If people I care about are hurt, what difference does it make whether it was something evil or just unfortunate? — T Clark

So a car slides off the road and injures the passenger, the cause being low tire tread, a truly unfortunate event.

A mile away a speeding drunk driver injures another passenger to the same extent.

Do you not see how the first instance will not be reduced from societal anger and outrage but the second will?

I'm going to midrash traffic signs. For real. — frank

Hopefully oncoming traffic will interpret the same way you do.

I don't have any criticism of people who judge and condemn those who have harmed them. I just don't think it does anything productive beyond helping them deal with the situation emotionally. — T Clark

You jettison emotion as if it were not a critical component here. Emotion is is that which moves and motivates, the word itself referencing motion. That is to say, if you don't care, you won't do anything about it. It's not about offering a therapeutic remedy to the traumatized. It's about expressing outrage at the outrageous in order to bring about change.

If we are speaking of therapeutic responses to victimization, I'd suggest forgiveness over bitterness and anger.

I hadn't heard of midrash. Can you midrash anything? Or does it have to be scripture? — frank

It relates to scripture, but you can use the term sarcastically when someone is going to great lengths to make sense of something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially when they've begun with the assumption that what they're interpreting must be really important and impregnated with all sorts of hidden meaning when really maybe it's just fragmented slop.

That's at least how I just used it.

I think that's your own personal Wittgenstein. — frank

Like much of Wittgenstein, it's ineffable, understandable only through midrash.

For me, the purpose of social control; including enforcement of rules, laws, customs, and etiquette; is to prevent people from causing avoidable and undeserved harm and seeing to it they face the consequences of their actions. If you want to call social control "morality," that's fine, but making moral judgements about people isn't an effective way to protect others. That's the important point for me - moral judgement leads to ineffective social control. Is righteousness and retribution more important to you than a peaceful, safe society? Not for me. — T Clark

Moral condemnation versus punishments aimed a deterring future antisocial behavior are not mutually exclusive. That is, it is possible that the condemnation will result in deterrence and it is also possible that we can both morally condemn and additionally offer pragmatic solutions to deter the behavior.

If we do believe certain acts are immoral (and you indicate you do, in particular those that do not lead to a safe peaceful society), I don't see why it would be inappropriate to call it immoral, condemn it, and declare it bad if it in fact is. From there, I would agree, we now need to decide how to resolve the issue, but I don't see why identifying it and calling it what it is is a incorrect first step.

Jonathan Haidt argues that our moral values are the product of inborn evolutionary adaptations. He lists the following 5 innate moral foundations:

Care/harm
Fairness/cheating
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/subversion
Sanctity/degradation — Joshs

I'd have to go back and re-read it, but I didn't consider the significance of Haidt's book to be so much as providing evidence of the source of our moral value systems, but more in trying to understand why there was such a divide between the political right and the political left. He identified drivers for each side in what they considered important in determining right from wrong, and hypothesized the foundational basis of those disagreements. That is, the right holds certain things to be more important than the left (and vice versa), and therefore the disagreement.

It would seem to be a truism to argue that any human trait arose from evolution, given the theory of evolution posits all traits arose from evolution.

We have no choice but to be pragmatic - for me humans create morality to facilitate social cooperation in order to achieve our preferred forms of order. — Tom Storm

If the subjugation of a minority resulted in a preferred form of order, would you declare it moral?

If, on the other hand, you under-analyzed this question, and the achievement of a "preferred order" is not the ultimate objective, but it is instead X (whatever that might be), is not X the holy law of morality which you seem to deny existing?

That is, we seem to have 2 options here: (1) admit to no true morality, but to just a code of etiquette unique to our fleeting time and place, or (2) proclaim there is a true morality, elusive to our exact detection as it might be, that applies always and to all.

#1 denies us the right to condemn the seemingly atrocious, but demands we just recognize that some play by different rules than us. Where we draw our boundaries creates further ambiguity in that it's hard to know who I have the right to claim must play by my rules and who gets the pass to do as he chooses.

#2 invokes a transcendent good, which is a difficult leap for those mired in naturalistic and scientific worldviews.

I prefer to say that rape in wrong, regardless of whether it advances or falls to advance some social objective. I also unapologetically judge the rapist, and find those who fail to offer their condemning judgment immoral themselves. The sort of immorality that arises from those who refuse to judge from a sense of misplaced empathy or tortured intellectual nuance is some of the least admiral behavior we endure. There are perhaps some so unsophisticated and limited that they might be excused for not recognizing evil among us, but there is no excuse for those who have actively suppressed their intellectual and moral abilities to allow that which shouldn't be allowed.

So what's the point of your comment? Comedic effect? — schopenhauer1

That antinatalism doesn't entail pessimism or thanklessness.

If procreation is impermissible, as it appears to be according to antinatalism, why should those impermissibly procreated celebrate, or give thanks for, that which occurs to them and others impermissibly procreated? — Ciceronianus

Perhaps they celebrate their gains should they see more people converting to their cause. They are not necessarily atheist, so perhaps they thank their heavenly father for each person who swears off procreation.

It would not be the stupidest religion out there, and it might just provide our sullen antinatalists with feelings of awe and inspiration.

I just became aware of this. A new survey of 1785 English-speaking philosophers from around the world on 100 philosophical questions. — Banno

You're getting old my friend. You talked about this a year ago

here..

If any of you subscribe to the belief that copying data is a holy act, you might want to consider joining the Kopimist Church. As far as religions go, it's not the stupidest one.

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

At least our radicals are worth looking at.

I know nothing of him, but he's said to be a bit nuts, so I'd vote for him assuming he can run with a football.

, in the video Herp-a-durp stepped on another dude's head and that counts `as a score, I get it. As for the connection to politics, is this how you decide which laws get passed in 'Murica? Party members step on each other's heads and those with the least brain damage get to make the laws? ...Plausible — Baden

Now you've put me on a mission to find a crazy Irish politician so I can retaliate and divert. Let me get to Googling and I'll be back in a few.

My dad was in diapers when he was 20?

Now I know where I inherited my pervyness.

You and Banno appear to advocate that some knowledge/information is missing unless one undergoes the experience for themselves. As I see it, that is not a rejection of the ineffable, but an endorsement. — Luke

Exactly.

As I noted in a prior comment, the concession that the experience is not wholly conveyable in language concedes (1) that experiences are divisible into qualia, where some portions of the experience are conveyable and some not, and (2) that language is an interpretative act, offering a generalized glimpse into the experience, but not equivalent to it.

As to #1, I think it actually goes beyond that because if we can't accurately convey parts A, B, and C of an experience, I see no reason why we should think we could accurately convey D, E, or F, meaning the entire experience and all experiences are ineffable. If there are portions of the experience that are capable of being perfectly conveyed, I'd like to know what those portions are and why. It sounds like we're about to go down a Lockeian sort of division of the mental world, where there are primary qualities of mental events that can reduced perfectly to language and secondary sorts of ones that cannot. Sounds like a failed enterprise of trying to draw false distinctions. Where we'll end up is that all is ineffable or all is fully describable. It's equivalent to the direct realism versus indirect realism debate. Either we see all the world just as it is or none of it.

As to #2, if we start claiming distinctions between what we experience and what we talk about, we're in the murky world of metaphysics that I thought Wittgenstein was trying to avoid. That is, we're back to dealing with what there is versus what we can speak of, and if it appears that all experiences are ineffable (per #1), then we must remain silent about everything (a pleasant thought).

Walker is from my alma mater — jgill

A long line of Hanovers went to UGA. One's now in Colorado. Son, is that you?

Leaving that aside, the guy seems to be a scumbag from just about every angle. If you do vote for him, for the love of Yahweh at least have the decency to lie about it afterwards. — Baden

Herschel was a hell of a running back, which usually translates into an equally amazing upper legislative chamber member.



BTW them Dawgs is #1 right now, probably will win the national title. Coinkidink? I think not.

I read your post by skimming down the middle of it, so if I say something that doesn't really respond to it, it has to do with my reading style.

I think the win for Trump here is that with a Republican majority in the House, the investigative committee against him will be disbanded and then they can go about the important business of investigating Hunter Biden's computer or some such shit.

Trump rules from fear, which he uses only against his own party to keep them from challenging him, leaving a bunch of battered opponents waiting for the chance to destroy him once he's been weakened, which seems to be about now.

I need to go vote in a few days. It's between Warnock and Walker. It's a difficult choice. I sort of like the idea of a pro-life candidate who has paid for a few of his girlfriends' abortions. Something just rings true about that.

In addition to all that can be said about Trump causing the weak performance in the midterms, I think we can also credit/blame the Supreme Court. Having an entire branch of government sympathetic to Republican causes for the next few decades likely has taken some of the urgency of Republicans to elect representatives. That is, they're happy with the way things are, so it would follow that they have no motivation to shake up the status quo.

I say this to make Democrats sad, by telling them that the reason they won the mid-terms is because the Republicans don't care because they didn't matter. They already won something much bigger.

I can't see how that might work. What is there that cannot be said? "...it hardly conveys the full experience" - of course not! That has to be experienced! But as suggested to Frank, that just means that it is not something to be said, but something to be done. It's not a something that remains unsaid! — Banno

I don't understand this concession, where you acknowledge that the experience cannot be accurately conveyed. That would equate to universal ineffability, and it seems to acknowledge a distinction between the object and the phenomenal state, a distinction you've always maintained.

If I tell you I saw a sunrise, but I can never actually fully describe it, then there is something within my experience that cannot be stated, and is thus ineffable. If what we say of sunrises can be said of all experience, then all experience is ineffable.

To borrow from Kant, the unity of apperception is the a priori ability to perceive an object as a single thing, as opposed to it being a disorganized mix of various perceptions. If that unity we perceive of a single experience if not conveyable by communication, then what is being conveyed other than particular qualia composing the unified perception?

We've debated before whether there were a need to speak of qualia, with your position being that perceptions were not subdividable entities and that perceptions and objects were mirror images, not distinguished by our perception faculties (i.e., seeing, hearing, mentally processing, etc.) . Such is direct realism.

If you say now that the perception is not to be dealt with as a unity, but as that with various qualities (i.e. qualia), with some qualia being describable and some ineffable, then you seem to be admitting that which I thought you previously vehemently denied. We're now talking about the qualia that composes the unity of the experience and discussing which may or may not be describable in language.

And that raises another question here: If there are parts of the experience that are conveyable through language, which ones are they? I can't follow why the sunrise would be ineffable but the rays of light, the warmth, the joy provided by the sun (or any other such portion of the unified experience) would not.

have three related words. The ineffable, about which we can say nothing, and which as a result can not enter into our explicit considerations; ↪Tom Storm's numinous, to which we can no more than nod, and perhaps the sacred, which remains undiscussed. — Banno

I'd define the ineffable as that which we cannot say everything about, not nothing. We can call the ineffable sunset magical, which is to say something about it, but it hardly conveys the full experience.

That is why I disagree with your assessment that my view on universal ineffableness is solipistic. I didn't suggest we can say nothing at all about anything.

I think your definition of sacred is off. The sacred is that which is set apart from the mundane and venerated. While some things may be so venerated as to be forbidden to be discussed (the Orthodox Jewish prohibition of ever speaking the name of God (YHWH) comes to mind), that is the exception. Sacred prayers, for example, are recited daily. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacredness

Seems you wish to create a typology of thought, from those most capable of being reduced to symbol to those least capable. I'd submit it's not a type distinction, but just of degree, and dependent upon the artistry of the speaker in painting a picture of his thoughts.

Our thoughts are extremely complex, intertwined with countless perceptions and interpretations, so much so we cannot expect they'd be specifically and inerrantly conveyed, nor is it reasonable to assume they'd be interpreted similarly by others. That is, my understandimg of your comments will differ from how others understand them.

My private mental world will always remain to some amount private, no matter how much I might be the sort that wishes to share my deepest thoughts.

I'm hoping the cause of this is seen clearly as the unelectability of Trump candidates so that the Trump era can once and for all come to an end.

perhaps it can only understood by metaphors. — Banno

I subscribe to the notion that all language is metaphorical to the extent it can only to better or worse extents describe one's internal states to tell the listener what that internal state "is like" (thus implicating a metaphor or simile). This assumes a similarity in our experiences which is purely assumed, which may or may not present to you some feeling of what I was experiencing based upon what I assume you have previously experienced. Even in the most non-abstract of sentences where I tell you what my dog experience is by pointing to a dog, what I am telling you is that I expect your experience will be like my experience.

What this assumes, which I understand you disagree with, is that my descriptions are of phenomenal states, not of things, which I hold to be very distinct (this is the direct realism versus indirect realism issue).

The point to this whole preface is to say that all thoughts are ineffable. The best we can do is share our experiences by reducing them to symbols and uttering them, but the picture we paint with our words is a rough sketch, only partially revealing the actual thought.

If it is all a matter of choice, why choose a world that spins meaninglessly? Why not choose one that revolves for a purpose that you are a part of?

But you're addressing something entirely different from me. I thought the thought experiment raised interesting epistemological questions and that's what I addressed.

You're just focusing on the medical ethics question. Whether the detainment were justified will turn upon unavailable subtleties in the hypothetical you posed that would be available to a judge in an actual case, whose decision would be reviewable on appeal.

This seems an uninteresting hypothetical as you're confining it.

But to address it. I'd think the administration of justice in actual such cases will follow the trend they always do. That is, the system generally works, with some celebrated instances of injustice, with injustice typically more common among the poor and inadequately represented.

She believed she would be unjustly detained, but she wasn't. She was justly detained. She was wrong.

It"s close to a Gettier case, but not quite.(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem#:~:text=The%20Gettier%20problem%2C%20in%20the,(JTB)%20account%20of%20knowledge.) In your example, the justification was insufficient as it was not founded on fact, but only in hunch. A Gettier case would only be implicated if she had an uncorrelated justified belief.

In your example, the false belief was perfomative of making the belief true, resulting in a Pinocchio like paradox. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio_paradox

When Pinocchio lies and says "my nose grows," it grows and he's not lying so it doesn't grow.

So, when the lady in your example says "I will be detained," she won't until uttered and then she will.

I'd say she's no more clairvoyant than Pinocchio when he said his nose grows when it didn't.

It's somewhere between Gettier and Pinocchio I think, but as my first comment says, I do think her assertion suffers from some vagueness in that it she believed herself being subject to unjust detention, when in fact her detention was just.

I'm curious how the data was compiled. A "threat" means what and who must it be reported to to be included in the data? How long have they kept such data, and was it compiled pre-1996. Do they register the likely daily threats posed by various terrorist groups around the world and include that in the data?

It just sounds vague to me. If there has been a recent decision to take the threats more seriously and to investigate them more closely, I would expect there to be a rise in the number they are investigating. It's like if there is an initiative to reduce drunk drivers, we should expect to see a sudden rise in the number of suspected drunk drivers, but that arises not from the increased drunk driving, but just from the increased efforts to identify them and prosecute them.

Anyway, I'm not suggesting that these numbers can't be correct, nor am I suggesting that Trump might not have sparked some to make these threats, but I don't feel like I can do much with the data provided.

What I do agree with is that I feel Trump has a moral duty to deter others from violence, and that can be accomplished by stressing to his supporters the need for non-violence and civility, something Trump has steadfastly refused to do. I don't think the response should be to stifle free speech rights or to subtract any personal responsibility from the ones who have actually made the threats and impute it on Trump. It's enough for me to just state that Trump is morally bankrupt and unfit for a leadership position. What I would hope is that democratic rule eventually gets this right and removes him from a position of power.

I think they're underrated

In this context - a grotesque and self-serving justification for prejudice and censorship. — T Clark

I really have no idea what you're talking about.

The other side of this: https://www.chabad.org/4411808

I don't get it. His dad said he might be chips, and then he saw a bag of chips.

Also, it's mom, not mum. Chips, not crisps.

C minus.

That cartoon I get, but still don't know why the shirtless woman had her hair straight up.

Can you make me a cartoon with a breast bearing fish with its hair straight up? Maybe that will clarify things for me.

I first suggested merging the recent series in pessimism into the Life Sucks thread to the other mods, but Mikie got to it first.

I wanted to point that out because I don't want my delay on doing the merge myself to be the reason I'm saved from your criticism.

Came up with a name for this cartoon. Monkingfish.

Logic, then, being an attribute of language, stands subordinate to language. This feels intuitively like something useful to my argument, but, first, I must ask how symbolic logic can stand alone (which it can) without being its own language? — ucarr

It is the symbol that is the syntactic element of the language and the meaning that is the semantic element of the language.

English: "If I go to the store, I will buy milk."
Symbolic logic: S --> M

In English, the syntax were those certain words, and should I have said "If I now am go to store, I after have milk,' perhaps I mean the same thing, but my syntax is all screwed up. You hear that in pidgins, where a foreign speaker can be understood without properly using accepted format.

In symbolic language, the semantical content of your symbols is heavily abstracted, but there still must remain an accepted syntactical form.

Consider:

S --> M
S
Therefore M.

This is logically sound, yet it's entirely irrelevant whether we are talking about stores and milk, meaning the specific semantical content of the symbols has become irrelevant, as for any S that occurs M will follow, regardless of what S or M represent.

If I create a syntactical error in a syllogism, that will likely negate the truth of the syllogism, but that has to do with the precision and limited room for error when your syntax is so abbreviated.

I think a good example of a logical syntax error is one that occurs quite literally in computer programming. The computer immediately recognizes what you've attempted is not "understood" by the computer. You've just spoken gibberish to the computer as it might have much less room for error than a human in understanding a pidgin.

Anyway, somewhat nascent thoughts on my behalf with some of this, so tinker with what I've started if some of this doesn't hold.

Language and formal logic are no more synonyms than language and fortran. The latter is a specific use of language. — Joshs

I disagree that "formal logic" and "Fortran" are similarly related to language in that both represent specific uses of the language.

I see formal logic as the semantical component of language, which does not represent a structure , but a meaning, whereas Fortran is a specific syntactical language form used to convey a semantical meaning. Under any language (Fortran, French, English), you will need to adhere to a logical based semantics for coherence, but the form can vary among types of languages. That is, logic is not a language, but a component of language, whereas Fortran is a type of language.

Language is a human extension of perceptual interaction with the world, and is continuous with perception , which is already conceptual and cognitive prior to the learning of a language. Our embodied perceptual-motor interaction with the world plays a large role in the origin of the structure of linguistic grammar. Animal cognition already implies a spatial-temporal ‘grammar’. — Joshs

This references a specific type of non-linguistic thought, specifically "how to" thought. That is, a chicken knows how to jump on the perch and likely engages in some form of non-linguistic reasoning when plotting her course from the ground, into the coop, up the ramp, and onto the perch. That is akin to much higher human non-linguistic "how to" knowledge, as when we can disassemble, repair, and reassemble an automobile transmission without putting a single action into language before acting.

Living my life with dogs, cats, goats, and chickens, I am very sympathetic to the view that animals have much higher levels of thought than people wish to give them credit for, but I don't think your reference to "perceptual-motor interaction" touches on those higher levels of animal intelligence. That is to say, I agree with you to the extent you suggest that there are all types of thought without language, but I believe your example of "how to" language points to the least controversial one that is generally conceded by the staunchest of deniers of meaningful thought without language.

What makes a government legitimate or illegitimate? — Average

I was thinking about this, and what rights a population might have to overthrow the government if it were considered illegitimate. This is what I sketched out. It's my first thoughts, but this is what I came up with:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security