I don't have the time to go more into detail concerning your response right now, my apologies, but might you know the aristotelian stance on whether keeping a rock on a table is morally wrong as it's perturbing the telos of that rock, which is reaching the ground? — BlueBanana

To be honest I'm not entirely sure. I suspect only unities, or things with essences, have a telos but I'm just guessing. I get where you're coming from, cause the old Aristotelian physics held things fell to the Earth because that's where they "belonged". Even if a rock has a telos, it's not a permanent frustration of its telos to keep it from falling to the ground. I think this is how Aristotelians and the like get around the charge that, say, blinking, is morally wrong because it frustrates the telos of an eyeball to perceive light. But it's awfully convenient. Natural law theorists have often almost exclusively focused on abortion and abstinence, as if their ethical theory is fine-tailored to a specific view regarding these acts (but not so much in regards to other ethical issues - when in doubt, something-something Doctrine of Double Effect, who the hell knows really).

I'm not a fan of natural law theory, if you couldn't tell.

The way I see it is that a person may exist only when they are conscious (i.e., we "die" when we go to bed but are "resurrected" when we wake up) - but that the ethical implications surrounding people extends beyond their material existence.

We have (prima facie) duties to the dead not to desecrate their graves, steal their shit or slander their image, even if they're not around to know anything about it. We have duties not to kill people in their sleep - the fact that we can say we can "kill" them (even if they don't "exist" at the time of killing) means we recognize that there is, in fact, some sort of "residue" left behind that is morally relevant. Just because it's a memory or an idea doesn't make it any less "real".

Maybe we can call some of this residue "preferences" or "interests". But there's also the case that people who have lived a long time are entrenched in their community and killing them would involve permanently taking-away this asset of the community. So we can also see the morally relevant factors of someone's "footprint".

It's not often recognized that ethical debates don't usually revolve around principles or values or whatever but more around metaphysics. The abortion debate largely revolves around the metaphysics of persons, self-hood, identity, etc. Those opposed to abortion often say a fetus is a person that must not be killed, whereas those who think abortion is permissible will say a fetus is not a person and therefore cannot be killed. Nobody really disputes that killing people is morally wrong - what they disagree on is whether or not a fetus is a person that can be killed.

Those opposed to abortion usually say there is something "about" the fetus that makes it morally relevant - the Aristotelian version is that the fetus has a "telos" (to mature into a baby in the same way an acorn matures into a tree), and that having an abortion permanently frustrates this telos. It's also commonly held that the fetus has a "soul" and therefore quite literally is a person.

How I see it is that an unborn fetus or zygote or whatever has no conscious intentions, aspirations, preferences, etc, and the only real footprint is has in this world is that it's a constant memory of an oftentimes "accidental" sexual act. Any "telos" is may or may not have is not intrinsic to it but applied by external constraints as well. I'm resistant to this teleology - things happen in the world but there's no "function" to them that isn't derivative from more general principles. I'm also an atheist, and I don't think souls exists. So it's somewhat hard for me to be opposed to abortion, although I understand why some people might see it as murder.

Am I still the same person, then?

I don't know of any distinction between what is moral and what is ethical. The two are commonly used interchangeably.

I'm not concerned with whats good or bad, I'm concerned with desire. Also allow me to correct that part if my passage; the highest "agreed upon" common interest of the "perceived majority" of sentient beings "by the perceived majority of sentient beings"

And I haven't defined the "good" with that statement, I have defined the "desired".(hypothetically) — XanderTheGrey

But then what relation does this have to ethics?

This is actually embarrassing to ask because I feel I understand exactly how to go about being ethical. Its a rather simple formula: do nothing to sabotage that which is preceived as the highest common interest of all sentient beings. — XanderTheGrey

Perhaps, but now you have identified the "good" with "highest common interest of all sentient beings". And like Moore, we can ask, is this really good? In the sense that:

"The highest common interest of all sentient beings is good"

is equivalent to

"The highest common interest of all sentient beings is the highest common interest of all sentient beings."

The latter is a tautology, but the former seems like a synthetic statement. They don't seem to be equivalent.

There isn't one single definition of "ethics", just as there isn't a single definition of "good". Roughly, I would say that ethics is the study of how we ought to act, which includes what things are good, what determines right/obligatory/permissible/wrong acts to be this way, as well as related issues about ethics (meta-ethics).

In a nutshell, then, the goal of ethics is to ascertain how we ought to live. Life throws us into ambiguous situations in which the course of action is not clearly defined, and we need advice for what to do in these situations. Life is also a continual process of growth and decay, and those interested in ethics want to know what makes this process go best, i.e. what it takes to be a good person and to lead a good life.

It's hard for me to take seriously the notion of an entity that is so powerful he created the world, but has it in his mind that it's right to punish people who don't believe he exists.

Children are primarily accidents, or had because of a social expectation. For many people, having children is just another thing on their checklist. Make more people with checklists. It's very important that we have more people with checklists. It's very important that we check those lists!

If I go to a fiery pit then it will be for unjust reasons. An infinite punishment for a finite sin is unjust, especially when I didn't ask to be a part of this cosmic drama.

Death is very scary for me but also comforting when I'm suffering. The notion that one day the Earth will rotate without me on it is incomprehensible to me. But the notion that there is an end to suffering is also relieving.

Most of the time I wish I could die, without like, actually dying.

I remember reading that a long while back and being engrossed by the possibility of reducing morality to a set of calculations. Now it largely just seems like a fantasy that can't cash out in real life and doesn't cover all our moral beliefs.

Therefore emotivism and intuitionalism with the theory of good being culturally dependent and relative, meaning in some sense postmodernism? — Posty McPostface

I'm not sure what you mean. Utilitarianism does not entail emotivism and intuitionism (the two aren't compatible, either).

Yeah, what makes it the best? Materialism for that matter is also a "satisfying" solution because it denies that the mind exists in any way transcendental to the body. And of course, then we have positions like substance dualism, or neutral monism. — Agustino

But materialism fails for the self-evident truth that the mind is not reducible or identical to the brain.

I'll admit, dualism a la Aquinas are plausible as well.

So just like the metaphysics of being is a psychological defense mechanism against the flux of existence, so too the metaphysics of becoming is a psychological defense mechanism against immutable, unchanging Being. These are of course neither arguments for nor against one metaphysics or the other. They're just red herrings. — Agustino

The point is not to refute metaphysical positions through psychology but to move away from them, cast them aside as being unnecessary.

The utilitarian rejoinder would be, whatever works. Utilitarianism is not an absolutist position. Whatever government maximizes utility is what we ought to have.

Now, disregarding the above and assuming that utilitarianism is what philosophy ought to be, then isn't the problem now to create a calculus that would be able to determine what would be the optimal utility to all people (the greatest good principle). Is this something that will be possible in the future or another hopeless dream? — Posty McPostface

Used to be a consequentialist, still have some leanings towards it. Consequentialist theories like utilitarianism are seductive because their aim is to make the best-possible-world in terms of good. It's hard to argue why we ought not do that.

Utilitarianism, historically, was meant to be applied to systems of government more than individual people. Most consequentialists including utilitarians held/hold that for individual actions, it's better to not actively try to calculate the best aims but to live life naturally and intuitively, only applying consequential calculus in more extreme situations. Similar to the paradox of hedonism, it's argued that the best consequences come about generally when we're not obsessively pondering the consequences. Governments, on the other hand, have to deal with statistics, numbers, amounts, etc which are a lot easier to work with, generally. Does the military bomb a civilian settlement to eliminate radical terrorists? What are the consequences? No one individual is responsible for this decision, at least not usually.

The criticism that there is no calculus that could be applied (and therefore utilitarianism/consequentialism is false) fails to work. It is clear that a lesser headache, say, is better than a terrible migraine. We clearly know this because we take pain medication. Experiences can be roughly measured by intensity and duration, and while we don't have precise mathematical measurements for them, this is not different than other perceptual difficulties - we have a hard time estimating the length of objects without a ruler, for instance, but that doesn't mean there is no actual length.

So in general the utilitarian would argue that normal experiences are intuitively ranked without much worry. When things get hairy or we're talking about governments, that's when it says we have to start estimating the comparative value of alternate courses of action. Sometimes it's easy, but sometimes it's not. Things get super hairy when you're a pluralist in terms of value - how do you calculate the value difference between values?

Sometimes the value difference is obvious. In which case, there's not much of an issue. Othertimes it's a lot harder. This difficulty, perhaps even real-life impossibility, is not really an argument against consequentialism. It just adds in another layer of non-ideal circumstances.

In all of these situations, it can be argued that there is an ulterior motive behind these actions and that they were thus never really selfless to begin with. — Alec

Psychological egoism is pretty much rejected by most moral philosophers and moral psychologists. Just because you have a desire to do something doesn't make it selfish. Selfishness isn't defined in terms of desire-satisfaction, it's defined by the contents and orientation of desires. Motivation is the determinate factor here.

haha I wish

What do you mean it's "the best solution" to the mind-body problem? — Agustino

It's a satisfying solution to the mind-body problem because it denies the body exists in any way transcendental to the mind.

And what does that have to do with the becoming/being dichotomy (flux)? — Agustino

Nietzsche's position is that people cling to metaphysics, especially metaphysics of eternal, unchanging, present substance, as a psychological defense mechanism against the flux of existence. Under all this wild current, there "must" be some unchanging entity that is undisturbed. Lots of religious, mystical, ethical projects are aimed at achieving some kind of contact with this substance.

Not really a fallacy, more like just bad reasoning. If there's not enough evidence to support an empirical claim, then there isn't a good reason to believe it.

Also, "Rational"Wiki >:O

It's great things worked out in your favor but that is not the case for a very large amount of people. It's certainly not the case for most organisms living in their natural environment, who usually die in horrible ways (if they even survive gestation - see R-selection). There's a confirmation bias going on here. You don't hear about the failures too often because the failures are all dead.

Affirming life by means of portraying it as a challenge or something like that is paradoxical. It cannot be a real challenge if success is not guaranteed - but if success is not guaranteed, then it cannot be the case that life can be success for everyone. Whatever doesn't kill you may make you stronger, or it might make you wish it had killed you.

The circumstances you find yourself in are largely due to what we usually call luck. This includes your mental states - you are lucky not only that you are in favorable circumstances but also that you have mental states that help you survive. Your type-character is not under your control.

I voted idealism because I think it's the best solution to the mind-body problem. Also it's a super sexy position. The metaphysical weak are those who depend on an unchanging reality to cope with the flux of existence.

Anyways, long story short, one can still be in the relatively normal range of moods (probably a slight bit more towards acute depression though), and still work within a wordview that keeps in mind the Pessimistic trademarks of relentless desire, the burdens of life, and an understanding of the absurd. — schopenhauer1

I don't think philosophic pessimism can be fully separated from a negative mood or state of mind, even if it is just melancholy or moderate depression. There wouldn't be a problem with the things pessimism identifies if there wasn't a negative reaction to them. Lots of other people think there's problems in life that don't constitute life in the way pessimism sees its problems as - as such, these people can simultaneously affirm life while still remembering that there are certain imperfections with it.

At base, I think philosophical pessimism asserts that life is intrinsically not worth living. It doesn't seem coherent to believe this and yet live consistently in a state of mind that one would expect from a person who believes the opposite - that life is meaningful and valuable. There's no issue with being intermittently happy, but I strongly believe that being a pessimist entails some primary negative experience, like dread, ennui, sadness or whatever that comes as a natural response to the problematic things pessimism identifies. Think about how absurd it would be for someone to say "life is suffering" and smile while doing so.

Because of this, positive states of mind are interpreted differently. Instead of seen as reasons for living, they are seen as episodes of relief, oblivion, unnatural spikes, etc. The big rub of pessimism is that there isn't a good reason for living, and whatever we find to be meaningful is simply killing-time or a hodge-podge kludge. This is why I think it's wrong to call someone like Camus a pessimist, since he definitely affirmed life with the existential rebellion. Or, rather, why I prefer affirmative/negative rather than optimist/pessimist. A negative thinker is one that when asked why they haven't killed themselves, replies "I don't know" or "because I'm stuck in life" or "because life isn't bad enough yet" or "because I haven't gotten around to it" or maybe "because I have ethical duties in life." Life becomes simply a postponement of death.

If you're going to live, that is, go through all the motions of life without really considering why you're doing it, you have to "forget" a few things. A pessimist can only really live if they temporarily forget about their pessimism.

Clinical and severe depression is a mental disease. Those with severe depression have a skewed perception on reality. Oftentimes they develop victim complexes, catastrophic thinking patterns and even conspiratorial beliefs. They cannot function as a worker in a capitalist economy a member of society. Self-medication and suicide attempts are common.

Nowadays there's a blooming movement surrounding depressive realism, which may be equivalent to what you mean by "discouragement". A depressive realist is hypothesized to have a better grasp of reality than the normal, and suffer moderate depression because of it. Of course, most depressive realists would never give up their perceptual capacities, probably out of some form of pride or ressentiment. Being depressed is never fun but occasionally it allows you to feel superior to all the "sheeple". But in general depressive realism is a form of neuroticism.

Metzinger's article was interesting. Can't say I learned all too much that I didn't already "know", apart from Metzinger's own musings about how suffering manifests in his philosophical model of the self (PSM). Was surprised but also disappointed at his short section on antinatalism, was glad to see the distinction between negative utilitarianism and AN.

He's right, though. Suffering is a very important, if not the most important, relevant constraint on inquiry. It's time we start taking it more seriously, in science, phenomenology, and ethics. In this sense, religion has a serious head start.

http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/231

http://heavysideindustries.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/HARMAN_IAmAlsooftheOpinionThatMaterialismMustBeDestroyed.pdf

Took a look at the Metzinger essay. I can't say I like what Metzinger writes in general - I read his book The Ego Tunnel expecting to be blown the fuck away and left with a bunch of unanswered questions. Later I realized his view is based largely off of shaky contemporary neuroscience. Graham Harman has a good set of criticisms of Metzinger's positions - his general scientism (contra phenomenology, commonly found in reductive materialist and eliminativist literature), his reductionism (once again, contra phenomenology), and his incoherent notion of a no-self (ditto again on the phenomenology). He uses science as the unexplained explainer - ignoring subjective phenomenal experience in favor of "objective", "hard", "phallic", "scientific" data.

A few pages into the essay and he re-states what Nietzsche had already made clear - that what makes a life worth living is whether or not you would live it over again. The amor fati of a hypothetical eternal recurrence. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's ahistorical wheel-reinvention.

The first question on this road is, is Being an artifact of language (i.e, in itself meaningless)? That is, as language is a kind of template laid over the world, does the excavation of Being really mean digging just and only in language, with the consequence that "Being" would have only a language-function that once understood can and should be discarded. Or is it more? — tim wood

Being is not a "thing" (an ontic entity), nor is it some transcendental realm beyond our understanding. Being is that which distinguishes the existent from the non-existent. Dasein is that which can understanding the ontological distinction, and for whom this distinction is important (because it produces anxiety).

We say, "It is," or "Things are." Each thing is, in some sense. Does each thing "be" in the exact same way? Or is Being (i.e., the Being of beings) a many, each being Being in its own way? — tim wood

Heidegger goes to great lengths explaining how things "be" in different ways - at least, existence discloses itself to us (Dasein) in various ways. The most common way things present themselves to us is in terms of tool-use: things are "ready-at-hand".

But another way things appears to us is what Heidegger called "present-at-hand", or "presence", where things seem to simply exist as a Cartesian-esque extended entity in space-time, with a certain set of qualities that are well represented by mathematics. Heidegger thought almost all of Western metaphysics was utterly obsessed with the present-at-hand and forgot about the ontological distinction, which the Pre-Socratics apparently recognized. He also thought that technology made it worse, as technology reduces everything to mere numbers, quantities, piles.

Heidegger's analysis ultimately points to the identification of Being (in this case, Dasein's Being), with time.

The simple difference would be that the artificial doesn't have the means to make itself.

Nature makes itself whether that be at the level of rivers carving out their channels or bodies turning food into flesh. The artificial only happens as the result of someone having the idea and the desire to manufacture the material form. — apokrisis

Right, like I implied earlier, the artificial is that which does not have an identity or telos itself but rather exists for a purpose that has been applied by the manufacturer. Take away the manufacturer and the user and you're left with a material object, bottom-up reductionism with no natural purpose.

The answer is always the same. Machines are our way of imposing our will on nature. And in doing that, we are being formed as "selves" in turn. We become mechanically minded and disconnected as "human beings". — apokrisis

Yes. Heidegger has a famous piece on the problem of technology. Essentially we become obsessed with the present-at-hand and begin to see the world in terms of calculable entities that must be weighed and measured and sorted to maximize efficiency and production.

We want a balance where we are the unpredictable ones and the world functions with machinelike reliability. Or at least we think we do until that gets boring or creates too much responsibility for making up our own individual meanings in life. — apokrisis

But do you think there is something "natural" about, say, a Christmas icicle light string? Normally we wouldn't call this a natural phenomenon, as it was created by human hands. But actually, it was probably created by a machine, which was created by human hands. But that opens the door to seeing the Christmas lights being made by nature itself. There doesn't seem to be a strict cut-off being what is natural and what is artificial.

And of course, what we see as "natural" could very well be a strange anomaly in the big picture, and that the long stretch of time gives the illusion that it isn't.

It is incredible to think that the very same atoms that make life can be milked in such ways to create our animated technological world. The fact that we can crudely arrange them to achieve our purposes this way really reinforces the idea of just how remarkable these little things are and how far we have to go in truly understanding them. To my mind, it points to a type sentience we don't fully understand. — MikeL

Yes, this is similar to what I was getting at, but not necessarily in an awe-inspiring way, although I will agree it is remarkable how flexible reality seems to be. Like it's almost unbelievable how something like a printer is even physically possible. Why is there so much flexibility and diversity? Why not just the same and nothing more?

What I see to be disturbing at times is how technology resembles a form of torture, a mangling of an assortment of unrelated things, put together in ways that, had humans never existed, would never come to be this way on their own.

I'm by no means advocating biological intelligent design or any bullshit like that but it's remarkable how the world is so flexible and allows us creative human beings to come up with seemingly endless new creations.

I'm a computer engineering major. I have some experience with engineering in general and I can tell you that many things that seem to work "perfectly" as if by magic are the result of many, many failures, and may barely function properly itself. "Whatever works" is how engineers tend to go about things. And it's surprising when you learn how things work - sometimes it's cool but for me at least I've found that I'm more surprised that this is actually the way it works. How things work in the inside of the black box can oftentimes seem counterintuitive or unexpected. Often it seems like it shouldn't work, but somehow it does.

Actually I think one of the disturbing aspects of technology is the fact that technology's teleology is entirely imposed by humans. Even the identity of these technologies is a projection of humans. When humans go extinct there will likely be some leftover technology that no longer has an identity. A book will no longer be a book, it will just be a "thing". Some mutated assemblage of random pieces, held together by a purpose that no longer exists. It's creepy.

Have you considered a career in writing? :) — JupiterJess

Thank you. I've considered it but not in any serious degree.

Cons:

• Is woefully incompetent in politics.
• Is a racist and a blatant misogynist.
• Is physically and mentally compromised.
• Is lazy and stupid.
• Is dishonest and malevolent to most Americans.
• Is trigger-happy.
• Is an international joke.

Pros:

???????

But who is to say miss diving beetle isn't just being coy, discovering which male is tough and fit enough to overpower her? — apokrisis

This sounds similar to saying, how do we know the girl wasn't just asking to be raped? For all we know, the girl likes to be dominated, overpowered, abused, etc. Rape apology.

And if you find that framing of the situation objectionable, it is only the reverse of claiming instead it is a case of male rape. We shouldn't anthropomorphise in either direction. — apokrisis

I don't see that framing as an issue of male rape. The male diving beetle is the one that forces the female to stay underwater. The male developed suction cups on their "objects of prehension" to keep the female from swimming away. The female developed grooves on her shell to counteract that. The male developed little points on the suction cups at the same distance as the grooves to counteract that. etc.

Female diving beetles have died because the mating ritual went on for days, preventing her from coming up to the surface to get an air bubble. The male beetle apparently gets so sex-frenzied that he forgets about the value of a living mate and aims simply to deposit his seed.

So diving beetles may evolve sucker arms to clasp the females. And the females counter-evolve ridges and pits on their shells to make grasping harder. But where is the intent here? Where is the choice in the biological design? Are you arguing that the lady beetles do give willing consent to some males that take their fancy?l — apokrisis

No, I'm not. I'm saying that female diving beetles, as well as female blue sharks, female black widows, and a whole host of females in other species are put through a violent act to achieve reproduction. It is commonly thought that male black widow spiders sacrifice themselves for the nourishment of the female, but it has been observed that female black widow spiders will eat male black widow spiders, even if they haven't copulated. What seems to be the case, actually, is that many male black widow spiders will die trying to overpower the female, before a male finally succeeds. However after the act of copulation the male is exhausted and the female can eat him as well.

Nature doesn't actually have "species", we put that label on things that are similar enough to each other and have a similar genetic history. Similarly, nature doesn't actually have any concept of "rape" - but we do. How we choose to describe the sexual reproduction of species is a choice we have to make.

In fact a video I watched that was about the reproduction of diving beetles was called "An Unending Mating War". Is it wrong to call it a war?



I'm also reminded of the book A Natural History of Rape that argued that rape was a legitimate adaptation meant to get access to a non-consenting sexual partner.

I have absorbed more than my share of thought about gender. Many times I have heard it said that MRA's, including female MRA's, are misogynists. I have seen/heard words and actions that left me almost convinced that feminism--at least at this point in its evolution--has nothing to do with women or equality and is purely an ideology through which people are seeking power by any means, including lying, demonizing their opponents, deluding themselves, etc. And probably almost everything in between. But never before, until a few minutes ago, had I read or heard it said that every gender issue is rooted in misogyny. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Liberal feminism is crap and it's easy to criticize it, like shooting fish in a barrel.

More coherent feminist thinking, like radical feminism, aim less at "equality" and more at liberation, primarily from the patriarchal institution of gender. But even then, there are many crazies who would like to separate men from women, who are hostile to transgenders and clearly have a cult-like exclusionary prejudice, where there are "women-only" talk spaces that can breed hatred and suspicion for men.

I find it fascinating as an outside observer but I have very little patience with real time gender discussion. It's like you said, far too ideological. It's about waging a righteous crusade against the infidels and pretending you care about truth or objectivity. Red herrings, more like.

I believe that's a projection of your own ressentiment towards unsophisticated scientists, who make money and get the attention of the public while you, deep thinker and philosopher, who answers existence's hardest puzzles with such elegance and care, the most you can do is chat with five other thorough thinkers on the -currently- greatest online philosophy forum. Oh, I'm feeling so very nietzschean this morning! — Πετροκότσυφας

>:O Perhaps it is ressentiment, but ressentiment is not always unjustified. Sometimes it's due to feeling as though something or someone hasn't been given the credit they deserve.

As far as public perception goes though, conflict and black-and-white line drawing are alot more fun, so it's unsurprising that Dawkins and others find such an audience. Again, just best to not play into it. — StreetlightX

Although I agree that the black and white conflict is not really there, I would say that nowadays it seems like scientists are less knowledgeable about philosophy (and perhaps vice versa). The impression I have is that people think science is where you go to get all the answers and philosophy is some weird mystical shit, an anachronism or something.

No but thanks for the rec! My primary inspirations for this view are precisely Wittgenstein and Deleuze, so it's awesome seeing something that takes both for it's approach as well. — StreetlightX

It's a good read. A few of the chapters are a little rough but overall it's enjoyable.

So you suggest that science would merely neutralise our feelings here. Somehow your belief in "savage reality" can be presumed to be correct - because you feel that way - and any other view, no matter how differently founded on a system of reason and evidence, must be an ego defence mechanism.

Sure, it is possible to use selective facts to explain away something unpleasant. But the argument is that you (and your cite) are employing selective facts to make that unpleasant case in the first place. You are referencing observations like female diving beetles burying themselves in the mud. So it becomes rather contradictory to both cite science and decry science in bolstering a position. — apokrisis

I don't see how this follows. Anyone can go out and observe the mating ritual of diving beetles. Anyone can see how the female beetle frantically tries to escape the male beetle.

The hesitation to call this an instance of "rape" is from a general belief that morality is a "human construct" that is not suited to be applied to descriptions of reality. It is not scientifically accurate to call the chemicals in male semen "evil" (as the essay does), as this carries normative connotations that aren't found "in nature". However it is just as accurate to call the male diving beetle's appendages "rape arms" as it is "objects of prehension". There is a choice to favor the latter over the former - but because the latter gives us a bit of shielding or padding, "it is what it is".

The fact is, however, that a disturbingly high proportion of sex acts in organisms that, if these organisms were moral agents, we would call rape. It is also the same thing with R-selection. A sea turtle may lay hundreds of eggs but only a few survive. It's not technically genocide ... but it kinda is. At least, from the perspective of those harmed, i.e. the victims of nature.

you are adopting a catastrophising metaphysics were things are either right or wrong. If rape is wrong, then rapish looking behaviour is just as wrong. And in the end, anything in the remotest construable as rapey is wrong. There just is no smallest degree of rape that isn't wrong because you have no demarcation line where rapey behaviour becomes either instead a positive - as in a shift from globally cooperative reproductive strategies to locally competitive reproductive strategies. Or indeed, it just becomes background noise - so insignificant that it doesn't count as action of either kind. — apokrisis

I'm not necessarily saying anything about the "wrongness" of rape - although I obviously see rape as wrong. All I'm saying really is that a common form of sexual reproduction is in fact rape, no quotation marks, and scientific terminology disguises this, softens the blow. It's a great big universe with a great big story and the little itty bitty details like the rape of countless female organism isn't important. It's not rape, it's simply how things are.

But this "how things are" is consciously decided to be described in a certain way.

Who do you have in mind exactly? And how much is this simply just a fact about what the public wants to buy?

The best-sellers are probably those that take the triumphalist reductionist tone you may be objecting to. And the same will then apply to philosophical best-sellers, like anything Dennett writes. — apokrisis

Yes, "triumphalist" is a good way of putting it. Reminds me of Hegel's quote from his Phenomenology:

"The more conventional opinion gets fixated on the antithesis of truth and falsity, the more it tends to expect a given philosophical system to be either accepted or contradicted; and hence it finds only acceptance or rejection. It does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but rather sees in it simple disagreements."

Which of course has the context of Hegel's criticism of the ahistorical mode of thought in consciousness. The habit of forgetting that everyone in the past thought they had it figured out as well.

Another point is that you already seem convinced that naturalism can't explain stuff like morality and aesthetics. I find that to be the unsophisticated philosophical view - left-over 1800s romanticism and theology. — apokrisis

Aesthetics, maybe? We'd have to have a good idea of what the aesthetic even is, and I take that to be a philosophical issue.

Naturalism can explain morality, sure, as it exists as a phenomenon that can be described. But yeah I am supportive of the autonomy of ethics. Naturalism is not a substitute for moral philosophy, even if it helps inform it. This is not romanticism or theological. It's simply ethical non-naturalism, which works even better when we're anti-realists about morals and/or value.

Naturalism in meta-ethics has promised lots but delivered very little, all things considered. I think it's running on fumes.

When science is working at the edge of things, the spirit is "can this new idea be crazy enough?" Science can afford to speculate wildly because experiment sorts it out. It is at the other end of things that the discipline kicks in. — apokrisis

The problem, as I see it, is that they are given an audience to speculate, which makes their wild speculation come across as more grounded than they really are. Additionally, they get embolded by this new fame and start making stupid metaphysical claims - see Lawrence Krauss declaring the universe can come from nothing (but only if we re-define something as actually nothing). Krauss' book is hardly the "new Evolution of Species" that Dawkins made it out to be. It's laughable and insulting to both science and philosophy to call this egghead's book that.

The frustrating part is that I suspect people like Krauss or Dawkins, or even Dennett, know they aren't philosophically literate but also know the public isn't, so they can get away with selling this snake oil bullshit.

One of the main things I'm concerned about is the desire to assimilate all philosophy into a "scientific" methodology, in the sense of, divide-and-conquer and make each part of philosophy into some specific field with a specific subject matter and a specific methodology in order to simply "acquire" facts.

Philosophical "facts" aren't like scientific "facts". Both are true but philosophical facts should be not be seen as simply another fact. "Metaphysics" shouldn't be a "discipline" in the Scholastic sense. It shouldn't be the case that philosophy is "taught", as if there's certain facts that someone can learn and be like "yup, that's what metaphysics has discovered."

Rather I think the close proximity philosophy has with our Being creates an attitude of hospitality towards subjective, personal inquiry. There is an element of flexibility in metaphysical belief. For instance I think Cartesian dualism is not tenable, but it's fine to let someone follow that path and defend Cartesian dualism. Whereas in science it's less flexible - perhaps because scientific theories are easier to formulate given the restricted subject matter.

I don't see the necessity of pitching philosphy and science in an antagonistic relationship, and if anything the strange animus towards science in the OP seems more like 'little discipline syndrome' than anything else. I also think what reigns in the public is not 'jealously' of philosophy so much as sheer mis- or non-understanding. Philosophy remains largely opaque as to what exactly it 'is' to alot of people, who for the most part encounter it only ever as bumper-sticker quotes to append to those Sunset-inspiration posters. — StreetlightX

While I agree "the public" has lost its understanding of philosophy, it is informed by the pop-scientists who continue to label themselves as "rationalists" and who erect a false dichotomy and misunderstanding of science and philosophy.

My point, I think, still stands though: that the questions philosophy tackles are by and large the most interesting and difficult questions, and that many other things get their interest by being relevant to some philosophical questions. I am not antagonistic to science - I am antagonistic to the philosophically-illiterate scientists of today. They are brazenly arrogant and have little understanding about anything they're talking about.

For my part I'm more and more inclined to see philosophy as something like a second-order sense-making enterprise: that is, philosophy examines how we make sense of the world - it makes sense of our sense-making (hence 'second-order'). Another important function of philosophy is to propose new ways of sense-making: we should understand the world like so, instead of like so. 'Sense', I think, being perhaps the most important question of philosophy, underlying even that of truth; thus the question of truth - 'what is truth'? - ought to be understood to ask not after this or that truth, but the very meaning and sense of truth itself. — StreetlightX

Are you familiar with A. W. Moore, and his book The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things? Moore sees metaphysics as the broadest way of making sense of things, including making sense of sense (which we see as effectively started by Kant).

I have no issue with the methodology of science, and I don't deny that science has bequeathed us with many helpful things (but also many harmful things). But to demand that something like philosophy "justify" itself by providing some pragmatically useful thing puts the cart before the horse. We have to already be in the mindset of technology to formulate this demand.

Heidegger sees the origination of philosophy as a homesickness. I think it's at least also partly a feeling of helplessness, disorientation and confusion. Anxiety, which both Heidegger and Wittgenstein seemed to have picked up on. The idea of philosophy as being a noble, determined, phallic enterprise is not correct, I think. Leave that to the "hard" (pun) sciences.

Make no mistake I see a kin relationship between philosophy and religion. Or, at least, philosophy and religious orientation, even if you're an atheist. One can be, as I am, religious but in a more sad way, in that I regret the non-existence of God. I am religious without any religion.

The Right and the Good by W. D. Ross.

I'm not sure.