No, not literally. — Constance
There are an infinite number of facts. — Constance
With value, there is something else, once the facts are exhausted for their content. there is the "non natural" property of good and bad. — Constance
This finds its justification in the pain or joy itself--these serve as their own presupposition, as I have said. — Constance
They are not things that defer to other things for their meaning; — Constance
... the expressed principle issues from the world, not just some arbitrarily conceived bit of pragmatic systematizing of our affairs called jurisprudence. — Constance
So we are talking about fantasies? — praxis
This is not true. Our world is quite limited. I know it may seem like we know, or can know, everything about the world but trust me, we don't, and I highly doubt that we have the capacity to know everything. — praxis
There's nothing unnatural about the experience or concepts of 'good' or 'bad'. — praxis
Our conditioning does not require justification. — praxis
Everything requires context to have meaning. — praxis
Arbitrarily conceived laws? :lol: But you're right of course, they don't issue from jurisprudence. — praxis
Someone extracts your tooth without analgesic: not a fantasy. In fact, far more ethically emphatic than any rule can possible be. — Constance
Careful about the connotative value of words. You say evil and we think we are in a dramatic moral conflict between God and Satan, and this is precisely what bad metaphysics does, the kind of thing that sends women to a fiery death and the spiritual sanitization of social rules. Rather, life goes on as it always has, and the sense of what is good, bad, right wrong, and everything in between continues as it is, for there are no stone tablets and God is not a person who speaks, judges, lays down the law. God is the insistence that moral nihilism is impossible. On the positive end, God is love. Why love? Because being in love is a powerful affirmation of our affectivity; no better reason than this. Love is the summum bonum.You seem to believe that sensations, like the sensation of pain, have a moral quality. Do believe that an unpleasant smell, for instance, is evil? — praxis
Careful about the connotative value of words. You say evil and we think we are in a dramatic moral conflict between God and Satan, and this is precisely what bad metaphysics does, the kind of thing that sends women to a fiery death and the spiritual sanitization of social rules. ... God is love. — Constance
You advise care in connotative phrasing and in the same breath demonstrate recklessness. "God is love" is rather emotive. Rules for thee but not for me, it seems. — praxis
How can you know God so well, btw, to know that "God is not a person who speaks, judges, lays down the law"? Do you believe that you are a God? — praxis
Getting back to your beliefs about sensations, I think evil is the correct term to use because you seem to be saying that sensations like pain have inherent moral qualities. I'm curious where you believe the moral quality exists. Is it somehow in the sensation itself or in what causes a sensation? For example, is the sensation of an unpleasant smell evil or is what causes the smell evil? A rotten apple will have an unpleasant smell and the cause of that smell could be determined to be bacteria. So does that mean bacteria is inherently bad or evil? — praxis
Here, again with some jargon, the moral precept is its own presupposition! Meaning, to witness the pain IS the precept! This, as you say, is the "Godly (I add the capital letter) approach to ethics." I think this right! But how is it Godly? — Constance
Emotivity is reckless? — Constance
God is not a person, a creator, a judgment, a principle, a kind old man, and should not be conceived in the traditional way as something impossible remote. — Constance
if you take that rotten apple and rub it in someone's face, is this not by default (defeasibly) wrong? — Constance
But then meta ethical judgments like pain is bad: these do not change. This is important: Conditions in whcih the judgment takes place can change, and this does make our ethical issues so ambiguous; but in cases where the entanglements are minimal, and the value as such is clear, even pure, as when you stick your hand in a fire, value is an absolute. — Constance
This is why I used the term "God", the "logos", the fundamental principle/law behind science, spirituality, trial and error, change, free will, etc. Something with ultimate explanatory power. Now that is something worth pursuing regardless of what we name it. — Benj96
of course, pure pleasure is a myth. Any pleasure is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions with its appropriate activity. The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the pleasure of drunkenness or of anger is still another."
Dewey continues,
"Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to pleasures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good as any other-the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindness, simply as pleasure.” — Joshs
A tough cookie in that one: what is "knowledge of the world"? And what is "lived experience"? — Constance
Buddhist say they want to extinguish desire, but perhaps this is yet another paradox. Mustn't we desire to extinguish? — Gregory
They believe that it is a desire of a qualitative difference and it extinguishes itself (when accompanied by the practices). But more importantly, I think, there is a dualism at the heart of Buddhism. Accept what is outside you, but don't accept all of what is inside you.Buddhist say they want to extinguish desire, but perhaps this is yet another paradox. Mustn't we desire to extinguish? — Gregory
philosophical argument will replace religious dogma; and this is something of an inevitability ...in a few hundred years or so, if we're lucky) but a bringing people together will require either a very liberal attitude that accepts what is really not agreeable or appreciated in the comportment of others who are different; or an agreement in values, such that everybody lives comfortably with others because they are essentially the same. The former is a tall order. Really, nobody wants to live with others who are so morally and aesthetically remote. — Constance
Hume once said that if it were up to reason as reason, reason would just as soon wipe out all humanity, for there is here nothing of value-meaning-content in reason. Reason is an empty vessel of logical structure, and possess none of this dimension of ethical shoulds and shouldn'ts and rights and wrongs. But value, now there is something palpable: the feels and feelings of the world! But they are unwieldy to agreement.
I do agree that there is in all of our affairs there someting as you say, science, spirituality, and all the rest of what we are, but the "behind" is a very mysterious idea. Keeping in mind that, as Wittgenstein understood, the logos cannot apprehend itself; it cannot say what the logos is, for the saying presupposes the logos. This "behind" is elusive; and yet: what is elusive really is possessed in[/, the existence we witness all the time. This is the key to penetrating into this mysterious "behind" of metaphysics. It is not to look behind or beyond and the like; rather, it is to realize that what is manifest IS the behind of things. — Constance
the logos cannot apprehend itself; it cannot say what the logos is, for the saying presupposes the logos — Constance
Maybe the goal is to have maximal vitality of mind, which experiences helps nurture. Emotionalized rationality keeps us always moving forward. One drawback of Buddhism *seems* to be that the excitement for the future, wherever that may be, may perhaps be considered maya. Buddhist say they want to extinguish desire, but perhaps this is yet another paradox. Mustn't we desire to extinguish? — Gregory
I meant discursive knowledge; the point is that such knowledge is always in the form of subjects knowing objects, or knowers knowing what is known, or objects analyzed in terms of their predicates, Lived experience is prior to that — Janus
If Buddhism is metaphysical, maybe it can be classified as absurdism — Gregory
Accepting contradiction as paradox changes how the mind thinks — Gregory
the understanding that is engaged is bound in a temporal dynamic of past/present/future, and it is not as if there really "is" such a thing" as the past or the future. Really, is it even possible to affirm the past AS the past? Past is neither an empirical nor apriori concept. In fact, it is a genuine fiction, as is the future. — Constance
Husserl believed inquiry can isolate this horizon if intuitions, and there discover absolute "presence". He — Constance
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