If something progresses by using "whatever works" then on of too things are true. 1) Whatever works is part of the scientific method, or 2) it's not science. — T Clark

This is most definitely question begging. Just because I make a really good burrito doesn't mean I use the "scientific method" to make it. Just because a fisherman catches many fish doesn't mean she uses the "scientific method" to catch them.

Furthermore, by ascribing whatever works to a scientific method that is exclusively scientific then we're left with no way to actually criticize science. Science becomes this infallible source of knowledge, where whatever doesn't work apparently isn't science. Yet clearly this is false. There can be bad, poor, shitty science just as much as good science. Actually most science is bad science, with faulty assumptions, poor methodology or whatever.

A lot of the ways "Science" goes about "sciencing" is not very different from other activities. It's just that these scientific fields have special equipment and have the public image of being a dispassionate search for truth.

To summarize the question, then:

How does presentism ground ethical claims rooted in the past (and future) if the past and future do not exist?

But there is no singular scientific method, nor is it used all the time in science, and nor is it unique to science. Science progresses by using whatever works, not by leaning on a methodological crutch.

Mostly the name "science" is an honorific term. Whatever discipline has high social favor is a science. Consensus and practical consequences are what really end up mattering, because they give you confidence that you're right without actually seeing yourself.

o past trauma might cause me to believe (subconsciously) that I'll never be professionally successful; the past exists not only in my present beliefs, but in my real, present circumstances, thanks to how belief mediates the past with the present. The belief maketh it so. Lemme know if that makes sense. — Noble Dust

I'm not sure how this is different from saying the past is an "echo" or a "footprint". What I'm saying is that if the past does not actually exist then what we see as residue from the past is like a fossil of an animal that never actually existed. If the past does not exist then it no longer mattered if it happened - it doesn't even make sense to say it happened.

Sort of how we perceive the world around us in a naive realist fashion, but that's just the way in which our experience is structured, and not that the world around us is actually there materially and we are directly accessing this independent world. Experientially the holocaust happened in an independently existing past, but materially there's no reality somewhere that contains the facts about the past (that could hypothetically be accessed). — antinatalautist

So I think you get what I'm saying, but I insist that this has very problematic ethical consequences. There are people who have devoted their entire lives to making sure other people do not forget the Holocaust happened. Yet, what you are saying and what I have been suggesting is that there is no difference between a present world that "has a past" with a Holocaust and a present world that instantaneously came into existence with no past Holocaust but is in every way shape and form identical to the world that has a past with a Holocaust.

The reason we shouldn't forget the Holocaust isn't just that we don't want it to happen "again". It's that it's shameful and wrong to forget what happened. In this sense, the past is a very real thing, shrouded in darkness and inaccessible, but still very real. The inmates at Auschwitz really did get tossed into gas chambers and cremented. Their suffering is "stored somewhere in temporal memory", for lack of a better way of describing it. It's Read-Only Memory, 6 million Jews suffered and died in the concentration camps. That is a fact and it continues to be a fact even if these 6 million Jews no longer exist. Their suffering, although not in the present, is still "real".

The B-theory of time makes the most sense, ethically, since it holds that at least the past is held tight and is "real". In this way, the universe is literally "growing" 4 dimensionally. It's not just an unreal blip.

The past exists in the present. Your post, made an hour ago, exists for me now as I respond. The deed you did, posting the topic, exists in the present in the form it takes on the internet. Likewise the mass murder of Jews exists in the present in the form of family lines broken or altered, cultural values strengthened and weakened, generational suffering, immigration patterns, population numbers... — Noble Dust

I think that the past exists as more than just a footprint. At least I think we approach the past as if it still somewhat exists. Soldiers with PTSD are traumatized by what they saw - they re-live the moments over and over again. Their PTSD is a footprint left behind by the past - but these soldiers have PTSD precisely because they think the past is more than an unreal footprint. People can't just shrug off the past because it no longer exists. Things continue to bother people even if they're "long gone" because they think it still matters that they happened. But it can only really make sense for it to matter if the past is somehow cemented in place and really exists, and isn't just an unreal phantom, an illusion or whatever.

A world with a present identical to ours but which had no Holocaust in its past would be vastly superior to ours. It also does not make sense to say, "you murdered this person but since this person is dead and in the past, it no longer matters and you're free to go." We wouldn't be able to ascribe responsibility at all. History would literally be a lie. The present would be a foundation-less moment and nothing more.

Basically the goodness of whatever final metamorphic state is put into question when we reflect on the evil that came before. It's hard to see how something really could be good if it necessitates this much evil. Doing so requires us to seriously become numb to this evil to the point of forgetting it even is evil.

lmao it's not hard to pick him out. He should get a life.

If I remember correctly a Catholic, or maybe just Thomistic (idk) perspective on this is to withhold judgement on this and to basically accept that God "works in mysterious ways".

Oh, now I seem to have remembered encountering him on the old PF when I called him out on some bullshit. Guess that's when he decided to leech on my blog. Hahaha

Mosesquine? From what I've seen he has been terrorizing the blog of darthbarracuda for some time >:O — Agustino

I'm not sure who you are referring to? The guy who insists on making a logical syllogism proving I am the most disgusting hot dog on the sidewalk in South Africa or something?

It's what we do when we make certain claims like science being the asymptote of truth. Philosophy basically deals with framing questions, not certain facts about the world. We're trying to figure out how it all fits together - because we appreciate the distinction between appearance and reality and wish to see the relationship between the two. We want to know what it is that we are asymptotically approaching (truth), why science is the curve that does so (is it always?), and whether or not its asymptote is anything even meaningful at all, or simply the end of scientific inquiry.

Part of what makes philosophy so interesting is how self-reflexive and indeterminate it is. You can't pin it down but philosophers nevertheless keep trying to. It's certainly the case that philosophy deals with legitimate things but it's also a philosophical question to figure out what these things are.

1) Nietzschean- Live life like its your work of art. All the suffering one experiences just adds to the art to make life its own special thing for that individual. It is what makes life more challenging, and challenges are somehow transcendentally good (for some reason). I guess the reasoning is that it gives life its flavor and stories to tell about oneself? People can post-facto embrace life because of the challenges it affords them to overcome and make into their life story. — schopenhauer1

Nietzsche's overman applies to a minority of people. He basically denies that the majority of people can ever achieve such a form of existence, and that because of this their lives suck. If we're being charitable then living your life as though it were a story or a work of art is a good thing because it is self-evidently a good thing. In the same sense that it is self-evident that gratuitous and pointless suffering is a very bad thing. There's no "for some reason" here. If you have to apply "for some reason" then either it's not self-evident, or you aren't the person who can tell that it is self-evident. And clearly this has connections to Nietzsche's "perspectivism" theory of truth. It's not self-evident to you, I'm not sure if it's self-evident to myself, and Nietzsche would have thought both of us aren't qualified right now to become an overman.

Saying "I don't see the value of art" doesn't change the fact that some people do see the value of art. The Nietzschean perspective is that the value of life is objectively indeterminate, and can only be given its value by a projecting subject. In an almost Freudian way, if you disagree with Nietzsche that a life can be a work of art then you're probably not going to be a Nietzschean, or an overman or whatever.

Whether or not anyone can actually be an overman is a different issue altogether. A better argument here would be to accept Nietzsche's concepts but show they fail to be plausible in real life. People are too decadent, too selfish, too full of shit, too whiny, too weak, too mortal, too wasteful, too stupid, etc for Nietzsche's concepts to have any practical application to reality. The overman, amor fati, eternal return, all of these concepts are great but in the end only go to show how unqualified humans are.

Probably criticizing the coherency of authenticity is a form of authenticity.

Metzinger is okay - I mean, his work on the "non-self", the "phenomenal self-model", was sensationalized in pessimistic literature like Ligotti's Conspiracy (which I'm sure you're familiar with given your user name), but philosophically his ideas are too reductionistic, too scientistic, and too oblivious to the work of 20th century phenomenology. Graham Harman has a great piece criticizing Metzinger's position as being overly verbose and in many cases incoherent. In many cases Metzinger hits the nail on the head, but in many other cases he misses the mark. I don't see him as a "perennial" thinker but more of a product of the current philosophical-metaphysical paradigm (reductionist materialism).

Thanks for the reading suggestion. I haven't read much Deleuze but he's on my list, maybe even the next one I read.

Not sure how this went under the radar, but I'll leave this here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_conflict

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_coercion

Basically for many species, there has been and continues to be an evolutionary arms race between the male and female sexes due to conflicting strategies of reproduction.

Reality, Existence, Being, World and Actuality. — Marty

Reality: whatever "is the case". The actual state of affairs, how things really are independent of our beliefs. That which can kill you if you're not careful. Political.

Existence: what something that exists has that makes it the case that it exists and differentiates it from non-existence.

Being: ???????, basically existence, but not? Existence vs existants, Being vs beings...A mode of presentation of objects by intentional consciousness?

Actuality: that which is the effect of some cause, the manifestation of a possibility in reality. I guess actuality would basically be the same thing as reality, but more so in the sense of that which is the culmination of some process, the final metamorphosis to "perfection". Also whatever is "illuminated", an actor with a name and a lead role surrounded by the forgettable and dispensable supporting cast.

All of these come across as fairly circular. Or co-dependent on something else. Being is what distinguishes that which is from that which isn't. Non-Being is what distinguishes that which is not from that which is.

The 'materialist' view of time does render out of time an entirely relative phenomenon. There exists no absolute time, time itself is immanent within the world. I am reminded of 180 Proof asking rhetorically "what is north of the North Pole?" when asked "what happened before time began during the Big Bang?". — Agustino

This is one of the questions I have regarding cosmological arguments. In what sense are we to understand God "causing" the universe (and time) to exist, if there was no time before hand? Our concept of causality seems to me to be intrinsically tied to time. Things change because of certain causes, and this takes time to happen. So if time did not exist "before" (what does that even mean, though, "before time" - was there a time before time?), in what sense is God "causing" the world to exist?

I guess we should be asking what anything being morally respectable is based on and whether it's justified to demand us to respect the dead to find the answer. — BlueBanana

I think morality is based on intersubjectivity. There needs to be at least two different subjective beings in existence for morality to have any worldly form.

I don't have the time to go more into detail concerning your response right now, my apologies, but might you know the aristotelian stance on whether keeping a rock on a table is morally wrong as it's perturbing the telos of that rock, which is reaching the ground? — BlueBanana

To be honest I'm not entirely sure. I suspect only unities, or things with essences, have a telos but I'm just guessing. I get where you're coming from, cause the old Aristotelian physics held things fell to the Earth because that's where they "belonged". Even if a rock has a telos, it's not a permanent frustration of its telos to keep it from falling to the ground. I think this is how Aristotelians and the like get around the charge that, say, blinking, is morally wrong because it frustrates the telos of an eyeball to perceive light. But it's awfully convenient. Natural law theorists have often almost exclusively focused on abortion and abstinence, as if their ethical theory is fine-tailored to a specific view regarding these acts (but not so much in regards to other ethical issues - when in doubt, something-something Doctrine of Double Effect, who the hell knows really).

I'm not a fan of natural law theory, if you couldn't tell.

The way I see it is that a person may exist only when they are conscious (i.e., we "die" when we go to bed but are "resurrected" when we wake up) - but that the ethical implications surrounding people extends beyond their material existence.

We have (prima facie) duties to the dead not to desecrate their graves, steal their shit or slander their image, even if they're not around to know anything about it. We have duties not to kill people in their sleep - the fact that we can say we can "kill" them (even if they don't "exist" at the time of killing) means we recognize that there is, in fact, some sort of "residue" left behind that is morally relevant. Just because it's a memory or an idea doesn't make it any less "real".

Maybe we can call some of this residue "preferences" or "interests". But there's also the case that people who have lived a long time are entrenched in their community and killing them would involve permanently taking-away this asset of the community. So we can also see the morally relevant factors of someone's "footprint".

It's not often recognized that ethical debates don't usually revolve around principles or values or whatever but more around metaphysics. The abortion debate largely revolves around the metaphysics of persons, self-hood, identity, etc. Those opposed to abortion often say a fetus is a person that must not be killed, whereas those who think abortion is permissible will say a fetus is not a person and therefore cannot be killed. Nobody really disputes that killing people is morally wrong - what they disagree on is whether or not a fetus is a person that can be killed.

Those opposed to abortion usually say there is something "about" the fetus that makes it morally relevant - the Aristotelian version is that the fetus has a "telos" (to mature into a baby in the same way an acorn matures into a tree), and that having an abortion permanently frustrates this telos. It's also commonly held that the fetus has a "soul" and therefore quite literally is a person.

How I see it is that an unborn fetus or zygote or whatever has no conscious intentions, aspirations, preferences, etc, and the only real footprint is has in this world is that it's a constant memory of an oftentimes "accidental" sexual act. Any "telos" is may or may not have is not intrinsic to it but applied by external constraints as well. I'm resistant to this teleology - things happen in the world but there's no "function" to them that isn't derivative from more general principles. I'm also an atheist, and I don't think souls exists. So it's somewhat hard for me to be opposed to abortion, although I understand why some people might see it as murder.

Am I still the same person, then?

I don't know of any distinction between what is moral and what is ethical. The two are commonly used interchangeably.

I'm not concerned with whats good or bad, I'm concerned with desire. Also allow me to correct that part if my passage; the highest "agreed upon" common interest of the "perceived majority" of sentient beings "by the perceived majority of sentient beings"

And I haven't defined the "good" with that statement, I have defined the "desired".(hypothetically) — XanderTheGrey

But then what relation does this have to ethics?

This is actually embarrassing to ask because I feel I understand exactly how to go about being ethical. Its a rather simple formula: do nothing to sabotage that which is preceived as the highest common interest of all sentient beings. — XanderTheGrey

Perhaps, but now you have identified the "good" with "highest common interest of all sentient beings". And like Moore, we can ask, is this really good? In the sense that:

"The highest common interest of all sentient beings is good"

is equivalent to

"The highest common interest of all sentient beings is the highest common interest of all sentient beings."

The latter is a tautology, but the former seems like a synthetic statement. They don't seem to be equivalent.

There isn't one single definition of "ethics", just as there isn't a single definition of "good". Roughly, I would say that ethics is the study of how we ought to act, which includes what things are good, what determines right/obligatory/permissible/wrong acts to be this way, as well as related issues about ethics (meta-ethics).

In a nutshell, then, the goal of ethics is to ascertain how we ought to live. Life throws us into ambiguous situations in which the course of action is not clearly defined, and we need advice for what to do in these situations. Life is also a continual process of growth and decay, and those interested in ethics want to know what makes this process go best, i.e. what it takes to be a good person and to lead a good life.

It's hard for me to take seriously the notion of an entity that is so powerful he created the world, but has it in his mind that it's right to punish people who don't believe he exists.

Children are primarily accidents, or had because of a social expectation. For many people, having children is just another thing on their checklist. Make more people with checklists. It's very important that we have more people with checklists. It's very important that we check those lists!

If I go to a fiery pit then it will be for unjust reasons. An infinite punishment for a finite sin is unjust, especially when I didn't ask to be a part of this cosmic drama.

Death is very scary for me but also comforting when I'm suffering. The notion that one day the Earth will rotate without me on it is incomprehensible to me. But the notion that there is an end to suffering is also relieving.

Most of the time I wish I could die, without like, actually dying.

I remember reading that a long while back and being engrossed by the possibility of reducing morality to a set of calculations. Now it largely just seems like a fantasy that can't cash out in real life and doesn't cover all our moral beliefs.

Therefore emotivism and intuitionalism with the theory of good being culturally dependent and relative, meaning in some sense postmodernism? — Posty McPostface

I'm not sure what you mean. Utilitarianism does not entail emotivism and intuitionism (the two aren't compatible, either).

Yeah, what makes it the best? Materialism for that matter is also a "satisfying" solution because it denies that the mind exists in any way transcendental to the body. And of course, then we have positions like substance dualism, or neutral monism. — Agustino

But materialism fails for the self-evident truth that the mind is not reducible or identical to the brain.

I'll admit, dualism a la Aquinas are plausible as well.

So just like the metaphysics of being is a psychological defense mechanism against the flux of existence, so too the metaphysics of becoming is a psychological defense mechanism against immutable, unchanging Being. These are of course neither arguments for nor against one metaphysics or the other. They're just red herrings. — Agustino

The point is not to refute metaphysical positions through psychology but to move away from them, cast them aside as being unnecessary.

The utilitarian rejoinder would be, whatever works. Utilitarianism is not an absolutist position. Whatever government maximizes utility is what we ought to have.

Now, disregarding the above and assuming that utilitarianism is what philosophy ought to be, then isn't the problem now to create a calculus that would be able to determine what would be the optimal utility to all people (the greatest good principle). Is this something that will be possible in the future or another hopeless dream? — Posty McPostface

Used to be a consequentialist, still have some leanings towards it. Consequentialist theories like utilitarianism are seductive because their aim is to make the best-possible-world in terms of good. It's hard to argue why we ought not do that.

Utilitarianism, historically, was meant to be applied to systems of government more than individual people. Most consequentialists including utilitarians held/hold that for individual actions, it's better to not actively try to calculate the best aims but to live life naturally and intuitively, only applying consequential calculus in more extreme situations. Similar to the paradox of hedonism, it's argued that the best consequences come about generally when we're not obsessively pondering the consequences. Governments, on the other hand, have to deal with statistics, numbers, amounts, etc which are a lot easier to work with, generally. Does the military bomb a civilian settlement to eliminate radical terrorists? What are the consequences? No one individual is responsible for this decision, at least not usually.

The criticism that there is no calculus that could be applied (and therefore utilitarianism/consequentialism is false) fails to work. It is clear that a lesser headache, say, is better than a terrible migraine. We clearly know this because we take pain medication. Experiences can be roughly measured by intensity and duration, and while we don't have precise mathematical measurements for them, this is not different than other perceptual difficulties - we have a hard time estimating the length of objects without a ruler, for instance, but that doesn't mean there is no actual length.

So in general the utilitarian would argue that normal experiences are intuitively ranked without much worry. When things get hairy or we're talking about governments, that's when it says we have to start estimating the comparative value of alternate courses of action. Sometimes it's easy, but sometimes it's not. Things get super hairy when you're a pluralist in terms of value - how do you calculate the value difference between values?

Sometimes the value difference is obvious. In which case, there's not much of an issue. Othertimes it's a lot harder. This difficulty, perhaps even real-life impossibility, is not really an argument against consequentialism. It just adds in another layer of non-ideal circumstances.

In all of these situations, it can be argued that there is an ulterior motive behind these actions and that they were thus never really selfless to begin with. — Alec

Psychological egoism is pretty much rejected by most moral philosophers and moral psychologists. Just because you have a desire to do something doesn't make it selfish. Selfishness isn't defined in terms of desire-satisfaction, it's defined by the contents and orientation of desires. Motivation is the determinate factor here.

haha I wish

What do you mean it's "the best solution" to the mind-body problem? — Agustino

It's a satisfying solution to the mind-body problem because it denies the body exists in any way transcendental to the mind.

And what does that have to do with the becoming/being dichotomy (flux)? — Agustino

Nietzsche's position is that people cling to metaphysics, especially metaphysics of eternal, unchanging, present substance, as a psychological defense mechanism against the flux of existence. Under all this wild current, there "must" be some unchanging entity that is undisturbed. Lots of religious, mystical, ethical projects are aimed at achieving some kind of contact with this substance.

Not really a fallacy, more like just bad reasoning. If there's not enough evidence to support an empirical claim, then there isn't a good reason to believe it.

Also, "Rational"Wiki >:O

It's great things worked out in your favor but that is not the case for a very large amount of people. It's certainly not the case for most organisms living in their natural environment, who usually die in horrible ways (if they even survive gestation - see R-selection). There's a confirmation bias going on here. You don't hear about the failures too often because the failures are all dead.

Affirming life by means of portraying it as a challenge or something like that is paradoxical. It cannot be a real challenge if success is not guaranteed - but if success is not guaranteed, then it cannot be the case that life can be success for everyone. Whatever doesn't kill you may make you stronger, or it might make you wish it had killed you.

The circumstances you find yourself in are largely due to what we usually call luck. This includes your mental states - you are lucky not only that you are in favorable circumstances but also that you have mental states that help you survive. Your type-character is not under your control.