When justifying your own actions or statements, according to what factors do you formulate your argument?

On what grounds do you decide whether a justification is appropriate and valid? — Vera Mont

I don't. I have never been asked why I chose to do a particular thing in moral terms. I generally just do it (feel my way through) and, if pressed, can provide post hoc justifications.

Like all of us, I hold presuppositions or axioms: to promote human flourishing; not to cause suffering. But such principles and the justifications they can engender are interpretive and lack precision. I see morality as essentially a code of conduct that is an evolving conversation over time. It is never conclusively arrived at, is subject to continual revisions and has variations across communities.

I'm not an American, but my colleagues and I have been wondering if a shooter would appear at a Trump event for some time. The fact it happened is not very surprising given the emotion surrounding this politician. I imagine also that preventing these sorts of events is not an exact science. Cue conspiracy theories and general bullshit.



Indeed. Although his base are more likely to talk about Isaiah 45:13. (NIV)

I will raise up Cyrus in my righteousness: I will make all his ways straight. He will rebuild my city and set my exiles free, but not for a price or reward, says the Lord Almighty.”

:up: and it can have brutal effects upon people.

I see no demonstration of karma and it is of no use to me as a concept.

accepted your post as the answer to this thread; but, wanted to further ask, if inference based off of causality is something that only humans can do, (is it called 'backwards rationality')? — Shawn

You'd need to ask an expert. Inferential thinking (making connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information to draw conclusions) appears to be part of the behavior of animals like family pets. They know that if a drawer opens and a lead is picked up, it means a walk. They know that the fridge opening means food. And animals who have been abused will often cringe when a person raises their hand. They can often and mysteriously tell when the owner is arriving home - even when unscheduled. And much more complicated behaviors. But what does this tell us about making connections, intentionality and pattern recognition?

Seems a fairly straightforward matter. Humans look for order and predictability to manage their environment. We see that most things, if not all, appear to be caused. Hence the quesion who caused reality? The idea of a sky wizard or cosmic mummy seems to be a reasonable supposition. And in more sophisticated terms, the idea of a cosmic consciousness seems reasonable too. The unassailable human drive to make sense and identify patterns (our innate apophenia) would seem to suggest that we need to understand the world in terms that already make sense to us. Creation and causality seem to be built into our cognitive apparatus.

No idea what varieties of animal cognition allow for but it can be observed that unlikely animals relate to another species of animal for their mother or their offspring.

Do you mean our knowledge and understanding could just as well degenerate as improve? — Janus

Yes, that was my read of the response. I guess that sounds fair.

What I have observed is that a little bit of philosophy can mess with people'e thinking and relationships. You know the kinds of thing, the bumptious young men who think they are Nietzsche's heirs, the enervated Rorty acolytes who can't commit to anything at all. The elitist Platonists who... maybe I'll just leave that one there.

Seems to me that one's disposition is important here. I've never been drawn to philosophy (by this I mean deep reading/studying) But I am interested enough to want an overview of key themes and directions. And I certainly understand that we are all the product of philosophical presuppositions, but so what?

The idea of exploring what is the good or truth or the nature of wisdom seems pretty tedious to me and does not match how I experience life. Critical thinking takes care of these matters pragmatically. Perhaps what it comes down to is this - I am not trying to solve any mysteries of existence or engaged in a poetic quest for self-knowledge. Sorry, rant over.

Has the philosopher outgrown the need for stories? — Fooloso4

I'm not entirely sure what this quesion involves. Isn't human knowledge a story, or a series of interrelated, overlapping narratives? Can you say some more on this?

Not sure. I have no theory of truth. But mostly it seems to be contingent and an artefact of human culture and linguistic practice.

I guess I prefer the frame of intersubjective communities of agreement such as @Joshs posits.

Billions of theists for thousands of years, since the time of the Shaman and medicine man - all of them so unsophisticated. — Fire Ologist

I think that might be an exaggeration and I see why you or others might argue this. I would say that people generally are unsophisticated. Including atheists. The worst atheists are those who argue that because the Bible stories are myths that this disproves god. This does not make any sense and doesn't take into consideration the long history of allegory used to understand spirituality and our relationship to the divine.

Is unsophisticated bad? It can be, but not always. Sometimes it can be an advantage. I think it depends on where that unsophistication leads you.

That seems to be a very good account of morality.

I find it interesting how often unsophisticated theists I have met think that if there is no god than everything is permissible (presumably borrowing from Dostoyevsky). I recall Slavoj Žižek making the entirely reasonable riposte that, 'If there is a God, then anything is permitted'. Given the atrocities which take place in theism's name it's clear that all too often the most dangerous and unethical people on earth have been theists.

Do you think that the development of morality is a significant aspect of our evolutionary trajectory? We are stronger in groups and groups are stronger when there is mutual respect, predictability and safety. Any thoughts on this?

Ok. That's the pop understanding of "naturalistic fallacy". — Banno

Cool. That's the only one I have heard of.

The naturalistic fallacy in philosophy "is the claim that it is possible to define good in terms of natural entities, or properties". Saying that the good is what is pleasurable, or what makes the greatest number of folk happy, and so on. — Banno

Ok, that's interesting. I wouldn't know G.E. Moore from Dudley Moore. I've just read a ChatGPT account of it but I still don't quite understand the concept.

Maybe what I was thinking of was the is/ought problem.

I'm no philosopher, so I may be wrong. I was alluding to it here because people will argue that because nature can be understood as violent and full of suffering it is therefore ok for humans to behave in ways which cause violence and suffering. It's natural and ipso facto ought to be allowed.

Human actions are what we have control over, and so we ask what we should do. — Banno

Seems clear.

While I don't want to invoke the naturalistic fallacy, it's hard for a human to look at nature and think that we inhabit a fair world.

Nature is a bloodbath predicated on killing and suffering. Animals slowly devour each other alive over hours, enduring extreme pain. Babies of animals and birds are torn apart and eaten by predators in front of their mothers. The mere weather regularly freezes or burns to death scores of creatures. Something deplorable is happening in our backyards as I write. Imagine an omnipotent deity who decided that of all the methods possible for creating life, he'd settle on one where suffering and predation are built into the fabric of reality.

I agree we don’t have any certain way (that comes from anyone else but our own selves) to establish how God wants us to behave. God doesn’t send everyone text messages. How we each decide to actually behave and what we actually do is for each of us alone, even alone from God. So I can sit with that part of the quote.

I also agree that when we are together talking about how we might behave, building moral systems together, we struggle to interpret the words and traditions. And this debate among even members of the same religion, is really the same activity (just a different subject) as people discussing the best government or best economy, or even the best interpretation of any data into any system. — Fire Ologist

That's all I am saying. At last we got there. :wink:

By destroying other people's hope, they cause untold damage. The step from unbeliever to satanically evil is very small. All one needs to do, is to project one's own despair onto others. It even works because misery loves company. — Tarskian

That's hilarious.

Might as well say this of theism:

By destroying people's freedom and ability to think, theism can cause untold damage. The step from believer to satanically evil is very small. All one needs to do is project one's own nihilism and religious absolutism onto others. It even works because fanaticism craves converts.

Well I understand you don’t believe in god or religion, — Fire Ologist

While this is true, it does not go to the argument I have been making.

This is, perversely, actually an argument I first heard in the Baptist community I grew up in. It came up in the context of Christians who thought gay people were destined for hell and that homosexuality was against god's morality.

So here it is, one more time: Religions disagree about god's moral system. Even within the one religion people can't agree about how god wants us to behave. Theists therefore have no access to an 'objective' or god given moral system. Our Chaplain put it something like this - 'The faithful are in the same position as the secular humanist. We can debate what is right and wrong and we, as Christians, can invoke god's name, but we don't have any certain way to establish how god wants us to behave. Only the literalists will make such an argument and even they will be at odds over the conclusions.'

All the religious person can do is interpret scripture or respond from personal perspectives regarding how they 'imagine' god wants them to behave.

Again - this is not about the nature of theism or atheism, it's about the nature of moral systems which can help but be pragmatic, adaptive and evolving.

I don’t blame you for ending the conversation. It’s actually is an example of the point I was making. — Fire Ologist

Explain.

I think we should end this discussion for now. We are talking past each other.

I am not talking about objective truth. Whether it exists or not is irrelevant to my point.

Take care - TS

Some very useful responses. Cheers.

Im not wasting my time spinning wheels talking about what is correct and what is not correct about truth and morality when, if I was an atheist post modern thinker, the end of every conversation is “well we’ll never know, all we can do is make up our best, and go on with our lives in our bubbles of bullshit.” — Fire Ologist

Well, if you stick to such straw men then this conversation won't go anywhere. And what's with the wacky Jordan Peterson style utterance? Isn't his bogyman the 'postmodern Marxist?

My argument does not take into consideration postmodernism, of which I know little. It does not explore atheism, as this not relevant to the points made. It does not take into consideration what truth or objectivity are - different subjects entirely.

These are points you seem to have raised to distract from my key argument which is even if you grant there might be gods you can't demonstrate which one is real or what god's moral system is. That's all. In other words to say god is the source of morality is functionally irrelevant since there is no agreement about what that morality is or which god is true. There is no objective morality from god you can point to.

So it's clear that the atheist and the theist can both do little more than explore morality through an ongoing conversation and via a community coming to agreements about the behaviours we believe avoid suffering and promote flourishing. Which is pretty much what we do.

I have not said theists are full of shit, just that they can be no closer to an objective morality than a non-believer. It’s subjective any way you go.

All you’re doing here is saying god equals objectivity. But you can’t demonstrate a single belief any god holds regarding morality. Pretty sure you can’t point to a single objective truth about that god. And you certainly can’t demonstrate a god.

It also doesn’t follow that if there are gods that they are (or that they create) morality itself. For all we know a god might simply identify what is good, but not be the source of it. How would we know?

Not sure why you brought up Nietzsche or science. I haven’t raised them, nor do I have much interest in either.

My point is a simple one. We have no way of knowing what any gods want from us. I am not putting this up against any other system, certainly not science, which can make no value statements or proclamations about truth.

In relation to morality, a theist has no more access to an objective morality than a secularist.

You have to remeber, we're playing by THEIR rules. You can't just question the Abrahamic God if we've established it exists - and not be wrong. — AmadeusD

But THEIR rules contradict each other. I would argue that it's far from clear what the characteristics of the Abrahamic god are even to believers. For one thing, is the Bible still a series of allegories in this reality? Which stories are accurate and how do we deal with contradictions?

If the Abrahamic god is real then we still don't know what that god wants unless it says something to us directly. What if his god were real and appeared to us saying - 'The Bible was an attempt to capture my nature for a less sophisticated time. Much of the stories were misconceived and misunderstood.'

IFF an Abrahamic God exists, then there we have objective facts from on high. — AmadeusD

I'm not sure about that. If this god exists then it would still be a series of confusions and mysteries. Which parts of the Koran and the Bible would be accurate and which bits not? How would contradictions be understood? Was Jesus god or a man? God might be established as an objective reality, but we still wouldn't be able to determine if this god was good (the Abrahamic god seems to operate like a mafia boss). Does god like what is moral, or is the good that which emanates from god's nature. How would we know?

Where? When? Who? Effectively? — Fire Ologist

The Declaration of Human Rights.

And I have worked for social justice organisations that were secular, busily providing health and housing services for people experiencing homelessness and mental ill health. In fact, in my city during the 1990's it was secular charities that made religious charities stop treating disadvantaged folk as lepers to be patronized and dragged the welfare system into the present, from a kind of bleak, Dickensian charity model, so beloved by many Christian welfare services.

That’s the illogical part to me. If three people agree there is no god, there is no objective truth, there is no access to reality as it must be for all, then they should also agree that they have no idea whether each of them mean or agreed on the same thing - collaboration in philosophy and ethics becomes pointless. — Fire Ologist

It's illogical to you. It makes perfect sense to me.

No theist can identify objective truth either. They can only point vaguely to some amorphous god idea (as nominally foundational to whatever they think is real) a deity no one understands in the same way or expects the same things from. Religious wars and internecine conflicts between religions and sects within religions demonstrated pretty clearly that theism offers no advantages to secular thinking when it comes to building a shared understanding.

I’m just saying if I was an atheist, morality and truth talk would seem pointless. — Fire Ologist

But if you are not an atheist how can you fairly come to that view? You would appear to lack the grounding to make that claim.

if I was atheist I would be an anarchistic, hedonistic sociopath — Fire Ologist

There are plenty of such people within the world's religious traditions. I don't think a little thing like god changes people's wiring.

Democracy and capitalism were once the greatest hopes we crafted as collaborations for the community, and today, many think they are evil and doomed to corruption. — Fire Ologist

People seem to be addicted to stories of doom and end of times. Media has fed us a steady diet of apocalypse stories for many years.

To me, it’s because we collaborate at all about anything that we experience the possibility of God. God is in the collaboration. So you take God out of it, the collaboration falls with it. — Fire Ologist

Well clearly this isn't the case because secular humanists have long plugged away at building ethical frameworks quite consistently and effectively, without need for gods. But I get that for you personally (and many other theists) this may seem incomprehensible.

She too thinks her drinking is fine despite downing near a bottle of wine every night. — Philosophim

A bottle of wine a night is pretty standard. While it isn't good for health, it isn't a huge drinking problem. Many people I know drink 3 or 4 bottles a night.

People who drink often know that what they are doing has risks but are often content to assume/hope that they may get way with it physically because many people do. My grandfather drank almost a full bottle of gin every night and lived a happy life to 98.

I keep it at four drinks a day. My body seems to have handled that pretty well over the decades. Vital signs were good at last checkup. — RogueAI

You will likely be fine even if this is more than is widely considered healthy by the literature. I used to drink too much and I often had more than 20 drinks a night. A biweekly binge. I decided that although this never ceased being fun, I should stop for health reasons. So I haven't had a drink for 10 years. Life is way more boring and I rarely go out anymore, but it's probably for the better.

Thanks for elaborating.

You're a highly entertaining and eccentric poster.

I'm curious about your various arguments and pronouncements.

National socialism is actually the most fundamental doctrine of European so-called democracy. — Tarskian

What made you think this?

The only saving grace of the erstwhile marxism was its internationalism. — Tarskian

How did you arrive at this?

Regardless of how they do it, failure is the inevitable attraction point of European civilization. — Tarskian

Why?

If only pure reason is allowed to provide the meaning of life, then there simply is no such meaning. — Tarskian

You're saying that if we rely solely on pure reason to determine the meaning of life, we will conclude that life has no inherent meaning? I wonder if that's the case. I'm not big on pure reason and I came to the conclusion that life has no inherent meaning simply by how it feels and looks to me.

Voting for far-right politicians, i.e. the modern national-socialists, is the national European rebellion against the absurd, of a society that will ultimately commit suicide. — Tarskian

Seems to me you could make this same argument and simply replace 'national-socialists' with 'socialism' or 'identity politics' etc.

I was wondering what the take away should be with more younger people being boss to older people? — TiredThinker

I imagine a massive range of diverse situations (cultural, economic and historical) probably accounts for this age gap. Also sectors. How this looks in retail will be different to how it looks in a health setting.

I think if a boss is 45 and you are 55, who cares? Where I think it can get tricky is where your boss is 28 and you are 58.

I hold the view (based on management experience) that managers and senior leaders often don't know what they are doing, regardless of age. They rely on the team around them to get things done and follow, blandly, the organisation's strategic plan. No innovation necessary.

Personally, I don't buy the idea that older people always bring wisdom and experience. In some cases experience is a teacher of poor, outmoded habits and perspectives. Wisdom can be found amongst the young.

The basic experience is of reading an 18th picaresque novel, not remotely like reading other books labelled as postmodern. If it's self-reflexively clever it's in the same way that, say, Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy are. — Jamal

Interesting and probably true. I don't have a recent enough memory to be certain. But I did think of Barth a lot when I read Cervantes. I found Barth extraordinary but hard going, in as much as it just never lets up: layer upon layer of prodigious syntactical brilliance. I guess for many people the book is so dense and lengthy that unless you really love the playfulness of this absurd tale, you will probably become exhausted. For my taste, it might have been better (easier on my brain) cut by a third. In some ways, TC Boyle's Water Music is that book for me. That said, there's little quesion that Barth is a genius.

:up:

here are my two contributions to this thread:
Fairness is not found in the world, it is found in what we do about it.
The way things are does not determine what we ought do about them. — Banno

Sounds reasonable.

Quick clarification - based upon this if fairness is not found in the world, then unfairness is not found either?

Fairness and unfairness are the perspectives of conscious creatures (well, humans specifically) who hold views subject to evaluative ideas?

The problem with pragmatism is that it does matter what you pick - awful things 'work'. At an extreme end, murdering people to get to the top can work. Abortion works as birth control. And what do we mean by work? A lot of people say things ‘work’ but on close examination you can see that they don't.

But, perhaps, ironically, I can say skepticism 'works' for me - in most cases I can't believe in things for which I have no good evidence.

Do you believe that one metaphysical position is true and all the others - materialism, realism, anti-realism, idealism, physicalism, existentialism, and so on and so on - are false? You have always struck me as a pragmatist and that idea, to me, is very unpragmatic. — T Clark

I haven't said anything is false - gods, idealism. Just that they haven't been adequately demonstrated. Hence I have no good reason to beleive them. I'm not saying they are not true - that's a positive claim I can't justify. Skepticism rather than pragmatism.

As you know, non-dualism goes back much further than the New Age movement. The Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism go back as far or further than the earliest Greek philosophers. — T Clark

Indeed the source of the new Age movement and some fairly soft core version of the perennial philosophy. I just meant the recent morphing of this.

What kind of mental processing is taking place when we have an intuition, a gut feeling? How often do experts in a field, such as surgeons, pilots, tightrope walkers, rely on the felt sense of a situation to guide them? — Joshs

Sure, but I figure intuition of that kind is based on experince and lots of exposure to good and bad decision making which was more formally structured.

Are they ignoring the facts that they have learned over the course of their careers or, on the contrary, holistically drawing from that reservoir of knowledge to arrive at a decision? — Joshs

Probably drawing from a theorized basis.

I think what makes that decision ‘felt’ rather than laid out as a logical structure is that it is too fresh an insight to articulate is such developed terms, not because it is lacking conceptual substance. — Joshs

Could be. I guess what we'd like to avoid is capricious thinking being used to label people 'guilty' or 'undeserving' based on physical appearances or some other emotive association which does not take into consideration the matter itself.

Isn't that what philosophers have always done — Gnomon

Not just philosophers - everyone.

I'm a non-philosopher and a minimalist, so I'm not particularly reflective, nor am I a searcher.

I superimpose interpretative values on everything like anyone else. I just haven't reached for a prepackaged system or someone else's complex thinking. And yes, of course, we all inherit values from language and culture. Everything is contingent upon these.

Fair and just are human terms, subject to some criteria of value. Just which criteria would one use in order to determine if the world we appear to inhabit is fair and just?

A brief look around showcases a reality which does not offer the same predictable experince to every creature. It seems to be chaos on which we try to project a sense of order. It's daily painful death to countless children, heroes get cancer, a world based on predation and the immense suffering on a constant basis of billions of creatures who are eaten alive slowly by other creatures, etc.

I have encountered no good reason to superimpose a philosphy or religion upon this in order to make it seem less appalling.

No.

Would you be amenable to the idea that it is just as a convenience that we separate affective and rational aspects — Joshs

I can see this.

I love this wording:

The gist of it is that emotion is the cradle within which rationality rests. It is what gives the rational its coherence, intelligibility and relevance. — Joshs

Emotion here goes hand in hand with intellectual development. Why should we want to be reasonable unless knowledge were intrinsically rewarding? Why would knowledge change our mind about anything, causing us to ‘go against ourselves’, unless reason were its own reward? — Joshs

Makes sense.

The emotions are said to disrupt our thinking and lead us astray in our purposes. This what I call the Myth of the Passions: the emotions as irrational forces beyond our control, disruptive and stupid, unthinking and counterproductive, against our “better interests,” and often ridiculous. Against this platitude, “emotions are irrational,” I want to argue that, on the contrary, emotions are rational This is not only to say that they fit into one’s overall behavior in a significant way and follow regular patterns (one’s personality”), and that they can be explained in terms of a coherent set of causes according to some psychological theory or another. All of this is true enough. But emotions are rational in another, more important sense. Emotions, I have argued elsewhere,1 are judgments, intentional and intelligent. Emotions, therefore may be said to be rational in precisely the same sense in which all judgments may said to be rational; they require an advanced degree of conceptual sophistication, including a conception of self and at least some ability in abstraction.

I find this ( Solomon)) very interesting.

Possibly a digression but since you raised it - I'd be interested in trying to unpack this via some examples. For instance - when determining the guilt of someone in a court of law, someone might say of the accused - 'It feels like he's guilty to me.' - and determine guilt based on this emotion rather than any facts provided about the crime. I suspect we wouldn't want important decisions made based on how it 'feels' to any given person at the time. Would we not want to use differnt tools? How do we determine which approach to privilege in the light of what you write about emotion?

You seem to take a lack of definitive answers to things as evidence that they have been exhaustively examined and deemed pointless. — Constance

That's not really what I am saying. That was me reframing your point about the epistemic hopelessness before us. Which I take to be the similar Rorty's view that everything we believe is essentially a product of contingency - of culture and shared linguistic practice. The point is to move on and get things done.

Remember, I often say, ALL one has ever witnessed in the world is phenomena. Impossible to witness anything else, for a phenomenon is "to be wittnessed." — Constance

Sure. That's pretty much what I say too. It's a post-Kantian world. But the point remains; what is next?

Heidegger sounds just like someone you could relate to. Two, three months study and you would start to see what it is really like to be free of "glib answers." — Constance

Heidegger's unpacking of our mistakes and assumptions since Plato and all the advanced theorising about being that this entailed, didn't prevent him from getting involved with the ultimate in glib answers, Nazism. So even Heidegger had to step away from theory and his remarkable, nascent post-moderism - what hope for the rest of us?

Anyway, of course, I understand this immediate rejection of "transcendental" talk. But transcendence is always already there in the world, and all of those practical matters rest with this openness of our existence. The only issue is whether one takes an interest. You know, starry night, one looks up at the night sky (aka, the inside of one's cranium), and wonders. Wondering deeply enough, one discovers religion. One wonders thoughtfully enough, one moves to Kierkegaard. Then Kierkegaard opens the door to one's self. — Constance

This sounds more like an aesthetic response.

You're right that I don't take much of an interest in transcendence. As a reluctant post-modernist (by culture) I don't think it is possible to arrive at any conclusions about reality - just tentative theories and speculations. Most of which are cheap.

You know, starry night, one looks up at the night sky (aka, the inside of one's cranium), and wonders. Wondering deeply enough, one discovers religion. One wonders thoughtfully enough, one moves to Kierkegaard. Then Kierkegaard opens the door to one's self. — Constance

Hmmm. You sound like a romantic. The point of philosophy is how much I as an individual need to engage with it, not whether it is good for the world or whether Heidegger or Kant were revolutionary thinkers. These are very different matters. I am primarily interested in what I need from philosophy.

I doubt most people who read Heidegger understand him or gain a useful reading of him. Even academics seem to struggle. I think this is material for formal study, not for someone like me who doesn't read philosophy or have time.

If there is no answer then what's next?
— Tom Storm

See the above. — Constance

I don't think you have really answered this question.

Enjoyed the chat. :up: