Good and evil are relational. It is the relation between what is and what is adequate that makes things good or bad. There is nothing bad about cancer cells growing in a petri dish, only cancer cells interfering with health are a physical evil. — Dfpolis

Exactly. Ergo there is nothing objectively evil about cancer, only subjectively evil about my cancer or the cancer of a loved one, or my general reduced life expectancy because of the existence of cancer (immature railing against death).

I am surprised to find that you think we are designed at all. — Dfpolis

In the blind watchmaker sense :)

In the course of dying, our health will decline, and that is a physical, but not a moral, evil. So, what point are you making? — Dfpolis

That there is nothing 'evil' about it. It's merely a fact of life, without which we'd have nothing to complain about... Or with!

To deteriorate is to become worse. In other words, something was better and has now lost its previous perfection. — Dfpolis

I was saying that nothing deteriorated.

You seem to think ideas exist in the ether, and that they are not tied to a consciousness ground, and not subject to evolutionary principles.
— Pop

Yes, of course, just as numbers, functions, sets, properties, relationships, and all the other abstract things exist in the ‘above-heavenly world (hyperuranion)’ – which is just another way of saying that they don’t exist in space or time (but not outside them, either, for outsideness is a spatial notion) – and aren’t tied to awareness or evolution or anything conrete for that matter, be it physical, mindly, spatial, or temporal. — Tristan L

In the context of creativity, which this must be, my issue is that this is a philosopher's idea of "idea" being conflated with a creative person's idea of "idea". You are free to define your terms as you see fit, of course, but when I "have an idea" in a creative context, it is not some abstract thing, nor is it the output of a creative act.

I think Pfhorrest's description of it as a configuration space is accurate. Your algorithm and that used in the link I posted above is a brute force, unguided trawl through this configuration space, where each dimension is an independently variable (if not uncorrelated) parameter of creative exploration. (In music, tempo could be one, key another, verse melody, verse first harmony, verse second harmony, etc.) There is no means of assessing the success of the search.

When I have an idea for a song, say, it will typically be a bassline, or melody, or an interesting harmony for a section of the song, or maybe the theme of a lyric. This does not pin down the song, but rather it significantly reduces the number and/or range of those parameters. I.e. instead of searching the entire configuration space, I am searching a highly constrained subspace.

But most importantly, an idea comes with its own rough measure of success. If I am to explore an idea, I will have some means of assessing whether the execution, after further refinement, fell short of, met, or exceeded whatever quality made the idea attractive. So an idea, in a creative sense, means to me a highly guided, highly constrained search through a configuration subspace.

Computer algorithms are very good at the searching, but they need to be told what success looks like, something entirely absent from the infinite monkeys approach, and something difficult to conceive a computer figuring out by itself. Generally I think ideas are results of prior searches and some exact solutions (a great song I heard) whose vicinity could be explored with some translation. (What does Stand By Me sound like in a minor key? for instance.)

A masochist would have people cause him pain. Following the Golden Rule, would he have to conclude that he should cause other people pain ? — MMusings

The earlier formulations are prohibitive, not compulsions. Yes, Jesus would have a masochist hurt others, but you could not reach that conclusion from the others except Jainism.

I didn't appreciate til now what a mental midget Jesus was. Everyone managed to get it right for centuries and he still fluffed it.

It's just that here in America it's more of a losing battle for you. — 3017amen

It really isn't. Even in the USA, Christianity is on the decline, having dropped 25% in the last 30 years. And good riddance to it, honestly. Islam... That's the bugger to watch out for.

Just a random coincidence or are we dealing with the same force, only at different scales? — TheMadFool

Could be the latter but, even if electric and gravitational forces have no identification at any scale, it is not a coincidence. The inverse square law is a consequence of geometry and conservation laws. If you picture an arbitrarily thin, spherical shell around a point charge/mass at its centre, the amount of radiative energy in that shell must equal the amount in any other shell, since it all radiates from the same point. Since the shell area increases as r^2, the energy density must decrease as r^2.

Cancer is a physical evil because it, itself, is a privation of health. — Dfpolis

This makes no sense. Something cannot have a property in and of itself if that property depends on other properties of other things. If the ball is objectively red, it is so independent of the state of any observer. To say it is red because people with red-green colour blindness see it as such is not a statement of its objective properties.

First, we're not designed to live on carcinogens. If we were, they wouldn't harm us. — Dfpolis

We are designed to breathe molecular oxygen which is a mild carcinogen.

Second, the very fact that you call it a "deterioration," means that it is a lesser state. i.e. one in which some perfection is no longer present. — Dfpolis

That can't seriously be your argument. So if I say "There is no God," do you then think there must be a God in order for him to not exist? Fun! I was describing the absence of a deterioration, not a presence.

It is neither immature nor ranting to call things by their proper names. — Dfpolis

Correct. But not pertinent here.

What do you mean by "text"? Where did Tristan limit his purview to texts? — Luke

In a post you responded to, even quoted, but apparently didn't bother to read. I disagree btw with the notion that ideas pre-exist their discovery, but Tristan has defined his terms robustly. You can lead a horse to water...

However, not every string of characters is an idea. — Luke

This is irrelevant. Every text -- and Tristan limited his purview to texts -- is a string of characters. That is, by searching the entire space of strings of characters, one searches the entire space of texts.

Rome conquered them first — Gregory

And that was intentional, as evidenced by the huge scale military action. That is not, therefore, a crazed conspiracy theory.

This is also incorrect. I, and most other people, accept the fact that bad things happen. I do not wish to continue if you are going to engage in further ad hominem attacks. — Dfpolis

I wasn't describing your discourse but the general railing against death of mankind.

I never implied that it was. — Dfpolis

Actually you did, but if you agree that a cause of a thing is not the thing itself, then you agree yours was an irrelevant point since the claim is that a thing like cancer is objectively evil in itself.

So? The evil is still a privation -- the lack of a perfection in a human being. — Dfpolis

But again this is meaningless poetics. It isn't based on fact. If we are designed to rely on carcinogenic substances to live, thus assuring eventual deterioration of health, then there is no meaningful perfection of human life that is deprived by this deterioration. That's not evil, it's just irrational, immature, arrogant, egotistical railing against our own nature's. Again, not crediting you with this feature: it seems to be a constant.

For saying that they make up things like every religion in the world? — Gregory

No, for describing it as a conspiracy theory to take over the West. Standard anti-Semitic delusion.

And this view collapses charge and parity into a single formalism (or at least, that was what I have been meaning to check more carefully). — apokrisis

I don't know much about LQG but if P is fixed by C before the symmetry-breaking of the Higgs mechanism and at high (relativistic) energies, that would seem to exacerbate the problem of matter-antimatter imbalance that CP-violation solves. Either way, I'm not sure how you expected anyone to read the above into what you were saying earlier. I was just clarifying that matter and antimatter can have either spin, that's all.

I said that was their intent. You can't prove otherwise — Gregory

Then I was quite accurate in describing you as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist nutjob.

No it would be "(another part of)will" deciding to chose, because you don't like indecision for instance. — ChatteringMonkey

Probably rarely will, at least directly. One might will to flip a coin in the case of two equally good or neutral options, but the actual choice at hand is left to chance. Or, in the case of two equally bad options, one might lose one's temper and lash out, altering the choice through unintended violence against one's environment: an entirely unwilled action.

If you took pleasure in harm to others, you would lack the disposition to empathize proper to a social animal, which humans are. So, you would be a defective human being. — Dfpolis

That is perfectly reasonable as a description of cause. I behave this because I lack, e.g. empathy. The act itself is not its own cause.

because it deprives their bodies of their proper function. — Dfpolis

Again, this is not a description of the thing, but of the impact of the thing on the sufferer. Also, were we to die of nothing else, we would die of cancer due to the small carcinogenic properties of the very oxygen essential to our life. Death is not evil unless life is; it is built into life. Cancer is a fact. Death is a fact. Describing such things as evils is precisely the adolescent temper tantrum I mentioned, nothing more than an inability to accept facts that don't happen to suit us. There is little that is more subjective.

When we look at examples of evil, we always see a privation of some perfection -- of good health, of justice, of compassion, of rights, etc. So, while you may use words as you wish, I prefer to analyze examples to understand what terms mean. — Dfpolis

A "privation of some perfection" is, again, poetry. If, for instance, you were to take pleasure in the pain of someone you did not cause, no one and no thing is literally being deprived. One might say that an ideal is being lessened, but this has no meaning outside of a poetic sense. And while I like poetry, it is metaphor. Having established the metaphor as metaphor, one cannot also treat it as literal.

Cancer in and of itself is a mindless and inevitable consequence of terrestrial biology. It was not created with purpose, does not proceed with purpose, and knows nothing of harm. It is only with respect to someone it impacts that it takes on the quality of evil and only in a poetic sense. It is our arrogance and bias that says we do not deserve it, should not have it, are being deprived. 'It is unfair because it effects *me*.'

As I say, I don't object to the poetry, but it mustn't be then treated as a literal example of evil. If one wishes to speak of harm or privation in a literal sense, whether by evil or by accident, those words are already accurate. I find it intensely egomaniacal to believe that anything that harms one is evil, like a teenager throwing a tantrum because they do not get what they want, when they want, and hang the consequences. (You might infer correctly that I am blessed with two such teenagers :D )

Yes, it is literally evil -- a privation of good health. — Dfpolis

Even that is with respect to the host, not of cancer in and of itself. Evil is not defined as a privation of anything. It is defined in terms of immorality or wickedness.

One might point to ideologies that put an emphasis on individual liberties, and look for an explanation in people wanting to rationalize their ideologically inspired beliefs. — ChatteringMonkey

That is true, but distinct. The liberty objection has been put, and I think this also weighs in on the question. But that just highlights the madness of reaching for a conspiracy theory among those who apparently find the ideological challenge insufficient.

I do think, though, that libertarianism is enough of a barrier to climate change action, even without crazed conspiracy theories. We cannot be free to do as we please and take responsibility for the world, since we have demonstrated that, given the former, we do not act on the latter.

I don't think that is what motivates those people holding those ideas. They want to be defiant — ChatteringMonkey

Oh, I wasn't saying that they're motivated by stupidity. The people themselves might not even be stupid. But I don't think it's an arbitrary manifestation of defiance either. In almost every example I can think of where obviously outrageous claims are made in defence of such defiance, it corresponds to an impact on someone's personal life or beliefs, from insane anti-Semitic 9-11 theories and "teach the controversy", through Pizzagate, to the Covid hoax and postal voter fraud. It's rarely difficult to see why someone is adopting or defending a batshit crazy theory.

Defiance for defiance sake doesn't require or justify idiotic conspiracy theories.

Kenosha Kid, I'd like to add to that, that while the idea itself from the example you gave may be stupid, I can understand the general sentiment behind it. People have been lied to continuously in order to get them to sacrifice for the greater good, only to learn that the greater good usually meant some select group.

So rather than stupidity, it seem to me it's more a case of wilful defiance. There is no trust whatsoever in what authorities say, and a sense of living in a world that is only out to get you... which has led to a deep cynicism and instinctive reactions to try to repel manipulation. — ChatteringMonkey

My comment was not against accusing governments of bad faith generally. It was pretty clear to me that Iraq had nothing to do with national security or human rights, and everything to do with oil, for instance. I don't think this is a "stupid" accusation on the grounds that the governments involved denied it; on the contrary one can see why the US would want to implement a friendly Iraq government and one can see why they'd like about it. And it had precedent.

This is not an excuse for insane conspiracy theory. The idea that world governments all over are harming their own economies and political credit for an arbitrary exercise in control is not only unprecedented, it is outright stupid

There is a difference.

We were not discussing subjective moral character, but whether good and evil can be objective. — Dfpolis

When we say cancer is an evil, it is poetic. It is not literally evil. Poetry makes sense subjectively insofar as cancer feels like an evil done to us or loved ones. This does not imbue cancer with an objective property of 'evil'.

I find myself increasingly incline towards misanthropy. It's the form of Humanism that realises that all we have is each other, then looks around in despair. — Banno

:up:

One of the profound epiphanies that Covid gave us is that people will claim to believe anything, no matter how utterly, insanely stupid, in order to minimise the impact of social responsibility on their personal lives. In the UK, a significant proportion of people have taken to coughing and spitting on anyone who asks them to wear face masks or observe social distancing. The justification is that Covid is a hoax designed to, I don't know, create a market for face masks or something. Given the economic and political harm Covid inevitably inflicted, it's a mind-boggingly stupid idea that cannot stand on its own merits. It is adopted because of its utility, not it's sanity.

This does not bode well for environmental conscientiousness. Currently, what environmental measures we have in place are minimal, hypocritical and enforced punitively. I have little doubt now that any serious attempt to reverse climate change would be interpreted as an equally insane conspiracy as soon as it impacted people's daily lives. They'd probably hold fossil fuel burning parties in protest. :o

Some people opt to be non-religious for the following reason: different religions make different and contradictory claims — Jjnan1

Unlikely. More likely this is given as one of a great many explanations as to why they do not adopt a religion henceforth. The overwhelming reason why non-religious people are non-religious is that they were not indoctrinated as children. The second largest reason is that no amount of indoctrination could shield them from evidence and reason. No one "opts" to be non-religious: it is the equilibrium state.

The existence of an equally rational opposite, at most, diminishes the degree of confidence in their warrant, but it does not mean that one should just give up belief in some set of religious claims since one still has some reason that appeals to a particular person in such a way that it makes a particular claim the case for that person. Hence, the original argument seems to not succeed. — Jjnan1

Except that this not a justification for opting to believe in a particular religion, but one for maintaining belief in one you already believe in. It does not collapse the equivalence of each religion, so you have not in fact shown that the argument against adopting a particular religion is unsuccessful. You did a switcheroo from one argument to another and back again. Was that conscious?

I was steering towards a discussion of chirality. That should have been obvious. — apokrisis

Yeah, stupid me.

So the difference between an electron and a positron is simply that one is left handed, the other right, in its “spin”. — apokrisis

This is not true. An electron may be spin up or down.

Intense belief must be backed by equally sufficient evidence. — Josh Vasquez

False. And trivial to demonstrate. There are many religions, and all can't be true. All have had intense believers and martyrs and they can't all have equally sufficient evidence.

But also just logically this is a weak play. All it says is that you will not admit any cause of intense belief in the object of *your* belief that does not affirm that belief. It's just more Christian faith, it's not a proof.

You are confused. I am not saying that good or bad acts have a moral dimension independently of the intent of the agent, just that they are objectively good or bad. — Dfpolis

I don't think you know what you're saying. Yes, a tyre can be good or bad. But it can't be evil. What value you think pointing out that a tyre can be bad to the argument that it is moral actors who have moral qualities is beyond me. Are you just saying that other, non-moral qualities may be objective? No argument from me, but it's irrelevant.

It's not about Jews in particular. Religious documents, like the Book of Mormons for example, were written in order to take over a region of people — Gregory

You can wtite a pamphlet to try and convince people you're right. You can't create one to "take over Rome and the west". The spread of Christianity did not rely on the Bible, but on violent world and church leaders. Conflating outcome and intent is a conspiracy theorist play.

Morality reflects the agent's intentionality, not directly the good or evil (privation of good) of acts. — Dfpolis

Good and evil are moral categories. They do not admit non-moral elements. But this is a semantic issue. Point being, pushing a child is not morally positive or negative, but depends on whether the intention is to push them into or away from traffic :) For an example of the absurdity of endowing acts with moral dimensions see, for instance, this thread: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7660/natural-evil-explained

Mass is considered a charge, charge being generalised to cover electromagnetics, nuclear force, and gravity. Why it's positive and negative is simple: a hydrogen atom, consisting of one proton and one electron, has a net charge of e + -e = 0.

Charges are properties of elementary particles. Thermodynamics is the behaviour of groups of particles.

You assert that ‘clothes are necessary for basic survival’, but many posters here have pointed out that clothes are needed to survive only in some circumstances, not all. There are, in fact, many human experiences in which nakedness is not even a health risk, let alone a risk to survival. Clothes are useful for survival, but not necessary. — Possibility

Pointing out that there are specific situations in which clothing is not required is not the same as showing that clothing is unnecessary. To do that, you'd need to show that there is never a survival advantage. That is obviously not true.

Personally, my clothing is necessary because no one other than me should ever have to deal with this middle-age spread

Acts can be objectively good and evil — Dfpolis

Any theory that assumes that the act itself has moral character will inevitably generate absurd moral statements. It doesn't take long to think of examples.

If neither side agree that the other is being reasonable, how do you know they both mean the same thing by 'reasonable'? Case in point, I've never seen a critique of Darwinism that refuted one of its postulates, or its derivation, or provided empirical evidence that didn't turn out to be false, or refuted empirical evidence in a sensible way. The overall anti-Darwinist thrust is not that Darwin made a mistake, but that his conclusions are obviously wrong because we know that God created all the animals. This can never be described by an atheist as a reasonable argument: knowing the answer in advance is not a process of reason. But I imagine to the theists making such arguments, it seems perfectly reasonable.

Dooesnt dawn on them that first century Jews might have had an agenda in writing the Gospels. Like the take over of Rome and the West. And isn't that exactly what happened — Gregory

Yeah, we're dastardly like that. I have a question... Why do people who think that Jews are super-organised and super-villianous always announce themselves? Aren't you at all worried I might tell the rest of the Jews that you're onto us? I mean, if we brought down Rome, imagine what we're doing with today's technology. It's almost like you have to be stupid to think this stuff.

One argument in favor of (1) is:
a) Logical inference requires that premises and conclusions have truth-values.
b) There are logical inferences (and other logical relations) between normative statements.
c) Therefore normative statements have truth-values. — MMusings

The ability to make logical inferences between normative statements, or indeed any statements, says nothing about those statements' truth values.

Not sure if you made a typo here, but objectivism as I mean it is context-DEpendent but observer-INdependent. — Pfhorrest

No typo:

who is making the judgement is an important part of the context of the moral statement — Kenosha Kid

When we judge moral acts, we must take them out of context to some degree. Our brains simply lack the capacity to represent everything that might be relevant. So, we are forced to deal with abstractions, treating what seems most relevant to us -- not the situation in its full complexity. That is why Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that we most not expect the same degree of exactness in all sciences. — Dfpolis

Yes, I was going to suggest looking at how we assess the moral value of an action taken by an actor in a given scenario, how, in order to estimate that value, it would be necessary to understand the actor himself. And in truth this is attempted in most courts of law in most progressive countries,albeit filtered by narrative-building.

The moral character of an action really comes down to whether that action was made in good faith, in bad faith, without moral dimension, or nonetheless without moral consideration (e.g. neglect), all of which grants primacy not to the action but to the perspective of the actor. Which is harder for philosophers to deal with, both in terms of complexity and incompleteness, because there is a limit to how much we can understand. And I think this is why relativism is rejected on grounds of taste. We want hard and fast rules, but pragmatically we have to assess each case separately to the best of our abilities, accounting for the perspective of he or she we judge. Allowing this degree of context-dependence in a moral objective framework strikes me as a covert admission that morality is not objective, that if a particular judgment can depend on the actor, it must necessarily depend also on the judge who seeks to understand it.

I don't know if someone already posted it, but this seems relevant:

https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw

As a songwriter, accident plays an enormous role, and as a musician jamming is the main means of creating opportunities for accidents. This is a semi-guided search of configuration space, where you stop when you find something aesthetically pleasing and hopefully original-sounding (parameters of the metric we're optimising). But sometimes a riff, baseline, melody, chord sequence or drum beat just seems to occur to me. My feeling is that this is a similar kind of search, just in a highly discontinuous way. Sometimes a new starting position is seeded well before it's explored.

The similarity between creativity and numerical optimisation is a subject I'm extremely interested in. Obviously I'm a tad late to join in, but I'm encouraged to see that others think similarly. I raised this on a writing forum once. It was a very unpopular opinion haha!

↪Isaac You and Kenosha Kid are the first two to come to mind. He really seems to go back and forth about whether he actually seems like a relativist in practice, throughout his descriptions of his position, but he consistently calls himself one. — Pfhorrest

Sorry, late for the party. It depends what you mean, of course. If you simply mean the rejection of objectively true moral statements as per the OP, yes, I am an atheist of moral objectivity. In my experience, objectivists tend to use the term perjoratively a la Chomsky to mean something like a moral Zelig or to suggest a moral nihilism. I am neither.

Btw... who is making the judgement is an important part of the context of the moral statement. You can have context-independence, or you can have observer-dependence. I don't think both is logical.

What light can or cannot do is irrelevant to my point. It is similar in other ways, which is why I brought it up. My arguments have not been based on light signals. — noAxioms

You cannot talk of length-contraction and hold that what light can or cannot do is irrelevant. That makes absolutely no sense. Relativity is fundamentally tied to the behaviour of light in different frames. Remove that, and you lose the Lorentz transformations. Remove the Lorentz transformations and you lose length contraction. Lose that, and you have no Rindler coordinate system. As tempting as it is for the lay person to jump in at the most fascinating stuff, you have to know the relevant foundations, otherwise you find yourself saying things like the above. Sorry, that's just the way it is.