Basically, Do you believe some people require a larger effort in self reflection, meditation and self-directed positive cognitive training to maintain the same good traits/values as someone who just does it in the first place without thinking? — Benj96

Of course.

Take another practical example with two non-smokers: Tom has never smoked and has no difficulty not smoking. Harry, on the other hand, used to smoke for thirty years, but quit and he now hasn't smoked for five years.

Who should be commended?

How do you factor in the beginning point for each? Ethically, it makes a difference whether Tom is simply an intuitive non-smoker, or whether he actually chose not to smoke at some point.

a child with a bad nature — Todd Martin

What would you call a child whose parents didn't want him, but had him anyway, and have always sent him subtle or overt messages that it would be better if he didn't exist?

Not a popular thesis. No matter, I am right, my detractors wrong. I can argue this very well, and it is the genuine foundation for moral realism and the reality of the self. — Constance

Actually, it's one of the most popular theses in the self-help genre. So ordinary, actually.

Google "self quotes" and look at the image results.

And an endless number of posts like this: https://www.thehappycandle.ie/my-declaration-of-self-esteem-i-am-me-by-virginia-satir/

A question that might be helpful at this juncture is: would you rather have a purpose that you decided for yourself than have a purpose assigned to you by someone else, a god perhaps? — TheMadFool

Or a social worker, a judge, or a parole officer. Or a mob boss. To name a few.

If the former then you're completely free to choose whatever you want to do with your life and that would be your purpose.

That's not true, though. It is, for example, not solely within the power of the individual to become a billionaire, a president of a country, or the one who cured cancer.

Jordan Peterson's take on religion won't go down well with the religious section of the population. It's as if he would let faithful believe in a lie just to keep them in line. What a condescending attitude! As if the only thing keeping believers from becoming q band of criminals is religion. — TheMadFool

Why do you think the ends don't justify the means? — TheMadFool

So you, too, don't believe that the end justifies the means?


For a more advanced example of the end justifying the means in religion, look at Mahayana Buddhism and their concept of upaya, "skillful means".

The idea that the ends justify the means is that anything and everything is permissible in order to achieve a goal, given that the goal in question is moral. If one buys into this idea then you'll have no qualms about acting immorally if the outcome, the end result, is moral. So, for instance, you'll be willing to kill to if the resulting death had good consequences whatever they may be. — TheMadFool

The idea "the end justifies the means" and its opposite "the end doesn't justify the means" are too simplistic, that's why they are problematic.

Whose end? Whose means? What end? What means?

The idea that the end justifies the means is, for one, really just a thinly veiled justification for one-upmanship, whether done by one person or many. It's a way of saying "I want things to be the way I want them, cost what may, and others are merely puppets in the process and should see themselves as such".

Secondly, whether an end justifies the means depends on the value system of the person making the claim. For example, does completing a marathon justify ending up with permanent damage to one's joints or dying from a heart attack? For a person obsessed with completing a marathon, it probably does. For everyone else, not so much.

The idea that the end doesn't justify the means is simplistic insofar it doesn't take into account the above two considerations.

On the other hand if one is opposed to the claim that the ends justify the means one would be unwilling to commit an immoral act even if it the consequences of such an act were themselves moral.

Can you give an example of where an immoral act has moral consequences?

Was the victory of the Allies in WWII "moral"? Was it "immoral" to kill the Nazis?


I can think of many examples where doing something immoral lead to some beneficial consequences for some people for some time (such as cheating on an exam), but I would not describe those consequences as either moral or immoral, but at most as beneficial, for a particular person for some time.

Why bother to argue in detail about what people say when you have the easy tool of character assassination? — ssu

Like I already pointed out on another thread here:

Not all ad hominems are fallacious:


/.../
Walton has argued that ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, and that in some instances, questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue,[30] as when it directly involves hypocrisy, or actions contradicting the subject's words.

The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that ad hominem reasoning (discussing facts about the speaker or author relative to the value of his statements) is essential to understanding certain moral issues due to the connection between individual persons and morality (or moral claims), and contrasts this sort of reasoning with the apodictic reasoning (involving facts beyond dispute or clearly established) of philosophical naturalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Criticism_as_a_fallacy

When it comes to people who promote particular theories of morality, ethics, it would be remiss not to look at their personal lives and whether they live up to what they preach.


If a mathematician was drunk when he developed a certain mathematical proof has no bearing on the validty of the proof, and it would be wrong to reject the proof based on the mathematician's intoxication.
But matters of morality, ethics are not like that.

What the hell happened to Jordan Peterson?
Pity, rather than admiration. — Banno

Oy, vey iz him! Not to put too fine a point on schadenfreude, but I want to say "I told you so!"

I wonder how JP's unraveling will affect his fans. How will these people cope with this?

Jordan Peterson's take on religion won't go down well with the religious section of the population. — TheMadFool

I think that at least those religious people from cultures where their religion has been the majority religion for a long time are ambivalent toward him. On the one hand, they of course must be outraged at him for suggesting that truth is not that important in religion. On the other hand, they know that he's right and that he's just saying out loud what they themselves have known or suspected for a long time.

For example, I grew up in a Catholic country. The Catholics here go to great lenghts to publicly display a reverence for their religion, but in private, it's clear that they don't actually take it seriously. This duplicity is a public secret: everybody knows it but it's forbidden to talk about it and nobody will openly admit to it.

New religions and minority religions are different. In those, it seems that adherents do take them seriously and do in fact believe the religious tenets.

It's as if he would let faithful believe in a lie just to keep them in line. What a condescending attitude! As if the only thing keeping believers from becoming q band of criminals is religion.

But that condescending attitude is nothing new, religious people are used to it. You will have noticed that religious people from different religions have a kind of victim/martyr mentality in regard to outsiders anyway -- "Others are out to destroy us, humiliate us". And religious people tend to be condescending to outsiders to begin with. So it's all just business as usual.

What isn't business as usual seems to be that some religious people, esp. Christians at first took JP as someone who might be working for their cause, but who are disappointed that he refused to take a clear position on the matter for so long.

I also know some Buddhists who were sort of fans of his. One of them is an avowed vegan; I wonder what he'll say about JP's unraveling.

Jordan Peterson's view on religion is pragmatic in a way because his entire argument was that religions have a positive impact on people and not that they're true. — TheMadFool

Of course, I think so too. (And not because JP said it, I figured that out on my own, living among Catholics.)

Does it make sense to endorse or promote for public consumption an outright lie because it gives people comfort or keeps them on the straight and narrow or the like? Isn't this paternalism?

In my experience, many religious people know that religion is not about truth and they don't look for comfort in it. Such people don't take it seriously. But what they do take seriously with great effort is keeping up the appearance of taking it seriously. This is the taboo, the public secret.

Yes, it's paternalism -- but so what? If one believes that it's dog eat dog world and that life is a struggle for survival and that winning is all that matters, then most truths are trivial.

I myself have refused many luxuries and comforts to investigate this on my own. — Giorgi

What have been some of your discoveries in these investigations?

I am interested in alternative lifestyles and how they can offer resistance to consumerism — Giorgi

I assume you exclude the poor from this, ie. people who due to lack of money have to invent lifestyles that are alternative to consumerism and offer resistance to it?

Oh, right.

There does seem to be some correlation between jaw width and aggressiveness:

Recent research has identified men’s facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) as a reliable predictor of aggressive tendencies and behavior. Other research, however, has failed to replicate the fWHR-aggression relationship and has questioned whether previous findings are robust. In the current paper, we synthesize existing work by conducting a meta-analysis to estimate whether and how fWHR predicts aggression. Our results indicate a small, but significant, positive relationship between men’s fWHR and aggression.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122637

To be clear, I'm not saying the claim is false, I just wonder to what extend it was European Culture in particular that was the driver behind what happened historically. — ChatteringMonkey

And what does she have to say about China and Japan?

And Peterson concludes things from it that do not follow from the study. — Benkei

Such as?

Quite right, the prevalence of a narrower jaw did not arise after the invention of the contraceptive pill: — Kenosha Kid

No, the point is that even the same woman can have different preferences in men, depending on whether she uses hormonal contraceptives or not.
Hormonal contraceptives don't only have physical side-effects, but also psychological ones.

The link between jaw width and aggression is totally spurious — Benkei

Peterson and the study I linked to are talking about changed preferences about men in women who use hormonal contraceptives.

Peterson is a nazi, white supremacist, racist, sexist, evil, bitter professor — deusidex

Heh, maybe that's the scurvy talking out of his mouth!

Or this stuff: "You can test a woman's preference in men. You can show them pictures of men and change the jaw width, and what you find is that women who aren't on the pill like wide-jawed men when they're ovulation, and they like narrow-jawed men when they're not, and the narrow-jawed men are less aggressive. Well, all women on the pill are as if they're not ovulating — Benkei

Studies support this, though, e.g. Oral contraceptive use in women changes preferences for malefacial masculinity and is associated with partner facial masculinity


As for the rest of what he says about women ... I think he's an example of a male martyr.

How can we call anyone right or wrong when our justifications reach a dead end? — Darkneos

Obviously, one does not simply carry on with life when someone is wrong.

I think Nietzsche explains this perfectly:

I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. … I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and live accordingly, without having first given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward. — deusidex

But they're happy ...

What does believing that a meat diet cured their problems say about their critical ability? — Banno

Well, the placebo effect is real.
Someone who is eager to see themselves superior to others will reflect this in their eating habits as well.
Eating cows is somewhere at the top of the hierachy. Chicken, pigs, fish are lowlier, so there isn't much superiority in eating those.

Here's rooting he gets scurvy, at least that!

In the beginning of "The unbearable lightness of being", Kundera writes:

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other
philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that
the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once
and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance,
and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean
nothing. We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms
in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a
hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment.

Will the war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century itself be altered if it
recurs again and again, in eternal return?

It will: it will become a solid mass, permanently protuberant, its inanity irreparable.
If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud
of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody
years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have
become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between
a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns,
chopping off French heads.

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which
things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating
circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from
coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit?
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the
guillotine.

https://www.amazon.com/Unbearable-Lightness-Being-Twentieth-Anniversary/dp/0060597186/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

In the absence of some idea of the possibility of transcending the round of repetition, it becomes unbearable. On the other hand, believing that each person and each event are unique makes them lose value.

Does she propose that it is possible to have a technologically advanced society (and to arrive at it) in some other way than the Europeans did?

You don't believe natural tendencies can be repressed? Whatever the case may be, you would have a beef with Peterson. — Pierre-Normand

It's like when Christians complain how they are not allowed to express their religosity and how they are victims etc. etc.
Well, if God is with them, who could possibly be against them?!

If someone truly is, by their nature, inherently, superior, dominant, surely then this will show on its own and nothing can stop it.

It's all about 'reading age'. My young nephews have curious minds and are open to ideas, but there's no way they would fathom Kant or Hegel, neither of them have a university education. — Wayfarer

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
― John Rogers


source

he often blames the despair of young men as resulting from the toxic influence of feminism that represses their natural tendency to flourish through striving to assert themselves in the human "hierarchy of dominance". — Pierre-Normand

That's a contradiction! How can feminism repress "their natural tendency to flourish through striving to assert themselves in the human "hierarchy of dominance""? Shouldn't this natural tendency of young men naturally assert itself over feminism??

I mean -- should the world get out of the way so that young men can assert themselves in the human "hierarchy of dominance"?

Says Rilke:
Solang du Selbstgeworfnes fängst, ist alles
Geschicklichkeit und läßlicher Gewinn

This is what engaging with a religion on one's own terms is like: easy and with success that isn't worth much. It's like catching a ball that one has thrown.
It's only in interaction with others who are also pursuing that religion that one has to make an effort, new kinds of efforts and cultivate qualities that one could not on one's own.

I see ancient, original texts as openings for new disclosure, and therein lies their greatness. There are no definitive texts, only movement toward greater intimacy with truth at the level of basic questions. What is so important about Hinduism and Buddhism is that they presented an extraordinary efficient method for disclosing revelatory, intuitive understanding at this level. They presented a new intuitive horizon! And I believe it to be philosophy's sole remaining mission to talk about this, learn what it is. — Constance

Oh dear, that's ambitious for philosophy!

If i were putting forward something to replace Buddhism, this would be right. I just want to understand what it has to say. At the center is not a doctrine for me. It is an existential engagement.

That's just it: You want to understand and engage with Buddhism on your terms. You're ignoring or downplaying the importance of the living tradition, the living community of Buddhism, ie. the people who are actually working to preserve the teachings and make them accessible (from librarians to translators to those who pay for the upkeep of Buddhist websites to the monks who teach meditation and everyone needed for the system to function).

I just want to understand what it has to say.

And you think you can do that apart from committing yourself to an actual Buddhist community?

This is a vital point. Really think about it.

That about Kierkegaard and his inherited wealth seems like just an intentional ad hominem.

Not all ad hominems are fallacious:

/.../
Walton has argued that ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, and that in some instances, questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue,[30] as when it directly involves hypocrisy, or actions contradicting the subject's words.

The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that ad hominem reasoning (discussing facts about the speaker or author relative to the value of his statements) is essential to understanding certain moral issues due to the connection between individual persons and morality (or moral claims), and contrasts this sort of reasoning with the apodictic reasoning (involving facts beyond dispute or clearly established) of philosophical naturalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Criticism_as_a_fallacy

Kierkegaard applied this to himself when he broke off his engagement because he thought he wasn't good enough to marry.
And I think that his lifestyle and his not integrating himself with an actual religious community disqualifies his opinion in religious matters. He was an armchair Christian.

He was not aspiritual at all, quite the opposite

I was talking about being areligious, not aspiritual.

But then, this here is certainly NOT about the errors of the Pali canon at all! I mean, it is an interpretative expansion, but exploring meaning not unlike what it is to explore Jesus' words, only here, we have the "event" that is center stage, much more available for objective study. To me, meditation is a practical metaphysics!

Sure. I'm saying it might have nothing more in common with Buddhism than the name.


From what you've said so far about Buddhism, you're like someone who says that the best way to learn a foreign language is to study the textbooks and to do the exercises in the textbooks. But never actually try to function in that language as a member of a community that are native speakers of that language.

Yes, young girls have been taught forever how to be pretty and submissive. — Pierre-Normand

I suggest you read some women's magazines, esp. those secular ones targeted for teenagers and younger women.
No trace of submissiveness there.

I shouldn't have to blow smoke up the arses of idiots to be heard. Or should I? — counterpunch

If you don't see the problem with your attitude ...


Dude, your default is that you don't care about people, esp. those you expect to listen to you. But you expect them to care about you??!


'm 'fraid no deva is around ...

I AM a philosopher. — counterpunch

Here's a didactic story for you:

The story goes that when the Buddha first became enlightened, he was enthusiastic to tell other people about it. So he walked down the road and to the first person he met, he said, "I am the Rightfully Self-awakened One!" The man shook his head and went his way. The same happened with a couple of other men. The Buddha was frustrated and concluded that humans are stupid and worthless and not worth bothering with. Then a deva (a godly being) appeared before the Buddha and pleaded with him, saying that some people have only little dust in their eyes and are worth to be taught, and that out of compassion for them, the Buddha should make an effort and teach them. So he did, and many of his students attained enlightenment under his guidance.

Young women, OTOH, appear to have their act together more so — synthesis

The advice market for young(ish) women has been filled to the brim with self-help magazines and self-help books for a long time. But there is no similar parallel for young men.

Begs the question" Buddhism?? This is my point. Read about what is said at all, and you will find not a closed system of thought, but an openness of possibilities. Those who try to contain religion and philosophy to a doctrine put up barriers to understanding. — Constance

To be clear: By doing what you suggest, one asserts one's supremacy over the text and the ideas it presents.
If this is what one is going to do, then why bother with the text at all? You might as well buy a blank notebook and write down your own ideas.

Read about what is said at all, and you will find not a closed system of thought, but an openness of possibilities.

I can see how it can be read that way, but I don't agree with it.

Those who try to contain religion and philosophy to a doctrine put up barriers to understanding.

Those who refuse to acknowledge the origins and the systemicity of (a) religion are forcefully superimposing themselves and their own ideas onto (the) religion, thus making (the) religion their subordinate.

What is Christianity? Kierkegaard claimed that what Jesus, "Christ," was actually talking about lay with an existential analysis of the self, not in Christendom, not in orthodoxy.

He was a Protestant living off a trust fund, flriting with Catholic ideas from a safe distance. Of course he could afford to fiddle and flirt this way, never actually committing to the religious community which produced him and to which he was indebted. Ungrateful brat.

In other words, I judge, I condemn the areligious, "spiritual" approach to religion. Religious texts were not written for just anyone to read them any way they like and to do with them whatever they like.
It's a matter of common decency to acknowledge that and the religious tradition of which they are part.

I think the line is ironic. We think of the caging to cage the bird, but the cage is a cage unto itself. If there's no bird in it, it's empty. — Dawnstorm

Like defiance, overcoming?
But that makes it a Pyrrhic victory: remove, undo the self, so that there's no one to cage.

Every now and then, I come across the words of someone (usually an American) who doesn't know European history, nor geography.

This person's complaint is that the division of the European continent into countries (many of which are relatively small) is, basically, idle and arbitrary. Nevermind the long history of many of these countries, and, of course, the multitude of languages that make unity difficult or impossible. This is why Europe is not a country. It's the name of a continent.

I've known Americans who believe that the difference between, for example, Germany and France is like the difference between, say, Michigan and Illinois, or any other two US states. Those Americans gravely underestimate the historical, cultural, national, and, of course, language differences.

The European Union is also not a country, because it's a kind of federal association of several countries in which individual countries still maintain their sovereignity.

What I find unacceptable is that some use the same type of language they accuse Trump of, insulting, calling people stupid for voting for policies that they do not agree with. — FreeEmotion

I used to have a problem with this too, but I have since changed my mind.

When one is dealing with someone who understands only one thing, one has to be willing to either resort to their language and fight with their kind of weapons, or concede defeat and leave the battlefield. One cannot choose one's opponents.

But you will have noticed that Biden has a wide range of ways of expressing himself, while Trump has a rather limited one.


I like to remember Peter Jackson's Hobbit films -- the way those beautiful elves nevertheless go and fight the ugly orcs.

Yeah, prevail at all costs, by any means necessary.

My fault with him is far less about his conclusions than his arguments. — Kenosha Kid

Yes. I began watching a debate between him and Žižek, but I stopped because I couldn't stomach the way JP was misrepresenting Žižek's position. It was lame. If a student did that on a test, he wouldn't pass.

But then again, perhaps that's the whole point, and JP and right-wingers know that they are misrepresenting the other side, but they do so deliberately, as a debate tactic, a la Die Kunst, immer Recht zu behalten.