Posts by BenWilson
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There are many things that appear to lie 'at the heart' of most ethics, depending on whose heart you are referring to. Kant tried to catch what he thought the heart was with his 'Categorical Imperative', which is a more sophisticated Golden Rule (Do As You Would Be Done By) - "Act as if the maxim of your action were through your will to become a universal law".
But obviously the problem arises from the non-specificity of such a method - it basically means if you could accept it being done to you, or you can accept such a universal law, or you could handle the feelings you cause in others, then that's OK. Which varies enormously between individuals and quite a lot between cultures.
A good counterexample is the murder-suicide. What's good about that? The person has accepted on themself what they have done to another. They may even not mind if the entire planet killed itself and murdered it's wife/mother/whoever. They may be deeply empathic in doing so, you often see that with people who kill their families. They may love those they slay.
Or you have the enemy who would expect no quarter from you either. They are following the same principle they expect of all honorable warriors, to fight hard until death. They'd feel cheated if you didn't do the same.
And those are just examples which accept the spirit of the principle. The more niggly ones that show the sleight of hand which can be used in your justifications and your empathy, are also major problems for such an 'uber-principle'. Like 'I have no particular feelings about pulling my finger back at all', when holding a loaded shotgun.
I confess to not having kept up with trends in philosophy. It's one of those subjects where after a few thousand years there are few truly new ideas. I'm sure what I'm saying was said a thousand times before the birth of Socrates. It is simply to Plato that we owe the first really detailed account of it (in the West). And if we lived by his uber-principles I think it would be a pretty violent place. Hey, wait a minute...
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Just to make things super-freaky it was all meticulously bagged and organised by condition, title, year, special interest (if applicable) etc. Like a comic book convention for tight-fisted (or nostalgic) onanists.
I think that's to discourage excessive browsing, which seems to be a 'one guy at a time' job, and they want it not to be a 'one guy all day' caper. I hate to think how bad the condition could be, though.
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I've bought a vibrator from the supermarket the other day, batteries included. It's ribbed, studded, and has a clit-tickler. My mouth orgasms every time I stick it in with the sleazy mint flavoured paste they recommend. Then I floss, and no one is any the wiser that I wasn't just brushing my teeth.
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Impressive Jeremy. Your prize is you get to translate it.
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Oops and I missed a 'c'...see if you can spot where.
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I do like the way the German language can pack a whole sentence into one word.
Like "Donaudampfshiffahrtselektricitatenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamptengesellschaft"?
The longest word I've ever tried to say. Something about the Danube and boats I think.
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WH,
The exploitation is not unintuitive, its the voting pattern that results....
I got your point, was just joking really. Yes, poor people voting Republican is nuts, unless you believe what they believe, of course. That religion, race, crime, immigration are the big issues of the day and Republicans have the answers. I disagree with both points, but I do have to confess that I'm not a poor American, so how would I know?
Neil,
It is quite an unsatisfying moral theory, I have to confess. It reduces moralizing to the same action as a dog barking angrily over territory. Which takes away from the 'force' of moral arguments. I think the entire force of any moral argument is ultimately the chorus behind it. That does suggest that there is no 'right' morality, an unfortunate consequence if moralizing is your bag. In a beautiful circular motion, that becomes an unacceptable consequence to most people's intuition and they would rather put that ahead of reason on the matter. I find it quite hard myself when I want to moralize, until I remember "I'm not right, I'm just part of a chorus". -
That's the spirit, keep the dream alive. I guess I should be more clear in what I'm saying. It's not that hard to find an uncontradictory set of beliefs, but you really have to go to work on your moral intuitions to do it. And that makes it very hard convincing anyone else of those beliefs, since counter examples will abound and you'll end up sounding like any other ideologue.
As in science, so in morality, the perfect simple self consistent theory is a dangerous thing. If we think of morality as a science then that makes the observations/experiments equate to 'how we feel about example x'. That usually means we will have data inconsistent with most simple theories. If we then seek to change how we feel, we are really just massaging the data to fit the theory. Better is to accept that each theory has some unintended consequences, and make it more sophisticated. Eventually we have a theory so sophisticated that it matches all data. It's then as accurate as our intuitions, which we had all along. Why did we bother?
It's a real chicken and egg problem. I like Russell's take (Bertrand, that is) on it - that Philosophy is not about finding answers but learning to live with doubt. A different take on Socrates point that we know pretty much nothing for sure about these big deep problems. Both of these geniuses spent their entire lives on them, so it's nice to have a sneak preview of where it's likely to go.
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It is sometimes claimed out that modern Republican dominance is unintuitive and is built on the careful exploitation of cultural issues such as religion, race, crime, immigration.
What's unintuitive about that? Hasn't politics has centered around these issues since time began?
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No, but I was talking about me, rather than anyone else's messed up world :)
So was I :-) You're a good example to yourself. If you can't avoid contradiction in your own beliefs (and I can't when it comes to morals), why think anyone else can?
I see morals now as a bunch of competing principles which each have a weighting, and any particular moral issue will have an extent to which it violates some principle. The product-sum being high means I think it's not OK.
But that just transfers the burden of thought onto assigning the weights to the principle parts of any issue, and also the basic weights for the principles. How can we do that? If we take a bunch of examples and contrast them to each other, we get our weights, but then we've transferred the burden of thought right back to our moral intuitions on particular instances again. Why bother having gone through all the complicated philosophizing?
Similarly with any particular instance - we can work out how much it violates, say, the principle of compassion by comparing it to other various instances, but we still have to have lined up all those instances somehow. Since we are trying to work out the principle we can't use the principle to do it. Again we fall back to our feelings.
These thoughts have plagued me for over a decade now. It would be lovely to discover the perfect principle, or the perfect weighting for a set of principles, but any time I try, there's a good counter-example that just hits me square in the feelings. I can't just say 'bugger my feelings', when they were the source of the principles in the first place.
OTOH, it makes the world a more interesting place when it can surprise you by giving you feelings on issues you thought you already had answers for.
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