Err, if it pervades nature, that makes it immanent. And immanence is opposed to transcendent, not transcendental, in this context.

Focus on causality. We are talking about the reasons things are the way they ought to be. We are talking about the origins of the shaping constraints, the lawful regularities.

To say that formal and final causes act from outside the realm of material and efficient cause - as Plato did, and as Western religions do - is to claim transcendent origins.

Immanence - as argued by Anaximander, Aristotle and other organicists - is about self-organising materiality. The formal and final causes of being arise within the world itself. — apokrisis

In any case I don't see how this is at all relevant to the discussion. You continue to assert that what I believe in is transcendent woo and I have consistently pointed out that I am limiting morality to minds, and thus it cannot be transcendent.

So if we're talking about value, then I am arguing that it is immanent in minds. That is all.

And then the phenomenological fact that green can be mixed from yellow and blue paint ought to tell you that your experience is not actually brute at this level even. It ought to raise the question of why you can't phenomenologically mix two paints to arrive at red, yellow and blue? Or why the rule for mixing light is different in that now it is yellow that is composite and green that is primary.

Woo. This phenomenological shape-shifting really ought to bother you. And it's right in front of your face - if you ever open your eyes and mind. — apokrisis

How could it "bother" me if qualia is not real? How can I do anything if "I" don't exist?

Illusions, coherent or not, are still transparent. You can't just deconstruct your own experiences and pretend that they aren't really there.

All of this is just a red herring. Or I guess you could say it's just a herring, because our qualitative experience of red isn't actually there...?

Sure, we can talk about fictional worlds. But fictional worlds would have fictional moralities. So there doesn't seem a lot of point in wasting too much time on what can't be changed. — apokrisis

So once again you are thrusting practical applied ethics into theoretical normative ethics. Stop doing that.

Again, your antinatalism might lead you to argue for the wiping out of all life with an integrative nervous system - the minimal qualification for sentience. Leave reality to jellyfish, daffodils and bacteria. But as I have pointed out, you won't in practice beat life so easily. Antinatalism is always going to lose as it only takes a couple of sneaky breeders to slip your net. — apokrisis

This changes nothing about the ideal. Since when did we have to content with what the universe offers us? Why do we have limit our own expectations?

One could always wish. But given that is not the way reality works, we need instead to focus on more practical responses to the threat of nasty demises. — apokrisis

Again, practical vs theoretical.

Indeed I don't believe AN or veganism or anything like that will take off. But this doesn't change the truth value of them. If I can convince a few people to go AN or vegan than I will have done some legitimate good. The rest of ethics is just applied and practical ethics meant to compromise for everyone else's shortcomings.

Godwin's law not withstanding, aren't you at all troubled by the familiar debating point that Hitler was a vegetarian, Himmler wanted to ban hunting? The same pervasive Romanticism that justified their Nazi racism, justified their anti-specieism. — apokrisis

ehh...no. People can hold morally correct views but for shitty, contradictory reasons. Aren't you troubled by blind pragmatism, the same reasoning that went into the running of Nazi concentration camps? What a load of rubbish, organizing reason like this, as if my reasoning can be identified as a certain "kind" of reason and is prone to such things like bigotry and genocide, whereas your superior "kind" of reason isn't. You haven't even identified what it was about Nazi policy that makes it similar to what reasoning I am using, you've just asserted this and claimed association without justification, leaving this association hanging in the air like a fart, tainting the legitimacy of anything I say, as if being a vegetarian is potentially causally linked to Nazism. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves - does that mean democracy is suspicious? Christianity is linked to the crusades - does that mean every Christian is a war-mongerer?

Clumping them together is fallacious, and I honestly don't understand why you even mentioned it without providing any justification.

The same reasoning that led the Nazis to racism led some of them to vegetarianism. The same reasoning that led altruists to vegetarianism led them to things like democracy (how about that, non-pragmatic thinking leads to solutions that actually work?! Who would've thought!!! - it's bullshit to claim that everything that worked, worked because of your special pragmatism). So your fallacy of association fails in virtue of its own fallaciousness and exclusion of alternatives.

Nietzsche would have fallen under this vague "romanticism" term, yet he was vehemently opposed to nationalism. And Peirce, your philosopher-Jesus, was a womanizer and eccentric douche, and Aristotle was the personal teacher of Alexander, who was basically the ancient world's Hitler (without the racism). Pragmatism must be inherently predisposed to douchebaggery... I can cherry pick too!

In any case it is highly suspicious that you are willing to clump together rational inquiry with irrational racism and bigotry and call it "romanticism", as opposed to your enlightened pragmatism. It's insulting to compare the reasoning that goes into these ethical claims to the same "reasoning" behind racism and bigotry. But you try to get away with it by splitting reason down the middle, an us vs them mentality, and conveniently failing to make a thread on your views and instead attacking everyone else's views while weaving and dodging and moving the goalposts in an almost troll-like manner. According to you, we're either an enlightened pragmatist, or a bottom dwelling scum sucker who's lost in transcendence and associated with racist bigots. Bullshit.

The virtue theory still seems the most attractive to me. It accepts the individualism of our moral quest, and balances it against what people think and what the polis, society as a whole, will benefit from. — mcdoodle

I've been tinkering with the idea that utilitarianism might be a kind of virtue ethics. I think it was Mill who said that compassion is the virtue for ethical living.

I can't be doing with rules, whether Kant's super-logical principle, or consequentialism/utilitarianism (as I've said before, we don't know the consequences till we've acted, so I think again we're smuggling in virtues/vices in disguise). — mcdoodle

But surely we can reasonably estimate what the consequences are going to be. Is this not how we live our daily lives? I press the letter B on my keyboard; I am reasonably confident that the representation of B will appear on my screen. I am reasonably sure I will not explode when I take a drink of water. I am reasonably sure that I will be able to pass this midterm. etc. Intentions don't change the reality of an outcome.

Pain and suffering can be more biological or more social in origin. If you have a broken leg, take these pain-killers. If you have a broken heart, find a new partner.

You can't hope to fix anything if you don't have a clear view of how it works. — apokrisis

Why does anything need fixing or repair to begin with? What is so important that requires us to suffer? What great cosmic transcendental goal are we all advancing towards that justifies our collective troubles?

Extinction, that's the end-goal. Quite inspiring, truly.

Ethics becomes not a system of progress and triumph but a recovery mechanism meant for janitorial service, cleaning up the mess. Almost all ethics is affirmative, and thus second-order, as it forgets its own structure. Consequentialists are forced to accept that murdering a person can be acceptable - and although I am a consequentialist myself, the fact that I have to accept that murdering someone might be necessary just goes to show how royally f*cked up our little armpit of the universe is. The fact that we have to compromise should make us take a step back and think about what is going on that forces us to compromise in the first place. A truly good world would not require compromise, or the choosing of a "lesser evil". A truly good world wouldn't have any necessary evils.

Yep. As I say, you are appealing to trancendental values in talking about pleasure, pain and empathy in the dualistically disconnected fashion that you do. — apokrisis

What exactly do you take transcendental to mean, if not all-encompassing and universal throughout nature? That's exactly what I deny as an anti-realist! However, if you're talking about transcendental phenomenal experience, then absolutely I would say that pain, pleasure, and compassion are transcendental, pervading all our conscious and rational choices.

I'm saying there appear to be brute experiences, or transparent experiences. You're saying we can deconstruct them, and show their origins, and somehow this changes our perspective on things. It's akin to me saying there is the color green, and then you saying green is just blue and yellow mixed together, and there "is no green". There's green right there in front of your face! The origins of the color green doesn't matter in this case.

And then those sign relations are hierarchically open ended or recursive. Creating a robust layer of wise habits is what allows the further thing of intelligent variety.

We can ignore the suffering of going to the gym by focusing on the longer term benefit of getting fit. And after a while, the pain of the gym becomes a pleasure. We suffer when we can't go.

So as a model of feelings (and habits), semiotics is hardly downgrading feelings to signs. It is opening feelings - as just signs - to more sophisticated worlds of meaning. It is doing the very thing of allowing you to care about abstractions like "world hunger" or "specieism". — apokrisis

Once again you are arguing that what we have done (historicity) and what we are currently doing constitutes what we ought to do. Just because we murder animals doesn't mean we should murder animals. Just because we've made it this far doesn't mean we should continue.

Those who made it were the lucky ones, not necessarily the smart ones. And that's what life comes down to: the fetishization of genes, or gene-worship.

This is just you being wedded to concrete thinking like any good reductionist. — apokrisis

Huh? What does this mean?

So are you meaning to confirm my point that harm can only be mutually minimised and never in practice eliminated? Moral organisation consists of collectively targeting its minimisation. — apokrisis

Excellent, so we agree on at least one point. Harm is pervasive and impossible to get rid of. But this need not constrain our ability to think of what could be the case. Indeed I would personally argue that the state of the environment and our programming makes us morally disqualified in some sense. The world will never be "good", yet this does not stop us from acting ethically. There is too much imperfection, too much decay and insufficiency, to be even a candidate for a decent world. But this doesn't mean we can stoop to this level.

It is everyday life that matters. My complaint is that when you are challenged by exactly this kind of proximity principle, you start talking about finding yourself dying slowly in a motorway pile up or the existential horror of the Holocaust. — apokrisis

So what? What if you found yourself in the Holocaust? I'm sure you'd wish everyone else would adopt the principles I am advocating.

So it is metaphysics. But your metaphysics makes different presumptions than mine. — apokrisis

Well, yes, metaethics is a sort of metaphysics. But it is metaphysics in the service of ethics, not the other way around.

That's the naturalistic fallacy. Just because pleasure is what a machine creates as its value, doesn't mean that pleasure is transcendentally good. — apokrisis

You're the one accusing me of the naturalistic fallacy?

And I already explained how I am an anti-realist, so I don't think there is any transcendental value actually out there, just as I don't think there is any transcendental value to money.

We can always ask "so what?" to any normative claim. And we can do the same with pleasure, pain, and compassion. Yet I suspect that anyone who actually says "so what?" to these three things is being extremely disingenuous. You just can't get your arm cut off and shrug it off as a scratch. Our choices depend on an evaluation of the consequences - pleasure and pain. And so any sort of error theory can technically be right, but for all intensive purposes we end up acting as if morals actually do exist because we are forced to. Call it the persecution of ethics, perhaps. I like to just call it consistency - regardless of the objectivity of morals, we have moral beliefs and thus must act upon them in a consistent manner.

Just switch from talking about pleasure as qualia and start talking about it as a biological sign - a semiotic mechanism - and you will have arrived at my kind of pan-semiotic naturalism. — apokrisis

But this would require me to systematically ignore the important bits: feeling, downgrading it to some signal and nothing more. Whatever our beliefs in qualia are, you cannot deny that it at least seems as though there is qualia. The manifest image of qualia, something that isn't just plucked away as soon as we realize it is a sign or just a oozy chemical reaction in the brain, if that even makes sense. I continue to fail to see how the ontological status of pleasure and pain actually affects anything, since we already have a phenomenal experience of pleasure and pain that is as intimate as is possible.

No. We must focus on both by focusing on the mutuality of their relationship.

In systems theory, parts construct the whole and the whole shapes its (re)constructing parts. So the focus is on the primary dynamic that drives the self-organisation.

Sorry, but it is a fundmentally complex model of causality. And one has to focus on the irreduciably triadic nature of that holism. — apokrisis

Sorry, but I see no reason to place emphasis on an abstract object that cannot feel, unless it somehow benefits those who can feel. Doing otherwise reminds me of nationalism - you are proud of the country, not of the people that make up the country. But what does it matter if you support the country as an entity in itself, for itself? It's silly.

So there is no payback at all? — apokrisis

Why would there need to be? We have to find a balance between rational self-indulgence and ethical altruism. If the pain someone else feels would cause us more pain to eliminate, then we aren't committed to helping them. It's equality. The reciprocal relationship here is the distribution of values.

This sounds rather disengaged from life. But how do you define harm and manipulation? Are you going to recognise grades and distinctions? Or as usual, are you treating them as qualitative absolutes? — apokrisis

Being that I am a consequentialist (or a virtue ethicist cum utilitarian, I'm tinkering with that lately), doing vs allowing is just another one of those arbitrary constraints that works well in the legal sense but not in the moral sense, especially once we get rid of any idea of a Just World.

So I define harm as anything, whatever that may be, that results in feeling bad. A discomfort that cannot be redeemed.

And manipulation would be anything that goes against the interests of the person. It is libertarian in the moral sense - the good for one person cannot be equivocated as the good for another person, but only compared by what the consequences are to other people. We shouldn't just assume that what we feel is good is what others will feel is good, or that any bad we inflict on others will be redeemed somehow - that's where the Golden Rule falls short.

Consequentialism gets unrelenting flak for apparently asking too much of us - yet since when did self-interest have any role in equality? Equality recognizes the similarity between one person and another, and the prioritization of one person, such as ourselves, over another person is inherently unequal.

In any case, I'm a prioritarian and contingent-sufficientarian. We must prioritize the recognition of those who are worse-off within a certain degree: as soon as we get them to this level, then they are "on their own". As soon as we get everyone to this level, we then make another level, continuing refining the equality of experience between people.

If we are standing in a queue, and I am behind you with the need to get to the front, are you going to "harm" me by not stepping aside? Are you going to "manipulate" me by keeping your back firmly turned and ignoring my plight? — apokrisis

Well, let's say I give up my position and go behind you. Are you now obligated to give up your spot to me?

There are some pains and pleasures that are so innocuous and irrelevant that they don't warrant us to consider them. They are, from a consequentialist perspective, inconsequential. Things like paper cuts and bruises, the negative experiences that nevertheless do not manage to break a person's spirit, or their mood. The negative experiences that do break a person's spirit, I would call "terminal experiences", because they remind us of death or a threat to our very existence, and are usually quite painful.

However, in everyday life we often do give up our spots for those who really need it. A man with a broken finger really ought to give up his spot in line for another man suffering from a heart attack. There's priority in effect here.

But again we are back to your kind of unplaced and scaleless view of morality where there is none of the relativity that comes from relating. The "good" congeals into a mentalistic and immutable substance. It is not the kind of adaptive dynamical principle that lies at the heart of my naturalism. — apokrisis

Of course the good is going to be mentalistic and immutable - most of our phenomenal concepts are static. That's the whole goal of process philosophy, to show how our mental concepts of staticity cannot correlate to the rest of the world.

But that is beside the point. It's a red herring to claim that our own moral concepts don't even match reality when I have already said that there is nothing like our moral concepts in the objective world. It is an isolated phenomenon in an isolated environment of persons. To apply morality to the entire universe is to equivocate cosmic habit with morality, which is just plain wrong.

For example, you have to introduce the homuncular self that experience its experiences. Pleasure, pain and empathy now become qualia - substantial "mental" properties. And you even start appealing to "me" as a fellow homunculus doing the same thing.

It's a familar way of reducing reality - to matter and mind. But we all know that it doesn't work out in the end. Dualism is good for a while, but in the long-run, it is a philosophical blind alley. — apokrisis

It's a good thing we're not doing metaphysics, then. We're doing (meta-)ethics. It already presumes an un-removable manifest image of man, one of Selves, Qualia, and Free Will. I'm not sure how you get around the fact that pain, no matter what it actually is, hurts, and that pleasure feels good, and that it seems like we have Selves. Indeed the realization that we may not have a Self or any Qualia threatens nihilism, or a dissolution of all value whatsoever. And so any sort of metaphysics of ethics is going to have to work within these parameters unless they want to risk removing themselves from the ethical discourse entirely.

Yet you are committing the "naturalistic fallacy" in claiming that because pleasure is what is, then pleasure is an ought. — apokrisis

No, I'm not, because pleasure is inherently valuable to whoever is experiencing it. Like I said in the OP, humans are value machines. They create value.

Or a sarcastic one. — apokrisis

Sarcasm is not wanted, sorry. It's useless.

Ethics is about the flourishing of the social group. It is about caring about others in ways that creates reciprocal benefits. And that is a tricky balancing act because - as game theory can spell out mathematically - the "right balance" has to involve the possibility of selfishness too. — apokrisis

But we must make sure that we focus on the constituents of the social group, not the social group as an object itself.

We can care about the suffering of others, but then reality has to come into play - rational principles like proximity which you so strenuously want to deny. — apokrisis

Because they aren't supported by the triad I just presented. They are particular and when universalized become arbitrary.

So on the one hand, you accept that ethics is about enlightened self-interest - the mutuality and reciprocality that is the definition of social organisation. But on the other, you transmute these rational goods - the secrets of successful organisation - into transcendent goods. — apokrisis

No, it is not enlightened self-interest. I don't help people because they will help me. I help people because that's what they need. The "Platinum Rule" - i.e. do not harm others and do not manipulate others. Self-interest has no play here, only in practicality.

You talk dualistically about biologically-evolved feelings, such as pleasure, pain and empathy, as if they were Platonic abstracta. You treat the qualia as things in themselves - ineffable properties of sentience - rather than biological signals with pragmatic meaning. And in doing this, you ignore all the spatiotemporal complexity of the real world in which social organisation must operate to instead impose a scaleless notion of suffering that floats Platonically above the world we have to describe. — apokrisis

And in doing this you ignore that pleasure, pain, and empathy are immediately accessible - you reduce them away and pretend they don't exist.

You remain confused about this. It is Darth who is advancing the naturalistic fallacy here in suggesting that pleasure, pain and empathy are natural properties the good (and bad). — apokrisis

And once again I have to explain to you how I am a moral anti-realist. There is no "Good", there are only goods spread out across a population and abstracted as a "Good" in virtue of the basic triad.

And there are issues here -- what's pleasurable isn't always good and what's good isn't always pleasurable. — aporiap

I have to disagree with this here. What is pleasurable isn't always good, indeed - but only because it conflicts with other people's interests. The pleasure a rapist feels is good for himself, but should not be seen as good in the ethical way. I should have put it in the OP: the triad recognizes pain and suffering as more important than pleasure: indeed it is the case that when you feel compassion for someone, it is because they are suffering. You don't care for someone if they're happy - they are self-sufficient.

And so ethics involves the systematic distribution of care across a population.

Furthermore, to say that there are goods that aren't pleasurable is incoherent. Apo said he recognized pleasure as a mug of beer - but this is a shallow misrepresentation of what pleasure is. There certainly are higher-order, long-term eudaimonic pleasures, that are not just the carnal satisfaction of some brute desire, but what at least seems to be a much more complex goal pursuit - i.e. when Heidegger showed how humans are the only animals on Earth that lead their lives.

But the example of chocolate and sugar illustrates the fact that moral judgements have to be complex. What's good in the short-term as instant gratification of an impulse may be very bad as a long-term habit. — apokrisis

So like I said, the only thing that makes chocolate and sugar a long-time bad habit is that it will diminish the welfare of the individual. That is invariably what ethics is about: person welfare. Any other conception leads the train off the rails.

The whole "science vs philosophy" shtick is a complete misunderstanding of what either of them are. Indeed such a question can only be asked and answered by attempting to philosophize. There is no great smackdown between the two, because to assert that there is ends up being suspiciously philosophical (and downright retarded in any sense). You'll end up shooting yourself in the foot, in the same manner global skeptics or deniers of hypothetical reasons do: it's using philosophy to argue that we ought not use philosophy.

Although that statement would be incoherent, philosophy has historically had a knack with mutilating itself. Leave it to a philosopher to attempt to deconstruct their own field!

And that is precisely why philosophy is so important and necessary, and what makes it unique: it is a process, an activity, an attempt, to come to terms with the world, characterized by its practically limitless flexibility. From one question spawns multiple new ones in an ongoing process of refinement of truth-estimation. The history of philosophy can be summarized neatly as a dialectic between self-confidence and self-consciousness, and in fact the recent trend of scientism itself can be described as a naive rejection of metaphysics from skeptical self-consciousness (a rejection of one's own tendency to do metaphysics), and an even more naive self-confidence in Science™ as the one-true-method of obtaining whatever it is that we want (that wasn't the product of science anyway...)

The sciences were born from this very activity; it's not as if the sciences just popped up in a vacuum randomly and proceeded to shit all over the superstitious nonsense those toga-wearing plebs spat. In order to even ask if there is a friction between science and philosophy, one has to have a clear definition of what either of them are - a truth that many seem to have a vague idea of but are unable to put into crisp words because they either don't see the relevancy of it (which isn't an argument), or don't know what the hell they're talking about to begin with (which also isn't an argument).

People get scared of philosophy because it doesn't use numbers, equations or models like the sciences do (which is false but whatever). And yet once again we see the primacy of philosophy emerge: the dependency on these things is itself not a number or equation, but a model that doesn't use numbers or equations.

In fact I think we ought to be more concerned and skeptical of science than we are of philosophy, at least in these days and ages and given a context. A brief peruse of the internet leads the critical observer to recognizer how much the term "science" is abused as a way of validating a position without evidence. It's a trump card used by quacks and bullshitters alike: "I have science on my side, so I WIN! Ha!...now buy my books, watch my television show, vote for me for political office, spend billions of dollars on a public utility of my fancy, etc."

But why people favor science so much is because they are largely inherently pragmatic (and not necessarily in the good way). Life is fast and hard, nobody has time to read some apparently-pontificating nonsense. They want results, and they want them now goddammit!, before the quarterly review! Anything that fulfills this nihilistic agenda is approved, and anything else it hailed as bullshit - but the reality is that it's not bullshit, it's just it doesn't fit in with their progress-oriented agenda. In other words, they just don't care. But that's not an argument.

And the fact is that philosophy is everywhere, you just have to sit down every now and then to appreciate it. In my opinion we need to get rid of the view that philosophy is a discipline with a strict code of what it can do and what it cannot do. It's something everyone does, for better or for worse.

So it's not as if philosophy and science are diametrically opposed, as the silly pop-scientist pseudo-philosophers assert. They're two sides of the same coin - what happens in science can be analyzed by philosophers, and what happens in philosophy can be applied or transformed into science. Indeed I am thoroughly unimpressed myself at any attempt to separate the two or show how one is "better" than the other. What use is the theoretical if it cannot be applied? Of what importance or meaning is the practical if we have no way of understanding it?

You can certainly be begotten of the Wittgenstein of the P I and feel this way. But I think it involves you being doubtful of most systems, even the appealing ones, and building a philosophy for yourself brick by brick, mostly sans isms. — mcdoodle

Exactly, I completely agree. Philosophical systems are inherently disposable and volatile.

What I am primarily concerned about is the context religion provides a person. Religion has rituals, dogma, and scripture that inherently limits discussion and thus flies in the face of rational inquiry. I don't see how spiritual magic, like prayer, can possibly be reconciled with any rational attitude towards the world, or how any ordinarily rational person can actually believe that prayer works, or not be skeptical of scriptures (when they would be skeptical of any other unverifiable text).

The reason religion is a distinct entity in itself is because it operates differently than philosophy in general. The motivation for accepting religion seems entirely different from the motivation for accepting more open-ended philosophical ideas.

Oh don't even play that game, apo, you're a master at dodging bullets.

For good reason.

And yet the domestication of the planet, the curve of fossil fuel exploitation, and the overall human population, ride right over all that. — apokrisis

And during a large sequence in the former half of the twentieth century, it looked as though fascism was to become the dominant form of government on the planet.

You are identifying power as the good without justification. What works, works, in virtue of the fact that it is powerful, given the context of its environment. Yet this surely does not mean fascism is good. And surely, if we had the ability to stop the entropic heat death, many of us would do so. But we don't have power over the universe like that, so we accept this. But we typically don't pull a 180 and start calling it moral just because we're personally not powerful enough ourselves.

Yes, I suppose I agree then. Thank you for clarifying. Antinatalism is indeed an ethical position and not a rational hypothetical.

It does sometimes. Shallow anti-natalist arguments which life ought to end because suffering exists make this mistake. Other ones, which argue life out to end because suffering of life is unethical, do not. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I'm not sure if I follow what you are saying here, Willow.

Why call material arguments for antinatalism shallow? If suffering exists, and we apply a value to suffering (bad), and we see that the prevalence of suffering, on average, vastly outweighs any genuinely positive experiences, we can see how it just is not rational to have children, for their own sake.

This is, from what I can tell, the position held by people like Schopenhauer. They had little use of ethical denouncement.

Configuring the issue as an ethical one, however, forces us to see value not just as good or bad but with the additional imperative aspect - i.e. rules. We go from the purely descriptive to the prescriptive. But I don't see how it is necessary per se to describe birth as immoral to see it as, all things considered, a bad thing, since we could be error theorists and believe morality doesn't even exist to begin with, or non-cognitivists and believe morality is just disguised approval or commands.

In any case it seems strange, to me at least, to say that the suffering of life is unethical, despite being a consequentialist myself. I would instead hold that a state of affairs or a phenomenal experience of suffering is bad, and the action that was most responsible for bringing about this state was unethical. Otherwise it seems like this would lead us to the sinister position that somehow suffering is an offense to a higher power or something like that which makes it unethical, and not merely bad.

So what is religion according to the OP? Is it a set of beliefs and/or practices? Is it a benevolent social institution (which uses particular sets of beliefs and practices)? A harmful social institution (which uses particular sets of beliefs and practices)? Something in between? A form of self therapy? Are these categories mutually exclusive or some of them can contain others? Is it a social phenomenon which may include some -or all- of the previous? More importantly, can there be a definition of religion which is value free? That is to say, a definition which is not an expression of power relations? — Πετροκότσυφας

I try to make a distinction between religion as a cultural and social phenomenon and religious philosophy, like theology, eschatology, soterieology, etc. Religion in this case is a social group that attempts to ascertain transcendental truths by revelation, ritual, devotion, dogma and spiritual hierarchy.

However, theology and its subdisciplines fundamentally depend on religion to exist. Even atheistic theologians study the concept of God - and only to argue against theistic claims. There wouldn't be a point to study the concept of God if we knew there was no God, outside of anthropology.

So if we take away religion, then theology and its subdisciplines disappear, as does general philosophy of religion.

By being skeptical of religion, I am being an error theorist in regards to religion. To me, theistic theology, eschatology, soterieology, all of that is pretty much bunk. It's a study of something which does not exist. It comes across as almost ridiculous to even have a specific field that studies these things, as if it's a legitimate source of information. (I have a similar mistrust of people who claim they are metaphysicians, "mereologists", "axiologists", etc. It's just a whole lot of verbage for a discipline that ends up being rather trivial. I can see how we ought to have a name for a certain area of study - but to actually name yourself as a member of this "discipline" is kinda over the top in my opinion. Just call yourself a philosopher specializing in metaphysics and be done with it.)

Do you think it is plausible that an entire field (that exists in academia no doubt) could be this way? Does theology deserve to be respected outside of the religious community itself?

Because there has been a lot of criticism of theology in the past. Hume thought it was bunk. Schopenhauer thought theologians were idiots. Carnap criticized the meaning of metaphysical and theological terms. And Dennett today asks us how we are to tell a theologian that they wasted their entire lives pursuing a bunk field.

What is this "good" that you keep harking on about? I'm sure you must have a clear definition of it as you talk about it so much. But what is it in terms of the real world? — apokrisis

The good is sentient welfare, as viewed through the eyes of sentients themselves.

Fuck Richard Dawkins, the intolerant dumbass.

Entertaining story.

We can easily conceive of things that don't work. I mentioned marxism and flower power as examples. So that doesn't help your case. — apokrisis

Just because they don't work doesn't mean they aren't candidates for morality. They don't work, not because they aren't good, but because there's something limiting its instantiation.

Why can't the good be unattainable? Why must we be able to attain the good? Why must the good be constrained to be compatible with our own limitations?

So once again your pragmatism, although being useful for practical, applied ethics, is getting in the way when we talk about theoretical normative ethics. There is no need for the good to correspond to our abilities, because we are able to conceive of scenarios in which there is nothing stopping the instantiation of the good.

Whereas you start out with the assumption that a prosperous civilization is good, I go deeper and ask whether or not a prosperous civilization even is good, and if so, when. Thus your ethics is second-order and assumptively affirmative whereas my ethics is first-order in that it questions the ethics of existence (as it is currently practiced) itself.

I talk about how things actually are. You talk about what you wish them to be. — apokrisis

Probably because we are able to conceive of realities that are not.

This is getting very silly. — apokrisis

Please respond with an argument and not just a handwave. I have clearly shown to you how your emphasis on "natural-ness" is derived from a prior appropriation of value to a certain standard.

My argument is that morality is simply an encoding of the organisation by which a social system can persist. And to pretend it is anything more high-falutin' than that is a damaging romantic delusion. — apokrisis

You are merely asserting that the anthropological history of morality defines what morality currently is or could be in the future, thus limiting its prospects.

Hence why I am repeatedly said before that your position is inherently affirmative - affirmative of society, affirmative of progress, affirmative of life. While I am coming from a non-affirmative, perhaps negative, perspective, in which morality is not a tool to be used to enhance our ability to survive but rather a truly reflective enterprise meant to overthrow past assumptions based upon a critical analysis of the world we live in.

Why do they deserve it? I give the natural reasons. You talk about your emotions. — apokrisis

No, you also give emotional arguments because you have placed value upon the "natural" state, thus making it susceptible to moral discussion. Nothing discovered under the microscope is inherently moral or valuable - in the absence of any transcendental Good, value comes from the person.

These natural reasons are valuable because you think they are valuable because you have placed value on whatever it is that these reasons uphold.

Systems have a logic based on constraints and the freedoms they shape (which are the freedoms needed to energetically reconstruct that prevailing state of constraint).

So the reasons why society has to be that way - global cooperation and local competition - is that it is what works. Marxism, anarchy, flower power, dictatorships, communes - there are plenty of examples of alternatives that didn't work because they did not strike the right balance. — apokrisis

Right...so because it works, therefore it's moral?

You have jumped the is-ought gap here by implicitly assuming a standard that these reasons uphold. A standard that does not ring true to me at all as being obviously moral.

Today of course we can develop morality based on a proper understanding of natural systems. Which is where we can start to criticise much of how modern society might be organised from a credible basis.

That means I have no patience for your fact-lite PC guilt-tripping. If you want to make credible arguments, establish a proper basis for them. — apokrisis

Yes, but you still have to argue for what the standard should be that we should attempt to strive for.

The argument is that morality reflects the communal best interest. — apokrisis

Yes, but why should we consider communal best interest to be more important than a global community's best interest?

So the bleeding point of it is to transcend your personal feelings about what ought to the case because the very idea of suffering causes you unendurable suffering. — apokrisis

No, it's because no triumph or something silly like that can phenomenally compare to suffering as it is experienced in sentient organisms.

Personally I find cats delightful and dogs repulsive. Emotionally, the idea of vivisectionists experimenting on kittens is appalling, but beagles don't move me the same way. — apokrisis

This is not my argument. My argument is not that we must personally love animals. My argument is that we must treat animals with respect because they deserve it. I've said this many times before, we don't actually have to be animal lovers to recognize this.

Ethics is not about being comfortable or justifying our inherent animalistic dispositions.

I'll say it again. The systems view is explicit that society is a balance between competitive and co-operative imperatives. We need both to make society work. So there is self-interest in getting my own selfish way, alongside the self-interest in my community flourishing. — apokrisis

Oh, certainly we have to have these in place for a certain kind of society to work. But why should this constrain the possibilities?

We obviously have different views as to what constitutes the "good". I am willing to accept this, so long as you are willing to accept that the flourishing of society is not on my list of priorities for reasons I have already stated.

No I'm not. I'm taking the view that talk about categorical imperatives is transcendent bunk. As a Pragmatist, I can only support reasoned approaches to morality - ones that are natural. And I've said that all along, so I hardly have to come out of the closet about it. — apokrisis

I said in practice we do care about animals to the degree they "give back to us". And this is natural as morality is all about the practical business of organising social relations. We are social creatures and ethical frameworks exist to optimise that. As social creatures, we now have extended that to the realm of domesticated animals. We treat domestic animals differently from wild animals or good reason. We do things like pay their vet bills because we accept their welfare as our responsibility. — apokrisis

Right, so you are under the framework that what has been done, and what we currently do, is what we ought to continue to do because it's natural and rational, or in our own self-interest.

In other words, comfort is evidence of moral value. If we aren't comfortable with the prospect of giving up our dominion over animals, then by golly it's not important.

Not only can we do these things, but we do do these things. However the best argument is going to be that it is rational self-interest to do so. — apokrisis

Yet this is false because we hold many moral beliefs that are not in our best-interest. Perhaps we hold that lying is wrong, even if we could get away with it. It may be in our best-interests to lie, but perhaps we just don't think it's right to lie. Or perhaps we realize how our money would be better spent on aiding those in need, instead of buying that new video game that we want.

Or rather you are trying to win an argument by using emotionally loaded terms. I prefer reason and evidence myself. — apokrisis

As if ethics is entirely disconnected from emotion. Because self-interest isn't emotional at its core...?

This gets very weird. You want to cause us the suffering that is to feel guilt even if there is then nothing we could do to assuage that guilt you have created?

Is that ethical in your book? — apokrisis

Well, yes, it is appropriate, since your guilt is insignificant compared to the suffering of wild animals, which we do indeed have an ability to minimize. It's not that I want you to feel guilt, I want to you act more ethically. It does no good by proclaiming something moral or immoral if everyone is coming from different metaethical perspectives. So I resort to appealing to universal ethical concepts and asking people to consider why they constrain these concepts to a select few.

I really don't have much use for moral condemnation. I'm interested in presenting an ethical position that I feel should be pursued, by presenting facts and allowing others to come to the same conclusion that I have. This takes the form of an if-then counterfactual. If you abide by equality, then you ought to treat animals with respect (unless you have a good reason, i.e. a constraint, not to).

In your case, this reason seems to be rational self-interest. Yet this does not satisfy the open ended question very well, and especially conflicts with our intuitions that maybe we should focus on the welfare of people instead of merely seeing them as a means to an end for our own purposes. Because that is what rational self-interest egoism entails: that we care for others so long as we ourselves benefit from this. And I cannot be the only one who finds this to be troubling.

So I will say something along the lines of: if you care about suffering, then you will do something about it. This, I take it, is a fact - if you care about something, then you will do something relevant to it. If you don't want to do something about suffering, then you must not care about suffering. And I'll let you figure the rest out for yourself, and come to terms with this. If you don't care about suffering, then so be it. Likewise, if you don't care about equality, then so be it. Just don't pretend you do.

I'd like to see you attempt.

A scientific belief is a type of philosophical belief. To attempt to separate the two is to drive a nail in a complex and symbiotic relationship between the two.

So it is about the group dynamic - the give and take of mutual interests. But to simply give rights without reasons is arbitrary and irrational, unless you can argue for some further transcendent principle at work. — apokrisis

You're conflating hypothetical imperatives with categorical imperatives. You use "rational" (i.e. self-interest) as the motivating reason to adopt a moral scheme. This is all fair and good, if you're a moral egoist or an anti-realist non-cognitivist who rejects categorical imperatives. But then just come out and say so, and admit that the categorical imperative is really just self-interest.

Yet I think it is clear that morality, as it is being discussed here, is about the categorical imperatives. We are talking about morality as if there is some non-selfish reason to follow these rules. We are talking about a morality that clearly goes beyond self-centered behavior. Which is why I have relied upon appeals to the more "transcendent" moral principles, like equality, to defend my claim.

The fact that animals cannot really "give back" to you is seen as evidence by yourself that they are not worthy of ethical consideration, as helping them would be irrational (against our own interests). Yet I hope that you agree that this strikes a chord in some sense - that despite being "irrational" (altruistic), we still feel compelled to act this way.

Indeed, it is inherent to hypothetical imperatives that they seem to not settle the open-ended question.

So what I am advocating here then is an abandonment of conventional, historical morality. So humans tended to other humans who were part of their small clan in the past...so what? So humans have historically abused and instrumentalized animals in the past...so what? So humans have systematically discriminated against each other based on race, sex, or any other means...so what? Should we continue to espouse tribalistic behavior? Should we continue to abuse animals? Should we continue to discriminate against members of our own species simply because they have different shades of skin or different genitals? Are we not better than that? Can we not move on from these beastly behaviors? Can we not recognize that there is a difference between rationality and ethicality? Can we not recognize that, if we existed in a different world, we might not have to espouse these ancient, oppressive traditions?

By calling these traditions "oppressive", "tribalistic", "totalitarian", "unequal", etc., I am identifying an actual quality of these traditions. They really are oppressive, tribalistic, totalitarian, and unequal, whether you like to admit it or not. And my hope is that, once you admit this fact, your sense of morality will fire up and you will reject these prior traditions in virtue of the fact that they are oppressive, tribalistic, totalitarian, and unequal.

You could accuse me of putting everyone on a guilt-trip; yet this guilt is precisely why I think we ought to abandon these traditions. After all, I am only pointing out facts. Whether or not we are able to act ethically is entirely irrelevant to the discussion.

Umm...ok?

If part of the reason that we treat people better than we treat animals is that people are human then it's not inconsistent or irrational to treat people better than we treat animals. — Michael

But there needs to be a justification for why humans are special.

Perhaps we're special because we can vote or do philosophy. In which case, yes, we shouldn't give voting rights to animals because they can't vote! Yet they can suffer (as can we). They fulfill some standard necessary for a right to be applied.

What reasons do you have for believing that all things (and only those things?) which can suffer deserve equal ethical consideration? You keep asserting it and demanding that others prove you wrong, but that's shifting the burden of proof. — Michael

Well, because I think all value comes down to a balance of pain and pleasure.

But anyway this misses the point. I'm not arguing that only things that can suffer are worthy of consideration (although I do agree with this), I'm arguing that things that can suffer are worthy of consideration (among other possible things), and that animals can suffer. No matter what else you believe, I take it as a common value that if you can suffer, you are ethically relevant.

It's not my job to argue against your claim. It's your job to defend your claim. — Michael

I have, by appealing to our sense of equality. I have offered a reductionist approach to this issue: there is no good reason to not apply equality to animals.

Or to put it another way, you can't go from "all humans ought be treated equally" to "all things which can suffer ought be treated equally". And there's nothing arbitrary, irrational, or inconsistent about the former. — Michael

But I can, because I have argued that humans ought to be treated equally not because they are humans, but because they can suffer. I have pointed out how any other justification is inherently tribalism.

It is an inescapable truth that human rights (if such a concept has any meaning anyway) are the distillation of ethical arguments by humans, about humans, and for humans. There is no rational or logical argument by which the qualifier 'human' may be erased. They do not, by definition, apply to any species other than humans. For any other species to have these rights they must not simply resemble humans they must be humans or identical to humans. — Barry Etheridge

So you're appealing to the historic application of rights to argue that we ought not to apply these rights to other creatures.

"Human", in the case, can be replaced with "sentient". Indeed that's what our arrogance had us believe was the case: that humans were the only sentients on earth. But we know better now. Not giving animals rights is akin to not giving blacks rights because they're "sub-human".

This is high order sophistry! One is never required to prove a negative. It is the plaintiff that must prove his case, something which you have singularly failed to do in my opinion. The defendant is not required to prove anything. — Barry Etheridge

Quite the contrary. If there is any doubt in our mind that an organism is capable of suffering, then it is the skeptic that must provide evidence that they cannot feel suffering.

Thank God Chalmers cut his hair.

While I doubt I'm anywhere near as enthusiastic as you are, I very much enjoyed what I have read from him. I don't know what personal failings people mock him with - perhaps his ugliness or his lack of success in love - but I would regard bringing them into a discussion of his philosophy, unless there was a very clear link between them and the philosophy itself - as delete-worthy behavior. I am relatively new on here so I don't know all the available buttons yet, but I imagine there is a Report button you could use to report such posts to moderators. — andrewk

Certainly it would be an ad hominem to attack Schopenhauer's philosophy simply because he was a dick - but it really was the case that good ol' Arthur could be a real ass, even going as far as to rip ad hominems on Hegel and co. For example, Schopenhauer has this to say about Hegel:

"An unbiased reader, on opening one of their [Fichte’s, Schelling’s or Hegel’s] books and then asking himself whether this is the tone of a thinker wanting to instruct or that of a charlatan wanting to impress, cannot be five minutes in any doubt. … The tone of calm investigation, which had characterized all previous philosophy, is exchanged for that of unshakeable certainty, such as is peculiar to charlatanry of every kind and at all times. … From every page and every line, there speaks an endeavor to beguile and deceive the reader, first by producing an effect to dumbfound him, then by incomprehensible phrases and even sheer nonsense to stun and stupefy him, and again by audacity of assertion to puzzle him, in short, to throw dust in his eyes and mystify him as much as possible."

In other words, Schopenhauer was pissy cause everyone went to Hegel's seminars and nobody went to his own, even though he scheduled them at around the same time. Interestingly enough I think this criticism of Hegel's works can be applied to Schopenhauer's works at times, what with his worship of Kant and his assertions about human development (accurate or not). If tone was all that mattered to truth, then Schopenhauer would be right with his despised nemesis.

He was an elitest, a misogynist, a hypocrite, and he hated his mother (oh my!). None of this touches the validity of his philosophy - but it certainly doesn't paint him in a good light either. No wonder nobody wanted to be associated with him.

If animals, for instance, can't imagine their own extinction by death and so experience existential dread, then do we get to take that distinction into account, or not? — apokrisis

Well, sure, but we'll have to have solid evidence to show that they can't feel dread. In any case the murder of a non-human sentient would be similar to the murder of a human - you are taking away the chance to experience potential good in the future, or the freedom to do so. Ignoring this just makes them out to be machines with no purpose or goal, which just isn't true (or, at the least, should not be assumed)

You are taking an all or nothing approach to sentience. And where are the facts that would justify such an arbitrary stance on your part? — apokrisis

No, I am taking an all-or-nothing approach to ethics about sentience. I understand how minds exist in a gradience. This does little to the ethics of sentience, however.

What do you mean by it not making sense? — Michael

I mean that it is not consistent or rational.

Why limit rights to only those things which can suffer? And why do we need justification to not give them rights? — Michael

Well, because having a feeling mind carries with it certain liabilities, like the capacity to suffer. And I see no good reason to posit alternative capacities that makes something worthy of ethical consideration. They don't fulfill the open-ended question.

Why must our application of moral rights not be arbitrary? If I choose to give some people cake but not others then I'm being arbitrary. Am I obligated to give everyone else cake? Of course not. So that we choose to give some things rights but not others is arbitrary. Are we obligated to give everything else rights? Prima facie, no. A case needs to be made for other things deserving rights. And maybe non-human animals don't deserve the same rights as us, either because they can't suffer or because a capacity to suffer is not sufficient. — Michael

Again, if we apply the concept of equality universally, then we'll see how giving some people cake but not others is not advisable - is this not the basis of socialism?

I am coming from a perspective that affirms the concept of equality and the ethical importance of suffering. In order to argue against my claim, then, you will need to argue that equality shouldn't be applied universally (and thus not be equality in any meaningful sense), and that suffering is not the only ethically important notion - and from my view, the former would depend on arbitrary moral constraints, and the latter fails to fulfill the open-ended question.

Hot damn, that was a fantastic rant.

So? Clearly our moral considerations do not just take into account harm done, which is exactly why it is not sufficient to argue that animals ought be treated with equality simply because they can be harmed. — Michael

Yet we can refine our moral considerations and reject the notions of common sense morality that make no sense.

Administering rights at all requires justification (if it requires justification at all). And it might be that part of the justification for administering rights to humans is that they are human – i.e. humans have rights not because they can suffer but because they are human – and given that non-human animals are not human it is not arbitrary, contradictory, or irrational to administer rights to humans but not to non-human animals. — Michael

But why should we limit these rights to only humans? As I've shown there's really no justification to not give these rights to non-human animals.

I'm guessing the implicit premise is "we ought not kill things which can suffer". Clearly this isn't a premise that many agree with. — Michael

I disagree. A lot of people see animals as "lesser" creatures, of a "lesser" intellect and thus "logically" (?) "lesser" emotional capacity. They don't disagree with the notion that we ought not kill or harm things which can suffer. They just think that non-human animals are more akin to machines than feeling creatures.

It says something about the arbitrariness of common-sense morality when we look at how a hunter might own a pet dog to help sniff out the game, and has an emotional connection to this animal and cares about its welfare, while simultaneously failing to attribute these same rights to the elk it murders. It's cherry-picking bullshit, through and through.

I think I see your problem.... — apokrisis

Or rather, you should see this as your problem and look into why the constraints of common sense morality are largely arbitrary and defenseless.

It's only arbitrary if sentience is the only relevant factor. Given that we also give rights to the dead would suggest that this isn't the case. Rather it seems that humanity is a relevant factor. And given that non-human animals aren't human, it's not inconsistent to not give them the same rights as us. — Michael

In which case, I would urge us to reconsider our prior beliefs. Ancestor worship is irrational, the deceased are no more and cannot be harmed. Only the memory of them can be tarnished. So we aren't giving rights to the dead as much as we are preserving a legacy of this person.

I don't quite understand the implication of this. What exact rights are you proposing we give to non-human animals? The right to marriage and to run for President? What does treating animals with equality actually entail? — Michael

Right, so animals can't vote. They can't write dissertations defending their right to not be abused. They can't collectively come together and petition for change.

Equality in this sense does not register as equal "everything", just as equality between the sexes does not mean men can get abortions (it doesn't make sense). Rather, equality means equal treatment - if we treat humans with respect, then we ought to treat animals with respect. If we wouldn't murder a human, then we ought not murder an animal. If we wouldn't enslave a human (anymore at least...), then we ought not enslave an animal.

Administering rights to humans but not to non-human animals requires a justification, which will take the form of an ethical constraint. Yet, as I have argued, there are no constraints that aren't arbitrary, contradictory, or irrational.