These two views are related to whether one views Kant as a one-world or a two-world theorist. — Thorongil

(Y)

1) Does anyone ever truly "get" anyone or do we tolerate their presence with jovial laughs for a bit until we retreat and regroup our own cherished thoughts? — schopenhauer1

By "get", do you mean "understand who a person is"? I think most relationships are fairly superficial and maintained by a certain amount of dishonesty and sleight-of-hand, but also that there are some enduring relationships, often the product of some traumatic episode or emotional toil, that are founded on honesty and mutual appreciation. These are the relationships that are maintained not out of selfish desire but for a genuine concern for another person's well-being, their projects, their feelings, etc.

For the most part, though, relationships are dispensable and replaceable. This, of course, is a relevant factor in our decision-making. If a relationship is not very solid, there isn't going to be overriding reasons that privilege the maintenance of it.

2) Doesn't everyone have their own agendas that compete? In almost every waking action when exposed to others, there seems to be a competing for space, territory, action, goal, outcome, rights not to be impinged and to impinge ones desires on others. Negotiation might be the answer, but the fact that there is always a need to negotiate also must be taken into account. — schopenhauer1

Yes, precisely, although altruistic action is possible in the form of "welcoming" another person into your own space.

Generally it's wrong to expose people to things they will not appreciate being exposed to because it hurts them in some way. Given that life sucks and nobody in their right mind would live it over again, it follows that there's no good reason to have children.

This is a very funny caricature of what most people think philosophy is about. I don't see any sign that you intend it to be ironic. — T Clark

Pathos, man

Clearly from what I have written, I disagree. I have not been happy much in my life, but I've always known that the world is good and I belong here. Even when I was at my unhappiest I knew and felt that. We were created along with the world, as part of the world, by whatever mechanism you want to propose. This has been going on for billions of years. How could we possibly not belong here? — T Clark

Nature makes "mistakes", things that don't belong. Frankly it's surprising to me we've managed to hold on for as long as we have. Nature puked us out from its bowels, like everything else.

Specifically, why is it that moral codes are different depending on where you are? If there really is a universal moral code then why is it that it is different depending on where you are? — Matthew Gould

Actually, this is more of a myth. For as much as it is publicized that different cultures have different moral norms, they aren't generally radically different. Most cultures have the same general views on morality: seeing the acts of hurting people, stealing, lying, breaking promises, disobeying the law, disrespecting God, murder, rape, incest, etc as wrong are all basically universal.

Also, where does Morality come from? Did it come from religion or did it come from our evolutionary past? I am curious as to what some of you think. — Matthew Gould

No, I don't think it primordially comes from religion, as if we required an organized hierarchy of robed men to tell us what we ought to do. Nor are the sociobiologist (cranks?) right when they say our moral beliefs and behavior are entirely explained through an evolutionary story. Really, morality stems from an alien, but not necessarily hostile, relation to the "Other" which cannot be consumed or manipulated into the Same. That's the essence of "Ethics".

People don't get depressed because the world is bad, the world is seen as bad because people are depressed. — antinatalautist

This may be the case for some, but in terms of philosophical pessimism, this gets the cart before the horse. If the world is seen as bad because people are depressed, we have to ask why people are depressed. Sometimes they have philosophical reasons that entail a depressive outlook, and pumping them with SSRIs and attempting to negotiate their return to the capitalistic death train doesn't address these reasons. It just ignores them.

Pragmatism only works in theory.

The more I think about the world, the more I love it. The more I feel home in it. I belong here. All of us do. You do. Some philosophies hide that fact. I don't know why. — T Clark

Being-at-home-in-the-world and enjoying the transmutations of others into the Same is fine and all, but this is separate from the question as to whether or not the world, i.e. the totality that actually exists (and not necessarily a network of meanings in our lives), is justified. Certainly it is inappropriate to suggest a warm, home-made apple pie and a temporarily satisfied biological synthesis are enough to ensure the goodness of existence.

Really, happiness is a delirious escape into the infinite, a transcendence of Being, precisely because Being is not good. All around us there is Being, pressing in and threatening to consume us into the fanged plenum. We're always trying to flee it or keep it at bay, like a peasant shaking a torch at the wolves. Get back! Get back! Leave me be! I do not wish to be disturbed!

Public speech in inherently affirmative and "self-important." — t0m

(Y)

Because serious, prolonged and consistent reflection inevitably results in a radical disvaluing of the world, after which it is realized that there are absolutely no convincing reasons as to why it should exist.

You bring up a good idea about habit. We do things habitually, but the habits need that underlying hope as well because habits done without hope become despair really quickly. — schopenhauer1

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

The intoxicants are just one manifestation of the hope that gets someone through the day perhaps. They know after their habits of getting on with the day, they have something to look forward to. — schopenhauer1

Cioran notes how in order for us to voluntarily do action we have to believe we are important and the things we do are meaningful and have worth. Really, it's all desire, and hope is the desire for a desire to be fulfilled.

Nah, I disagree. It's not just hope that keeps people going, it's a disbelief in reality. I think a lot of people know damn well that life is a sham and hope is a delusion but they aren't able to correlate all of this together and digest it. (Exhibit A: myself. Exhibit B: yourself?). It's a pill that's impossible to swallow, but until you have it's just a possibility.

I think people get along mostly from habit and not thinking about things too much. We live in such a way that consciousness is hardly necessary. Really, consciousness is the problem so it's not at all surprising that people try to minimize how much they have to deal with it by living habitually, ingesting intoxicants and sleeping in.

Where does the "peculiar relationship" come from? — T Clark

I'm not sure what you mean, exactly.

Consequentialism, deontology, virtue theories, etc, these are all ethical theories. Levinas' phenomenology, to be brief, is a theory of Ethics with a capital E. He isn't all that interested in specific prescriptive claims but with the most fundamental and originative essence of ethics, that encounter with the Other. Levinas is hard to read but, as I understand it, ethics is seen by him as a sort of "welcoming" of the Other, where it's provided care, aid and attention without trying to dominate and assimilate it into the Same.

How do we determine this, though? What is this process?

You look at the context in which the action happens and understand how it fits in - how it connects with everything else. — Agustino

By this, do you mean, we identify common patterns of functionality? Does a pattern imply an essential feature, though?

Since moral imperatives have no truth value, is it technically right to say that the principle is still contradictory? — jancanc

ONLY if these imperatives are absolute, and not simply prima facie reasons for doing things (re: W. D. Ross my homeboy).

BUT If there is no human nature, then in what are our moral theories grounded? This is my first question. — bloodninja

If we go the Levinasian route, it's that ethics is fundamentally originative from a peculiar relationship to the Other. The Other is precisely that which cannot be assimilated into a "Self" worldview, defined and calculated and mixed and organized into a framework. The Other eludes such violence.

So, I think Levinas might have said that trying to pin ethics down to something like a "human nature" is a form of violence to the Other. By doing so, we'd be trying to ground ethics in the familiar and intelligible when the Other is not this way.

One point of difference, for example, is in my conception of sex as having two purposes, intimacy and reproduction, and so long as one of them is met, the activity isn't immoral - with the former taking precedence over the latter if they ever come in conflict. — Agustino

How do we come to know the telos of something like sex? How are we to know if we have the correct interpretation? Do we simply look at nature and "recognize" function? How does this work?

The issue with command type ethics is that you're left with a person who doesn't realize what they're doing is good, or why it should be counted as something good over some other action. This greatly stupifies the whole moral framework. There's no point in telling that some action is good unless they can't rationalize it themselves, and if you follow the news, then most of ethics can't be rationalized at all, it's rather a trait that can only be observed but not modeled. — Posty McPostface

I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. I understand how this happens in divine command theories (but why?? BECAUSE I SAID SO!!!), but theories like Kantianism, utilitarianism, or similar find grounding in reason, or intuition, or something.

People generally don't disagree about "fundamental" moral principles, like non-maleficence or fidelity. They disagree about empirical, sometimes metaphysical, views on the world. For instance, the debate surrounding abortion is not whether or not it's moral to kill a human being, because obviously most everyone agrees that it's not. The debate is whether or not a human fetus is a being that can be killed, i.e. whether or not it has moral status.

How does a virtue/care ethic approach this sort of topic? (I left feminist ethics out in this example because it's pretty obvious there's going to be strong views on abortion from the feminist crowd).

Virtue-care-ethics is elegantly simplistic because it puts the emphasis on the individual to extend their sphere of interest to include others than one's self. I'd rather live in a democratic collectivist ethical society than have a benevolent dictator tell me what is good. Ethics of care is inherently democratic and education is focused on not habituating a person to be good but rather giving them the tools to want to be ethical and moral. What's more, a person who is motivated by care or love or other noble traits will always be a better moral actor than one guided by command type prescriptivist ethical theories. And, that get's neglected in philosophy nowadays. The pursuit of moral absolutes or as you say, monistic tendencies are largely a failure in terms of ethics. — Posty McPostface

I don't think an ethical theory would count as an ethical theory if it didn't put emphasis on other people instead of yourself. I'm totally on board with investigating the ethics-before-duty, the phenomenology of the encounter with the Other (Levinas), etc. But I think it's a straw man to say only virtue-care-feminist ethics are ethics concerning other people, because that is certainly false.

Additionally, I think it was Aristotle who said virtue comes with habit. True, you must want to be virtuous, but it's something that needs to be taught as well. I'm not sure if the claim that virtuous people will always be a better moral actor than a prescriptivist person is true - and what are we defining "better moral actor" as apart from a person who does what is right, i.e. what ought to be done, i.e. prescriptions.

Yes, but if doing what is ethical isn't motivated by a sense of care or compassion, then what are we left with? The alternative is worse than having a personal care and go through the process of deliberation about what's best for someone other than one's self to decide what is moral. — Posty McPostface

I mean, sure, it's better to be a good person who does the right thing than a bad person who does the right thing for bad reasons. But I strongly believe what ought to be done stands independent of motives. Because it's certainly the case that a bad person doing the right thing out of bad motivations is still better than a bad person doing the wrong thing.

What ought to be the case stands independently of motives. Motives enhance the act, make it into something truly remarkable and praiseworthy, but it's not a requirement. It should be enough to say "don't rape" without the additional "don't rape because you don't want to rape," because if someone does want to rape, they wouldn't satisfy this condition. You mentioned previously how someone who doesn't "get" an ethical command will never see the rationale behind it. Yet I believe this is merely a case of someone not seeing the whole picture, or of having an impaired set of reasoning skills.

Like, I said, having a person motivated to be ethical through encouraging kindness, care, and love will in almost all regards be better than even the best Kantian. — Posty McPostface

But the Kantian is supposed to be motivated by duty to a categorical imperative. They are noble, serious and dedicated. The utilitarian is motivated chiefly by a recognition of the importance of pain and pleasure in the human experience, and while their compassion may not be situational-dependent, it's abstracted from everyday encounters and put into a hypothetical counterfactual that expunges context in favor of universality and consistency. Some might even go on and say consequentialist theories are an "enlightened morality", one that can work in situations that previous closer social bonds morality can't. (But can it replace this everyday morality? I think not).

To put this another way, emotivism and intuitionalism are superior to other ethical theories because they don't really rely on a yet undiscovered rationale as to what actions are the best, they are just intuitively obvious. — Posty McPostface

Emotivism and intuitionism are meta-ethical theories, not normative theories. At least, that is how I have learned it and I see it distinguished this way practically everywhere I go.

I seriously doubt a calculus of utility could also be imagined to discern what actions are best or worst in some or any predicament or situation. — Posty McPostface

Well, we have to keep in mind that consequentialists (like utilitarians) don't see their principle of utility as a very good decision theory. Utilitarianism is a theory of what we ought to do, not a theory of how we ought to go about doing what we ought to do. For the most part, utilitarianism (and most consequentialists) argue we ought to not use the principle of maximizing utility in our decisions because that's just not how we think. We aren't very good consequentialists, and consequentialists recognize this.

Anyway, was interested in whether other people have studied feminist philosophies and such. What's your take on feelings such as care or love be the guiding force to moral decisions? Is it overly simplistic or elegantly simplistic? — Posty McPostface

I think feminist, virtue and care ethics have a valid point that ethics has largely had a gap in recognition of love, care and sympathy, and that the terrain of human moral reasoning cannot be captured in monistic, commanding doctrines. But it's certainly overly simplistic to claim that this new form of ethical reasoning should be the only guiding force in moral philosophy, because there is a component of moral reasoning that is command-like (even if it's not monistic).

If there's one issue I have with "these sorts" of ethical theories (feminist, care, virtue, etc), it's that they tend to be too timid. They don't offer the opportunity to be radically moral. That, and by themselves they fail to provide a complete analysis of morality. Sometimes proponents will suggest we dispense completely with the notion of "duty", which is entirely unreasonable and unpersuasive, if not only because we are sometimes in situations in which we must make a decision that seems to be unaffected by things like virtue, love or care, and we have moral beliefs about what is right and what is wrong that are founded on principles; that is to say, a "virtuous" person believes murder to be wrong because it is wrong (and not that murder is wrong because a virtuous person believes it to be wrong).

In regards to virtue, I think people are generally stuck to their psychological types and it's only through an immense amount of effort that a person can "change" - yet even this possibility is dependent on the person being of a certain psychological type. If this is true, then not everyone can be "virtuous" - yet certainly there are things people should and should not do even if they are incapable of being "virtuous". In that sense, right action is to be sharply distinguished from good natured-ness (i.e. it cannot be a moral requirement to act from a certain intention or motivation).

In regards to love, I think it is entirely unreasonable to demand people love each other, because love is not something that can be voluntarily made. Love is not a foundation of ethics, at least, not in the romantic or deep friend-like way. Love is sometimes said to be the desire to see the good develop in someone else - yet this is a motivation, and I don't think motivations can ever be morally required (since we have no control over them).

So basically, virtue, care, feminist, (etc) ethics offer a different perspective on things and broaden the moral horizon but I hardly think they offer a complete alternative.

How is 's moral philosophy different from natural law theory?

Just asking this because I have a few issues with natural law theory that would seem to be applicable to Augustino's views if it is indeed the case that Augustino is a natural law theorist.

Sidgwick famously struggled with the dichotomy between agent-centered rationality and rationality used ethically. He thought there were good reasons for being self-centered and also good reasons for being oriented ethically.

What Nietzsche recognized, however, is that the choice to be moral cannot be a decision based on morality - for otherwise this would simply push the explanation back further. Why be moral? is a question not within ethics but outside of ethics.

This is why I think there really is no such thing as "choosing" to be ethical - because you either are or you are not. This works well with Nietzsche's theory of psychological types. Levinas spends tremendous effort explaining the "persecution" and "demand" of the Other - it's not something that we passively recognize and say "hmm, maybe I'll be moral", it's quite literally a non-negotiable pull, a reason that exists before reason.

When Aristotle talks about reason leading to the good, he is talking about a different sort of reasoning than simply being a calculated and sensing creature. Virtue ethics, however, has notoriously struggled with defining what the good is by appeal to reason (and virtue). Murder is wrong, according to the virtue ethicist, because a virtuous person would not murder. But that seems to get things backwards. Murder is wrong because it is wrong, and it's because it is wrong that virtuous people do not murder.

Very interesting response, Baden, thanks. As I tried to make clear earlier, I'm not against transgender people, I take issue with the movement. I'm a college student at a fairly liberal university, there's lots of progressive stuff going on here. What I notice a lot is how over the top, in your face, the LGBTQ groups are, as if the world dances to their music. It's very shallow lovey dovey and doesn't seem to be very serious.

The main problem I have is that the transgender movement has made itself a "part" of feminism, when the reality is that some of the things it's advocating threaten core parts of feminism. Feminism is first and foremost women-oriented, it's not about equality but women's issues, oftentimes how women are to be liberated from some form of oppression, which includes gender. It's a very serious movement with very serious issues. The transgender movement ends up ignoring this. In fact the issues the transgender movement bring up are shallow issues - pronouns, dating, clothing, etc, not the real issues transgenders face, like violence and abuse.

As you pointed out, it does seem as though the transgender movement might be demanded "too much". This is my main issue with social justice movements, that they tend to make everything about them. The world is filled with all sorts of differences and it cannot hope to satisfy everyone. It may be unfair, say, to not allow a transwoman to enter a women's restroom, but it is also unfair to put other women at risk of assault.

Of course, if you disallow transwomen from entering women restrooms you are not recognizing them as "real" women. Which is why I think it's killing two birds with one stone when I say we should get rid of gender and maintain natal sex. For the sake of women, we're going to have to make an exception. It's not that we hate transpeople but that we recognize that this is a tricky social issue that cannot satisfy everyone. There is only so much freedom you can give someone until this starts impinging on the freedom of others.

Cool to hear from someone with a partner who is trans. I'm not trying to be rude here, I know it's a delicate issue, but I do see transgender people as wanting to pretend they are someone they are not. I'm not sure how someone can just "choose" this kind of identity for themselves, even if they don't like the one they have. I acknowledge that it can be quite uncomfortable being a man if you don't want to be a man. However I think most liberations come not from a sex surgery but from a way of expressing yourself, how you act, what you wear, etc. To that extent it's more that masculinity and femininity provide outlets for this liberation, but it's not, or at least how I see it, should not be a requirement to have a certain physical body in order to express yourself. A man can be feminine but he cannot be a woman, even if people treat them as if they were a woman.

Do you think a transgender person can ever fully believe themselves to be not of their natal sex?

Without commenting on transgenderism per se, I think it's too narrow to see gender as only oppressive. I think gender itself can be a vector of self-expression, to the extent that one can find joy in the expression of one's masculinity or femininity, to the extent that a gender may be as much as site of bonding, fraternity and empowerment as any other form of identification/differentiation. Which is not to say that gender is only this, but that it is, as it were, ambivalent between it's 'good' and it's 'bad' faces. The trick is in negotiating the concrete circumstances that one finds one's gender in. — StreetlightX

I think in this sense gender is just like race - white people like to be around white people, black people around black people, just as guys like to be around guys, girls around girls, etc. It's human nature to want to be a part of those who are similar. That's not to say that black people necessarily hate being around white people, I'm of course not saying that. I'm saying that I think it is reasonable to believe that, given a choice, most people "feel at home" more around those who are similar to each other. And in some cases this is indeed a rational thing to feel - i.e. when a woman feels comfortable in a women-only restroom knowing that she is safe(r), surrounded by other women who feel the same thing.

We can work on overcoming prejudice and fear and becoming a mutually recognizing society. However I think this means getting rid of certain things, like gender, or at least separating the connection between biological sex and socially-conditioned gender, because of this "feeling of home". A transman will not be accepted as a man because he is not a man. You can go through the "motions" of being a man, get sex reassignment surgery, physically appear "as" a man, but this will not make you a man.

My view on this is that a woman should be able to "dress as a man", that is, be "masculine", without having to get a sex change or hormonal treatment, or calling themselves a man. I am not opposed to gender non-conforming behavior, I'm opposed to the activism behind transgenderism, because it is vocally cementing this connection between biological sex and gender.

If we are going to call gender norms oppressive then to be consistent we would have to call all norms oppressive. We would have to call anything that demands that anybody conform to any norm oppressive. For example, we are socialized to believe that we are biologically wired to be "sexual beings". There are probably people who do not think of themselves as "sexual beings". If telling somebody based on biology that he is a man is oppressive then telling somebody that due to his biology he is a "sexual being" is oppressive. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Yes, I mean, I recognize myself when you mentioned the socialization of us as sexual beings, since I've never had an intimate relationship nor do I particularly want to, let alone have sex with another person. It's oppressive to me when other people shockingly ask why I haven't gotten laid yet or have a girlfriend or whatever. It doesn't impact anyone else so what's the big deal?

In the case of gender (and sex), I think it's important to leave sex as an identity because of how useful it is. A gender dysphoric man may feel uncomfortable in a men's restroom, but think how uncomfortable women would feel if he were to transition and go into their restroom. Their sex may be oppressive to themselves but mitigating this oppression ends up coming at the cost of a great many more's rights.

If a gender dysphoric man dresses "as a woman" and enters a women's restroom there will be a panic, because this man is a man even if he dresses "as a woman". If this gender dysphoric man gets sex reassignment surgery and enters a women's restroom there will be still be a feeling of discomfort since this is, in fact, a man who has had his physical traits changed.

I wonder if perhaps this issue might go away if technology progresses to such a degree that hormone therapy and sex surgery can make someone of one sex indistinguishable to another sex. But unfortunately this probably is not the case since, for example, a transwoman cannot be a "lesbian" - they are heterosexual but gender non-conforming. And it still does not address the other main point in the OP, that we ought to sever the link between gender and sex, so people can be free to express themselves without feeling the need to actually alter their bodies - I think transgender activism is not helping people feel at home in their bodies but rather reinforcing the idea that you need to change who you are in order to feel at home.

^

We need a movement that addresses men's issues that isn't tainted by a poorly-hidden hatred for feminism. Feminism isn't about men, it's about women. If this pisses men off then it's time they start addressing men's issues themselves. Men aren't being forgotten, they're just not the focus of feminism. But this pisses many men off because it means the spotlight is no longer on them.

I seriously recommend reading the literature surrounding phenomenology. At times it honestly has made me despair at just how in the dark analytic philosophy is. Analytic philosophy has its strengths but historicity is not one of them, it insists on re-inventing the wheel for everything. It's like two separate groups all talking about the same thing but ignoring what the other group has to say. Except in this case, and philosophy of mind in general, analytics should really take a break and read some Kant, Husserl and Heidegger.

What it would take to convince academia that they've gotten something wrong? Specifically, I'm inclined to believe that academia, the whole of philosophy as far as I can tell at least, has gotten thought and belief wrong. I mean, convention has 'defined' thought and belief in terms of it's having propositional content, which has it's own unbearable burden on my view(either there is no such thing as thought and belief prior to language, or propositions exist prior to language and neither is acceptable). — creativesoul

To be sure, this is mostly an analytic thing. Desires, beliefs, propositional attitudes, they all are analyzed in terms of language, sometimes to the extreme of claiming that minds cannot exist unless there is a language.

However such a view would be incomprehensible to continental thinkers, specifically those in the phenomenological tradition. There is a vast amount of literature that covers how things are given to us through experience that is pre-linguistic. When I grasp a coffee mug, for instance, I don't have the actual belief that the coffee mug "exists" in such-and-such way. Such attitudes are theoretical when in reality I live most of my life in a pre-theoretical attunement to the world.

What you propose to do is something that should have been done a long time ago and it currently happening right now, the "gap bridging" between analytics and continentals. It's not easy, especially when certain analytics insist on being twats and strawmanning the continentals.

I appreciate it this way: nature is getting a good night's sleep. It is a refreshingly quiet and peaceful time. And the landscape is awesome and humbling a lot of the time. When things are white and bright it makes the landscape feel bigger and more awesome, just like how white walls make a room bigger. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Yes, I agree, I enjoy it when it's winter time because it's cozy indoors yet peaceful and quiet outside (unless you're holiday shopping). I'm more melancholic but that's probably just a seasonal thing. I dislike being super energetic and enthusiastic because I always feel like a fool afterwards. Colder months make things more serious and sober.

Edward Feser: Scholastic Metaphysics

https://isidore.co/calibre/get/pdf/Scholastic%20Metaphysics_%20A%20Contemporary%20Introduction%20-%20Feser%2C%20Edward_5458.pdf

Happened to stumble upon this one, been wanting to read it for a while.

you might like this.

If you can't give me a competing definition that's as clear and direct as the one I've given, the result is that "science" doesn't mean anything. — T Clark

Right. I don't think science really means anything, aside of a vague and mysterious group of smart people using instruments to get data about something, usually accompanied with a romantic image of spiritual purpose or whatever. Words unify people and make it easier to communicate.

If I had to decide on a criterion of science, it would be that it has some agreed upon set of measurements and field-specific methodology. Not that there is some specific methodology that science has that not-science doesn't.

Of course that's true. The scientific method was not created out of thin air. It's not magic. It is a systemization of the ways that people have always solved problems and looked for knowledge. — T Clark

But if it's not exclusive to, not originating with science, then why call it the scientific method?

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is a phenomenon whereby larger entities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities such that the larger entities exhibit properties the smaller/simpler entities do not exhibit. — schopenhauer1

The problem I immediately see with this, when applied to philosophy of mind, is that we see emergentism in physical-to-physical systems. It's quite a different thing to say there is emergentism in physical-to-mental systems due to them being two different kinds of things. Which is why the materialist has to hold that the mental, just kidding!, isn't actually really mental but simply a physical state.

Indeed, but it only asks you to do so temporarily until science has caught up to how to explain it. — Frank Barroso

Read the rest of my claim. If we have no reason to trust our first-hand experiences of consciousness then we have absolutely no reason to trust materialism as a theory of mind. Science is given an epistemic free-bee as an unexplained explainer. My experiences are of higher epistemic certainty than a more distant scientific theory. If a scientific theory threatens something of higher epistemic certainty then the wise choice is to reject the scientific theory.

But they disagree about what they think actually happened in the past, implying they assume there is actually a fact about what happened. It's not just a game where they pretend there's facts just so they can have a job.

But historians go about business with the assumption that there is, actually, a fact of the matter as to what happened. Things can't be evidence if there aren't any facts.

The more I study philosophy of mind and phenomenology the more I'm amazed materialism is as popular as it is. It's pretty obvious my mind, my experiences, my intentional, propositional, qualitative states, are not identical nor reducible to a neurological tissue state as it exists as a neurological tissue state. It is far more likely, given what we know from the self-evident and obvious, that the mind and the body are separate, or, as I see it, that the mind has definitive priority over the body in the sense that the world is intrinsically "minded" rather than intrinsically an unconscious lump of "material".

Materialism requires that we jump across an epistemic chasm, unwarranted. If we have no reason to trust our first-hand experiences of consciousness then we have absolutely no reason to trust materialism as a theory of mind.

The are no facts about the past. Just what is remembered in individual memory. — Rich

Then how can we say anything true about the past?

The present cannot be negated or undone. We cannot ever alter the past or the future, only create new and/or different moments-- this mission to kill Hitler is literally pointless by these terms. It will not change anything about our past.

In this respect, concern for a present is all ethics require, for any past or future, any possible world with a (im)moral outcome, is defined in a present event. To care for any past or future, is to be concerned about a present. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I will agree that ethics presides in the present. It is difficult to put into words but I think you and I might be touching on the same thing.

Basically, say the world is a four-dimensional worm, and God resides outside of it peering over approvingly for whatever bad reason. He sees the Holocaust, and turns his gaze slightly to the right and sees a few 22nd century time travelers going back to the Holocaust. They shoot Hitler and stop the Holocaust from happening, that is, the Holocaust disappears from the four-dimensional worm.

But now it seems like, even though they removed the Holocaust from history, it still had to go somewhere. Things can't just disappear without a trace, that's magic (of course, time travel is also magic). What happened to all that pain, suffering, violence?, did it just suddenly POOF! disappear?

The past and future do not exist, but they did exist and they will exist respectively. If you believe that there are facts about what happened then I don't see why you can't base your moral judgements on that. — Mr Bee

Yes, this is one solution I was thinking about. The past (and future) may not exist but the facts about the past (and future) exist (in some way). Therefore we can say that, what grounds historical claims are the facts about the past that transcend the material present.

I still contend, however, that the phenomenology surrounding the ethics of past events is that these past events are still "real" in some sense, and aren't only a transcendent fact. Somewhere, deep in the past, victims of the Holocaust are still "hurting". Whether this is actually true is another matter but it would seem to have some plausibility when we consider the B-theory of time, or eternalism. Facts, by themselves, do not "hurt".