If not anxiety (curiosity or panic) then what else would cause us to investigate something we don't have to?

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.”

- Theodor Adorno

Philosophically speaking, what do bear attacks, anatomy, chemistry, physics, office work, aliens, foraging societies, and technology have in common? — schopenhauer1

They can all be predicated upon, i.e. they are subjects (nouns) and thus metaphysically speaking substances, events, processes, or whatever floats your metaphysical boat.

The freedom that evolves in a hierarchical, stable environment results in a wide diversity of things. All of them are connected by the fact that they exist and produce entropy.

Considering there probably isn't a God, this question becomes irrelevant.

So really, on one level, all this reasoning is very dangerous stuff. We end up believing anything only due to some emotional reaction. We check in with our rather subconscious and automatic orienting responses and discover which way our feelings want to point us. — apokrisis

Yes, we follow the rules of logic not simply because they seem to match reality fairly well but because it "feels right" to think logically. The decision to use logic may itself be logical but it based upon an emotional conviction.

The normativity of logic enters when we start asking why we should use logic and reason. Logic is necessary to complete projects. Unreasonable behavior tends to hurt other people. Unreasonable behavior tends to hurt yourself.

So when we criticize people for not thinking logically or thinking emotionally, it's more of a difference in degree than a difference in kind.

I think the OP is actually an attempt to justify Hume's 'reason is a slave to the passions'. But it does this by use of reason, thereby undermining its own premises. — Wayfarer

But the argument itself is syllogistic. So if you want to prove that the argument is true, the only way you can do it is by appealing to the very faculty which you are saying ought to be deprecated. — Wayfarer

I'm not saying that logic ought to be thrown away. I'm saying that reason has the capacity to self-analyze itself, and realize that for every position we have, we have a basic emotional premise. This is why I said that humans are some of the most strange and neurotic organisms on the earth; we have a tendency to analyze things that aren't beneficial to our survival. The reason we have philosophy is because we have anxiety - philosophy is the intellectual method of calming anxiety (whether that be the curious anxiety or the panic anxiety).

So yes, Hume used reason to show that reason is a slave to the passions. Yet it was clearly his passion to show that reason is a slave to the passions. He had a desire to do so.

Emotions and beliefs are heavy hitters in the mind games that go on in our brains. It is sometimes not possible to tell whether we are being objective or not BECAUSE our perceptions and thinking can be colored so easily. — Bitter Crank

Agreed. All this reminds me of Nietzsche's proclamation of epistemic perspectivism; i.e. those who weren't dancing couldn't hear the music.

Modern day skepticism is dogmatic.

There is value to honesty because if you are caught lying, people will not trust you anymore. It is this dynamic between personal desires and social expectations that I think keeps people relatively virtuous.

I don't see why we can't try to progress to a utopia - it's a fallacy to claim that just because there hasn't been progress in the past means there will be no progress in the future. Yet I highly doubt we'll ever get to a utopia, simply because of the metaphysical truth that humans are imperfect and thus any human society is going to have imperfections; any "perfect" landscape is "ruined" by the presence of the imperfect. Perfection and humanity are thus incompatible. It's not that just because we haven't made progress, we won't make any future progress - it's that any substantial progress is inhibited by our own nature. The reason we didn't make any progress in the past was because we're not meant to progress substantially. To progress requires us to change our nature, and I'm not sure if we're capable of doing that.

I think that's the destiny of human achievement. We're always striving for perfection, because we get a glimpse of what it's like when we experience the beautiful. But the desire for perfection is the desire to implement the beautiful, which is inherently short-lived, over a long-term period. And that just doesn't work.

Oh, how I love retro-synthwave music. This one is wistfully melancholic.

Does it make sense to assign a (universal, not personal) "meaning" to "life"? Or has the question always been a category error? — hypericin

There is certainly objective "meaning" behind "life". The trouble arises when this meaning does not work well with our own concepts of meaning. This meaning, or rather, purpose, is the uncontrollable process of cellular reproduction, co-existing in a condensed, cohesive pattern of organic material, held together by said mitosis and ultimately responsible for the production of special exploration cells meant to pass on genetic information to a numerically different meat machine, so they can go through the same process and make more meat machines. That is what is ultimately responsible for our collective existence, a plug-and-chug train of DNA spliced across generations, without much of a discernible end goal apart from reacting to environmental constraints. I guess that's why they call it the game of life, after all. Unfortunately it seems that nobody gets to win. :(

Wittgenstein disproved radical global skepticism by identifying "hinge" beliefs as those which are necessary for reasoning, including the reasoning involved in doubting reason itself. Whether these a priori beliefs are actually true is irrelevant, because we are not able to evaluate them without simultaneously using these beliefs.

This is similar to Kant's idea of transcendental categories, which are necessary for rationality itself. You can't conceive of something without it being in space or time, or by not considering the quantity, etc.

In any case, however, these hinge beliefs seem to work pretty well. Hinge beliefs, or beliefs in general, that are horribly off-base would probably not be very conducive to survival and would thus be selected against. But it also seems unlikely that we have 1:1 correspondence in our models of reality; indeed we only experience a fraction of what is actually "out there" in a model composed of an accretion of sensory experience.

So neither are we born "tabula rasa" and neither do we have that Platonic "memory wipe" described in the Meno, but rather it seems that we have basic "rules" of learning that are required for any sort of inquiry at all.

So mild suffering sucks only relatively and not - per your original statement - absolutely? — apokrisis

To call suffering "mild" is to abuse both terms. A little pinprick isn't a case of suffering, clearly, because it doesn't break someone's spirit.

And thus if this permits prioritisation, then you have no issue with a little bit of suffering being balanced against a greater amount of pleasure? — apokrisis

If the same person is experiencing both and they consented then no, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Nobody is being instrumentalized.

Or even a fleeting amount of suffering being outweighed by long periods of fairly neutral affect - no strong feelings at all? — apokrisis

I doubt the existence of neutral feelings. You might not be feeling anything but you're still in a state of mind, or a mood, which is either positive or negative. Analysis leads to the realization that most moods are not enjoyable but rather striving.

A pragmatist understands a calculus of risk and reward. No pain, no gain, the say. But you have been taking a purist line which seems fundamentally intolerance of chance or "imperfection". — apokrisis

Because you shouldn't gamble with another person's life, or use another person's life for your own benefit, against their will.

Does mild suffering suck absolutely or only relatively?

Do you see your problem yet? — apokrisis

What does this mean? Suffering sucks regardless of intensity, although intensity offers prioritization.

My criticism of your approach is that it is essentially from the romantic perpspective and not from the enlightenment or rational humanistic perspective.

So you are always seeking purity or perfection. You reify suffering as pure qualia for instance. And the slightest imperfections of existence become intolerable for you as a result. — apokrisis

Because it is only natural to seek perfection. In any case, it's not romantic at all because I'm not applying an aesthetic to this issue; non-human suffering is not bad because it disrupts some special organic family, it's because suffering absolutely sucks and I recognize this.

And I stand by that quote. I asked you to provide evidence showing that the same reasoning involved in vegetarianism is involved in Nazism. And I defended the position that vegetarianism can be adopted out of both romantic and non-romantic reasons, thus showing how the apparent link between vegetarianism and Nazism is a red herring. The concepts held by those who think romantically will be connected in virtue of their romanticism. The same applies to non-romantic thinking. It's wrong to say that vegetarianism can only be arrived at by romantic thinking.

Actually it was you trying to find a connection between Nazism and vegetarianism by claiming that both depended upon romantic thinking. In which case I pointed out how both non-romantic and romantic thinking can lead to vegetarianism.

You asked what the connection could be. I said notions of purity. So your rant aside, I take it you agree about that then. — apokrisis

Not really. I agree that vegetarianism has been held by romantics, but also of non-romantics. It is incorrect to assign a causal relationship between the two.

Romanticism boils down to the complaint that the modern technological mode of existence is soul-less and impure. It is dirty, messy, disgusting, unclean, ugly and joyless. — apokrisis

Do you have any examples? Until you provide specifics, you'll have the advantage of ambiguity.

As far as I can tell this is just Luddism.

Philosophy has been a struggle against nihilism. You have the side that rejects aspects of the world, and you have the other side that tries to affirm them. Plato vs Aristotle, Stoics vs Epicureans, Aquinas vs Augustine, Schopenhauer vs Nietzsche, etc.

Of course early Romanticism had a lot of overlap with the Humanism arising out of the enlightenment. But Humanism was anti-theistic and socially optimistic. It was forward looking and celebrated the modern possibilities for human growth, personal freedom and the triumph of rationality. — apokrisis

Sure, at least the French Revolutionaries were, who came at least a century after Locke, who was a deist, and Hobbes who had a sour view of society in general. It wasn't until Rousseau that we have a major thinker who thought everything would be a-ok if we all just went back to nature.

Evolutionary theory also plays into it because it showed that humans were animals and so raised questions for both the rationalists and the irrationalists (the sentiment driven romantics) in terms of how animals ought to be treated. — apokrisis

In fact it seems that Darwin himself was a product of a "proto-Darwinian" movement, stemming from the Enlightenment, which was trying to formulate a new "secular religion" that could explain the human condition in a more "naturalistic" manner. He was right, of course, but his theory owe a lot to the environment that Darwin was a part of.

Anyway, the association between vegetarianism and romanticism is well known.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_and_Romanticism — apokrisis

But the association between vegetarianism and romanticism does not mean that vegetarianism is bullshit because romanticism is bullshit (which it's not obvious that it is either).

It would be akin to saying that philosophy is bullshit because an extraordinary about of philosophers in the past were misogynistic, and misogyny is irrational, therefore philosophy is irrational. Correlation does not equate to causation, and in any case the arguments presented for vegetarianism should be analyzed for their own merits and not from their apparent "origins" in romantic thought, despite vegetarianism being practiced thousands of years ago, cross-culturally.

In any rate the article you cited goes on to show how scientific theories of the day, as well as perennial liberal thinkers, were important motivating reasons to see humans and non-human animals as "interconnected", as opposed to "God's chosen", which we see so commonly in religious and rhetorical assertions.

Then there is this other view of back to nature that unites the romantics, Nazis and vegetarians. Purity is the ultimate good. Hence the sentimentality about children, bloodlines, untouched nature, medieval peasantry, animal innocence, etc. — apokrisis

It's a good thing that my vegetarianism, as well as a good deal of others' vegetarianism, is not motivated by that wishy-washy poetic nonsense. "Back to nature!", la-dee-dah, for the Fatherland!, nope, that's not my position at all.

Unless of course you want to argue that compassion is somehow "romantic" and not just basic decency.

An obssession with purity allows the rationalisation of extreme or absolute positions. That's how the Nazis could justify their concentration camps. That's how vegans can justify their own non-negotiable beliefs. If purity is the good, it is rational to argue imperfection should be eliminated by any means necessary. — apokrisis

Yes, indeed people tend to be staunch believers in something and think that belief is all they need to do. We live in an imperfect and violent world, belief ain't gonna change shit by itself. We have to compromise. I accept this. But this compromise is what we ought to do in practical terms, simply because the theoretical (which we can certainly conceive of) cannot be brought about because of certain contingencies, typically those involving and laziness and apathy of humans.

These romantics you cited are approaching this whole game from an aesthetic point of view. Animals should be treated with respect because it fulfills some aesthetic for a modern day Garden of Eden, lah-dee-dah, we'll all be animal lovers and live in a great happy family, yay!

I'm coming from a purely ethical point of view, paintings and orchestras be damned, one that stems directly from a conception of the phenomenal experiences of another animal. "Intersubjective experience".

But if your view of nature is instead essentially stochastic, then there will always be variety and imperfection. The good is now always about a global dynamical balance that constrains existence in a statistical fashion yet is also creatively sloppy, still fruitfully disorganised and playful at the margins. — apokrisis

Yet it seems that it is you who has an aesthetic for the universe. You use words like "sloppy" and "playful", or "creative" and "balance", when you could have said "non-uniform", "complex", "different", and "equilibrium". There's an aesthetic going on here: the universe is something utterly fascinating and bottomless, just an explosion of amazing material, and has anthropomorphic qualities - the Scholastics thought the point of life was to come to know God, and now you are arguing that the point of life is to come to know the Universe (an aesthetic pantheism). The Universe is just bristling with potential, waiting for the memorable and curious scientist to discover something new in a blaze of intellectual passion and triumph. And the more we come to know the Universe, the more we see ourselves as part of some great, beautiful cosmic tale...

If that isn't romantic then I don't know what is.

Interesting perspective, I can't say I disagree.

You said religion is metaphysics for the common man. What about the metaphysics of Aquinas, or Augustine, or the nominalists? Scholasticism set the structure for future inquiry.

But fire away. If you want to draw some kind of conclusion about the value of philosophical arguments based on the moral character of their originators, then amuse me. — apokrisis

I mean, you were the one who brought up the apparent relationship between vegetarianism and Nazism. A brilliant move, really.

Please explain to me what exactly is involved in the reasoning of vegetarians and Nazis that make them both "romantic" according to your book.

Err, if it pervades nature, that makes it immanent. And immanence is opposed to transcendent, not transcendental, in this context.

Focus on causality. We are talking about the reasons things are the way they ought to be. We are talking about the origins of the shaping constraints, the lawful regularities.

To say that formal and final causes act from outside the realm of material and efficient cause - as Plato did, and as Western religions do - is to claim transcendent origins.

Immanence - as argued by Anaximander, Aristotle and other organicists - is about self-organising materiality. The formal and final causes of being arise within the world itself. — apokrisis

In any case I don't see how this is at all relevant to the discussion. You continue to assert that what I believe in is transcendent woo and I have consistently pointed out that I am limiting morality to minds, and thus it cannot be transcendent.

So if we're talking about value, then I am arguing that it is immanent in minds. That is all.

And then the phenomenological fact that green can be mixed from yellow and blue paint ought to tell you that your experience is not actually brute at this level even. It ought to raise the question of why you can't phenomenologically mix two paints to arrive at red, yellow and blue? Or why the rule for mixing light is different in that now it is yellow that is composite and green that is primary.

Woo. This phenomenological shape-shifting really ought to bother you. And it's right in front of your face - if you ever open your eyes and mind. — apokrisis

How could it "bother" me if qualia is not real? How can I do anything if "I" don't exist?

Illusions, coherent or not, are still transparent. You can't just deconstruct your own experiences and pretend that they aren't really there.

All of this is just a red herring. Or I guess you could say it's just a herring, because our qualitative experience of red isn't actually there...?

Sure, we can talk about fictional worlds. But fictional worlds would have fictional moralities. So there doesn't seem a lot of point in wasting too much time on what can't be changed. — apokrisis

So once again you are thrusting practical applied ethics into theoretical normative ethics. Stop doing that.

Again, your antinatalism might lead you to argue for the wiping out of all life with an integrative nervous system - the minimal qualification for sentience. Leave reality to jellyfish, daffodils and bacteria. But as I have pointed out, you won't in practice beat life so easily. Antinatalism is always going to lose as it only takes a couple of sneaky breeders to slip your net. — apokrisis

This changes nothing about the ideal. Since when did we have to content with what the universe offers us? Why do we have limit our own expectations?

One could always wish. But given that is not the way reality works, we need instead to focus on more practical responses to the threat of nasty demises. — apokrisis

Again, practical vs theoretical.

Indeed I don't believe AN or veganism or anything like that will take off. But this doesn't change the truth value of them. If I can convince a few people to go AN or vegan than I will have done some legitimate good. The rest of ethics is just applied and practical ethics meant to compromise for everyone else's shortcomings.

Godwin's law not withstanding, aren't you at all troubled by the familiar debating point that Hitler was a vegetarian, Himmler wanted to ban hunting? The same pervasive Romanticism that justified their Nazi racism, justified their anti-specieism. — apokrisis

ehh...no. People can hold morally correct views but for shitty, contradictory reasons. Aren't you troubled by blind pragmatism, the same reasoning that went into the running of Nazi concentration camps? What a load of rubbish, organizing reason like this, as if my reasoning can be identified as a certain "kind" of reason and is prone to such things like bigotry and genocide, whereas your superior "kind" of reason isn't. You haven't even identified what it was about Nazi policy that makes it similar to what reasoning I am using, you've just asserted this and claimed association without justification, leaving this association hanging in the air like a fart, tainting the legitimacy of anything I say, as if being a vegetarian is potentially causally linked to Nazism. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves - does that mean democracy is suspicious? Christianity is linked to the crusades - does that mean every Christian is a war-mongerer?

Clumping them together is fallacious, and I honestly don't understand why you even mentioned it without providing any justification.

The same reasoning that led the Nazis to racism led some of them to vegetarianism. The same reasoning that led altruists to vegetarianism led them to things like democracy (how about that, non-pragmatic thinking leads to solutions that actually work?! Who would've thought!!! - it's bullshit to claim that everything that worked, worked because of your special pragmatism). So your fallacy of association fails in virtue of its own fallaciousness and exclusion of alternatives.

Nietzsche would have fallen under this vague "romanticism" term, yet he was vehemently opposed to nationalism. And Peirce, your philosopher-Jesus, was a womanizer and eccentric douche, and Aristotle was the personal teacher of Alexander, who was basically the ancient world's Hitler (without the racism). Pragmatism must be inherently predisposed to douchebaggery... I can cherry pick too!

In any case it is highly suspicious that you are willing to clump together rational inquiry with irrational racism and bigotry and call it "romanticism", as opposed to your enlightened pragmatism. It's insulting to compare the reasoning that goes into these ethical claims to the same "reasoning" behind racism and bigotry. But you try to get away with it by splitting reason down the middle, an us vs them mentality, and conveniently failing to make a thread on your views and instead attacking everyone else's views while weaving and dodging and moving the goalposts in an almost troll-like manner. According to you, we're either an enlightened pragmatist, or a bottom dwelling scum sucker who's lost in transcendence and associated with racist bigots. Bullshit.

The virtue theory still seems the most attractive to me. It accepts the individualism of our moral quest, and balances it against what people think and what the polis, society as a whole, will benefit from. — mcdoodle

I've been tinkering with the idea that utilitarianism might be a kind of virtue ethics. I think it was Mill who said that compassion is the virtue for ethical living.

I can't be doing with rules, whether Kant's super-logical principle, or consequentialism/utilitarianism (as I've said before, we don't know the consequences till we've acted, so I think again we're smuggling in virtues/vices in disguise). — mcdoodle

But surely we can reasonably estimate what the consequences are going to be. Is this not how we live our daily lives? I press the letter B on my keyboard; I am reasonably confident that the representation of B will appear on my screen. I am reasonably sure I will not explode when I take a drink of water. I am reasonably sure that I will be able to pass this midterm. etc. Intentions don't change the reality of an outcome.

Pain and suffering can be more biological or more social in origin. If you have a broken leg, take these pain-killers. If you have a broken heart, find a new partner.

You can't hope to fix anything if you don't have a clear view of how it works. — apokrisis

Why does anything need fixing or repair to begin with? What is so important that requires us to suffer? What great cosmic transcendental goal are we all advancing towards that justifies our collective troubles?

Extinction, that's the end-goal. Quite inspiring, truly.

Ethics becomes not a system of progress and triumph but a recovery mechanism meant for janitorial service, cleaning up the mess. Almost all ethics is affirmative, and thus second-order, as it forgets its own structure. Consequentialists are forced to accept that murdering a person can be acceptable - and although I am a consequentialist myself, the fact that I have to accept that murdering someone might be necessary just goes to show how royally f*cked up our little armpit of the universe is. The fact that we have to compromise should make us take a step back and think about what is going on that forces us to compromise in the first place. A truly good world would not require compromise, or the choosing of a "lesser evil". A truly good world wouldn't have any necessary evils.

Yep. As I say, you are appealing to trancendental values in talking about pleasure, pain and empathy in the dualistically disconnected fashion that you do. — apokrisis

What exactly do you take transcendental to mean, if not all-encompassing and universal throughout nature? That's exactly what I deny as an anti-realist! However, if you're talking about transcendental phenomenal experience, then absolutely I would say that pain, pleasure, and compassion are transcendental, pervading all our conscious and rational choices.

I'm saying there appear to be brute experiences, or transparent experiences. You're saying we can deconstruct them, and show their origins, and somehow this changes our perspective on things. It's akin to me saying there is the color green, and then you saying green is just blue and yellow mixed together, and there "is no green". There's green right there in front of your face! The origins of the color green doesn't matter in this case.

And then those sign relations are hierarchically open ended or recursive. Creating a robust layer of wise habits is what allows the further thing of intelligent variety.

We can ignore the suffering of going to the gym by focusing on the longer term benefit of getting fit. And after a while, the pain of the gym becomes a pleasure. We suffer when we can't go.

So as a model of feelings (and habits), semiotics is hardly downgrading feelings to signs. It is opening feelings - as just signs - to more sophisticated worlds of meaning. It is doing the very thing of allowing you to care about abstractions like "world hunger" or "specieism". — apokrisis

Once again you are arguing that what we have done (historicity) and what we are currently doing constitutes what we ought to do. Just because we murder animals doesn't mean we should murder animals. Just because we've made it this far doesn't mean we should continue.

Those who made it were the lucky ones, not necessarily the smart ones. And that's what life comes down to: the fetishization of genes, or gene-worship.

This is just you being wedded to concrete thinking like any good reductionist. — apokrisis

Huh? What does this mean?

So are you meaning to confirm my point that harm can only be mutually minimised and never in practice eliminated? Moral organisation consists of collectively targeting its minimisation. — apokrisis

Excellent, so we agree on at least one point. Harm is pervasive and impossible to get rid of. But this need not constrain our ability to think of what could be the case. Indeed I would personally argue that the state of the environment and our programming makes us morally disqualified in some sense. The world will never be "good", yet this does not stop us from acting ethically. There is too much imperfection, too much decay and insufficiency, to be even a candidate for a decent world. But this doesn't mean we can stoop to this level.

It is everyday life that matters. My complaint is that when you are challenged by exactly this kind of proximity principle, you start talking about finding yourself dying slowly in a motorway pile up or the existential horror of the Holocaust. — apokrisis

So what? What if you found yourself in the Holocaust? I'm sure you'd wish everyone else would adopt the principles I am advocating.

So it is metaphysics. But your metaphysics makes different presumptions than mine. — apokrisis

Well, yes, metaethics is a sort of metaphysics. But it is metaphysics in the service of ethics, not the other way around.

That's the naturalistic fallacy. Just because pleasure is what a machine creates as its value, doesn't mean that pleasure is transcendentally good. — apokrisis

You're the one accusing me of the naturalistic fallacy?

And I already explained how I am an anti-realist, so I don't think there is any transcendental value actually out there, just as I don't think there is any transcendental value to money.

We can always ask "so what?" to any normative claim. And we can do the same with pleasure, pain, and compassion. Yet I suspect that anyone who actually says "so what?" to these three things is being extremely disingenuous. You just can't get your arm cut off and shrug it off as a scratch. Our choices depend on an evaluation of the consequences - pleasure and pain. And so any sort of error theory can technically be right, but for all intensive purposes we end up acting as if morals actually do exist because we are forced to. Call it the persecution of ethics, perhaps. I like to just call it consistency - regardless of the objectivity of morals, we have moral beliefs and thus must act upon them in a consistent manner.

Just switch from talking about pleasure as qualia and start talking about it as a biological sign - a semiotic mechanism - and you will have arrived at my kind of pan-semiotic naturalism. — apokrisis

But this would require me to systematically ignore the important bits: feeling, downgrading it to some signal and nothing more. Whatever our beliefs in qualia are, you cannot deny that it at least seems as though there is qualia. The manifest image of qualia, something that isn't just plucked away as soon as we realize it is a sign or just a oozy chemical reaction in the brain, if that even makes sense. I continue to fail to see how the ontological status of pleasure and pain actually affects anything, since we already have a phenomenal experience of pleasure and pain that is as intimate as is possible.

No. We must focus on both by focusing on the mutuality of their relationship.

In systems theory, parts construct the whole and the whole shapes its (re)constructing parts. So the focus is on the primary dynamic that drives the self-organisation.

Sorry, but it is a fundmentally complex model of causality. And one has to focus on the irreduciably triadic nature of that holism. — apokrisis

Sorry, but I see no reason to place emphasis on an abstract object that cannot feel, unless it somehow benefits those who can feel. Doing otherwise reminds me of nationalism - you are proud of the country, not of the people that make up the country. But what does it matter if you support the country as an entity in itself, for itself? It's silly.

So there is no payback at all? — apokrisis

Why would there need to be? We have to find a balance between rational self-indulgence and ethical altruism. If the pain someone else feels would cause us more pain to eliminate, then we aren't committed to helping them. It's equality. The reciprocal relationship here is the distribution of values.

This sounds rather disengaged from life. But how do you define harm and manipulation? Are you going to recognise grades and distinctions? Or as usual, are you treating them as qualitative absolutes? — apokrisis

Being that I am a consequentialist (or a virtue ethicist cum utilitarian, I'm tinkering with that lately), doing vs allowing is just another one of those arbitrary constraints that works well in the legal sense but not in the moral sense, especially once we get rid of any idea of a Just World.

So I define harm as anything, whatever that may be, that results in feeling bad. A discomfort that cannot be redeemed.

And manipulation would be anything that goes against the interests of the person. It is libertarian in the moral sense - the good for one person cannot be equivocated as the good for another person, but only compared by what the consequences are to other people. We shouldn't just assume that what we feel is good is what others will feel is good, or that any bad we inflict on others will be redeemed somehow - that's where the Golden Rule falls short.

Consequentialism gets unrelenting flak for apparently asking too much of us - yet since when did self-interest have any role in equality? Equality recognizes the similarity between one person and another, and the prioritization of one person, such as ourselves, over another person is inherently unequal.

In any case, I'm a prioritarian and contingent-sufficientarian. We must prioritize the recognition of those who are worse-off within a certain degree: as soon as we get them to this level, then they are "on their own". As soon as we get everyone to this level, we then make another level, continuing refining the equality of experience between people.

If we are standing in a queue, and I am behind you with the need to get to the front, are you going to "harm" me by not stepping aside? Are you going to "manipulate" me by keeping your back firmly turned and ignoring my plight? — apokrisis

Well, let's say I give up my position and go behind you. Are you now obligated to give up your spot to me?

There are some pains and pleasures that are so innocuous and irrelevant that they don't warrant us to consider them. They are, from a consequentialist perspective, inconsequential. Things like paper cuts and bruises, the negative experiences that nevertheless do not manage to break a person's spirit, or their mood. The negative experiences that do break a person's spirit, I would call "terminal experiences", because they remind us of death or a threat to our very existence, and are usually quite painful.

However, in everyday life we often do give up our spots for those who really need it. A man with a broken finger really ought to give up his spot in line for another man suffering from a heart attack. There's priority in effect here.

But again we are back to your kind of unplaced and scaleless view of morality where there is none of the relativity that comes from relating. The "good" congeals into a mentalistic and immutable substance. It is not the kind of adaptive dynamical principle that lies at the heart of my naturalism. — apokrisis

Of course the good is going to be mentalistic and immutable - most of our phenomenal concepts are static. That's the whole goal of process philosophy, to show how our mental concepts of staticity cannot correlate to the rest of the world.

But that is beside the point. It's a red herring to claim that our own moral concepts don't even match reality when I have already said that there is nothing like our moral concepts in the objective world. It is an isolated phenomenon in an isolated environment of persons. To apply morality to the entire universe is to equivocate cosmic habit with morality, which is just plain wrong.

For example, you have to introduce the homuncular self that experience its experiences. Pleasure, pain and empathy now become qualia - substantial "mental" properties. And you even start appealing to "me" as a fellow homunculus doing the same thing.

It's a familar way of reducing reality - to matter and mind. But we all know that it doesn't work out in the end. Dualism is good for a while, but in the long-run, it is a philosophical blind alley. — apokrisis

It's a good thing we're not doing metaphysics, then. We're doing (meta-)ethics. It already presumes an un-removable manifest image of man, one of Selves, Qualia, and Free Will. I'm not sure how you get around the fact that pain, no matter what it actually is, hurts, and that pleasure feels good, and that it seems like we have Selves. Indeed the realization that we may not have a Self or any Qualia threatens nihilism, or a dissolution of all value whatsoever. And so any sort of metaphysics of ethics is going to have to work within these parameters unless they want to risk removing themselves from the ethical discourse entirely.

Yet you are committing the "naturalistic fallacy" in claiming that because pleasure is what is, then pleasure is an ought. — apokrisis

No, I'm not, because pleasure is inherently valuable to whoever is experiencing it. Like I said in the OP, humans are value machines. They create value.

Or a sarcastic one. — apokrisis

Sarcasm is not wanted, sorry. It's useless.

Ethics is about the flourishing of the social group. It is about caring about others in ways that creates reciprocal benefits. And that is a tricky balancing act because - as game theory can spell out mathematically - the "right balance" has to involve the possibility of selfishness too. — apokrisis

But we must make sure that we focus on the constituents of the social group, not the social group as an object itself.

We can care about the suffering of others, but then reality has to come into play - rational principles like proximity which you so strenuously want to deny. — apokrisis

Because they aren't supported by the triad I just presented. They are particular and when universalized become arbitrary.

So on the one hand, you accept that ethics is about enlightened self-interest - the mutuality and reciprocality that is the definition of social organisation. But on the other, you transmute these rational goods - the secrets of successful organisation - into transcendent goods. — apokrisis

No, it is not enlightened self-interest. I don't help people because they will help me. I help people because that's what they need. The "Platinum Rule" - i.e. do not harm others and do not manipulate others. Self-interest has no play here, only in practicality.

You talk dualistically about biologically-evolved feelings, such as pleasure, pain and empathy, as if they were Platonic abstracta. You treat the qualia as things in themselves - ineffable properties of sentience - rather than biological signals with pragmatic meaning. And in doing this, you ignore all the spatiotemporal complexity of the real world in which social organisation must operate to instead impose a scaleless notion of suffering that floats Platonically above the world we have to describe. — apokrisis

And in doing this you ignore that pleasure, pain, and empathy are immediately accessible - you reduce them away and pretend they don't exist.

You remain confused about this. It is Darth who is advancing the naturalistic fallacy here in suggesting that pleasure, pain and empathy are natural properties the good (and bad). — apokrisis

And once again I have to explain to you how I am a moral anti-realist. There is no "Good", there are only goods spread out across a population and abstracted as a "Good" in virtue of the basic triad.

And there are issues here -- what's pleasurable isn't always good and what's good isn't always pleasurable. — aporiap

I have to disagree with this here. What is pleasurable isn't always good, indeed - but only because it conflicts with other people's interests. The pleasure a rapist feels is good for himself, but should not be seen as good in the ethical way. I should have put it in the OP: the triad recognizes pain and suffering as more important than pleasure: indeed it is the case that when you feel compassion for someone, it is because they are suffering. You don't care for someone if they're happy - they are self-sufficient.

And so ethics involves the systematic distribution of care across a population.

Furthermore, to say that there are goods that aren't pleasurable is incoherent. Apo said he recognized pleasure as a mug of beer - but this is a shallow misrepresentation of what pleasure is. There certainly are higher-order, long-term eudaimonic pleasures, that are not just the carnal satisfaction of some brute desire, but what at least seems to be a much more complex goal pursuit - i.e. when Heidegger showed how humans are the only animals on Earth that lead their lives.

But the example of chocolate and sugar illustrates the fact that moral judgements have to be complex. What's good in the short-term as instant gratification of an impulse may be very bad as a long-term habit. — apokrisis

So like I said, the only thing that makes chocolate and sugar a long-time bad habit is that it will diminish the welfare of the individual. That is invariably what ethics is about: person welfare. Any other conception leads the train off the rails.

The whole "science vs philosophy" shtick is a complete misunderstanding of what either of them are. Indeed such a question can only be asked and answered by attempting to philosophize. There is no great smackdown between the two, because to assert that there is ends up being suspiciously philosophical (and downright retarded in any sense). You'll end up shooting yourself in the foot, in the same manner global skeptics or deniers of hypothetical reasons do: it's using philosophy to argue that we ought not use philosophy.

Although that statement would be incoherent, philosophy has historically had a knack with mutilating itself. Leave it to a philosopher to attempt to deconstruct their own field!

And that is precisely why philosophy is so important and necessary, and what makes it unique: it is a process, an activity, an attempt, to come to terms with the world, characterized by its practically limitless flexibility. From one question spawns multiple new ones in an ongoing process of refinement of truth-estimation. The history of philosophy can be summarized neatly as a dialectic between self-confidence and self-consciousness, and in fact the recent trend of scientism itself can be described as a naive rejection of metaphysics from skeptical self-consciousness (a rejection of one's own tendency to do metaphysics), and an even more naive self-confidence in Science™ as the one-true-method of obtaining whatever it is that we want (that wasn't the product of science anyway...)

The sciences were born from this very activity; it's not as if the sciences just popped up in a vacuum randomly and proceeded to shit all over the superstitious nonsense those toga-wearing plebs spat. In order to even ask if there is a friction between science and philosophy, one has to have a clear definition of what either of them are - a truth that many seem to have a vague idea of but are unable to put into crisp words because they either don't see the relevancy of it (which isn't an argument), or don't know what the hell they're talking about to begin with (which also isn't an argument).

People get scared of philosophy because it doesn't use numbers, equations or models like the sciences do (which is false but whatever). And yet once again we see the primacy of philosophy emerge: the dependency on these things is itself not a number or equation, but a model that doesn't use numbers or equations.

In fact I think we ought to be more concerned and skeptical of science than we are of philosophy, at least in these days and ages and given a context. A brief peruse of the internet leads the critical observer to recognizer how much the term "science" is abused as a way of validating a position without evidence. It's a trump card used by quacks and bullshitters alike: "I have science on my side, so I WIN! Ha!...now buy my books, watch my television show, vote for me for political office, spend billions of dollars on a public utility of my fancy, etc."

But why people favor science so much is because they are largely inherently pragmatic (and not necessarily in the good way). Life is fast and hard, nobody has time to read some apparently-pontificating nonsense. They want results, and they want them now goddammit!, before the quarterly review! Anything that fulfills this nihilistic agenda is approved, and anything else it hailed as bullshit - but the reality is that it's not bullshit, it's just it doesn't fit in with their progress-oriented agenda. In other words, they just don't care. But that's not an argument.

And the fact is that philosophy is everywhere, you just have to sit down every now and then to appreciate it. In my opinion we need to get rid of the view that philosophy is a discipline with a strict code of what it can do and what it cannot do. It's something everyone does, for better or for worse.

So it's not as if philosophy and science are diametrically opposed, as the silly pop-scientist pseudo-philosophers assert. They're two sides of the same coin - what happens in science can be analyzed by philosophers, and what happens in philosophy can be applied or transformed into science. Indeed I am thoroughly unimpressed myself at any attempt to separate the two or show how one is "better" than the other. What use is the theoretical if it cannot be applied? Of what importance or meaning is the practical if we have no way of understanding it?

You can certainly be begotten of the Wittgenstein of the P I and feel this way. But I think it involves you being doubtful of most systems, even the appealing ones, and building a philosophy for yourself brick by brick, mostly sans isms. — mcdoodle

Exactly, I completely agree. Philosophical systems are inherently disposable and volatile.

What I am primarily concerned about is the context religion provides a person. Religion has rituals, dogma, and scripture that inherently limits discussion and thus flies in the face of rational inquiry. I don't see how spiritual magic, like prayer, can possibly be reconciled with any rational attitude towards the world, or how any ordinarily rational person can actually believe that prayer works, or not be skeptical of scriptures (when they would be skeptical of any other unverifiable text).

The reason religion is a distinct entity in itself is because it operates differently than philosophy in general. The motivation for accepting religion seems entirely different from the motivation for accepting more open-ended philosophical ideas.

Oh don't even play that game, apo, you're a master at dodging bullets.

For good reason.

And yet the domestication of the planet, the curve of fossil fuel exploitation, and the overall human population, ride right over all that. — apokrisis

And during a large sequence in the former half of the twentieth century, it looked as though fascism was to become the dominant form of government on the planet.

You are identifying power as the good without justification. What works, works, in virtue of the fact that it is powerful, given the context of its environment. Yet this surely does not mean fascism is good. And surely, if we had the ability to stop the entropic heat death, many of us would do so. But we don't have power over the universe like that, so we accept this. But we typically don't pull a 180 and start calling it moral just because we're personally not powerful enough ourselves.

Yes, I suppose I agree then. Thank you for clarifying. Antinatalism is indeed an ethical position and not a rational hypothetical.

It does sometimes. Shallow anti-natalist arguments which life ought to end because suffering exists make this mistake. Other ones, which argue life out to end because suffering of life is unethical, do not. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I'm not sure if I follow what you are saying here, Willow.

Why call material arguments for antinatalism shallow? If suffering exists, and we apply a value to suffering (bad), and we see that the prevalence of suffering, on average, vastly outweighs any genuinely positive experiences, we can see how it just is not rational to have children, for their own sake.

This is, from what I can tell, the position held by people like Schopenhauer. They had little use of ethical denouncement.

Configuring the issue as an ethical one, however, forces us to see value not just as good or bad but with the additional imperative aspect - i.e. rules. We go from the purely descriptive to the prescriptive. But I don't see how it is necessary per se to describe birth as immoral to see it as, all things considered, a bad thing, since we could be error theorists and believe morality doesn't even exist to begin with, or non-cognitivists and believe morality is just disguised approval or commands.

In any case it seems strange, to me at least, to say that the suffering of life is unethical, despite being a consequentialist myself. I would instead hold that a state of affairs or a phenomenal experience of suffering is bad, and the action that was most responsible for bringing about this state was unethical. Otherwise it seems like this would lead us to the sinister position that somehow suffering is an offense to a higher power or something like that which makes it unethical, and not merely bad.

So what is religion according to the OP? Is it a set of beliefs and/or practices? Is it a benevolent social institution (which uses particular sets of beliefs and practices)? A harmful social institution (which uses particular sets of beliefs and practices)? Something in between? A form of self therapy? Are these categories mutually exclusive or some of them can contain others? Is it a social phenomenon which may include some -or all- of the previous? More importantly, can there be a definition of religion which is value free? That is to say, a definition which is not an expression of power relations? — Πετροκότσυφας

I try to make a distinction between religion as a cultural and social phenomenon and religious philosophy, like theology, eschatology, soterieology, etc. Religion in this case is a social group that attempts to ascertain transcendental truths by revelation, ritual, devotion, dogma and spiritual hierarchy.

However, theology and its subdisciplines fundamentally depend on religion to exist. Even atheistic theologians study the concept of God - and only to argue against theistic claims. There wouldn't be a point to study the concept of God if we knew there was no God, outside of anthropology.

So if we take away religion, then theology and its subdisciplines disappear, as does general philosophy of religion.

By being skeptical of religion, I am being an error theorist in regards to religion. To me, theistic theology, eschatology, soterieology, all of that is pretty much bunk. It's a study of something which does not exist. It comes across as almost ridiculous to even have a specific field that studies these things, as if it's a legitimate source of information. (I have a similar mistrust of people who claim they are metaphysicians, "mereologists", "axiologists", etc. It's just a whole lot of verbage for a discipline that ends up being rather trivial. I can see how we ought to have a name for a certain area of study - but to actually name yourself as a member of this "discipline" is kinda over the top in my opinion. Just call yourself a philosopher specializing in metaphysics and be done with it.)

Do you think it is plausible that an entire field (that exists in academia no doubt) could be this way? Does theology deserve to be respected outside of the religious community itself?

Because there has been a lot of criticism of theology in the past. Hume thought it was bunk. Schopenhauer thought theologians were idiots. Carnap criticized the meaning of metaphysical and theological terms. And Dennett today asks us how we are to tell a theologian that they wasted their entire lives pursuing a bunk field.

What is this "good" that you keep harking on about? I'm sure you must have a clear definition of it as you talk about it so much. But what is it in terms of the real world? — apokrisis

The good is sentient welfare, as viewed through the eyes of sentients themselves.

Fuck Richard Dawkins, the intolerant dumbass.

Entertaining story.

We can easily conceive of things that don't work. I mentioned marxism and flower power as examples. So that doesn't help your case. — apokrisis

Just because they don't work doesn't mean they aren't candidates for morality. They don't work, not because they aren't good, but because there's something limiting its instantiation.

Why can't the good be unattainable? Why must we be able to attain the good? Why must the good be constrained to be compatible with our own limitations?

So once again your pragmatism, although being useful for practical, applied ethics, is getting in the way when we talk about theoretical normative ethics. There is no need for the good to correspond to our abilities, because we are able to conceive of scenarios in which there is nothing stopping the instantiation of the good.

Whereas you start out with the assumption that a prosperous civilization is good, I go deeper and ask whether or not a prosperous civilization even is good, and if so, when. Thus your ethics is second-order and assumptively affirmative whereas my ethics is first-order in that it questions the ethics of existence (as it is currently practiced) itself.