Frank, I'm just not sure how much can be accomplished by a discussion of the morality of war in general — BC

I imagine the aim of such discussions is to get peace of mind through understanding.

Do I know what the truth is here, what is moral and what is not? No more than anyone else, which is why I am doubtful about what we can accomplish here.
/.../
I prefer that people not commit murder, wholesale slaughter, wanton destruction, and bring about general ruination.

But... sooner or later, people do those things and think themselves quite moral.

All the more reason to contemplate issues of morality.

Every philosopher worth his salt has to develop a system of morality that makes sense of life as it is actually lived (including the wars) and that gives him peace of mind. The aim of philosophy is wisdom, not confusion.

Similar with the Adam Smith reference. It seems it's saying that inequality and competition are natural, the natural order of things and that one must not indulge in compassion for others or otherwise concern oneself with social justice (or with big metaphysical problems), but instead look after one's own interests and cater to one's desires.
— baker

What is your main source of evidence for the words I have underlined?
Evolution by natural selection and survival of the fittest?
If it is, then was cooperation and altruism, not also essential aspects of that experience as well? — universeness

Like I've been saying all along: It is my understanding that passages like the one quoted from Smith are meant to be taken as instructions, in an ideological sense, not as descriptions based on empirical observations.

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

So what do people in those "more equal" societies do with all that social trust, health, wellbeing, etc.? What do they use them for? There has to be some purpose to them.

It is just -let's say - a pathway to a free state of mind. — javi2541997

Religious/spiritual people seem to be "free" to you? Free of what? Free to do what?

Whether you like it or not, there will always be the necessity to believe in something. Far away from what we are all able to perceive or understand.

Sure.

We seem to be talking past eachother.

I'm saying that I don't think religious narratives are meant for us to "understand" ourselves, but to become a particular type of people. Religions are all about how one *should* be. (Whatever narratives religions have about who we are and where we came from are in the service of how we should be.)

Whatever the actual alternatives might be [since I doubt social justice is available atm] , of course I do not want to be rich! — Vera Mont

You kid, right?

[image of meditating robot] — Bret Bernhoft

But religions an spiritualities are already zombifying people anyway. If anything, I see a convergence between what you call "techno-optimistic religion" and existing religions/spiritualities.

@Vera Mont
Do you want to be rich or do you want "social justice"?

Except that the disparity of rich an poor only becomes "the natural order of things" when it's pronounced so by the spokesman for the caste that has grown rich on the labour of the castes below. /.../ All that guff about natural competition might make some kind of sense if everyone played on the same field and had a say in making the rules. — Vera Mont

Like I've been saying, it seems to be about the difference between an instruction and a description.

Not all poor or otherwise disadvantaged people have a socialist (or some such) outlook. Some have a bourgeois mentality -- and they don't all stay poor for long.

What you describe is precisely that artificially imposed system of valuation to which I was referring. — Vera Mont

How is it artificial, if some people come out as the winners?

My own philosophical work is largely motivated by a sense that people don't know very well what they are talking about in the first place. — plaque flag

It seems to me that people are generally smarter than they seem, and that what might look like ignorance is actually an act.

The US is still the Wild West in its mentality. Of course any restrictions of rights, esp. the rights to self-defense will seem oppressive in such a Wild West setting.

The evidence is in the multitude of different mutually contradictory stories. They can all be wrong, but they can't all be right. — wonderer1

That's assuming that those stories were invented (?) for the purposes that you claim. How do you know they were invented for those purposes?

How implausible the stories are is evidence for them being a product of relatively uninformed thinkers.

Again, that's assuming the purpose you ascribe to them is the true and relevant one.

Religions (communities of religious followers) propagate claims about the nature of ourselves which are based on stories that the religion originating story tellers told.

What religion doesn't make claims about what we are?

Of course. Has it ever occured to you that those stories, even when they are in the form of descriptions or explanations, are actually instructions, statements of the norms of the particular communities that told those stories?

Who is "us"? Mankind as a whole, any particular person, or a particular person (but not some other person)?
— baker

I would have thought it should be obvious that I was referring to the way things generally appear to humans; you know, things like 'trees have leaves', 'water flows downhill,', 'clear skies are blue' and countless other well-established commonalities of appearances. — Janus

It all goes back to disagreement, and what to do about it, how to think about it.

The differences in locutions are not superficial.
— baker

I think what you say here has no relevance to what it aims to respond to.

Given that people often say "This isn't real, it's all in your mind", there's clearly more to it.

I've been following this theme of disagreement throughout this thread, but with little success, apparently.

It's precisely disagreement, on various levels, that points in the direction that the mental is all we have to work with. Not that the mental is all there is. But that it is all we have to work with.

And traditionally, and in general, the way many people try to overcome disagreement (and to win verbal disputes) is to posit the existence of an external world of which they claim or imply to have special knowledge, and that anyone who doesn't think the way they do is wrong, bad, evil, or in some other way defective.

In any case, the person who told you're wrong to like Portrait of a Lady was speaking idiotically; it's uncontroversial that there is no accounting for taste, no possibility of establishing objective aesthetic criteria.

Traditional literary theory disagrees with you.

Religions tell stories that our relatively uninformed ancestors came up with, to explain the nature of ourselves. — wonderer1

People keep saying things like this. Where's the evidence that they really made up those stories, and for those stated purposes?

The Adam Smith reference was both ironic and not. I think it's an instruction disguised as an "observation" or "explanation". A famous example of such a disguised instruction is "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger". It's obviously not true, for there are many maimed and broken people. But as an instruction saying that one should overcome adverse situations that are anything less than lethal it kind of makes sense. Similar with the Adam Smith reference. It seems it's saying that inequality and competition are natural, the natural order of things and that one must not indulge in compassion for others or otherwise concern oneself with social justice (or with big metaphysical problems), but instead look after one's own interests and cater to one's desires.

I was attempting to illustrate the distinction between what I call "direct utility" and what you call "a unique force" in the modern world. Money is an artificially imposed system for measuring the relative worth of things and people, a system whereby resources are collected and allocated unevenly. That's very different from a life necessity. A monetary system can collapse, can be arbitrarily changed, devalued, even abolished, without any loss to the other. — Vera Mont

How so?
Have you lived in a country that has undergone a major monetary change, like in a country that gave up its own currency in favor of the Euro?

Some in an society can be ardent believers, but the majority simply adapts to the prevailing situation. And the majority will also adapt when the situation changes. — ssu

Exactly. But what does it help if the body lives, if the soul, the spirit is crushed?

I have a daughter that has put all over her room pictures of Japanese cartoons, Manga, of cute puppies and always wants to go to the store with Japanese merchandise. So don't say to me that Japanese culture is somehow dead. — ssu

And you think *that* is "Japanese culture"??

"I want to live" says nothing about how you should deal with others, so it says nothing about morality. — Banno

It depends on what others, and what those others are doing or are willing to do.

One cannot be a gentleman among savages.

how do they end up using their own relatives as human shields? What psychological factors lead to that kind of behavior? — frank

Possibly the way a chess player is willing to sacrifice all pieces but the king.

Further, religion/ideology plays an important part here as far as civilians are concerned. If the civilians believe they are going to be killed in "friendly fire" but for the greater purpose of a holy war, then they themselves and their soldiers won't see themselves as victims.

a) believed it was wrong
c) believed it was amoral
d) rationalized that it was right even though their instincts were that it was wrong — frank

These options couldn't be possible, because the US was the one who declared war on Japan. They knew what they were getting themselves into, and they chose to do it.

This is also not true of many kinds of religions. Calvinistic Protestants aspire to a calling, a special task that gives meaning and utility to life. And various indigenous fertility rites throughout history can't be described as anything but life-affirming. — Pantagruel

Sure. But not Roman Catholicism, not Islam, not Buddhism, many kinds of Protestant Christianity. That is, the biggest, most populous religions have a negative view of life.

I don't understand how enlightened self-interest can not yet have reared its head though. — Pantagruel

benefitting the general good of human life — Pantagruel

Time for some Adam Smith again:

The proud and unfeeling landlord views his extensive fields, and without a thought for the wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest ... [Yet] the capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires... the rest he will be obliged to distribute among those, who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little is to be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the different baubles and trinkets which are employed in the economy of greatness; all of whom thus derive from his luxury and caprice, that share of the necessaries of life, which they would in vain have expected from his humanity or his justice...The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own convenience, though the sole end which they propose from the labors of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements...They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition.

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

(emphases mine)

What would "enlightened self-interest" even be?

Hardly humanist instruction. Transcendental reverie. It doesn't fit the case.

The next time the woke tell me they are going to set rolling the wheel of Dhamma, I'll give them a pass... — Pantagruel

Religions generally see life on Earth as a place of sorrow, or even view existence itself as a failed project. Religions are not life-affirming as such.

What matters (to me at least) is open discussion and cogent arguments, though, and points of agreement with historic philosophers (authorities) are worthless without cogent arguments presented in our own words and accompanied by a willingness to hear them critiqued and being prepared to sustain engagement as long as is required to either arrive at agreement or agreement to disagree. — Janus

Which is impossible when one of the participants is a moderator, putting his moderator foot down.

So, I interpret Kant's idea of in-itself as signifying that we know only what appears to us, which is not to say we know nothing of consciousness-independent real things, but that the reality of those things is not exhausted by how they appear to us and other cognitive beings. — Janus

Who is "us"? Mankind as a whole, any particular person, or a particular person (but not some other person)?

I think many of these disagreements come down to preferred ways of talking, and underlying the apparent differences produced by different locutions there may be more agreement than there often appears to be. It is remarkable how important these metaphysical speculations seem to be to folk.

I think there is a big reason why someone says
"This is a good book"
and not
"I like this book".

In the first instance, they are making a claim about the inherent, immanent quality of a book and implying that they are qualified to see things "as they really are" (while not everyone has such qualification).

In the latter case, they are stating a personal preference without assuming objectivity.

To wit: I once said to someone that Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady" was one of my favorite books. He replied, "You're wrong, because this is actually a very boring book."

From this, it's clear he took for granted that there is an objective reality, that a book has a particular immanent value, and that he knows "how things really are" while I don't. Other conversations with him supported this.


The differences in locutions are not superficial.

Then you should read the Pali suttas, the foundational Buddhist texts.

This is the Buddha speaking:

/.../"Then, having stayed at Uruvela as long as I liked, I set out to wander by stages to Varanasi. Upaka the Ajivaka saw me on the road between Gaya and the (place of) Awakening, and on seeing me said to me, 'Clear, my friend, are your faculties. Pure your complexion, and bright. On whose account have you gone forth? Who is your teacher? In whose Dhamma do you delight?'

"When this was said, I replied to Upaka the Ajivaka in verses:

'All-vanquishing,
all-knowing am I,
with regard to all things,
unadhering.
All-abandoning,
released in the ending of craving:
having fully known on my own,
to whom should I point as my teacher? [4]

I have no teacher,
and one like me can't be found.
In the world with its devas,
I have no counterpart.

For I am an arahant in the world;
I, the unexcelled teacher.
I, alone, am rightly self-awakened.
Cooled am I, unbound.

To set rolling the wheel of Dhamma
I go to the city of Kasi.
In a world become blind,
I beat the drum of the Deathless.'

"'From your claims, my friend, you must be an infinite conqueror.'

'Conquerors are those like me
who have reached fermentations' end.
I've conquered evil qualities,
and so, Upaka, I'm a conqueror.'

"When this was said, Upaka said, 'May it be so, my friend,' and — shaking his head, taking a side-road — he left.

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.026.than.html

How does phenomenology explain the existence of disagreement between people? And how does it propose that disagreement be resolved?
— baker

Husserl puts the emphasis on empathetically understanding the other from within their one perspective.
/.../ — Joshs

But doing such just maintains the status quo. If one puts oneself into another's shoes, one can always understand them, always perceive them as reasonable. How does that solve anything?

"Woke" simultaneously implies that I am right and that you are ignorant. No truly enlightened being would ever make that claim, but would demonstrate wokefulness through humanitarian actions. — Pantagruel

No. All foundational religious teachers made the claim (even explicitly) that they are in the know, and that everyone else is less or more wrong.
The Buddha, for example, called himself "the rightfully self-enlightened one".

In Bacon's time people were religious. — ssu

Science is objective. Religion is subjective.

But how religious were the people in Bacon's time? Like modern American Christians, or like old-fashioned Catholics in traditionally Catholic countries?

I grew up with the latter. As such, it is my opinion that they think of religion as objective and public. Certainly not subjective.

Or is it that to find Jesus you have to use your brain and think?

It's not like people generally chose their religion. They were born and raised into it, it was normally not a matter of choice, nor was it perceived as a matter choice. (Religious people in traditionally religious countries seem to tend to be skeptical of adult converts.)

I highly recommend The Dawn of Everything by anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wingrow. Their exhaustive look at the anthropological and archeological evidence led them to this conclusion: — Joshs

/.../ Not only do such views lack a sound basis in human psychology. They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand
scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it?

It's conceivable that relations based ultimately on violence and domination are the default for humans anyway, at all levels. But when everyone is that way (everyone carries a weapon), there emerges a certain mutual respect and relative social peace and harmony.
It's when the government monopolizes the right to weapons or otherwise regulates and restricts it that a characteristic sense of oppression and inequality emerges.

I don't personally find the tired, old, wornout tropes about testosterone or aggressiveness or physical strength very compelling. — LuckyR

Neither do I.
Besides, many, if not most men, don't fit the trope anyway, or if they do, only for a part of their lives.

But it is clear to that once men were ensconced in power how that tradition was passed down

Yes. It seems that being male is part of the job requirement.

But on the other hand, there's the saying "Behind every successful man there is a woman". It seems women are more suitable to rule from the shadows, from behind and below. And they do rule.

I have no idea if I am waffling or if I make sense at all. — ButyDude

Strike one.

The women’s studies and historical women’s studies are mostly concerned with the idea of “power.” From the gender perspective, or basically the women’s feminist perspective, society is interpreted as a hierarchy of “power structures,” ranging from government to gender roles. I will offer a rebuttal to this interpretation of society.
/.../
The interpretation of “power” both reduces the complex gender interactions to the “oppressor and oppressed,” and overlooks completely the fundamental reason why this gender structure has risen in every single society ever. First, it attacks this idea simply by saying men are the oppressors, and women are the oppressed. This is absolutely ridiculous. Men are the ones who have to organize society. Their biology calls them to provide, just as they did hundreds of thousands of years ago in hunting parties.
/.../
Women are much better at taking care of children, and at being the one to teach, be patient with, and see to the development of the child into a grown adult. Most women are simply not capable, by biology, to be the providers, builders, and organizers of society at large, because they do not fit cleanly into hierarchical structures.

You're making the same kind of simplifications as the feminists you argue against.

It's not just women who are traditionally usually barred from obtaining positions of explicit power in society, it's quite a number of categories:
those that are too young,
those that are too old,
those that are of too poor health, mentally, physically, or both,
those that are too poor,
those that have a reputation as criminals,
those who don't have any particular reputation at all and few social connections,
those that are in prison,
foreigners,
and other outsiders.

In other words, a considerable percentage of the population, not just women. I would guess somewhere around 90% of humans aren't fit for positions of power.

If we want to discuss Trump, then we must all see him as Trump, not as Hillary Clinton or Shirley Temple, no? We must all first agree about what he has been recorded as saying and doing, before can disagree about our interpretations of his acts, no? — Janus

Sure.

But saying, for example, that someone "inoculated people against reality" is already an interpretation of his act, not the act itself. Of course, then there are those who will say it's not so, that it's not merely an interpretation.

I'm attempting to moderate a thread by keeping it on track. — Wayfarer

It is on track. I'm not discussing Trump. I'm discussing how philosophers, too, have taboos, which is ironically relevant, given the topic.

Not so. It is specific feature of modern and post-industrial culture with its emphasis on scientific instrumentalism. — Wayfarer

And in previous systems, the equivalent was the tyrannical socio-economic system in which most people were considered expendable and often treated accordingly.

In earlier cultures, the 'is/ought' gap had not yet appeared, because it was presumed that what one ought to do, and what is the case, are connected: 'In the Indian context it would have been axiomatic that liberation comes from discerning how things actually are, the true nature of things. That seeing things how they are has soteriological benefits would have been expected, and is just another way of articulating the ‘is’ and ‘ought’ dimension of Indian Dharma. The ‘ought’ (pragmatic benefit) is never cut adrift from the ‘is’ (cognitive factual truth).'

Take away the robes and other thaumaturgical veneer and you get the same discourse that we have today, that has always existed.

In the old days, people were considered subjects of a deity and of monarchs and landlords. Nowadays, we are considered subjects of well, whoever happens to be in the position of power. But we never cease to be subjects to someone or something.

The nature of the discourse has not changed: there is a hierarchy between people, there is a power differential between people, and resources are scarce, and we shape our input in accordance with this knowledge It's only the externals that change (and those are the ones you're focusing on).

A religious/spiritual person will tell you that you "need to see things as they really are".
A psychologist will tell you that you "need to see things as they really are".
A politician will tell you that you "need to see things as they really are".
And somehow, "things as they really are" is always what those in position with more power than yourself say that they are.

Many pre-modern moral systems never doubted it - the idea that the universe comprises dumb stuff directed solely by physical forces is a very recent one. (It has always been around, but had never before become dominant.)

But to the man in robes, *you* are the dumb stuff!!

When I'm working with another carpenter and I ask her to pass me the saw, she does not pass me the router. When I throw the ball for my dog he sees it as a ball to be chased, not a food bowl to be eaten from. No social coordination at all would be possible if humans and animals did not see the same things in their environments. — Janus

Sure, there are some obvious instances of people "seeing the same things".

Is Pluto a planet or not? When you look at Pluto, you might see a planet, but someone else doesn't. How so?

I think you're capable of highly insightful and incisive contributions but right now you're just firing off random questions, dragging Trump in for mention, for instance. — Wayfarer

*sigh*

Philosopher, know thyself!

I brought up Trump precisely because he's such a hot topic, to see if you can apply your insights from this thread when it comes to talking about something other than meadows and butterflies.

And there you go, patronizing me again.

You're muddying the waters — Wayfarer

Talk about upholding taboos!

"Philosophical insights can and should be applied to mountain meadows, butterflies, dogs, teapots, but not to hot topics like the criticism of Trumpistas."

If we all saw different things; if I saw a bus where you saw a tree, then no normativity would be possible. The fact that at the basic level of bare perception we see the same things is not a fact engineered by us. My dog sees the same things I do, judging from his behavior. — Janus

How do you know we in fact see the same things?

What if we are merely conforming, to the point of sometimes even pretending that we see the same thing? As in, "Do you see this black snow?" -- "Yes, I see this black snow."

The normativity I'm talking about is about what we *say* that we think is real. (And of course, if one says something often enough, one is bound to believe it, even if one originally didn't believe it.)


As for the conceptual image that your dog has of what you call a tree: it possibly isn't the same as yours.

What kind of question is that? — Janus

An inquisitive one.

It's a blind spot frequently encountered in philosophical discussions. In philosophy, there's a taboo against using a philosopher's philosophy against him, and a taboo against using some philosophical claim on the spot, testing it in vivo, as it were.

It's rather ironic. For example, some philosopher complains about how some people are treating other people (and other beings as objects), yet this same philosopher is treating them the same way, as an object.