Why do you think the ends don't justify the means? — TheMadFool

Well in this particular case it's enough that the ends simply aren't known to be good. If you don't know the ends are good, then they can't justify the means, even if ends could justify means generally.


As for why ends don't justify means generally...

It's like how a sound argument cannot merely be a valid argument, and cannot merely have true conclusions, but it must be valid – every step of the argument must be a justified inference from previous ones – and it must have a true conclusion, which requires also that it begin from true premises.

If a valid argument leads to a false conclusion, that tells you that the premises of the argument must have been false, because by definition valid inferences from true premises must lead to true conclusions; that's what makes them valid. If the premises were true and the inferences in the argument still lead to a false conclusion, that tells you that the inferences were not valid. But likewise, if an invalid argument happens to have a true conclusion, that's no credit to the argument; the conclusion is true, sure, but the argument is still a bad one, invalid.

I hold that a similar relationship holds between means and ends: means are like inferences, the steps you take to reach an end, which is like a conclusion. Just means must be "good-preserving" in the same way that valid inferences are truth-preserving: just means exercised out of good prior circumstances definitionally must lead to good consequences; just means must introduce no badness, or as Hippocrates wrote in his famous physicians' oath, they must "first, do no harm".

If something bad happens as a consequence of some means, then that tells you either that something about those means were unjust, or that there was something already bad in the prior circumstances that those means simply have not alleviated (which failure to alleviate does not make them therefore unjust). But likewise, if something good happens as a consequence of unjust means, that's no credit to those means; the consequences are good, sure, but the means are still bad ones, unjust.

Moral action requires using just means to achieve good ends, and if either of those is neglected, morality has been failed; bad consequences of genuinely just actions means some preexisting badness has still yet to be addressed (or else is a sign that the actions were not genuinely just), and good consequences of unjust actions do not thereby justify those actions.

Consequentialist models of normative ethics concern themselves primarily with defining what is a good state of affairs, and then say that bringing about those states of affairs is what defines a good action. Deontological models of normative ethics concern themselves primarily with defining what makes an action itself intrinsically good, or just, regardless of further consequences of the action.

I think that these are both important questions, and they are the moral analogues to questions about ontology and epistemology.

Are you referring to the discussion in which literally everyone involved was pointing out how you were wrong but you insisted you were right regardless? — Isaac

I'm referring to many previous discussions in which you repeatedly, and I think willfully, misinterpret "reductio ad absurdum" as "reducio ad something-I-subjectively-don't-like", rather than the technical meaning in which "absurd" means "self-contradictory".

But you seem to be referring to one specific discussion in which everyone kept bringing up things I didn't disagree with and then acting like that somehow proved something against my position that already included within it the things that they were saying.

So how come it's the case that it's me who doesn't 'get' your argument and not you who doesn't 'get' everyone else counter argument? — Isaac

Because I already agreed with what "everyone else" was saying, so it can't be that I was somehow failing to be persuaded by their arguments, since I wasn't disputing the conclusions.

It reminds me of arguing for libertarian socialism only to be met with right-wingers presenting arguments against the state as reasons why not to adopt socialism. Yeah, I already agree with those arguments against the state... that's why I'm not a state socialist, but a libertarian one. No amount of arguments against the state could change my mind about the state, because I already agree with the conclusion of them, and am already anti-state. If you think that those are arguments against my position, it's you who fails to understand what my position even is.

Tell me, what's most likely - that you're a unique genius who nobody understands, or that you've made a mistake which you don't understand? — Isaac

I never claimed to be a unique genius. Almost all of my positions are ones that much better-credentialed people than me also support. In this case, aside from the obvious philosophers like Karl Popper, Ernest Gellner, and Hans Albert, you've also got legal scholars like Reinhold Zippelius, physicists like David Deutch, biologists like Hans Krebs, and the one I expect you'll like most, neurophysiologists like John Eccles.

But yeah, when it comes to discussing a topic in which I majored summa cum laude with easy straight-As, putting me in the top twentieth of people who have BAs on the topic, on an anonymous internet forum where over two thirds of people don't even have a BA in it at all, yeah I'm leaning statistically toward it being other people not understanding me rather than vice versa.

Are you claiming that what is 'wrong' is synonymous with what you personally find absurd or objectionable? — Isaac

No, and you should know that already, because we've been around this merry-go-round many times before and if it didn't sink in the first million times I'm not wasting my time going over it with you again.

Let me Google that for you: reductio ad absurdum.

Why is Plato wrong? — TheMadFool

About "noble lies" in particular? Because a false reason to do something is a bad reason to do something. If the thing the noble lie gets people to do is actually good, then there is some true reason why it is good, which is the same as to say a true reason to do so. That true reason makes the noble lie unnecessary. If there is not known a true reason, then it is not known that the thing is good, and so the ends (the good thing) can't justify the means (the lie) even if ends could justify means in general, because the ends are not actually known to be good.

It's similar to the Euthyphro dilemma. If something is good only because the gods command it, then what is "good" is arbitrary and "good" doesn't really mean anything morally imperative. If on the other hand the gods command things because they are good, then there are independent reasons known to the gods for why those things are good, and those reasons should likewise suffice for human purposes; we don't need the gods to tell us to do things, the reasons the gods have for telling us to do them are good enough reasons for us to do them whether or not the gods command them.

You can show something is wrong regardless of external premises, via reductio ad absurdum. If assuming the thing itself leads to contradictions, then you have reason to discard it, without appeal to anything else.

This trilemma is precisely such a reductio for justificationism itself: if you assumed justificationism was true, the trilemma that follows from it would prove that it’s impossible to ever justify anything, a contradiction with your initial assumption; so you must reject justificationism.

If we want empirical evidence to be able to falsify things too, we just need to show that anti-empiricism leads to a similar absurdity, which I think can be done. Disregarding empirical evidence is then thereby ruled out, so aside from internal self-consistency a belief has to be consistent with empirical observation as well or else your belief system as a whole will have an inconsistency.

From there science proceeds as normal, and philosophy can sit back and just watch.