To say ethics is the study of ends presupposes the value of an end.

I'm not sure if it does. That there are ends that people act for seems obvious. If we were wrong about this, it seems we should be wrong about just about anything and everything. Moreover, there are obviously better or worse means towards different ends. If I want to sail off my island and have at my disposal logs to make a raft or stones, the logs shall work far better for achieving my end.

One states an end, a purpose to one's actions, and no matter what this is, there is another question latent and ignored: What good is this?

Right, this is how I would put it: Aside from the question about what is good vis-á-vis any particular end (e.g., winning a race) we can also ask about the choiceworthyness of that end itself. Ends can be ordered to other ends. For instance, we might want to win a race against fleet footed Achilles because if we do then he will agree to release our captured friend. Ends can be ordered to other ends. So, we face the problem of grounding proximate ends and means in some sort of end that is choice-worthy for its own sake, i.e., "an end that is sought for its own sake."

Are there any such ends? Are there many?

A common answer here has been pleasure. Yet it is generally been agreed that simple pleasures—from food, sex, drugs, etc.—are inferior to the "pleasure" derived from participation in common goods (i.e., the good of being a good husband, a good parent, a good citizen, a good soldier, a good priest, a good artist, etc.) or a sort of intellectual pleasure associated with wisdom, contemplative understanding of the world and one's role in it, or as Hegel says: "being at home in the world." Some people use "pleasure" only for "bodily pleasures," but I think we can speak about different sorts analogously. Sometimes, we seek bodily pleasures so as to accomplish one of the "higher" sorts of pleasures, as when we want to be in a good mood so as to help someone else better. Yet happiness as a sort of overall flourishing, "living a good life" and "being a good person," seems to be sought for its own sake.

Anyhow, that's just a candidate for what is good in itself, and sought for its own sake.

Others deny that there can be anything worth seeking for its own sake. So all judgement about ends relies on an infinite regression of finite ends ordered to other finite ends, which must, in virtue of our being finite creatures, bottom out somewhere, seemingly in irrational impulse. However, these folks still think we can live "better or worse lives," and "learn to deal with this ungroundness." So, even for them, there can still be an ethics and a politics (politics as an art for producing good/virtuous societies)—a study of living a better or worse life.

However, I want to suggest that one can have "the best," or an "infinite good" in mind as a goal without knowing such a good. Indeed, if the human mind has an infinite appetite for goodness, as philosophers of all stripes from Platonists to athiests have claimed, then it seems that, on account of our finitude, we can never fully know or be "mentally conformed" to such a good, since it surpasses us. Yet we can be "always ever more open to it." That's sort of the root of Plato's notion. It is the desire for what is "truly good" not merely what "appears good" or "is said to be good by others" that allows us to transcend current beliefs and opinions, to move beyond our own finitude in a self-determining pursuit of the Good. The object is not known at the outset, it is merely desired (that's the whole idea of the "erotic ascent").

Normally, traditions that build on Plato—Boethius, the Golden Age Islamic thinkers, many of the Patristics, the Scholastics, etc.—also posit a sort of "knowing by becoming" here. Praxis is essential (e.g., contemplation, ascetic labors, etc.). But within these schools it isn't "knowing the good" that comes first, but knowing what essentially precludes knowing and consistently willing the good, which is being divided against oneself and controlled by one's passions and lower appetites, rather than the rational appetite for goodness or truth as such. Hence, ethics here beings from a sort of "meta" position, from looking at what must be the case for any ethical life regardless of what goodness and justice turn out to be. Indeed, much of what Plato puts out there would seem to hold even if "good" just means "what I myself will prefer." It applies to anyone not embracing full nihilism, in that being ruled over by one's appetites and passions will only lead to good outcomes by accident (and we know from experience that it will often result in disaster).

Which is all to say that ends can be quite unknown and we can still have an ethics.

The problem itself is, of course, messy, as the OP notes, but does this make ethics itself reducible to the thinking only, that is, ethics being the kind of thing that is made and conventional only, and not discovered. If ethics is essentially discoverable, then this implies something outside of thought , addressed by thought to determine how to understand it.

I don't see how it could be. If ethics is the study of ends, of what is sought, then it seems clear that some ends are not sought merely as a matter of convention. People do not seek happiness and avoid suffering as a sort of convention. We do not desire food, oxygen, warmth, etc. by convention; and yet these do seem to be chief "goods." That it is, at least ceteris paribus, bad to be blinded, to have one's hand cut off, to suffer brain injury, etc. does not seem to be a matter of convention. Convention itself is only coherent if it springs from a sort of goal-directedness that already presupposes value, else there would be no reason to follow conventions.

As to discoveries, surely some moral insights are discovered. Newton famously drank mercury because he thought it was good for him. Yet today, knowing what we know about the effects of mercury ingestion on the body, we can say that, all else equal, it is bad for people to have mercury slipped into their food and drink. This is knowledge of value that must be discovered though.

Indeed, but it seems that memories can be stored in other ways. For instance, Saint Augustine goes on at length about memory in the Confessions but he also recounts many of his early memories. And yet now these memories are, in a sense, stored in a text that millions have read and shared in. Likewise, if we write a reminder note for ourselves, and it prompts us to act, it is serving as a sort of medium term memory storage device. A pen and paper do the same for short term memory when doing arithmetic.

Augustine's memories were originally recorded in parchment and velum, but have since spread to paper, hard drives, etc. They are recorded as sound waves on magnetic tapes and optical disks as well, and in a sense, in the bodies of all those who have experienced these and now also remember them. Yet physically, an optical disk is very different from paper which is very different from a sound wave, which is very different from sound waves. The physical substrate does not seem to matter much. It is the information (form) that matters, and arguably this is "immaterial" in a number of senses.

You can observe brain activities corresponding to pleasure, pain and even consciousness on functional MRI scans.

We know these states "correspond" to pleasure or pain because people tell us they do. A huge amount of neuroscience in this general area presupposes that people are accurate reporters of real, private, mental states. If we didn't assume that, did not presuppose it as fact, then all of our "measurable, third person data" would only tell us about how different stimuli cause different responses in different parts of the body, e.g., "do this and people emit this sort of sound wave." This is why some philosophers and neuroscience argue that we should declare consciousness a sort of unscientific illusion.

Anyhow, if this counts as "observing" inner life, how is goodness not observed? Isn't medical and vetinary science incoherent without the good of the body, health? Isn't most of the field of psychology incoherent with the assumption of a mind and what is good for it? "Psychology" is itself the "discourse of the soul." So too, engineering as a science, architecture, etc., all sorts of arts and sciences, are quite incoherent without a notion of goodness. How can one decide between a good bridge and a bad one, or a good water treatment plant and a bad one, without ends you want to achieve? If a building that falls down is just as good as one that stands, or a treatment that kills patients just as good as one that heals them, these disciplines disappear.

Hence, the good (ends, desirability, choice-worthyness) seems to be everywhere. Further, if it is in the mind, and the mind comes from the physical, then ends, desirability, etc. come from the physical.

I guess that's my point. Your division here seems to beg the question, and I don't think it's actually a wise thing to just assume. IMHO, it's unclear exactly why pleasure should be so different from goodness, one "real" the other illusory for instance.

Things like that need to be stopped, not because they’re bad but because they hurt people

Yet if hurting people isn't bad, why ought we try to prevent it?

It’s a society‘s responsibility to protect its members.

Even if this responsibility existed, if it isn't good to live up to one's responsibilities (or wrong not to) then I am not sure what this amounts to.

I guess there seems to be two things. Whether it is called such or not, there seems to be a sort of social level morality being invoked, right (i.e., what societies ought or ought not do)? However, at the same time, societies are made up of individuals, and if they do not value this social morality and it has no claim on them then how does it apply?

If we explain naturalism in terms of "natural" we need to explain what "natural" means, and this is generally where there is equivocation. What makes a cause "natural?" (Also, it seems to me that people who are on board with eliminating causation still consider themselves naturalists; yet if there are no causes this definition won't work).

When naturalism is defined as the view that "the natural is all there is," then for something to be "natural" is just to say it exists. If ghosts and spirits and magic exist, then they must be natural. It's the same issue as Hemple's Dilemma.

Your original question was: "Is right and wrong just a matter of thinking something is right (e.g. it is right to save and improve lives) and something is wrong (e.g. theft, fraud, rape, robbery, enslaving, torture and murder are wrong)?"

But here:

Different because scientific theories, e.g. the theory of gravity, are about something physical outside one's mind... Morals and laws are psychosocial constructs.

aren't you presupposing the answer to this question. It seems to me to get close to: "Facts about morality are different because morality is only in the mind." Or, "moral anti-realism is true because moral anti-realism is true."

There is no objective measure of right and wrong in the universe, the way we can objectively measure the gravity on Earth and on the Moon.

There is no objective way to measure pleasure or pain, nor consciousness itself. Are these illusory too? Are the only things that exist that which can be measured (presumably quantified)? Yet if nothing really exists except for that which can be quantified, then it would still seem that the illusion that such things exist must itself truly exist. For surely we experience values, beauty, pleasure, etc. And yet is "illusion" something that can be quantified? If not, then we must reject the idea that morality, beauty, etc. are illusions, and must simply say that most of our experiences aren't even illusory, they are nothing at all.

Our morals and laws arise out of the dynamic interactions of our genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences.

Ah, well the things you've mentioned morality arising from are "physical things outside the mind," no? So how does something that is not a "physical thing" (e.g., goodness) arise from physical things? There must be some sort of convertability, or else such an arising would not be possible. But if physical things relate to value in this manner, then it seems to me that there is no reason why value should be exclusively "in the mind." What is in the mind "arises" from the "physical" and so the physical seems to somehow contain, at least virtually, values, etc.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." - William Shakespeare, Act 2, Scene 2, "Hamlet".

Anyhow, I believe the correct response here is: "There are more things in heaven and earth... than are dreamt of in your philosophy" - William Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene 5, "Hamlet". :smile:

Morals and laws are different from physical things like the shape of the Earth. Morals and laws are mental constructs which come from our beliefs,

Different how? Are scientific theories not "mental constructs?" What about understandings of history? Now if morals are "mental constructs" what causes them? Presumably, they do not spring from the aether uncaused into our minds fully formed, but have causes that lie outside of us. But this makes them, at least in this respect, like scientific models and theories, no?

e.g. apostasy and blasphemy are considered wrongs in Islam and are punishable by the death penalty in some Muslim-majority countries, while apostasy from Islam and blasphemy against Islam are not considered wrongs in Western countries and are not punished

Right, behaviors and norms vary. But this is true as relates to all sorts of factual claims. With the advent of germ theory, some parts of the world started to boil their water to sterilize it in order to curb outbreaks of infectious diseases. Other parts didn't, and recommended other procedures to try to fight epidemics. Norms and public policy varied based on what was thought to be best, the same as is going on in your example. In some places, young Earth creationism is taught as the origin of the world. In others, the narrative explains that the world is 4 billion years old and that life slowly evolved on it over billions of years. This is a question of fact, and yet norms about it, what is taught, etc., vary by time, place, and culture in much the same ways that laws and moral beliefs vary.

More than that, there are, in my book, two versions of empiricism. One of them has been popular in philosophy and leads to the empiricism of appearances, ideas or sense-data. The other is mostly unspoken but is the foundation of science; this version understands experience in a common-sense way and doesn't posit theoretical objects that boast of being irrefutable and turn out to prevent us from understanding the stars or anything else.

Ah yes, I mention this. But I think this leads to an unfortunate and common conflation where the second sort of "empiricism" is appealed to in order to justify the first sort, such that all scientific progress is called on as evidence for the superiority of the first sort of empiricism, and a rejection of empiricism is said to be a rejection of science.

As noted in the OP, if we go with the second version, then Hegel is an empiricist and figures like Aristotle or Albert Magnus, and Archimedes would be more "empiricsts" than the original Empiricists.

This way of justifying the first sort of empiricism isn't just flawed on the grounds that it equivocates. As far as I am aware, it has no good empirical support either. The Great Divergence whereby Europe pulled dramatically ahead of China and India in economic and military development doesn't track well with the (re)emergence of empiricist philosophy. Areas where rationalists dominated did not lag behind in military and economic might. Many famous inventors and scientists did not hold to the first sort of philosophy. And I have never heard of an experimental study finding that having more empiricist (first sense) philosophical views makes one a more successful scientist or inventor.

It's easy to see how the two often become mixed together though. I think this is especially actue in metaethics, where empiricsts epistemic presuppositions essentially amount to metaphysical presuppositions. "Examine the sense data; there are no values (or universals, or facts about meaning, etc.) to be found." But of course, our lives are full of apparent universals (wholes) and values. The critic can rightly claim that these, in fact, seem to be everywhere. Phenomenology seems to find them, as did the philosophy of the past. So all the heavy lifting seems to be done by what is assumed to be admissable from experience.

At any rate, in arguments such a J.L. Mackie's "queerness argument" against values, I think it's clear that the epistemological presuppositions do all the work, and essentially assume the conclusion. But the conclusion that all prior talk about ethics, goodness, beauty, etc. is a sort of "error" is a radical, and in a sense, skeptical conclusion. Yet to my point in the OP, if our epistemology leads us to this—to dismiss claims as seemingly obvious as "it is bad to have my arm broken," or "it is bad for children to be poisoned at school" as lacking any epistemic grounding (i.e., not possibly being facts)—then I'd say this is an indication that we simply have a bad epistemology. Doing science does not require such views. But this is particularly true as the same basic arguments once used to dispatch goodness and beauty have since been leveled at truth. With the deflation of truth into emotivism, such an epistemology becomes straightforwardly self-refuting.

The same sort of thing that happens with "empiricism" happens with "naturalism." Both have been equated with accepting or rejecting science to such a degree that virtually no one says that they aren't an naturalist. Yet this just leads to a huge amount of equivocation, where "naturalism" can be either extremely expensive, or "only reductive, mechanistic materialism." I think it is, in general, an increasingly useless term. It's also subject to Hemple's Dilemma, where "natural" just comes to mean "whatever there is good evidence for."

Hamlet is pithy on this point, but I prefer Milton's Satan:

A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Note, Satan always relates everything to himself. He begins this first epic speech ostensibly talking about another demon, but then it is all "me mine me me" for most of it. He is almost always speaking in similes relating the rest of reality to himself most often. God, very strikingly for Paradise Lost, never uses any similes. I think it's a brilliant, subtle, linguistic point about elements of the "New Science" and mechanistic philosophy of Milton's day, which makes everything a matter of private valuation.

On the question of different laws holding at different times, if this is meant to suggest skepticism, I would just point out that the same holds for all issues of truth. For most of human history, people held disparate beliefs about the shape of the Earth, how infectious diseases spread, etc. What individuals believed on these issues has tended to be a function of the answers they grew up around. If you're culture thought the Earth was flat , you probably did too. But surely this doesn't give us grounds to believe that there is "no fact of the matter," or that the shape of the Earth varies depending on which cultural context you are currently in.




In practice, this seems to be what many "ethics" end up reducing to.

Here you go:

"Arguments from underdetermination are extremely influential in contemporary philosophy.

They have led to many radical, and seemingly skeptical theses.

These theses are perhaps more radical than we today recognize, when seen from the perspective of Enlightenment and pre-modern prevailing opinion.

These types of arguments were not unknown in the [ancient] past, and were indeed often used to produce skeptical arguments.

The tradition most associated with these arguments, ancient Empiricism, sought skepticism on purpose, as a way to attain ataraxia.

Thus, we should not be surprised that borrowing their epistemology leads to skeptical conclusions.

Hence, if we do not like the skeptical conclusions, we should take a look at the epistemic starting points that lead to them.

Indeed, if an epistemology leads to skepticism, that might be a good indication it is inadequate.

The Thomistic response is given as one example of how these arguments used to be put to bed. I use it because I am familiar with it and because the Neoplatonist solution is quite similar. (But the Stoics also had their response, etc.).

I do think that solution is better, but the point isn't to highlight that specific solution, but rather the genealogy of the "problem" and how it arises as a means of elucidating ways it might be resolved or else simply understanding it better."

Now, the term "skeptical" here is a tricky one. I would call many, but certainly not all forms of anti-realism and eliminativism vis-á-vis core subjects such as consciousness, truth, causality, "skeptical" in a broad sense. But skepticism is not epistemic or moral nihilism. There are "skeptical solutions," which is pointed out. So, just as @Ludwig V rightly points out, Hume is a sort of skeptic, but he is hardly a nihilist. Most skeptics aren't nihilists. The ancient skeptics generally weren't, and neither were the Indian skeptics in general.

But I would question whether or not some modern forms of skepticism that appeal to "pragmatism" as a sort of panacea solution actually avoid a sort of nihilism. That's a broader topic.

Added: links and citations are conducive to clarity. It might be helpful if you did not remove them

It would be rather silly to remove them. As I believe I have pointed out before, I have to run an antiquated browser for other purposes and the pop up quote button doesn't work on it. I'll be honest though that I also forget that it's there on other devices out of habit.

That underdetermination stuff is a feature, not a problem. It's about being unhappy with a determinate causal answer such as "God willed it" and looking for more, doing the experiments, using your imagination, seeing what happens when you do this or that..

Again, this lies on the unsupported claim of an essential dichotomy of: "either causes need to be abandoned or else there is only ever one cause, 'God willed it.'"

It should be obvious that this is a straw man. Nonetheless, the history is interesting here because the rise of the "New Science," nominalism, and empiricism was very much an effect of a new theology that positively wanted to make "God wills it" the proximate cause of all things. The idea of self-determining natures was originally rejected on the theological grounds that anything being any thing in a strong sense (i.e., "God cannot make a cat to be a frog while being a cat"), or the notion of final causes, violated absolute divine freedom. Historically, the theological case comes first, and then later arguments are developed explicitly to support it. This view is adopted by the advocates of secularism later. In part, the demand for secularism comes from skepticism about human ends that is generated by the reduction towards a wholly inscrutable divine will. This sort of skepticism was a corner stone of liberal theory for instance.

Even the language of the New Science reflects this. The appeal "natural laws" and the "obedience" of all things to them (rocks as much as men) is motivated by a volanturist theology of sheer divine will. It's from a theology of command and obedience. God makes the law, things must follow. This is why the sort of occasionalism you are referencing, while long popular in Islam (which had already turned to volanturism), only became popular in the West in the early modern period.

The huge gap between Anglo-empiricist and Continental thought is in some ways a continuation of this earlier theological division.

OK. It's just that causal explanation, along with the metaphor of the machine, has been such an icon of what science is about that I find it hard to grasp the alternatives (apart from statistical explanations).

Well, here we run into one of the great difficulties of any genealogical account in this area. What is meant by "cause" varies considerably. I'd argue that it is precisely the empiricist epistemic presuppositions, and the metaphysics that tended to go along with them in the early modern period, that deflate causation into nothing but mechanism (there has been a push in philosophy and physics to restore notions of formal causality on this point, e.g., Max Tegmark's ontic structural realist account or Terrence Deacon's approach to biology). The empiricist reduction of causes to mechanism or mere temporal patterns is not how I intend the term.

I think Hume, as he so often does, provides a devastating diagnostic account of what causation amounts to given these suppositions, which is "not much." But as per the point made above, this shift on causes was not made on the grounds that "otherwise, God is the direct cause of everything and all causation must reduce to 'God wills it.'' Quite the opposite, particularly in the Reformed tradition influential in Scotland.

That's an interesting point. Yet even in modern "building block ontologies" where things "are what they are composed of," I doubt that you would find many advocates for the idea that properties are "inside" things. They normally say the fundamental building blocks just are their properties, plus some individuating principle.

Take “redness” as an example. Under the substantialist view, redness is either an inherent trait of the object or the set of all red things. In processual ontology, redness is an event that unfolds through the interaction of:

The thing (e.g., the apple, whose structure determines how it reflects light);

The light (photons of a particular wavelength);

The observer (a human or other creature interpreting that reflected light through their perceptual apparatus).

Redness, then, is not inside the apple. It is born from the interplay of all three participants. This makes the property contingent: for a different observer (say, someone with color blindness), or under different lighting conditions, redness may not manifest at all.

It's interesting because the original argument for the "primacy" of substance runs something like this:

In the world, we can see red things, red light, but never just "redness." Dogs or trees can be living, tall, fast, but we never have "nothing in particular" that lives or is tall, or a fast motion with nothing moving.

But then substances, originally at least, aren't building blocks. They are the wholes in virtue of which being is many and not only one (although it is also one in another sense). They undergo corruption and generation, and so they are themselves processes in a way. Round substances change. They can cease to be round. What isn't changing would appear to be roundness. But if roundness only exists where there are round things and in the minds that know them, there is a bit of a puzzle here. A process metaphysics still needs unchanging regularities by which to identify processes that are similar, no?

If one considers this from the perspective of a deflationary information theoretic process metaphysics, where all of the universe is something like a changing mathematical "code," it can be helpful. That this is too deflationary is no problem for the example. Within the universal code are subsections of "code" that are more or less intelligible in themselves and self-determining. These are beings/things. There are also accidents, actions preformed by things, properties like color, relations like "being to the left of," etc. The accidents that are not "substance" and so cannot appear except as embedded in or related to some other "thing-unit" of code. They need a substrate to inhere in. The thing-units more fully have essences, in that they do not have a wholly parasitic existence in the way the accidents do. But accidents still have some sort of "essence," in that all instances of roundness, redness, rapidity, etc. will share some sort of morphisms by which they are the same (on pain of equivocation).

I think a key difficulty here that led to a sort of corruption of notions of substance that brings the difficulties you mention, as well as others, is that the term tended to be used in two related but diverse ways. From the perspective of metaphysics, organisms are most properly beings, being organic wholes. Break a dog or tree in half and you get a corpse; break a rock in half and you just get two rocks. Unity and multiplicity are contrary, not contradictory opposites, akin to light and darkness or heat and cold, so we can have greater or lesser unity in metaphysics. But for logic you need univocal terms. With the rise of nominalism and the demand for univocity, you cannot have any play in the terms of substance, leading towards the reductionism that attaches properties to some sort of unchanging building block.

Anyhow, on your point re the relationally of redness; it is worth pointing out that this holds for all properties, not just those involving minds. We can say that 'salt is water soluble," but it only dissolves in water when interacting with water, etc. While modern thought began to center on the epistemic consequences of something akin to the old Scholastic dictum that: "Everything is received in the manner of the receiver," this focus tended to make "the receiver" only a mind, when originally it was anything (likewise the "subject" was originally the "subject of predication" not exclusively the "experiencing subject."

Properties like charge, mass, etc. reveal themselves in interaction. Hence, "properties in themselves" would be epistemically inaccessible but also irrelevant to the world. "Act follows on being."

Of course, terminology evolves, but I call these corruptions because they introduce many of the problems process metaphysicians are often trying to address. But process metaphysicians still need a way, it would seem, to separate substance and accidents, or else there would just be one monoprocess, and a black cat would become a different thing when it fell into brown mud and became brown, etc.

Still, a hammer has a modus (potential, opportunity) to be a hammer, as does a stone, especially when attached to a stick, as does a microscope when used to drive nails. But this property is not in the object or the subject, but in the encounter. In the involvement. After this encounter, as I said, the hammerness remains in our consciousness. Hammerness can be lost in modus (the hammer just rotted and became unusable), hammerness can be lost in act (for example, people started using screwdrivers and stopped hammering nails), and hammerness can be lost in consciousness (we have raised a generation that doesn't know what a hammer is or what to do with it).

That makes sense. Artifacts seem like a particularly hard place to start. It is debatable if anything used to hammer is a hammer, or if it is just being used for hammering. However, it is simply not the case that everything that is used as a sheep is a sheep. If you try to breed a male pig to your female sheep, you will starve. If you try to get cats to pull your dog sled you will get scratched and go nowhere. But more to the point, not only will the "tool" not work, but the living organism is itself its own goal-directed whole and this is not altered by our use of it.

I suppose though that this could be considered a matter of degree. A volume of water or air never makes for a good hammer. When Rorty debated Eco, he said that what a screwdriver is doesn't necessitate (or even "suggest") how we use it, since we could just as well use it to scratch our ear as turn a screw, and yet in an obvious sense this isn't so. A razor sharp hunting knife is not a good toy to throw into a baby's crib (at the very least, for the baby) because of what both are, and this is true across all cultural boundaries and seems that it must be true. You can use a PC tower as a door stop, but you cannot run Widows or check your email on any other sort of doorstop.

Ah, I see now, you meant:

The only proper metaphysical way to pin down terms is dichotomously. We have to have to be able to say what wisdom is sensibly “other” to in a measurable fashion.

...as a criticism. I took it as a recommendation; as in, we need to find dichotomies.

I don't think the bolded is true though. Dominant theories of goodness from Aristotle on (and one might even include Plato here) primarily think of bad/evil (and falsity) in terms of privation. The two are contrary opposites. But prima facie, this no more makes goodness (or beauty, truth, and unity) impossible understand than it is impossible to understand light because darkness is merely its absence, or heat because cold is its absence. Light and heat have a positive content, and so does goodness and truth. If one dispenses with these, then I'm not sure what inquiry would consist in; our goal could no longer be truth (knowledge/understanding), and such a goal could no longer be good to pursue.

So what is the proper “other” that grounds adaptive? Well the Darwinian story is that variety is what evolution requires. It is exceptions to the rule that feed the existence of that rule. Every individual must take the risk of being a mistake so that statistically the collective success emerges.

What is "success" here? A difficulty is that natural selection and related theories have been philosophically interpreted in extremely disparate ways. You get articles to the effect that "reality is evil" or Tennyson's famous:

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law —
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed —

...right alongside the Lion King's "circle of life" (and more sophisticated versions). I've also seen thermodynamics used to justify a sort of Hegelian providential progress towards "being knowing itself as self, as the Absolute/God," a sort of twist on de Chardin's Omega Point. I don't think "empirical evidence" dictates that one be preferred over the other (although wisdom might).

Success is often interpreted simply as reproduction. In which case, chickens, pigs, sheep, and cattle have been the beneficiaries of a tremendous adaptational boon. And yet, one could hardly look at your standard poultry "factory farm" and not come away questioning if this is "success."

I have a romantic notion of philosophy as potentially being able to provide this kind of psychological or experiential transformation, not just the lifeless pursuit of analysis and cold reasoning, but a new way of seeing that enlarges our experience in some way. Yet such a description feels rather tendentious, soft and poetic. — Tom Storm

Well, one interesting thing is that back when the primary goal of philosophical education was existential transformation instead of intellectual specialization (i.e., for most of pre-modern though, and for much Eastern philosophy) it was also taught very differently. In order to achieve that sort of transformation, it was very much a sort of "lifestyle" education, with a heavy focus on asceticism, "spiritual exercises," and generally time for silence/contemplation (although not as much for the Cynics).

Whether this actually worked, or how exactly it worked is another question. The ancient sources are often idealized, and we might suspect that some of them are fictionalized (a few are satirical or slanderous). Obviously, it worked in a certain sense, in that life in the community was radically different as long as people stayed in it. From what I know, in-depth guides to practice don't really exist until the Middle Ages, when different monastic communities wanted to compare notes on methods. But by that point their role had already expanded significantly and so they were often dealing with populations that were less zealously committed to the project, or were putting other sorts of concerns first (charity, more general education, good old fashioned corruption, etc.).

I can imagine some contexts in which it wouldn't. But my version of "repute" doesn't have to mean "acclaimed by colleagues." I'm struggling to find a term that describes people who "know the subject," as I said earlier. Perhaps there isn't a single term for that. Or is it "expert"? But then I know quite a few subjects while not considering myself an expert. Maybe it's more like, "If you can read an article in a contemporary phil journal, understand the discussion, have read many or most of the references, and are familiar with the issues that have arisen about the position being espoused, then you deserve a respectful hearing in reply." But even that admits of exceptions, of course.

That makes sense to me, but it seems like a criteria for "who gets a hearing" not which positions are accepted. So, in the confines of the original example: determining which acts belong to the set of just ones, we cannot simply rely on who deserves a hearing, since—unless we are very restrictive about who gets a hearing—they will likely present us with mutually exclusive positions. Likewise, if we find none of the options sufficient, and we wish to develop our own, there must be some sort of way for us to determine which new paths are worth pursuing.

Basically: "who deserves a hearing?" and "who is closer to the truth?" are two different questions.

A radical critique need not be accepted in order to gain a hearing. The acceptance involved is "a seat at the table," as described above, not agreement with the critique.

Sure, that seems fair. But as noted above, this moves away from a standard for assent, to merely a standard of what is worth considering.

How do we learn to discriminate? By engaging in the practice with others and watching how they do it, and why.

Well, I don't want to repeat myself, but I suppose my objection here is a variation on what I said earlier. I do agree. I think it is true, in that intellectual virtue is learned/trained in a way analogous to a skill. If one practices, has good teachers, etc., progress can be made. However, I don't think all practice and observation will lead in this direction. It seems equally possible to learn, or be habituated in intellectual vices. I think some theological/philosophical schools have exemplified this problem throughout history. They become dogmatic and parochial, or overly hierarchical, etc., and so they end up tending to habituate their membership with these same vices.

To pick an easy target that a lot of academics (philosophers included) have criticized: elements of "publish or perish" promote bad research habits and have a negative impact on discourse, but moreover they teach certain sorts of intellectual vice. But obviously far more severe examples abound.

So, then to my mind what is important isn't necessarily the persistence in practice, but rather persistence in practices that foster certain skills and, for lack of a better term, virtues (habits). Expertise alone isn't enough either. Astrologers have expertise in astrology, but we might think they are more deluded about how the stars affect our lives than the average person (alternatively, we might say that "expertise" is only truly expertise if it actually involves knowledge of what it claims expertise in. The astrologer is an expert in something, but not what they think they are an expert in).

Perhaps I wasn't clear. The distinction I'm focusing on is the one that he himself adopts - between what he calls pyrrhonism, but which is probably actually closer to Cartesianism. (Given the history of philosophy taught in Philosophy 101, it seems very odd that he doesn't mention Descartes.) I think that he is really quite close to the old tradition, without the Stoicism (so far as I can discern). (I owe that understanding to you.)

Ah, gotcha. That makes sense.

That reading is a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein. I do not think you include Wittgenstein among the incautious sceptics.

Sorry, that got shifted out of place. That was a reply to @Banno who thought I had Wittgenstein with the "skeptics." I do not think this is so. But some positions that appeal to Wittgenstein, such as the cognitive relativism thesis, lead to a sort of broad skepticism about our ability to understand others (outside our own time and culture, or even tout court). This is a misreading of Wittgenstein to the extent it is attributed to him I think, but I think most advocates don't say this; rather they claim that if you follow out Wittgenstein's insights, with their own additions, you get cognitive relativism.

Everyone is me.
Everywhere is here.
Every when is now. :smile:

When Svetaketu was twelve years old he was sent to a teacher, with whom he studied until he was twenty-four. After learning all the Vedas, he returned home full of conceit in the belief that he was consummately well educated, and very censorious.

His father said to him,

"Svetaketu, my child, you who are so full of your learning and so censorious, have you asked for that knowledge by which we hear the unhearable, by which we perceive what cannot be perceived and know what cannot be known?"

'What is that knowledge, sir?' asked Svetaketu.

His father replied, 'As by knowing one lump of clay
all thatthat is made of clay is known, the difference being only in name, but the truth being that all is clay so, my child,is that knowledge, knowing which we know all.'

'But surely these venerable teachers of mine are ignorant of this knowledge; for if they possessed it they would have imparted it to me. Do you, sir, therefore give me that knowledge.'

' So be it,' said the father. . . . And he said,

"Bring me a fruit of the nyagrodha tree.'

'Here is one, sir.'
'Break it.'

'It is broken, sir.'

'What do you see there?'

Some seeds, sir, exceedingly small.'

' Break one of these.'

'It is broken, sir.'

'What do you see there?'

'Nothing at all.'

The father said, 'My son, that subtle essence which you do not perceive there in that very essence stands the being of the huge nyagrodha tree. In that which is the subtle essence all that exists has its self. That is the True, that is the Self, and thou, Svetaketu, art That.'

'Pray, sir said the son, 'tell me more.'

'Be it so, my child,' the father replied; and he said, 'Place
this salt in water, and come to me tomorrow morning.'

The son did as he was told.

Next morning the father said, 'Bring me the salt which you put in the water.'

The son looked for it, but could not find it; for the salt, of
course, had dissolved.

The father said, 'Taste some of the water from the surface of the vessel. How is it?'

'Salty.'

'Taste some from the middle. How is it ?'

'Salty.'

'Taste some from the bottom. How is it?'

'Salty.'

The father said, 'Throw the water away and then come back to me again.

The son did so ; but the salt was not lost, for salt exists forever.

Then the father said, 'Here likewise in this body of yours,
my son, you do not perceive the True; but there in fact it is. In that which is the subtle essence, all that exists has its self. That is the True, that is the Self, and thou, Svetaketu, art That.

From the Chandogya Upanishad

Your main argument is that underdetermination only seems feasible because of the rejection of your two metaphysical principles. From this you deduce that "...the skepticism resulting from underdetermination has been seen as a serious threat and challenge". But what you call "underdetermination" here is very different to the use of that term in Duhem and Quine. Where they showed us specific cases in which we could not decide between competing theories, you suppose that we can never decide between any cases, unless we accept your two premises. Doing so lumps together quite disparate approaches, flattening the philosophical landscape, reduces complex positions to caricatures. Your "argument" consists in labelling.

This is a misreading. See the summary I provided above for Moliere. That particular response is offered as merelyone example of why the form of the argument, though known from antiquity, was not considered to be widely applicable in the past.

From this you deduce that "...the skepticism resulting from underdetermination has been seen as a serious threat and challenge".

No I don't; that would be a bizarre "deduction." The comments on the difficulties with some of these positions are all in the first half of the paper, before those premises are presented.

A relevant section would instead be:

Again, the difficulty here is that the “solutions” often seem quite skeptical, e.g., “words never refer to things,” “there is never a fact about exactly what rules we are following,” etc. Here, it is worth considering what it is one ought to do if one sees an argument with an absurd conclusion. The first things to do are to check that the argument is valid, and crucially, that the premises are true. I would argue that contemporary thought, particularly analytic thought, has far too often only done the first. Because it holds many empiricist presuppositions beyond repute (indeed, “dogmatically” might not be too strong a word) it has not generally questioned them.

Yet if an epistemology results in our having to affirm conclusions that seem prima facie absurd, and if further, it seems to lead towards radical skepticism and epistemological nihilism, or an ever branching fragmentation of disparate “skeptical solutions” and new “anti-realisms,” that might be a good indication that it is simply a bad epistemology. Indeed, an ability to at least secure our most bedrock beliefs might be considered a sort of minimal benchmark for a set of epistemic premises. Yet, due to the conflation of “empiricism” with “the scientific method,” as well as modern culture’s preference for iconoclasm, novelty, and “creativity,” the starting assumptions that lead to these conclusions are rarely questioned. With that in mind, let us turn to the realist responses that, in prior epochs, made these arguments seem relatively insubstantial.10

(Note: Kripke himself allows that the claim seems absurd.)

I write that the wider application of this form of argument, and that fact that it is thought to be extremely strong, has often led to theses that would have seemed radical for most of history. I also point out that thinkers have thought that these do pose a serious challenge (e.g., Russell's quote on Hume). I do point out that others have been enthusiastic about the ability to support a variety of radical theses, seeing this as liberating, or supporting a move to "pragmatism."

Some of the redefinitions of truth do strike me as dressed up epistemic nihilism with a hand wave to "pragmatism" as a modern panacea. I do think this particular trend is quite problematic. What this generally reduces to in practice is: "those with power decide what is true." Or at least, this is eventuality is not kept out.

Where they showed us specific cases in which we could not decide between competing theories, you suppose that we can never decide between any cases, unless we accept your two premises.

No I don't, I say those are the two core premises related to the example. It's a relevant example because the Neoplatonist response is similar. The Stoics, however, had a different response, etc.

But what you call "underdetermination" here is very different to the use of that term in Duhem and Quine

I define what I mean in the first paragraph. The arguments listed follow that general pattern. The term is associated with the "underdetermination of scientific theory," but that does not mean there are no other arguments from underdetermination. I mention the ancient Empiricist version and (briefly) the even broader Academic ones for instance.

The issue here is not that there are uncaused events,

Good, so you agree with it.

so much as that a method that supposes explanation in terms only of ultimate cause is no explanation at all.

It doesn't mention anything about "ultimate causes." For the purposes of the arguments in question, the relevant causes are the causes of our perceptions, the act of understanding, etc.

"God wills it" satisfies your rejection of "underdetermination", but at the cost of providing no explanation at all.

A dichotomy of:

A. Contingent events just happen; and
B. A sort of occasionalism where God (or a necessary cause) is necessarily the only cause.

For instance, in the example cited, "God wills it," is not the only cause. What is the positive argument that:

" 1. Things do not happen “for no reason at all.” Things/events have causes. If something is contingent, if it has only potential existence, then some prior actuality must bring it into being. It will not simply snap into being of itself. Our experiences are contingent, thus they must be caused by something that is prior to them."

Entails that "God wills it," is the cause of everything?

He seems to think that since evidence can't determine which of the competing theories is true, we cannot chose one theory to go on with - as if the only basis for choosing were deductive.

I suggest nothing of the sort. Obviously, we can have a sort of volanturist approach to theories, or invoke principles such as parsimony, etc. However, the appeal to parsimony is a particularly pernicious principle in the hands of empiricsts precisely because the main data of experience are excluded from consideration, and then phenomena such as consciousness or causes are recommended for elimination on the grounds of parsimony.

For some reason, a little while ago, I re-read Hume's Enquiry, and realized that he is not at all the sceptic that he is painted to be. His rejection of what he calls pyrrhonism is emphatic. (He does not believe that it can be refuted but argues that it is inconsequential, and recommends a stiff dose of everyday life as a remedy.) He distinguishes between pyrrhonism and "judicious" or "mitigated" scepticism, which he thinks is an essential part of dealing with life. See Enquiry XII, esp. part 3.

Funny, this is generally precisely how I've seen his approach to skepticism described. Others have just generally found his conclusions, particularly in ethics, more problematic than he does.

I don't think "skepticism" has historically been used only to describe extreme positions such as: "I can know nothing at all; the sky is falling!" For instance, this hardly describes the paradigmatic ancient skeptics. I would think Hume's approach actually isn't that different from the ancient skeptics however. Their skepticism is also largely pragmatic. What do you think makes them radically different?

In any case, what difference would it make if it were true that the first state was full of memories and people?

Presumably, it would remove some of our warrant for thinking things will continue on as they have in the past, seeing as how there is no past.

Well, yes and no. If we think that we have to dismiss this anti-realism by means of argumentation in the traditional fashion, we have a problem

I am not sure about that. The arguments I have seen for it seem me to use questionable premises. If the premises are (likely) false, there is no good reason to believe the argument is true.


If you think I am calling Wittgenstein himself a skeptic then this is incautious reading. The general pattern of the rule-following argument has been expanded in that direction by later, less cautious thinkers.

But that's just it -- I don't think it's nonsense. It's a position that needs refutation, unlike the position that justice is a fish.

If nonsense is limited to statements on a level of "justice is a fish," then it seems to keep out very little though, right? But "nonsense" was originally the criteria for what deserves to be taken seriously, no?

But, to anticipate your objection, that doesn't mean that anything goes, that some nonsense from Tom deserves to be taken as seriously as "justice(Rawls)."

By "we," I meant philosophers of repute, those who know the history, the questions, and the difficulties.

So then the standard would really be "what philosophers of repute" take seriously. But I wonder if this really works well for all contexts. In the context of Stalinism or Hitlerism, was it the "philosophers of repute" who had a monopoly on serious claims about justice? Salafi scholars have repute amongst Salafis and are often denigrated in the West. Dugin has great standing in Russia. Nick Land was a professor at one of the most prestigious English language programs in Continental philosophy. He only fell out of repute when he began to espouse far-right views. But then, this seems to leave open the possibility that "what deserves to be taken seriously " is just whatever those who exert control over reputations (i.e., academia) allow. This seems particularly problematic for a field that is routinely criticized by its own membership for being parochial and operating in a siloed echo chamber.

I am certainly not against the idea that wisdom might best be measured by the wise. My point is rather that there seems to me be some significant daylight (sometimes a great deal) between "who is currently said to be wise (in our preferred context presumably)" and who might actually be wise. It does not seem to me that the two must coincide, or even that they must inexorably progress towards coinciding.

Plus, a standard based on the opinions of those with current repute seems to rule out, by definition, any radical critique until that radical critique has already been accepted by those of repute. But if those of repute hold to this standard of only taking the views of those who already have repute seriously, they will never countenance a radical critique.

It depends how literally one means "nonsense," I think -- whether it's shorthand for "views I don't find defensible."

Well, if it was the latter, that seems preferable. "Views that are defensible" are kept out, not merely "views that are wholly ridiculous," or "views espoused by people lacking proper repute within our preferred context." And what "makes a view defensible," is presumably not just that it fails to be absurd, or is put forth by someone of repute. That then, is what I would suggest for a standard.

I truly believed you were focused on definitions rather than knowledge, and claiming that without a definition of, say, the good, we wouldn't know how to recognize good things.

I can see the confusion in context. If we are beholden to the idea that properties are sets of whatever exemplifies a property, then yes, it does seem that something like a definition is required to know what the members of that set ought to be.

Initially though, I was just responding to the possibility that there might be sui generis properties for each person's opinion about each property. Aside from a lack of parsimony, it's hard to see how knowledge would be constituted in this case. I cannot really ever be wrong about what belongs to justice(Tim) or living(Tim). By definition these properties just would be what I think belongs to them. For us to ever be wrong, it must be at least possible for us to be wrong about which common terms apply to which particulars.

The only proper metaphysical way to pin down terms is dichotomously. We have to have to be able to say what wisdom is sensibly “other” to in a measurable fashion.

I'm confused, how is "good and bad" (or "beautiful and ugly," "true or false," or "one and many" for that matter) not "dichotomous?"

Is it impossible to "measure" what is better or worse? I'm quite ready to offer an explanation of why Nazism was bad and unwise. It seems that it is precisely the move towards a reduction to "adaptation" (without any clear idea of what is being adapted towards) that renders such an explanation impossible, from what I can see at least.

A reduction of goodness, beauty, truth, metaphysics, etc. to talk about brains and natural selection seems, dare I say, unwise.

Yes. Contrast that with the way Tim sticks to stipulated definitions

Where have I done that? The only mention of definitions was @J's usual straw man to the effect that if one mentions knowledge of the relevant subject (i.e., justice, health) as the measure of expertise or wisdom, one must necessarily be appealing to a "Great Philosophical Definition in the Sky."

I don't think anything about my past thoughts would suggest that I think things are "whatever we stipulate them to be."

I asked @J in virtue of what are some opinions nonsense" and he brought up a (IMO false) dichotomy between (great sky) definitions and "practice." One might suppose though that, from an epistemic standpoint, one needs something like a "definition" to determine the members of these sets, so I suppose something like a definition might enter into things there.

But either all practices a justificatory or they aren't. We agree that some aren't. So this isn't an answer. In virtue of what are some practices to be discounted? I'm not sure. Practice seems to have been an incomplete intermediary; the search goes. Athough now it seems to be suggested that some sort of innate knowledge allows us to recognize "nonsense?" But then why do traditions that put forth nonsense not recognize this then? How did Protagoras miss this for instance?

PI §201 yet again: there's a way of understanding justice that is not found in stipulating a definition but is exhibited in what we call "being just" and "being unjust" in actual cases.

Right, hence, the Good is not on the Divided Line. It must be outside of it because it relates to the whole, the apparent and the real, and so it cannot be merely one point upon the line. To be properly absolute, the absolute must include reality and appearances. Likewise, in the cave image, Socrates must break into his own story from without as the sign of the Good. And then the text itself refers outside itself to the historical Socrates at this point, to a life lived.

Plato is (reasonably IMO) quite skeptical of the power of language in this area (e.g., the Seventh Letter).

You don't seem to be addressing the critique. IS there a way for syllogistic logic to recover here?

I pointed out that the rejection of properties (or individuals) is absurd and your response was "yep." What more is there to say? It is possible to explain what a circle is without recourse so "it is the property of being a circle." Even if the case is different for red (as G.E. Moore argued) I don't see the issue. One can know what red is without having a bunch of words formed into an explanation of it, and that red is a predicable. You're the one asking for a definition of red for it to be considered a property, which seems absurd to me.

But red is not a primitive that stands on its own. As Hegel would point out, its intelligibility relies on the broader notion of color, etc. So I would tend to disagree with Moore here; yet even if he is right, I don't really see the issue.

Really? In those words? I'd say that was comparatively rare. Good philosophers tend to be much more interested in understanding and, sometimes, refutation, than in name-calling. Is there some publication or passage you have in mind?

Have you read the New Athiests? This isn't anything new. Consider Nietzsche's invective or that Russell writes that the reason Nietzsche made his more misogynistic claims about whipping women is because "he knew that in reality the woman would get the whip away from him and end up beating him."

No one in the Republic suggests that "Justice is really a fish." Why not, if they don't know what justice is? Why doesn't their ignorance open the door to nonsense?

You think "might makes right" is nonsense but not Thrasymachus' claim that justice is "whatever is to the advantage of the stronger?" What about Cleitophon's claim that "justice is just whatever the stronger thinks (appears) is to their advantage?" Or, in other dialogues, Protagoras' claim that whatever one thinks is true is true for that person (a position I am pretty sure you have called nonsense before) and Gorgias' claim that rhetoric is the master art because it can convince powerful people and assemblies to agree with you over experts?

Thrasymachus' silence is generally taken as being a shamed silence after being called out on his nonsense, and he cannot accept Cleitophon's suggestion to save his argument because it would imply that sophists are useless because one is always already right about what one thinks.

Yes, and look what happened: We no longer consider such a position viable.

Who is "we?" That particular take has had a great resurgence on far-right circles that have a good deal of sway these days. I imagine that Bronze Age Pervert has sold a good deal more copies than any academic philosopher in the past decade.

That's how intellectual investigations operate, over time. Less plausible, less defensible positions are weeded out, and newer, stronger possibilities are broached. And the discussion goes on.

Is this something like a "law of history," inexorable in the long term? Something like natural selection, but for truth? Would this imply that more recent philosophy will tend to always be better in the long run?

I would think that history shows that only certain sorts of processes produce such progress, and that it is sometimes reversible, and also uneven. The good is often sewn alongside the bad when it comes to ideas. It does not seem to me that truth is equivalent with something like "fitness" vis-á-vis the reproduction and dispersion of memes, information, theories, or opinions. This is why salacious gossip and implausible urban myths often "replicate" better than true statements.

In technology, where there are a strong, widely applicable incentives in play, there might tend to be a stronger pull towards progress, but this relationship seems more fraught when it comes to ethics and politics. It seems more likely that, in general, vice will tend to beget vice and error to beget error, and vice versa—not in any irreversible process mind you, but on average.

Indeed, agreeing that the proffered definitions of justice are inadequate presupposes agreement concerning what is just and what isn't.

We already had what Socrates was looking for...

To an extent, yes. The reader is supposed to recognize absurdities, although they have to be fully untangled first.

In the dialogues themselves, agreement is rarely reached however. Socrates often switches interlocutors because the original one is intransigent. I think there is a salient dramatic point in that. Normally the sophists just lapse into sullen silence. With Protagoras' this move is quite straightforward. If no one is ever wrong, then no one needs Protagoras as a teacher (his profession). But this often isn't so much agreement about the topic at hand (initially) as it is exposing how these positions refute themselves.

A main theme in the Republic is that reason is itself defenseless. Socrates is forced to go down in Book I because "we are many and you are one."

Part of the problem here is that properties are taken as fundamental, when they are better understood as one-place predications, set amongst a hierarchy starting with zero placed predicates and working on up - or a hierarchy of individuals, groups of individuals, groups of groups of individuals, and so on

In older writings properties are often called "predicables." How are there "predictions" without anything to predicate? This is what I mean by: "we will invariably just end up reinventing properties."

There are reasons why snake oil isn't taken seriously as a nostrum -- reasons that have little to do with knowing how todefine health

This is red herring, like the "definition of justice in the Great Dictionary of Philosophical Terms." I said "knowledge of health" (or "knowledge of justice") not "the definition." Do advances in medicine and the development of medical skill not involve knowledge of health and disease?

For me, "snake oil" is another way of talking about "nonsense" or "anything goes," so my response is the same.

Sure, I perhaps made the example too obvious. There are, however, professional philosophers or scientists who publish in philosophy who make claims and counter claims about how each other's traditions are nonsense and sophistry (e.g., the targets of the New Atheists and those who have responded to them). They're both part of broader established traditions.

More to the point, what could have gone wrong in the Salafi tradition? They had discourse and practices. So did German academia in the 1930s, yet many of their ethicist, jurists, and theologians, etc. were enthusiastic or at least stayed about the countries new course. So, it does not seem that "practices" in general lead to what we would probably agree is justice, but only certain sorts of practices.

Why not? Why doesn't "anything go"? Why doesn't aporia lead to intellectual anarchy? See the Republic.

Which part exactly?

Can you think of a discipline in which that actually occurs?

Sure, philosophy. Although its becoming academicized has tempered it (although this is partly from exclusion, and arguably flows more from power dynamics than anything else). From the birth of the printing press to the early 20th century it was full of quite radical positions. Positions like "might makes right" were popular enough to warrant in depth responses from figures like Hegel (when he was already famous).

I keep wondering if there are transformational understandings about time and self and being and truth and reality that would open up and utterly change one.

That's one of the key points of Saint Augustine's autobiography. In his thirties, after a very different sort of life, Augustine became a celibate, gave up his very promising career in the imperial circle, and gave away all his (not inconsiderable) wealth. Only then did he start producing all his influential philosophical texts; although obviously the ideas had been developed over time. It's not an uncommon motif, particularly in earlier philosophical biographies. It seems significantly less common in modern philosophy, although there are examples such as Pascal. It's a sort of "trope" in Eastern thought too, the life of the Buddha being a paradigmatic example. But, just because these are tropes and find their way into hagiography, doesn't mean they aren't real; we do have first hand biographical accounts as well.

There is a similar, but much more limited phenomenon within Marxism, the "Marxist conversion." Yet that tends to be a more limited awakening to a particular political outlook.

So it always has the same aim

Sure, in a broad sense. Practical wisdom aims at making the choices that are best, and at properly valuing ends and means to those ends.

There is nothing particularly "transcendent" about that, and at any rate I find the term "transcendent" to generally be unhelpful because it is often a source of equivocation. I guess the problem I see is that anything can be said to be "adaptive" if we are given free aim to choose the ends that we are supposedly adapting towards, but not all adaptations/actions appear to be wise.

In the Function of Reason, Alfred North Whitehead charts out the goals of life as: to live, to life well, and to live better (which is remarkably similar to St. Maximus' "being, well-being, eternal being"). Now, adaptation can be ordered to any of these. Whether or not something is "adaptive" as opposed to "maladaptive" depends on ends (i.e., what it means to "live better"), and that's exactly what practical wisdom is supposed to help with.

Society is always adapting, but it appears that societies can grow more or less wise or more or less virtuous. For instance, Nazism was an adaptation to the pressures of post-war economic and political circumstances in Germany, but in general we'd want to call it "maladaptive." Another example might be the tendency for people to fill spiritual needs, or the need for recognition, with radical manichean politics. As a "coping mechanism" this is in a sense adaptive, but we might think it is also deeply flawed (unwise). Wisdom would be prudent adaptation.

The Disembodied Criminal:

This is the last section of background before we get to the media analysis.

Landa argues that Nietzsche and Stirner exclude most ordinary, property-related offenses from their "glorification" of crime. I think "glorification" might be a bit too strong a term here though. The notion is more that there is something laudable in a certain sort of crime. Landa identifies the "proper" motivations as "non-material." By this he simply means that the crimes are not motivated by a petty desire for wealth, goods, etc., nor for out of desperate biological need. Stirner puts it this way: the covetous criminal is a failure, since they are grasping after what is not truly their own.

So, what is valorized is strictly a sort of “Dionysian crime," that is an expression of the will to power. This frames the "right sort" of crime as an aesthetic and symbolic revolt against mediocrity and mass society. This stands in contrast to socialist-humanist (and often Victorian Christian) views that linked crime to poverty or inequality.

For Nietzsche, the criminal largely served a metaphorical purpose. They are a figure embodying rebellion and strength, not a literal model for social reform. Landa argues that this selective glorification of crime was ultimately coopted by bourgeois ideology. Property crimes could be seen as "petty" while the reimagining noble criminal served as a sort of cultural rebel archetype to use against egalitarianism. Hence, the trend inadvertently reinforces the sanctity of private property and serves to justify the social hierarchy, in that the successful capitalist, if accused of crime/immorality, can adopt a similar sort of archetype.

I will skip the next section and the one on M because it is probably less well known. Moving on:

Thrill Versus Self-Preservation

Landa uses the Leopold and Loeb trial of 1924 to illustrate how Nietzschean ideas about crime infiltrated public discourse. For those unfamiliar with the case, it involved two wealthy youths who murdered a younger boy, after allegedly being inspired by Nietzsche’s rejection of herd morality and call to revalue all values. During the trial, the motive for the crime became a major area of focus.

The defense focused heavily on arguing that the murder was not committed for personal gain, but rather for the thrill of the crime itself. That is, it was a Dionysian act; perhaps evil, but more "purely" motivated. The defense worked to portray Leopold’s reading of Nietzsche as evidence of stifled intellectual brilliance in order to suggest that the crime stemmed from lofty rumination, not base greed. Indeed, the defense even tried an anti-egalitarian tactic, arguing that the defendant's wealth had made them an unfair target of ire.

By contrast, the prosecution, in hoping to secure a heavier penalty, insisted that money was the true motive, portraying the killing as an afterthought to protect the robbery. That is, as a practical act of self-preservation, not passion. At one remarkable point, the prosecutor actually criticizes the boys for not killing for passion or pleasure, but only out of calculated greed.

An interesting point here is that, in classical Western ethics, it would be "killing for pleasure" and particularly "killing because of lofty ruminations" that would be considered the worse sort of sin. For instance, Dante puts crimes of incontinence and uncontrolled desire in the upper level of Hell, where punishments are less severe. Below that lies the realm of violent crimes, and in the deepest pits of Hell we see sins that corrupt the intellect. The idea here is that a person is more culpable for willed, intellectual vice than for mere incontinence, but also that sins of the intellect are more dire precisely because they represent the corruption of the very faculty that would allow us to know and pursue the good (i.e., the intellect and will) instead of evil. On this view, the worst sorts of sins involve the will becoming its own object (as opposed to the Good, the proper target of the will). This is the maximal form of the Augustinian curvatas in se, where the soul curves inward on itself like a black hole. But Dante's architecture is essentially copied over from Aristotle and St. Thomas; and parallels an area of wide consensus.

Personally, I think this shift would seem to stem from a larger shift towards volanturism in modern thought, and the tendency to define freedom in terms of potency/power.

At any rate, Landa argues that this implies that both sides implicitly accepted a "Nietzschean" hierarchy of motives. Passionate, “Dionysian” crime appears to have seemed more excusable than material, utilitarian crime. The court transcripts reveal a convergence between Nietzsche’s valuation of “beautiful crime” and bourgeois legal norms, where profit-driven crime (the corruption of the market) is considered to be the gravest variety. For Landa, the case shows how society views insanity and uncontrollable passion (including intellectual passion) as less dangerous to social order than sane, utilitarian crime—since a rational criminal exposes the arbitrariness of property and social safeguards.

I don't think Landa has this quite right. He highlights an interesting case. However, I am not sure if this doesn't say more about more general aesthetic and moral attitudes. Certainly, such attitudes might have helped promote capitalism, but I think that is probably an ancillary effect.

So the answer to the question, "Who decides what is nonsense?" is not "The person who looks up the definition of justice in the Great Dictionary of Philosophical Terms," but instead, "The group of people who are competent, by virtue of study and practice, to interpret the question of what justice is, and understand how it connects with other key philosophical issues."

Wouldn't it be "by virtue of what is known through study and practice?" If study and practice are justificatory of themselves, I'd observe that the leaders of ISIS were educated and part of a particular study and practice of justice and ethics (IIRC, al Baghdadi held a doctorate). But then the leaders of ISIS have a very different view of justice from that of Anglo liberals. So either study and practice alone are not enough, or else there is a different justice for each practice (which is closer to @litewave's solution to differing sets of just acts).

Think about it this way: if someone studies snake oil medicine for a long time, and are part of a well-established, does that make them as much of an authority of health as a medical doctor? What if their methods do not promote health, but actually tend to produce disease? The difference between the two would seem to lie in what they know about health and disease, and this affects what they are able to achieve in terms of treatment. Now, in the former case, what is it the legitimate authorities know?

If Tom, Rawls, et al. each make a claim about what justice is, and we don't think any of them can be supported, what is the situation? Do we say, "Each of these people has a different justice. So for them, justice just is what they consider just." No, we say, "None of these people has been able to tell us what justice is. I don't know either, but I don't have to know in order to understand why the proposed definitions are unsatisfactory." This is Socrates' position, more or less. This, I think, rules out the "positive metaphysical claim"; the question is whether @litewave's thesis can also rule it out.

That makes more sense to me. @litewave's response was that, when we have different sets, we have different properties (i.e., different justices, plural); however I think one could retain the notion of a property as a set without necessarily having to be committed to this clarification.

'within' is an interesting concept in this context. It's a spatial metaphor in which brain/body is a container and the mind is something inside it. But from another perspective, the body exists 'within awareness'.

It's also interesting because, while the body is a locus of activity, it is not sufficient to generate a mind. Place a healthy human body in most of the environments that prevail in the universe—the bottom of the sea, the surface of a star, within the Earth's core, in the void of space, etc.—and you don't get consciousness but virtually instant death. You can abstract the context away, but only by holding the environment within narrow parameters. Even a normal room, if filled with CO2 or NO2, will make consciousness impossible.

You say that with great certainty, as if it were an explanation of what a property is.

I am just explaining how the term is used in metaphysics. Properties are not unique to realism or theories of "abstract objects." Depending on how one views sets, I would think that the original suggestion could also be construed in constructivist or fictionalist terms, or whatever one likes.

"Predicatables" are an older term for instance. But, presumably "getting rid of properties" isn't getting rid of predication or common terms. Which means that what are normally referred to as "properties" will remain.

The closest parallel I can think of would be individuals/particulars. No doubt, it has been difficult to define these and exactly how they are individuated. However, there would be a similar difficulty in eliminating individuals.

A deflationary account of individuals and properties is still a particular account. I am not sure if the presence of disagreement of difficulty suggests any particular account though. It would be a bit like suggesting that, because "life" is difficult to define, and because there is great disagreement surrounding it, we should default to not explaining life, but rather simply looking at what we call "living." This methodological move might be supported in some contexts, but I don't see how any further positive metaphysical claim like "there is no life, or living versus dead versus non-living, but only ways of speaking" could be supported over any others using an appeal to ignorance or difficulty.

Society would judge them as having being immature, or just unlucky perhaps, and now wise after the event. These miserable folk clearly developed their habits, but unwise ones. And society might even deserve the blame as its own "wisdom" might have set out the game of life in a fashion where being miserable was rather an inevitable outcome

Right, so wisdom isn't equivalent with what appears to be wise or is said to be wise by others. In this case, the individuals, and perhaps the society, are unwise. So then wisdom isn't just any intellectual habit, but rather a certain type of intellectual habit.

Leaving out sophia and looking only at practical wisdom, Plato's notion seems pretty appropriate here:

Plato describes being educated as primarily "desiring what is truly worthy/good and despising what is truly unworthy/bad."

Cleverness may turn into wisdom. It may also turn into adaptive habits aimed at unworthy ends.

Wisdom always sounds like a good thing to have. But really, it is just some set of habits that have evolved within a society's own game of life

Certainly not all habits are wise though. And yet all habits might be considered to be "pragmatic" as achieving some ends. The question is if those ends are truly (rather than merely apparently) desirable though. If one does not distinguish between good and bad ends (wise and unwise ends) then it would seem that wisdom is just "whatever habits just so happen to emerge," or "whatever is currently said to be wise."

Prima facie, while people or societies might not tend towards maximal vice, neither do they appear to naturally tend towards perfect virtue.

However, in general the data is that trans people are much, much more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators,

Nothing in your source seems to indicate what you are saying. It is silent on the rates at which trans individuals are perpetrators of violent crime. In general, groups that are more likely to be the victims of violent crime are also more likely to be perpetrators. "X is more likely to be a victim," does not entail "X is less likely to be a perpetrator." In general, it's quite the opposite. For instance, men commit most violent crimes and are also more likely to be victims.

Mashing Hume, Wittgenstein, Kripke, Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, Mill, Feyerabend, and Goodman together and calling them "sceptics" ought ring alarm bells with anyone.

Yes, but you are conflating arguments from underdetermination and skepticism. The examples you listed are given as examples of the former, not the latter. These arguments are not necessarily skeptical. Wittgenstein, for example, is often read as offering a purely descriptive account, not a skeptical or metaphysical account. However, historically these arguments have often been extended towards anti-realism and skepticism, or positions that would have been considered skeptical and/or radical up until the 20th century. I do, in fact, point out that there is disagreement as to whether redefinitions of truth itself are mere modifications, or an equivocation that essentially denies truth and knowledge and offers up an alternative "pragmatic equivalent" such as "'true' is just an endorsement of beliefs we feel it is good to hold."

Kripke's skeptical solutions, for instance, are not straightforward skepticism and I do not present them as identical. They are also not strong refutations of skeptical claims however. Arguments to anti-realism from underdetermination are often but not always skeptical (e.g., "there is no fact of the matter we can empirically verify..."). They try to reduce the burden of proof they face, arguing merely for undecidability or skepticism instead of making positive metaphysical claims, but this is not always so, sometimes they make stronger metaphysical claims (often on the assumption the empirically verifiable differences are necessarily equivalent with ontological differences).

Second, just because a philosopher says: "I am not a skeptic," doesn't make it so. Hume accepted the label gladly. Contemporary philosophers tend to run away from it. But by prior norms and standards, many of these claims, or their extensions would be considered skeptical (and are still often considered so by some contemporary thinkers).You are missing this nuance.

And those two supposed foundations - That things do not happen “for no reason at all" and that everything has an explanation - at least some discussion might be worthwhile, rather than mere assertion.

The second one is not "everything has an explanation." It's:

1. Things do not happen “for no reason at all.” Things/events have causes. If something is contingent, if it has only potential existence, then some prior actuality must bring it into being. It will not simply snap into being of itself. Our experiences are contingent, thus they must be caused by something that is prior to them.

2. Being is intelligible, and to be is to be intelligible. Every being is something in particular. That is, it has a form, an actuality, that is determinant of what it is (as well as the potential to change, explained by matter). This actuality determines how a thing interacts with everything else, including our sense organs and our intellects. If this was not the case, interactions would be essentially uncaused, and then there would be no reason for them to be one way and not any other (i.e. random).

...Indeed, if they did not hold, if being were unintelligible and things did happen “for no reason at all,” we might suppose that philosophy and science are a lost cause.

If you want to argue that things/interactions/events are (and are one way and not any other) "for no reason at all," without causes, feel free. Likewise, if you want to object that something can be "nothing in particular (nothing determinant) of "nothing at all."

All a property, in the broadest sense, is just an attribute or quality possessed by something. So, Socrates is a man, a rose is red, etc. The rose is red, but the rose is not identical with the color red. And there is the idea that multiple things can instantiate the same properties.

For instance, a common simple version of Leibniz' Law is: "Necessarily, no two objects share all their properties." One need not assume redness is a "thing" to make use of this.

There are nominalist accounts of properties. One does not need to be a "Platonist" to make use of properties. It's a quite useful concept because:

If there are no properties, in virtue of what would some things be members of "the set of red things" but not others?

Or in virtue of what would different individual things he discernible?

What's your answer? That red things are exactly those that have the property "red"?

I think it's pretty easy to identify red things. Color can be explained in various ways. Likewise, triangular things are those things with three sides, etc.

But even if we were left with properties as some sort of inexplicable metaphysical primitive, that still seems better than "nothing has the property of being triangular" which would seem to imply that nothing is triangular. Or more broadly, "nothing has any properties," which seems absurd. One will just end up reinventing the basic idea of a property under another name in order to say that anything is anything.

If there are no properties, in virtue of what would some things be members of "the set of red things" but not others?

Or in virtue of what would different individual things he discernible?

In virtue of what would:

-resisting absorption into dominant systems
-resisting commodification and turning into marketable lifestyles
-being able to avoid recoding by systems of recognition that make them legible, or manageable.
-opposing reincorporation into cycles of reproduction of normative social structures.

be desirable? Prima facie, I am not sure why these are necessarily valuable or laudable. Being legible and manageable does not seem like a necessarily negative trait. It's often a positive one.

To be honest, these standards, particularly the last, sort of do seem to be "the celebration of the novel and transgressive for their own sake."

That's all up to the individual.

Sure, but how could their choice be non-arbitrary? The individual chooses, but if it isn't for some sort of understood reason, it would seem to be an inchoate choice, or something more akin to a muscle spasm or careless act than self-determining, reflexive freedom.

The more obvious objection, to my mind, ties into the modal caveat in the OP:

This problem can be fixed by clarifying that a property is the set of not only its presently existing instances but also of its past and future instances and of all its possible instances (existing in possible worlds)

Isn't it possible that people might consider properties all sorts of ridiculous ways? I don't see a mechanism here for dismissing Tom's opinion on the grounds that it is "nonsense" when we have already opened things up to every possible set configuration. Yet this would seem to make "everything to be everything else."

I don't think the "opinion based flexibility" works with the modal expansion. And something like "all possible opinions that aren't 'nonsense,'" seems to ignore that there are many possible opinions about what constitutes "nonsense." This is made more acute by the modal expansion, but I would say it applies just as well for what you've said, since there is the question: "who decides what is nonsense?"

Look at the Republic. Justice never gets a satisfactory definition, but it would be hard to read the book carefully and not believe you've learned something about the subject.

Sure, but lacking a definition seems to me to be much different issue. On this account, we don't have many different claims about what justice is, but many different justices. It's a positive metaphysical claim to say that justice just is the set of things each individual considers to be just. So, we'd be justifying a positive metaphysical claim using our own profession of ignorance.

What's new about it?

It's been used in some novel ways. For example:

• David Hume’s argument against causal inferences and explanations, as well as his hugely influential “Problem of Induction;”

• Ludwig Wittgenstein’s rule-following argument, as well as Saul Kripke’s influential reformulation of it;

• W.V.O Quine’s argument for the inscrutability of reference;

• Quine’s holist arguments for the underdetermination of theories by evidence, as well similar arguments for forms of theoretical underdetermination made by J.S. Mill and expounded upon by Pierre Duhem;

• Thomas Kuhn’s arguments about underdetermination at the level of scientific paradigms;

• As well as many others, including Feyerabend’s “epistemological anarchism,” Goodman’s “new riddle of induction,” etc.

Yes. But I don't see that anti-realism is a necessary consequence of the applicability of these criteria.

Sure, arguably it is "underdetermined."

One difference is that there is not the slightest reason to take any of those possibilities seriously.

Maybe, but it's a not unpopular opinion that the existence of the universe and its contents are an inscrutable "brute fact." Now, if inscrutable brute facts can "just happen" without causes, then there is no reason why they should be one way and not any other. So why would it be any more or less likely that a universe just "happens to be" with a first state something that looks something like cosmic inflation rather than a first state full of memories and people?

I will grant that this is only a problem for those asserting the "brute fact" view. But if we assert, to the contrary, that the cosmos had a determining cause, then presumably this is a realist claim. In which case, maybe an inability to dismiss anti-realism will bother us.