But let’s suppose that unregenerate man fails to fulfill his means-obligations. What then? Will telling him that he must do the supererogatory fix the situation? I don’t see how it would. If he isn’t fulfilling his means-obligations it’s not clear why he would fulfill his means-supererogations. — Leontiskos

Yes. Telling people that they must do more to do enough, when we already can't do enough, doesn't work.

I would say that for the non-religious, or for those who believe that this state is our inevitable and perpetual condition, the only option is some form of resignation (to failure). To reuse the recycling analogy, this would be resigning oneself to fail to correct climate impact. You can still recycle, but only with the knowledge that you will not succeed—with the knowledge that you are only delaying the inevitable. And one can play Camus all they like, but that burns out fast enough. — Leontiskos

Answers to the problem aren't really about what to do, I think, they're about how to cope with our condition of being unable to do "enough". One way of dealing with that is to try to do enough. Or to try to bring about a state of things were people can do enough. Like @Count Timothy von Icarus engender.

That said, I think there are other options of how to feel than resignation, absurdity and faith - one could learn to love the taste of the brick wall. I think that goes against our natures more than what we've been talking about in this thread, though.

Existentialism looks like it provides an answer. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to rant about it. The number of people I see adopt an "existentialist" posture in person is quite high, but it does nothing to stop everyday petty grievances and tragedies from hurting them, and it doesn't allow them to enjoy the pain of it. I see an appeal to absurd as a metacognitive trap, it's how you think you think, but you only think that because you're not looking at how you think. It's also metaphysical stopgap, a refusal to inquire or do more. It's a refusal to be troubled by the troubling. Though doubtless there are more sincere engagements with it than the one I see often.

I will spare you my comments about faith in this context. But they resemble my comment below about extreme leftism, which I see as a secular form of faith.

I agree with you that a secular "answer" to the problem is quite difficult. The people I'm aware of who are troubled by these problems are generally socialists or communists, and treat The Revolution in eschatological terms. It will be Kingdom come, but of our own making. The faith they have in a future end-state with no means of imagining how to bring it about. They don't have the option of absolving themselves of all responsibility - all acts of going above and beyond - for bringing it about though. I think they're aware of how fucked things are {our fallenness} and stop thinking about it. It all dissolves into the question "What is to be done?". Though I think they real answer to that question is "What is to be done, that goes above and beyond, that I can actually do without an incredible amount of self sacrifice?". Which I have a lot of respect for. The amount of going above and beyond required from everyone for things to be markedly better may be pretty small indeed, and I can respect the gamble.

CS Lewis {for which I will retag @Count Timothy von Icarus due to his stanning for the man} has excellent commentary on this in The Screwtape Letters. For those of you which have not read it, this is a series of funny and disturbing essays, written from the perspective of the middle manager devil Screwtape mentoring his enthusiastic but hapless younger sibling Wormwood in the art of tempting mortals to sin. Throughout they fight "The Enemy" - God - principally through perversions of human faith and duty. The ideal state of the sinner in the book is someone who behaves without virtue who believes themselves either righteous or able to absolve themselves of their evil while continuing it.

To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too — just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow's work is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future —haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth — ready to break the Enemy's commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other — dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

It follows then, in general, and other things being equal, that it is better for your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope (it doesn't much matter which) about this war than for him to be living in the present. But the phrase “living in the present” is ambiguous. It may describe a process which is really just as much concerned with the Future as anxiety itself. Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is, going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once. Here again, our Philological Arm has done good work; try the word “complacency” on him. But, of course, it is most likely that he is “living in the Present” for none of these reasons but simply because his health is good and he is enjoying his work. The phenomenon would then be merely natural. All the same, I should break it up if I were you. No natural phenomenon is really in our favour. And anyway, why should the creature be happy? — The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis

Lewis' antidote to this was to really give your all in the present and consign the outcomes to the will of God - for posterity and luck to judge, in secular terms. This is a form of living in the present. Notably Lewis sees our duties tomorrow as "acts of justice and charity", which are duties in the expanded sense @Count Timothy von Icarus was talking about. I think whether you read the above similarly to any self help book, or a means for bettering the world, depends upon the scope of duties and what you believe people following their duties successfully look like. From my relatively quotidian perspective on duty, in which people tend to satisfy them in our day to day lives, the above reads like any self help book extolling the virtues of living in the moment. If you instead read Wormwood's target of temptation heroically, that they will indeed plan tomorrows acts of justice and charity and simply pray for grace in their execution and outcome, the issue disappears. But the bar for good human conduct raises to a level that it becomes practically unattainable. At which point, in my view, it beggars belief that we could refer to any human as good accurately. And I do see us as referring to ourselves as good accurately, so what is good must be more quotidian than the world transforming eternal present of Lewis', or @Count Timothy von Icarus's, moral hero.

The latter moral hero functioning as someone to aspire to, or as the regulative ideal of our moral imagination? I can agree with that. But then we circle the inherency of failure again, and of the impossibility to fulfil that ideal, despite being required to do so by the state of things.

This post is just clarification.

If you’re only saying that some forms of agency are diffuse and collective, then I have no problem with that. The OP struck me as going farther than that, and claiming that there is monstrosity apart from the acts/creations/effects of agents. — Leontiskos

I am saying that. Though I imagine it can appear that I am saying something different since I see the flavour of agency that institutions and ideologies have as principally inhuman. And at a push I'd commit to human agency being kind of inhuman at its root. That's by the by though.

All you’re saying is that if 1c is not present then 2 does not follow, and my reasoning explicitly agrees with this. — Leontiskos

Yes. I assumed you were using the obligation of X into obligation of parts of X inference in a prior post. I then attacked the inference as if it were yours. I am making no use of the inference in my arguments. The failure of the inference is part of what leaves me the room to say that some obligations require supererogations, with the requirement being a logical one. The issue is part of the OP, but me writing about it like I have is because I believed you were using the inference against the OP, and I was attacking the inference without using the principle it embodies. I care that supererogatory acts aren't obligatory, I don't want to collapse any supererogations into obligations. That our obligations can require us going above and beyond our obligations in some sense is one of my central theses. That particular sense being {achieving the spirit of our duties or bringing about the kind of world living our obligations aims to bring about or the intended outcome of following our duties to begin with}}.

There is an equivocal term between (2) and (3), and once that is removed your (contradictory) supererogatory obligation dissolves. Namely, you added the word “meaningfully” in (3). Remove the equivocation by adding that adverb to (2) or removing it from (3) and the contradiction dissolves. — Leontiskos

Yes. "Meaningfully" was supposed to convey connection between our duties and why we follow them to begin with - that sense I spoke about in the final sentences of my prior paragraph in this post. If I was talking about fulfilling our duties and how that means we haven't fulfilled out duties, that would be a contradiction - and it's not the tension I care about in this thread. The @Count Timothy von Icarus leveraged this to form a counterargument of sorts, by inflating our obligations above and beyond my rather quotidian portrayal of them, our collective failures then become true "moral failings" of our duties, rather than some failure inherent in our moral conscience and the satisfaction of our duties to begin with. The latter is what I'm advocating. That we really do fulfil our duties, that they are quotidian in comparison to why we follow them, why we follow them casts a shadow on our conduct that renders our duties insufficient. Nevertheless we "do our bit", and it isn't enough.

That we "do our bit", and it isn't enough, I then interpret as a sense of monstrosity inherent in the "state of things", in our institutions and forms of life. The specific form of monstrosity is that what could be enough are acts of supererogation, the laudable but non-obligate. Even then they are no guarantee. The monstrosity that makes running food banks required to feed people despite massive food surpluses is one that those food banks volunteers' face, if they stop going above and beyond people go hungry. They're thus "expected" to in a manner that goes beyond their duties, and life presents them a threat in the form of a modus tollens impact, if you don't do this then that will not happen. Stop going to work for free and the poor starve.

That's the same threat we face whenever the letter of our duties does not also fulfil their spirit.

I hope this is clearer now.

Why'd you all have to keep pooping everywhere, gods.

Unless you're just saying that the many are lazy and therefore the few have to pick up the slack, but that seems like a different argument. — Leontiskos

My attitude toward us and our duties is that, by and large, we fulfil our duties. And I think to @Count Timothy von Icarus' point, our duties as we tend to circumscribe them are our duties. I think that most people are decent and have a good moral conscience, and follow most of their duties. Most people don't steal, cheat, harm others needlessly. Most people keep their promises and do their best to honour duties of care. I want to insist that by and large those duties are fulfilled. I just also want to insist that the broader purpose of those duties - their spirit, what they're done for, the kind of world following them is supposed to engender - is not fulfilled without going above and beyond them. That here is an inherent failure in the aggregate of just doing one's duties, that kind of conduct alone cannot bring about the world those duties are imagined to play a part in.

I think your response to this, and the Count's, is that this inherent failure coincides with an aspect of humanity's fall. That, in some sense, we're supposed to be better than this. I'd agree with that. But I think that supposed is holding ourselves to our better natures, principally in our imagination. We make ourselves aim for something better, even if we always fail in doing so. And that's good.

It's also a fundamentally optimistic gloss on he situation. It holds out a potential for humanity to be better based on better education toward virtue, or at least absolution for our perpetual failure to be better. I'm sufficiently cynical to believe that the optimistic gloss above is a less a means of aspiring to our higher natures, and more a means of telling ourselves that we are already acting in accordance with them and the world they imagine. That is perhaps by the by.

What I am certain of, however, is that the inherency of our failure to live up to the aspirations of our nature, and the necessity of absolving ourselves of that failure, are duties and norms working as normal. If you do your bit, you need not do more by definition - that's the connection between supererogation and duty, and what gives the prior argument you made @Leontiskos its refutational force. That to go above and beyond is, indeed, not expected on the basis of duty. And it cannot be, as to insist to go above duty is duty is a contradiction in terms

That failure, our perpetual inability to act in accordance with our better natures, and our ranging ability to absolve ourselves of responsibility for this, far from being an awfulness which can be excised from humanity is our essential condition. That our good conscience is inescapably not fit for the purposes it imagines itself to have.

Very cool. Individual Franciscans are hit or miss for me, but I do appreciate their overall ethos and I have met some remarkable individuals. — Leontiskos

They're stuck in my head as Christian hippies. But an attempt to live by a moral code, like they do, makes me respect them more than I would a hippie stereotype.

I'm an orthodox Christian, and the orthodox answer is that the state which brings about tragedy flows out of the Fall. Christians have not traditionally accepted tragedy as part of God's (primary) plan, and that's why. It doesn't surprise me that Christians who throw out those doctrines run into these problems. The doctrines are there for a reason. You get the same thing in Catholic theology with limbo. Limbo is thrown out and then you end up with all sorts of intractable problems with the stark heaven/hell dichotomy. We forget that the doctrines were there for a reason, and cannot be thrown out indiscriminately. — Leontiskos

I see that. I enjoyed her willingness to dive into the questions and sustain her belief despite the pain of aporias. From what I gathered she and hers were quite fond of Kierkegaard. The students that the Fransiscan group drew in had Christian flavoured Wittgenstein epistemology too {make everything difficult a hinge proposition}. Lots of existentialist stuff in there.

Though I doubt you or @Count Timothy von Icarus would enjoy the degree the above allowed postmodernism ingress into their concept of Christianity. Not that they saw it like that.

Yes, that would quell many of my critiques. "That would have been a heroic act if he had chosen it himself!" — Leontiskos

It would've made it a less interesting thread if I went with that.

I'm not really opposed to that view of gods or angels/demons, so this isn't a full-scale criticism of that sense of monstrosity, but it is a criticism of the idea that one can be unjustly or monstrously compelled when no other agent is involved. — Leontiskos

Involvement is quite a different concept from direct cause though right? It's clear cut that if someone has a gun to your head and tells you to do a thing, they're coercing you. If someone writes a law that makes your current behaviour prohibited on pain of jail time, whose responsibility are those consequences on you? Could say it's the enforcers, the lawmakers etc. At that point I think it makes sense to see the broader system that produced the law as a system of compulsion. Though at a certain point that system does need to have real teeth - police officers, bailiffs. They "just" enforce laws and contracts though.

I think that the operative issue is whether it only makes sense to think of culpability in terms of what a specific human agent proximately causes, or whether agency is better diffused into a broader concept like an institution . Broadly speaking, this seems like an issue of collective vs individual responsibility. Again I'll appeal to business as usual and say we've got loads of mechanisms of collective culpability in the everyday - legal persons, like Reddit can be responsible for something. A university is responsible for its admissions process, not any particular person in it. If it makes sense to ascribe responsibility to an institution without ascribing responsibility to any of its human agents in particular, we're left with a choice of saying either institutions are agents or non-agents can be responsible or both.

I think I've embraced "both" in my prior posts.

I would say that:

1. If
1a. You are obliged to clean your flat, and
1b. Cleaning your flat entails cleaning the kitchen counter, and
1c. You decide to clean the counter with antibacterial wipes, and if 1c...
1d. ...Then two antibacterial wipes are required to clean the counter
-then-
2. You are obliged to use at least two antibacterial wipes when cleaning your kitchen counter

<(1a ∧ 1b ∧ 1c ∧ (1c → 1d)) → 2>

If we omitted the words "at least" from (2) then the conditional would be false, as there is no obligation to use exactly two wipes (unless we want to bring in another premise, say, about wasting wipes). That is, your claim that using three would be a dereliction of duty is false. — Leontiskos

I don't think this works. The reason being that there are loads of substitutable acts for the bacterial wipes. I could've used a cloth and spray, a cloth and a different spray, one wipe {it was a small area}, a dish scrubber. A wet sock would've worked. If you assume X is obligate entails X-parts are obligate, the X-parts are really particular in a way X as a whole tends not to be, so you end up requiring absurdities.

In what sense is one required to use three antibacterial wipes in order to clean the kitchen counter? — Leontiskos

One is not. My point was broader. I've got in mind something like the following:

1 ) People ought recycle.
2 ) Recycling is done to reduce climate impact.
3 ) Recycling isn't sufficient to reduce climate impact meaningfully.
4 ) Reducing climate impact meaningfully requires supererogatory acts, like high commitment activism.

If 1's true, and it's done on the basis of 2, then it fails "in spirit" due to 3, and it only works "in spirit" if you do something else.

The thing regarding parts is to block a modification of the above. One could reason as follows. People ought recycle, this derives from the obligation to reduce climate impact, reducing climate impact requires activism, therefore activism is obligate, what is obligate is not supererogatory, therefore activism isn't supererogatory. The parthood thing blocks going from "reducing climate impact requires actvism" to "activism is obligate".

My use of it is just to sustain the aporia, from what would be a good angle of attack.

There can't be one. The forum back end doesn't allow it.

A friar, a gyrovague! That takes me back. Dominic and Francis were only ten years apart. — Leontiskos

I used to live with a Fransiscan nun who did lots of outreach work. I'm thus quite fond of Fransiscans. I enjoyed their commitment to the inherent beauty and moral value of nature, though we ended up having a lot of heated discussions regarding whether brutal tragedies, like miscarriages, should be seen as other parts of God's artwork. I was of the impression that all of creation meant all of it, the nun agreed. Neither of us could quite stomach loving the majesty of suffering and indifference. The damnedest thing we spoke about was that it was ultimately our senses of compassion and espirit de corps with humanity that stopped both of us from also loving pain.

If this isn't a contradiction, then I would invite you to go ahead and define "supererogatory" and "obligatory" and work out how you haven't just uttered a contradiction. Presumably you are just using poetic and inaccurate language to say that our obligations are more than we assumed. What is your definition of "supererogatory"? Is a supererogatory act something that goes beyond obligation, or is it merely an act that is uncommonly arduous? — Leontiskos

Yes this is definitely a site of ambiguity {and perhaps weakness} in my account. When I've been referring to supererogatory acts, I've been wondering if I should've come up with another construct like "acts that would be considered supererogatory if they were not coerced or compelled in any sense". I kept referring to them as supererogatory to play with the question I just asked you regarding that distinguishes an act which one feels compelled to do and an act which one is really compelled to do. It is a hard question, as it seems you agree?

Another aspect of the ambiguity, which I would like to elevate to a "clusterfuck" is this: I think the requirement that one does supererogatory acts, given one's stated duties, is perhaps of a different sort to the requirements of duties. It concerns what should be expected given that one has stated duties. Here are two examples.

I have an obligation to take care of my flat, and part of that obligation involves cleaning. That would seem to suggest that the obligation to take care of my flat imbues me with an obligation to clean my flat, because cleaning my flat is part of the obligation of taking care of it.

However, I just cleaned my flat. It was obligate in the above sense. I used two antibacterial wipes to clean my kitchen counter. Using two antibacterial wipes was part of my cleaning of the flat. I should then perhaps conclude {on the same basis as the previous paragraph} that I was obliged to use two antibacterial wipes to clean my kitchen counter. Which means using three would've been a dereliction of duty. Which is absurd. What this shows is that obligation doesn't distribute over some types of entailment. So that if we had "I am obliged to do X, and X entails Y, then I am obliged to do Y", it would fail as a syllogism as there are counterexamples. This is relevant because Y could be a supererogation, and you could not derive a contradiction from X entails Y and one-ought-X due to the failure of the syllogism.

Which is the situation I am construing us as being in. We have obligations, those obligations entail supererogatory acts, but nevertheless we are not obliged to do them. Even though we are required to do them to fulfil our obligations in some sense. Which is why I've been referring to the spirit of our obligations rather than their letter. "Doing one's bit" is the letter of our obligations, playing by the rules and doing what counts as enough. Even if it turns out to be logically required to do something which is not obligate to do your duties successfully. So if one believes one ought to do something about climate change, "your bit" is recycling, but everyone knows it's not enough.

Nevertheless I want to insist that you really have succeeded in your duties if you do your bit. It's just that succeeding in your duties doesn't correspond to your duties fulfilling their intended function or purpose. Like addressing the existential threat climate change poses to human civilisation on the basis of putting the sardine tin in the green bin.

ne feels compelled to do something heroic. To say that they are compelled is stretching language too far. I can feel constrained or compelled to propose to the woman I love, but I am not in fact compelled to do so. There is no compulsion, strictly speaking. — Leontiskos

Under what conditions would you say someone is really compelled to do something vs if they merely feel compelled to do so something?

I exaggerate a bit here, but you see my point. — Fire Ologist

I believe I do, thanks for clarifying.

Sad that I think this way, or sad for the state of human beings? — Fire Ologist

Both.

you do as well. — Fire Ologist

I often think things that I find sad.

There’s either God, or no reason to imagine a different world. — Fire Ologist

I find this quite sad. You wouldn't want to imagine a better world just for the people in it?

I can’t tell if you are having a sort of crisis over this question or not. — Fire Ologist

No more than usual.

If you are, I hope you can find a way to improve things, or rid yourself of the task to do so. — Fire Ologist

I already have rid myself of that responsibility, as have most of us. And we're right to. And we're falling.

I'm not a believer and have no interest in eschatology. Well that's a lie, I like eschatology.

The biggest things, like the world, remain, as always, in God’s hands. And that’s ok. — Fire Ologist

Good sir, I believe this is cope.

So are you leaving TPF to become a monk after Eärendil? :smile: — Leontiskos

Nah I'm going back to the Society of St. Francis.

I read you as saying that things cannot improve without (compelled) supererogation, and that is what I was responding to. Do you say that things cannot improve without (compelled) supererogation? — Leontiskos

I suppose more precisely I'm saying something like:

There are things which will not improve without some acts of supererogation. If someone believes that those things must improve, then they believe some acts of supererogation are required. The model I have of this is giving up your life as an activist for a noble cause - really a necessary cause, like making sure people don't starve to death. Or something like St. Francis' shame when he realised he had not hitherto spread the word of God to birds.

Okay, interesting. I certainly see it, but I also disagree with Christians who would make the supererogatory obligatory. — Leontiskos

I'm certain you would. I've spoken with several Christians who saw bringing about the kingdom of god as their greatest moral imperative, minimally a kind and just world, and roughly this is a secular version of "can there be a kingdom of god without saints to bring it about?", so if someone sees bringing about the kingdom of god as a moral imperative, there must be some obliged saintly acts.

I think that when you drill down to people's deep rooted moral convictions, people wish with most of their heart that the world was better, and act in a manner that they would like to see in that world as best as they can. Which is all well and good, it's just that if someone were to believe that one was obliged to do what one must to bring about that better state, one would then be committed to the supererogatory.

An example, this is very much the logic behind "doing your bit". Someone {usually incorrectly} sorts their recycling and doesn't go join a group to help with the supply side of climate crisis issues, 30 years of zealous recycling ever and we're no closer. "Doing your bit" was never enough. People will absolutely get irritated at those who recycle incorrectly, or don't recycle at all, even though they are also putting the wrong things in the wrong bins due to design failures, and much plastic that ends up in the right bins can't be recycled anyway. You can do your bit forever and it's fine, but "just fine" forever means the quality of forever degrades.

I will respond to the rest of your response later.

Okay, understood, but does it? Couldn't we also improve by better understanding our obligations, or by better realizing a capacity to fulfill them? Those forms of improvement seem to have little to do with supererogation. I think we have to bring in your idea of moral imagination: — Leontiskos

I'm not trying to say that only acts of supererogation improve things, I'm saying that some acts of supererogation are required to improve things and trying to draw out a consequence.

Is moral imagination bound up with supererogation? Or with obligation? Or perhaps neither? What is the end that moral imagination conceives? — Leontiskos

What I have in mind with a moral imagination is, roughly, a psychological and social concept. It's commonly held intuitions about what would make a better world. I believe there's remarkable regularity in these aspirations. Everyone will agree that the world would be better without needless starving to death, or without homelessness, or if people had more free time, or if medical science improves and becomes universally available to every human on Earth. They're very much motivating dreams that people work towards and try to bring into being through their acts.

I'm sure you can see the Christian theological undertones there, they are quite intentional. I trial ran this discussion with a priest.

And what is a monstrosity after all? Is it anything more than a matter of constraining or compelling? — Leontiskos

What is monstrous is any state of affairs that requires some people to act in a supererogatory fashion at some times in order to improve the world. Or in terms of the above, to act in accordance with their moral imagination. In @Pantagruel's terms...

I think you could see "duty" as the moral floor, below which we should not sink, — Pantagruel

I'm making an argument that "the moral floor" is sinking, or too low, if you are only required to act in accordance with it. The minimum effort is not enough to attain what the minimum effort aims for, a kind world. If people act as they do in accordance with their moral imagination to be kind, for a kinder world, then the bar of duty isn't high enough. And because it's not high enough, existence compels us to a largely unachievable higher nature. This is monstrous, but not necessarily wrong.

People do not have to be exemplary. — Pantagruel

Alright. Do you imagine that the world would become a better place without some people behaving in an exemplary fashion?

By and large, people who perform supererogatory acts do not do so because ideologically compelled, but from a deep, personal commitment to universal values. — Pantagruel

Yes, they are saints who want to bring about a better world.

So attempting to cast the supererogatory as a kind of duty or compulsion seems inaccurate.

The rub I was pointing at is that such actions are necessary to bring it about.

Now I get to derail threads and be ornery. It's great.

Apologies for all the off-topic postings here. — Corvus

I don't care I'm not a mod any more. I thought @Banno tagged me for chitchat reasons.

I'm not at all convinced that the "alt-right" view of race is a novel conviction distinguishable from prior conservative views, some of which stem hundreds of years ago and echoed by prominent Enlightenment... — Maw

Reactionary Mind from Corey Robin?

Oh I thought this was the shoutbox, my bad.

But I bet you are glad you are no longer obligated to deal with this particular bit of melodrama... — Banno

My heart remains Christian, alas.

I blame fdrake leaving the mods. — Banno

My passing heralds the end of days.

@Leontiskos -

Isn't that part of the tension in the OP? — Moliere

Yes, that is what I was getting at.

My point there was that I don't see how obligation doesn't fall under the same shadow as supererogation with respect to compulsion, given the argumentation. — Leontiskos

The rough idea I was playing with is as follows, there's a big asymmetry between obligation and supererogation. People are compelled to follow their obligations with a binding normative force, if they choose otherwise they choose wrong. People are not so compelled with super-erogation, if they choose not to dive on the grenade to save the squad they did something A-OK.

The broader tension, which I tried to gesture toward with the latter half of the post, is that we seem to be that the state of things requires acts of supererogation to improve. We need to be saints sometimes to make a better world. And if we need to be saints sometimes, I've analogised that to compelling your squadmate to jump on the grenade.

The supererogatory is a gateway to the horrifying state of things. We live in a world where no one can be a saint, but everyone needs to be. So, the tension goes, you can choose to compel others to jump on the grenade, or you can reject that we need to be saints sometimes. And if it was previously established that the only way things can improve is that if some people are saints sometimes... that combination means that everyone is fine to reject sainthood, even if it destroys our very moral fibre.

The wrinkle here is that you are shifting agents. Magnanimous giving is supererogatory for the person giving, whereas coerced giving is monstrous for the person coercing. — Leontiskos

I don't believe I was shifting agents, I was describing an act as supererogatory. Treating supererogation as a modality on par with obligation and permissibility. In a similar manner I considered acts as saintly or exemplary, and not moral agents. The state of things which is monstrous, in that instance, is compelling an action that would otherwise be considered above and beyond the call of duty. Notably I am not intending to construe a specific agent as monstrous or supererogatory, or even just acts as monstrous or supererogatory, I'm trying to say that a broader state of things, which is largely placeholder term, can be considered monstrous when it forces supererogation on people for things to get better at all.

If it's some kind of intuition pump for you, the background I'm drawing on to delimit the scope of ethical judgements is a heritage of philosophical pessimism, which tends to treat arbitrary things, paradigmatically existence itself, as the kind of thing which can fail or be wanting. I think this is relatively comprehensible, though I wouldn't want to stake my metaphysical career on it. "Things are shit", "Life sucks", perfectly cromulent everyday valuations. I'll trust the type of them is alright.

The perspective I've adopted in the OP is also quite orthogonal to considering the excellent qualities of moral agents, it's very act focussed. Though, again notably, I've defended absolutely nothing in terms of the results of following ethical principles for a reason, or taking a particular meta-ethical stance towards those judgements - except construing things that resemble morals as having a mundane normative force, which you might not like if you're a divine command flavour of Aristotle fan.

Very true. I don't even know what it means... — DifferentiatingEgg

Alright. You take what someone has said and try to represent their argument in your own terms. You do so in a manner which tries to make the best of their argument, at the very least understand it in a manner your interlocutor might be able to see. That's very much like providing a bridge from your vantage point to theirs, through skilful exegesis of their work and your vantage point on it.

Then you use that interpretation to criticise what someone has said.

This often comes down to doing a lot of very fiddly disambiguation in terms and their scope of application. You might enjoy reading the essay I referenced in the OP, Heroes and Saints, for a very good example of it!

You're probably not used to arguing formally, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

To kill a charity worker out of revenge may be immoral, doesn't mean it wasn't right... — DifferentiatingEgg

When you say something like this, you need to distinguish right from immoral. An analogy like this:

Like giving Socrates hemlock for corruption of the youth. — DifferentiatingEgg

Doesn't cut it. All you've done in it is construe that giving Socrates hemlock is a consequence of a norm, which judged his conduct as wrong.

Hard limits means all killing is wrong and people would be incapable of breaking the hard limit — DifferentiatingEgg

The first bit of your sentence "hard limits means all killing is wrong" makes some kind of sense, because it's very easy to find a defeater for any context invariant moral claim, eg "killing is wrong" might not speak to acts of self defence. However the latter statement "people would be incapable of breaking the hard limit", either refers to finding such a defeater - which makes sense - or says it's in principle impossible for a universally binding moral principle to be broken. In the latter case, that misunderstands what a norm is - you can either follow them or not, if you couldn't help but follow a norm then it's pointless to consider it a choice.

The latter "choicelessness" is referenced in my OP.

In otherwords you need a reason to care... — DifferentiatingEgg

Yes. A reason to care, in the context of a philosophical discussion, is an argument.

Morality and immorality are merely soft limits that I consider only occasionally. — DifferentiatingEgg

You expressed a personal preference here, without argument.

Your rigidity suggests that because I only consider what my life demands that my life demands only me... — DifferentiatingEgg

And here. Only this time you called me rigid at the same time.

If all you're interested in doing is stating your values and insulting me, kindly leave the marketplace ye overman, before the mall cops come.

You can call anyone rigid when they disagree with you. Absolutely pointless argument strategy. How're you going to re-evaluate all the values with this lacklustre display.

You're providing no reason for anyone else to care about what you're saying. Which speaks to a misunderstanding of how normativity and morality couple, rather than a rejection of morals as the norms as they are. If you can give me a reason to care about an island such as yourself, I will, though I would wonder, in that case, why such a singular being would need to share their perspective to begin with.

The way you detail life within it is very strange to me. — DifferentiatingEgg

Why?

The nature of things is perceived as true because it alone is the yardstick by which every judgement is measured. Unfortunately whenever one has perceived the nature of things the content of that perception becomes a judgement, and we compare prior judgements with that one. We thus end up in the bizarre situation of measuring a yardstick against a picture of itself.

Luckily, the picture is never a perfect representation, and that other yardstick, the one which is neither a copy or a copy of a copy, resides in the mismatch between the two. Nature determines the truth of things because what it means to decide the truth of judgements is to hold them up to nature, and not our {implicit} judgements of our {explicit} judgements. Even though the latter judgements of our judgements count as nature, until we inevitably realise otherwise.

You have 604 unclear terms in your OP.

a physical, — MoK

A physical what?

the physical in the state of S1 — MoK

The physical what?

Physical however is not aware of the passage of time. — MoK

But they are indexible by distinct time points t1 and t2 by the presumption. Which means awareness, whatever you mean by it, is distinct from influence and indexicality. Influence - because a change occurs from t1 and t2, and indexicality, because labelling the states s1@t1 and s2@t2 was sufficient to denote the change.

What does it mean for "a physical" to be "aware" or "not aware" of the passage of time? Also the passage? Passing? Are you intending to refer to time as a substantive - having some influence or relevance, a basis in what is - even though "a physical" only references an indexical time? Puzzling.

You've then got three inferences, three "therefores", which seemingly follow from your terms with only contextual definitions in the OP, and you've not clarified their relationship. Awareness, physical, passage of time, cause power...

I'm sure this realisation was significant to you, but you can't tell much of what you mean at all by reading your words.

I can't remember ever seeing you lose patience — Janus

Thank you!

It has happened a few times. Luckily my anger is quite milquetoast. It's sufficiently British online that it counts as a barbed comment or passive aggression, which for some reason are more socially acceptable than being a sweary swear swear.

And I apologize for any irony in which I contributed to your burnout. — Leontiskos

I didn't step down because of burnout.

A dream isn't a distinct and inconsistent reality, it's a phenomenology with different patterns of content and association of content typified in it. You can tell that because it's always a human which dreams, and their sensorimotor capabilities and memories which inform the dreamscape. A dream is business as usual for the senses without the world modulating them through constant fairly reliable input in fairly stable conditions.

It takes a lot of effort for someone to watch a thread and keep it strictly on topic with mod powers. It would also be hard to police the boundary in a generic thread. Even though you can fairly reliably tell who is a climate change denier and who isn't based on how they argue.

If there are specific aspects of climate change adjacent philosophy someone wanted to discuss, it's probably easier to make an independent thread about it. Like how ought you prepare for the end of the world, what metaphysics is appropriate to even imagine climate change and so on.

That would also make it much easier to see which posts are on topic and which aren't. Climate change denial is definitely on topic in a generic thread about climate change related issues.

The thing I'd want most is for people to be able to state a reason why posts are reported.

This is an example of a feature that could drastically cut down on moderation costs, and also lead to healthier communities where bad actors are naturally disincentivized. Ideally it would help combat the way in which the internet has become a natural home for the anonymous, parasitic rabble-rouser. — Leontiskos

As much as this would help remove perceived trolls from discussions, it would also act as a vehicle for trolling. I think it's better to ignore sub-discussions that aren't to your interest. It would also be nice if Plush had an innate user blocking feature for members. But it does not.

For general AI, for now it's a boring problem that a Bay Area cargo cult popularised in order to dupe donations from impressionable software nerds.

By a big deal I mean it's a big deal to me if I put on my philosophy hat. Though I'm under no illusions that idealism could be convincingly refuted to every interlocutor. In the grand scheme of things whether someone is an idealist is so obscure it doesn't matter at all.

And it shall never be.

@Wayfarer knows how I feel about idealism very well. We argued about it for years!