You will neither, then, mend nor finish what you started? You will not offer understanding, clarity, or definition when asked? You will not educate but instead threaten? Do you know what this site is, is for? At the moment you appear to reveal yourself as an empty shell. I have to dismiss you, a kind of Hitchen's razor. I trust others will do the same, until and unless you improve. — tim wood

Are you aware that you are doing exactly that which you accuse me of doing?

You have been asked (explicitly) for your understanding, or a definition, or some clarity, and you have not provided any. Why not? Perhaps you are an empty shell?

You say I do not educate, but threaten. In fact, I have threatened nothing. I have stated that I do not wish to participate in a cross-examination, but would be interested in a discussion - an exchanging of information. Again, you seem averse, as you will only ask, but not answer questions. If you actually have nothing to say, then I will not really lose anything if you refuse to talk to me.

As for educating, I am doing it right now.

Sir, I may be new to this site, but I am not new.

It isn't clear to me that justice is (such) a set of rules, or that anyone has to follow them. So you've already started your paragraph. Mend as you go, or finish and then mend? — tim wood

And it isn't clear to me what you think justice is, or might be. You will provide another side to this conversation, or it won't happen.

See edit. You big winner, you. — Outlander

I did see it. It doesn't change your inability to prove (or apparently even make) your point.

The question was can it be defined sans theological background. Nothing more.

Perception of justice =/= justice. You're told Group A invaded Group B's lands and slaughtered women and children. It was Group C who told you this, and you believe them, so you do the same or otherwise punish Group A. Now say in reality it was Group C who actually did what they said Group A did and you remain unaware. In your mind, and that of everyone else who believes what you believe, this is justice. Is it really? — Outlander

This entire passage is so fraught with fallacies, I don't even know where to begin.

Your initial sentence seems to be the best. Let's start over. The question is "can we define a system of justice without (g)God?" My response is yes, and further that the addition of (g)God would violate the system and make it unjust. You appear to not like my answer, but have not yet articulated anything I can make sense of in response. Trying to put words in my mouth in the form of an incoherent straw man is not actually effectual. Try stating your own opinion as clearly as you can, or discussing something I have said using my actual words.

I don't need to explain myself, it lies in the definitions. God is God. Religious doctrines are man's attempts/efforts/dogmas to explain God and what is asked or required of us. If most of the world calls a spade a rake, is it? Well... perhaps. But let's use a real historic example. If most of the world says the Sun revolves around the Earth, does it? Not really. — Outlander

Er, ok.... Um, let's try: please provide your definition of the word "God" since you claim to have a different one than the rest of us do.

But let me ask you the following question then, do you think it is feasible to get enough people to think about these things in a sufficiently nuanced way for democracy to work as it is intended? Maybe they don't have the time, motivation,talent or whatever.... to do that.

And if the answer is no, wouldn't then the problem be that we have a system that relies for it to work on conditions that we can't really expect to happen? — ChatteringMonkey

And that is why I call it the crisis of Liberalism. You've stated it very well.

I'm afraid I know the answer, but I'm trying to be optimistic anyway.

The information stored in DNA about how a species should flourish is not fundamentally different from human information about how humanity should flourish. The difference is that we communicate this information at warp speed, so that we should be able to control this virus within a few years. — Thomas Quine

Yes, it is fundamentally different. Your own arguments undermine your conclusions. Essentially, you are arguing that there's no difference between natural and artificial selection - but, there is, there just....is. It's why we have two separate concepts.

All you're describing with your animal examples is a gene model of natural selection which only serves to propagate reproduction in animals and pass on the genes, which opens you up to all of @Isaac's criticisms, which are well-founded.

The virus response example further underlines this point. Humans, by virtue of their intelligence, possess an agency in approaching events that all other organisms on this planet absolutely lack. We are different, period. This difference is exactly why we have conversations about, and feel a need for, morality or ethical systems. Animals don't do these things.

I'm sort of amazed that instead of actually trying to develop your thoughts about morality in a human context which is the only one that matters or even exists, that you would rather spend your time pretending that a herd instinct has a moral dimension to it.

If you want to talk about the interesting part of your idea, which I see as "what is the proper scope for systems of human morality?", then I am happy to do so.

If you want to keep trying to convince me that every fish in the ocean is deeply concerned with living his best life and hopes all his fish friends are doing the same, then I'm out. You might find a more sympathetic audience at a screening of Finding Nemo.

Well it does to some, arguably lesser, extend... because otherwise people would revolt. That's why they did go through all the trouble of justifying their rule with ideologies. — ChatteringMonkey

I think we are straying into history here, and away from your point. In modern times, it is clear that Ideology is useful for capturing the imagination of those that are unwilling or unable to do the heavy lifting of actually thinking about a thing.

I just have to push you down this rabbit-hole - is that an injustice? You ought to be able to make your case in a brief paragraph, yes? I'll be an interested reader. I suspect I won't be alone. It's one thing to be able to do something, it's another to be categorically constrained to doing it a particular way. So, why must one exclude god to have any grounds for justice? — tim wood

I'm not being evasive, and I invite this discussion, but that's not achievable in a paragraph. It's much easier to demonstrate with a case study. Would you be willing to throw out a definition of justice or three and we can see how the existence of one (or maybe many for the polytheists out there) participant in a system who isn't required to follow any of that system's rules is inherently unjust?

Yes, i'm mainly talking about politics in democratic systems. But maybe the same thing could be said about ideologies developed in the name of the powers that be before democracies... they were not designed for the purpose of understanding the world. — ChatteringMonkey

True, but in the context of monarchies and oligarchies, it doesn't really matter what "the people" believe.

Agreed, and education as well. The fundamental calling of all philosophers should be to support education. Of what good is wisdom or its pursuit if it is not shared?

Maybe it has gotten worse over the last couple of decades, yes. But I feel like this is not exactly new, and always to some extend the case, because of the way politics works. — ChatteringMonkey

Depends on what you mean by "new". It is only a couple hundred years old. What I think you are describing as politics and ideology don't exist in the same way prior to the Enlightenment.

Well that's just silly. — Outlander

No, it's not, and if we argue about it, I'll win.

However, OP, yes. It is possible to define justice as an atheist. Now, is there any reason to abide by it when nobody is looking and/or you're sure you could get away with it? Not so much. — Outlander

You clearly don't understand what justice is. Paying attention to it whether or not anyone is watching is kind of the point.

Edit: I forgot to realize people conflate God with man-made religion and its doctrines regularly. In fact, most do I believe. Huge, huge difference. Replace the word 'god' with 'man-made religion and its doctrines' and we're on the same page. — Outlander

Um, yes, that is actually the prevailing customary use of the word. I also believe it is the usage intended by the OP. If you would like to use it some other way, the burden lies with you to explain yourself.

I would argue that one MUST exclude god to have any grounds for justice.

Does it require other people? Probably. It's hard to believe that if there were only one living human, they would give much thought to justice.

I refer to this phenomenon as the crisis of Liberalism.

Liberalism champions democratic movements in society. It has been successful over the course of the last 3 centuries in increasing the level of democracy across many countries throughout the world. Unfortunately, the bedrock of liberalism is education and rationality and these factors have not kept pace with democracy itself. The result is that you have huge numbers of people empowered to vote and participate in government with little to no understanding of what government is or how it works or how it should be used to help the human condition. Until a greater percentage of the population is capable of philosophical or at least rational thinking, we will continue to suffer the effects of pop politics and lazy "ideology". Social media has only exacerbated the problem.

Why do we need to look at who is supporting him? His own words and behavior have projected racist thoughts for decades. Here's one source on the matter, there are many more:

The Atlantic

Way back, I entered this conversation with the example of stairs privileging the ambulatory. I chose that example with care, because of what it shows about privilege.

Privilege is not often intentional. Stairs are a cheap, quick way into a building, and were not built with the exclusion of certain people in mind. But that was the result.

Fixing the problem will cost money.

Fixing the problem will cause inconvenience.

The result will be the removal of an encumbrance, and hence have long term benefits for everyone.

Importantly, the first step in removing this encumbrance is to recognise it. No one pulls out a set of stairs on a whim. Recognising the issue involves seeing the issue from the point of view of someone who has quite a different experience to oneself. Recognising the issue involves recognising one's privilege. That is, privilege should be pointed out. — Banno

Ok, this is getting bogged down in your specific example and straying from the topic quite a bit, but since it has been posted about several times I feel like I will weigh in.

The stairs analogy doesn't really work. Stairs are an object, a piece of technology. They have different levels of utility to different individuals based on a range of factors like age, weight, leg strength, cardio-vascular health, etc. One is not "privileged" to be able to use them, one simply does or does not based on need and ability. A person who knows how to chop firewood with an axe safely is not "axe privileged" they just have the ability to do an activity that uses a particular piece of technology. Some people aren't strong enough to lift the axe, some would just be in danger of chopping off their foot. Trying to use the concept of "privilege" to describe this state of affairs is not useful. It adds unnecessary baggage to the conversation.

Nonetheless, the US had this conversation some decades ago and passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA has resulted in all sorts of effects, some very unintended, but most frequently encountered by most people in the built environment. Every public building in the US has wheelchair access and handicapped parking spaces. The only exceptions are buildings that predate the law - however those buildings MUST be brought into compliance if they are upgraded or renovated in any way. The burden falls on the owner of the property. This has resulted (over the subsequent decades) in many small businesses being closed because they could not afford to comply with the regulations, contributing bit by bit to the big box Walmartification of our society.

The guidelines for handicapped parking spaces have also increased the area of parking lots which impacts groundwater penetration and has a range of undesirable effects, all so these spaces can sit empty most of the time. Or at least they used to, but now they play a key role in enabling the obesity epidemic in this country by rewarding people with weight problems all the good parking spots. Once again, visit any Walmart to see this in full effect.

Long story short, the right way to view this problem IS to focus on artificial limbs or other enabling technologies (as you mentioned), since they can be employed by the individual disabled person at the time of need, instead of making the case that the rest of us are "able-body-privileged" and therefore we should all suffer negative consequences to level the field at the low bar instead of the high one.

And that brings me back to the unhelpfulness of the "white privilege" concept. It denotes that the problem is some people being treated well, as opposed to the real problem which is some people being treated poorly.

First, there is a scientific grounding of race. — Harry Hindu

Defend this statement.

Second, cultural differences aren't important when hiring someone or giving them a raise. — Harry Hindu

Defend this statement.

Third, what is the difference between acting human vs. acting black or white? What does it even mean to act black or white? It seems to me that putting people in boxes is what is racist. I guess for you, acting black is voting Democrat and acting white is voting Republucan? — Harry Hindu

Stay on topic, please.

Your having gone to college and being white is not white privilege. White privilege is the negative effects/affects of systemic racism that you do not suffer from because you're white. — creativesoul

This is exactly the problem with the concept. You can only define it in the negative. White privilege is not privilege at all. It is the ABSENCE of being treated unfairly because one is non-white. To put this another way, no one (who isn't themselves a racist of a different type) wants to END white privilege. They want people of color to no longer be mistreated or have different standards applied to them. "White privilege" as you are describing will disappear when everyone is just treated fairly.

Using the term "white privilege" has the practical effect of irritating or offending some people who feel targeted or just lumped in unfairly. It has no corresponding utility or benefit in race conversations to offset this.

If it is pointed out to a white person that a black person was treated badly in a situation that both experienced, say a job interview or an encounter with a police officer, the proper response for the white person is not "I feel guilty and terrible that I was treated well", it is "I feel terrible that you were treated poorly", and hopefully they could agree to work together to try to change that in the future.

It is not necessary or helpful to demonize all white people for being white in order to try to improve conditions for people who are non-white.

Why agree on norms at all? My answer: all norms and moral precepts are an attempt to answer the question before humanity: what best serves human flourishing?

@Thomas Quine

Start over from here, and develop and defend only this.

I go to the species level not to make things complicated but to make them simpler. I mentioned in an earlier post that the only important difference between humans and other animals is that we store our memories outside of our own bodies. We have language, we have text, we have images, we have the Internet, we have a recorded culture, we have a recorded morality and ethical standards and we have philosophy forums to discuss them.

@Thomas Quine

Ok, so I repeat my question. Why do you insist on including animals? They weaken your argument considerably, as your diversion into turkeys and Isaac's responses demonstrate. If you want your argument to be useful in some way, then refine it at least so far that it doesn't fail to just casual reasoning. Please read that last sentence again. You have asked for responses to help you formulate your concepts, but you don't seem to be listening to any of them.

You say that all species "seek" "flourishing". Seek implies intent, and flourishing implies some knowledge that one IS flourishing, because one must have some sense of the abstract condition of one's species to know whether it is happening or not, or even to formulate the very idea of it. Animals don't do these things. They just don't. There is no lion morality. There is 'do what it takes to survive in the moment', overlaid by a biological imperative to produce offspring. In the majority of species, they care very little for their offspring's individual survival, except for some mammals.

Your point about the difference between humans and other species drives this point home even further. By saying that morality should be considered on a species level, you are acknowledging that morality has an inherently external nature. Morals are projected by the community at large and then (theoretically) acted on by the individual. As you have stated that humans are the only species that externalize their ideas in a way that allows them to be apprehended and considered by others of their species, why do you persist in the idea that, say, toads are somehow paying any attention to the flourishing of toaddom. It's facially nonsensical.

I continue to respond because I like the idea of individual humans considering the welfare of their species as opposed to their limited families, communities, or nation-states. I wish you would expend more effort on the scaling of that idea, and less on turkeys getting happy endings.

I'm quoting Isaac's response, but my questions are addressed to @Thomas Quine

1. Is false. Living species do not all seek to flourish, they seek to propagate genetic material. If you want to use this pseudo-Darwinian approach to moral objectives then the only common objective is to have as many offspring as possible which are fit enough to themselves have as many offspring as possible. Some niches will result in a complex, co-operative or even altruistic solution to this problem, other will not. As for this flourishing constituting 'the good', I've not read a single reference to it in any ethical text, nor any common conversation. He's a really good man doesn't mean he had as many children as possible, nor that he caused the survival of as many children as possible.

Why do you need to cover all species? You invite a lot of complications. Why not sentient species or something similar? After all, you are discussing an ethical system and trying to lift animal behavior from instinctual or biological to ethical is a heavy task. Likewise, your notion of flourishing seems to imply a level of quality. not mere quantity as Isaac is asserting. Limiting your scope to humanity is more in keeping with that qualitative assertion.

2. Is also false. Divine Command Theorists do not determine their principles of the basis of human flourishing either here or in a mythical afterlife. They believe that God's commands
should be obeyed because they are God's commands -regardless of their consequence on humanity in any way shape or form. Studies in the neuroscience of moral decision-making show conclusively that we do not always (or even commonly) consult any moral system dealing with consequences before acting morally. Babies can act morally - are you suggesting they calculate the effect of their actions on human flourishing?

Two parts here, religion and neuroscience.
Religion: If you are asserting human flourishing as your standard, you have all you need to remove religion from consideration. In a view sensitive to the well-being of humans on a large scale, religion is amoral at best, but probably fully immoral. Your desire to use science as a tool in determining morality would also lead to an exclusion of religious beliefs as moral systems that increase human flourishing.
Neuroscience: I think the best answer to this criticism lies in the distinction that you are making with regard to scale. Isaac's example cites a lack of moral consideration in the acts of individuals, but you have specifically stated that you are describing a species-level moral system. Even if people do not consult moral systems in their personal behaviors, they will typically espouse them to other people, and the power of these systems is in their normative character, not in their effect on individual decisions.

3. Is only true if you undermine your definition at (2), you can't have both. If you're going to include people's beliefs in a mythical afterlife as demonstrating that all moral theories are about human flourishing, then it cannot also be the case that science can tell us how to achieve it. For those that believe in an afterlife, science has no information to provide on the matter. Notwithstanding that, science actually has very little to tell us about human flourishing that could really help in any real-world moral decision. In almost all cases of complex systems there are disagreements among scientists as to the long term consequences and the vast majority of human systems (economics, social dynamics, ecosystem interactions...) are sufficiently complex to be chaotic in the long term and so beyond accurate predictability. Science might be able to tell us what is flat out wrong, but it certainly cannot tell us what is right.

I think the adjustments suggested above deal with the concerns raised here. Religion is out, and even if science is able to tell us that some things are false, that makes it a useful tool without needing to provide absolute truth.

First post here. I've enjoyed reading through this dialogue and watching how it evolved. There were some great twists!

I would first make the observation that the discussion has been somewhat handcuffed by the OP's choice of the word privilege to stage the question. It definitely muddied the waters. Still, I think ultimately some good points found their way to the surface.

I think everyone seems to agree that the outcomes of racist thinking are undesirable, so no need to continue beating that horse.

The remaining point of interest here is the conversation over an appropriate way to frame a response to "racism".

• On the one hand, we have the assertion that an important step in changing matters of discrimination, whether on the basis of race or gender or similar ideas, is to acknowledge that there is a privileged group that is immune(ish) to that discrimination (let's set aside the conversation of height or beauty discrimination, as these really aren't relevant to the discussion).
  
• The other position holds that the preoccupation with categorized privilege (white or otherwise) is that it inherently reinforces the categories - which are themselves the root causes of most of the problems.

I'm going to proceed based on those characterizations of the points expressed above - i'm sure someone will let me know if I've badly missed the point. :D

My problem with the first position is that I think it improperly places the focus on some perceived misconduct by a given group (all white people), instead of placing the focus where it should be, on the targeted misconduct AGAINST a different group (people of color). In other words, the movement must and should be BLACK Lives Matter, not WHITE Lives Don't Matter As Much As You Think They Do, which is the subtext of this need to make white privilege a conspicuous part of this discussion.

The problem is NOT that white people have generally safe(r) neighborhoods, more access to education and higher paying jobs, and a general lack of suspicion directed at them as they go about their daily lives. The problem IS that people of color shouldn't have less of those things for the simple reason that they are people of color. Systemic racism doesn't spring from the general public's attitude that white people deserve to have advantages (taking out the case of white supremacists, who are just awful people), it springs from a deep seated fear that has been woven into the culture over a long period of time with varying degrees of intent and aimed at people of color. Calling attention to that phenomenon and actively trying to root it out is placing the focus on the problem - trying to shame people for a state of affairs that they did not create and in most cases are not even conscious of is not.

That brings us to the second position - that the problem here is the insistence on lumping people into these categories, and that talking about White privilege or Black lives mattering is just a reinforcement of the conditions that one is supposedly trying to overcome. I think this idea (once it was finally made clear several pages in) is a fantastic one and a worthy aspiration. The plain fact is that "race" does not exist in any scientific way, it is just a social/political construct. It is in our best interest to attempt to edit this construct out of our culture. I agree with this. However, it falls short in two ways:

• It is not practical. In our culture AS IT EXISTS, most people believe in the notion of race and it plays a role in how they understand their environment. While it might be nice to imagine a world where this is not true, we don't live in that world, so for now we must acknowledge the idea of race and deal with it in those terms while we hope for enlightenment on the issue to surface somewhere in the future. For now, we must proceed with BLM until there is no longer an embedded belief in the "B".

• It is unreasonably selective. While race is merely a social/political construct, so too are money, freedom, constitutional law, love, and language, just to name a few. To try to dismiss the problem of racist outcomes by saying that people should just "smarten up" and stop believing in race is like saying that the solution for our economic problems is for people to just stop believing in money. It is not that simple or surgical. Few people are able to cherry-pick their worldview in this way.

TL;DR
I agree with those that say insisting on recognizing "white privilege" is not useful or helpful to solving the larger issue. The problem is not (for example) that I went to college and I'm white. The problem is (for example) that sometimes cops seem to kill people because they're black.

However, I disagree that the reason to avoid thoughts of "white privilege" is because it reinforces the concept of race and of dividing people into categories. People do that and will continue to do so in the near future. The real reason to avoid white privilege in this discussion is because it's not a helpful concept if the goal is the "end of racism".