How construct a sound Ethical Theory?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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but see that’s the thing. even this can be justified and defended as somehow morally necessary through some political narrative precisely because there is no rational foundation to morality such that principles and acts can be explicitly called ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. in fact, moral statements themselves are entirely devoid of propositional content and express nothing more than personal preference. so nothing more can be said about donald chump’s actions and/or disposition other than ‘yay trump’ or ‘boo trump’ or ‘meh trump’.

when you say ‘what trump did was wrong’, what do you mean? what does ‘wrong’ mean, here? is it some quality of a thing in the world, like the shape of an object or the nature of a mathematical fact? show me ‘wrongness’. or do you simply mean ‘i’d rather trump not do that’? if so, that’s fine, but to say what he did was ‘wrong’ does not yield a contradiction like saying a square object is circular or five plus five equals eleven. it therefore cannot be a ‘fact’ that what trump did was wrong in the same way other truths in the world are facts. sure, it’s a fact that you disapprove of trump, but this disapproval is just an attitude, a value judgement, and values fly like doves from our feet (paraphrasing sartre).

if you want me to join the battle you have to change the objective, because i refuse to fight an imaginary war of good and evil. i would help you dispose of donald chump because he’s a liar, a weakling, a slob, a parasite, a dolt, but not because he is ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’. ya can’t over-analyze shit like this. you gotta go with your gut, bro. shoot first and ask philosophical questions later.

you’re trying to fight fire with water, see; you want to produce a complicated argument from indignation that there is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and that trump is on the side of the ‘wrong’. that’ll never work. you gotta overpower him. you gotta become more evil than him. forget this stuff about the ‘righteous vs. the unrighteous’. the mother of all conflicts throughout the history of man has always been material and economic… certainly not ethical. the ethical is a derivative of the material. fix the material relations, the ethical will follow. and the battle hitherto that has been the source of the ethical conflicts throughout is the battle over wealth… more precisely, ‘rights’ concerning the ownership of labor force and its product.

you fix that, and watch how fast all these conflicts you want to solve with philosophy start dropping off like flies. these frickin’ philosophers want to over-complicate the matter and shoot too wide of the target. i mean it’s complicated, but not in the way most of them think it is.

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As you know from reading my works, I would never speak of a person as being “evill,” but are you saying to the readers of this Forum that it is not bad for one to have these characteristics or to be like this: a liar, a weakling, a slob, a parasite, a dolt, or are you saying those traits are not bad? They’re okay. …or even better than okay. :question:
:open_mouth:
As to the rigorous definitions of “good” and “bad,” Mark explained these way back in 2010, on pp. 19-20; and as Ida elucidated on pp. 24-25, in this essay:
M. C. Katz - A UNIFIED THEORY OF ETHICS
myqol.com/wadeharvey/A%20UNI … ETHICS.pdf
A booklet written in dialogue form, which is the first of four parts.

[b]He learned it, of course, from R.S. Hartman. This is also discussed in “The Science of Value” entry in Wikipedia (which I composed.)

As preliminary contextual definitions,here are a couple:
It is right to be good and to do good. It is wrong to be bad and to do bad.[/b]

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Greetings promethean75:

You seem to be claiming that Chapter Three of The Structure of Ethics is non-rational or irrational, or that maybe the whole treatise is.

Do the other readers of this agree? Speak up if you have read over the booklet offered in first link below - which I shall repeat here, in case no one got as far as the Signature as they read these posts:
myqol.com/wadeharvey/PDFs/TH … ETHICS.pdf

Please let us know if, in your view, the manuscript - once you ignore the few typos that always sneak in - is rational or not.

.

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You seem to be claiming that Chapter Three of The Structure of Ethics is non-rational or irrational, or that maybe the whole treatise is.

Do the other readers of this agree? Speak up if you have read over the booklet offered in first link below - which I shall repeat here, in case no one got as far as the Signature as they read these posts:

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My view is much more reduced conceptually, and normative ethics from tribalism on, is interpreted alongntue lines, summed by the hypothetical , that technology has so far been very progressive on such ethics.

Previously transcendent, having lost visible bearings with objectivity, due to appearent gains that modern production -did not evenly distribute;
lost the object which connected various economic objects. These objects, or models crafted and modeled as transparently equivocal, have politically lost that transparency, so as to dampen the rosy objectives that improvements have cast about them.

The short film typifies this, and can not by sheer numbers qualify a steady slope future objective, since preception and production have left a huge grey, undetermined area, of opinion on the relationship between quantification of mass production and qualifocation of individual reception.

This grey area has expanded faster then Madison avenue can gage the long term effects.

Structurally grey, the ethics of economic and political variances, are not as accurately synced, as when the control of quality started with less general prototypes , and more accurate approximations of durability of lasting power.

The built in obsolescence of 10 cars was reported by an agency , where those cars could not go over 100,000 miles. When the average American drives over 20-25000 miles a year. , replacing that vehicle after 4 to 5 years condemns workers to view transportation as an ongoing expense ,.

Viewed metaphorically, production machines may include other elements of life, such as qualitative use of recreational time, where individual styles can be safely said to have eroded, with technological progress.

People spend vastly lesser time interacting at home, because of the diversionary escape routes through television . Mealtimes are rushed and continually degrade by women working to pay for that car. Children rather get a job at McDonalds then to to school and postpone their tendency to instantly gratify their short term obkextivrd2.

Even betting on the idea of preventing mutually assured destruction becoming an absolute deterrent , has differing odds, politically versus technologically speaking.

As consequence, normative ethics has a very long way to go to recast it’s objectives within a binary form of perception, and understanding.

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Greetings, Meno

You write: “…ethics has a very long way to go to recast it’s objectives within a binary form of perception, and understanding.”

Can you please give us an illustration of how ethics would look if it did recast it’s objectives within a binary form of perception, and understanding. What do you mean by "a binary form of perception?

Thanks in advance.

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Removed for various ignoble reasons, postponed for a try on another occasion

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I get it.

By artfully and verbosely speaking philosophical double-talk, let’s hope that Meno is not implying that I was doing the same.

Yet the question arises: what motivated him to enter this thread in order to show what he can do,when it comes to giving ‘the old razzle-dazzle.’

What did Yours Truly do to deserve this?
:slight_smile: :slight_smile: :laughing: :frowning: :frowning: [size=43]Shouldn’t the Moderator let only normal people respond !![/size]

BTW, several years ago, at this ILP site, I applied Ethics to the issue of Abortion. Folks can look it up.
I seriously concluded that a person has a right to his/her body. Every woman should have a say as to what goes into, and what comes out of, her body.

Let’s also be seriously aware that with every Right there is a corresponding Obligation.
If we want our rights, we have an obligation to vote, to know some civics, to strive to be ethical individuals of good character.

"

         -----------------------[size=89]-Donald J. Trump[/size]
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Thinkdr,

I admit this was a major flaw, and hope it does not create a general pattern of opinion as.to the mistake of posting it.

I am working on something else, and I committed an ethical travesty by assuming that ethics can some way be morally reduced structurally so that it can be evaluated more in terms of objective qualification, then by opinion based data about how people feel about it based on such as religious and other preferences.: bracketed by public policy.

I was tired and wrote something in conjunction what I am trying to do right now, and tried to generalize on its application.
Razzle and dazzle doesent"t fit the overoverall pattern of it, I do admit, however that I am tempted to remove it .

Very awkward and forgive me for the misleading conclusions, however structural changes in preception through acquired knowledge must play a part.

Meno

Parting shot: allusions to obligations & responsibilities, and Trump ideation have given me some structural beginning. If at all possible

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Greetings, Meno
All is forgiven provided you do give in to that “temptation to remove it.”
I forgive you.

With regard to your p.s., your parting shot, I am pleased to be of service.
I would love to know how the “structural beginning” developed into some structural solutions in the field of ethical theory, once you have had a chance to work it out.
So do feel fee to send me a p.m. {an email message} telling of the progress in your thinking on this topic. Ethics does indeed encourage cooperation and coordination.

With teamwork the rigorous, logical, coherent system can be further enhanced …even though it may never be perfect.

Let’s get it ready for science!

We note that in the history of philosophy one field after another has been ushered from a collection of vague ideas into an exact discipline amenable to scientific methods:
Philosophy of mind into Psychology; astrology into Astronomy; alchemy into Chemistry; natural philosophy (with its phlogiston concept) into Physics; are some of the best-known examples.
There is no good reason why Ethics should be an exception.

In fact, due to the introduction of Moral Psychology - the science of the Moral Sense - and due to the Developmental sciences explicating advances in the understanding of human growth and development;

and due to progress in the theories of Evolution in the field of Biology, it is not an exaggeration to state that Ethics is already a science !!

…Something to think about …

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This is a post in Applied Ethics.

With respect to that remark attributed to Donald Trump, he didn’t say it; it was created by Steven Colbert who was doing his impression of Trump. That is who originated that clever ‘quotation.’ - [size=60][Now my conscience is clear.][/size]

I am writing this in defense of the poor guy (the one who gets “free” rides in Air Force One) who is mentally ill, according to a diagnosis by a leading psychiatrist, Dr. Frank, of the Psychiatric Research Department at Georgetown University.

Yes, unfortunately for the rest of the people inhabiting this planet, the man with the most power in the world is mentally ill. Something is wrong there. Something should be done. There are existing three for four movements for change that one may join or contribute to. Each of them is devoted to relieving the moral problems that arise from a dangerous man who also holds the keys to immense power.

And, when the time comes, be sure to vote :exclamation:

:slight_smile:

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Here is something topical as well, that while everything is burning, the politi cal policy is bent out of shape to redefine mental illness.
Colbert is fun in resisting
the platitudes of jargon, forgetting that the greatest paranoid made best impressions. They were not as much impressionists as much as impressions themselves .
Examples abound : Sztalin, Caligula, Tiberius, Hitler, Mussolini, Salvatore Dali ( admittedly so) as a matter of fact hystory abounds with them. They can generate their own sanity with method.

The point is, they are mere opportunists and the time’s readiness is their point of entrance into the theater of absurd, before the real theater of conflict begins.

This is why an intentional constructive objective is pre-organized far in advance , and whatever relates the far flung objective, is up to the masses to untangle. By that time hystory is revised substantially so as to make another ‘peaceful’ transition. I wouldn’t worry about the election too much , word on the street own that Trumpsevelt is openly talking about a third or maybe a permanent term.

If I am somewhat on target, poor guy has personality disorder on the border, literally and figuratively.

But a corrupted partial power can sink deep and fast into the absolute middle.

This is why Mr ITM /god , and other thank tinks needs are on top of their games… Before it(- in Leibtzian language of the identity of indiscernibles )deviates too far from normative ethics.

Normative means some kind of a mix between compatible systems and/or probable choices based on the most likely correspondence between optimum choices. A hardened determinate choice will necessarily induce a model from which to reconateixt the matrix of poasibilitoes, creating a necessary bridge between what is with what the optimum choice should be; whereas those fully undetermined strata which place a reconstructed logically ideal, never experiencing the reality of partial deconstruction , fail as well to realize the power behind the transcendence hidden in the power or the unseen objective, since their time signal are bracketed within the negligible near term effects within that partially derived imminance.

I can’t say much more other then international corporations try to fill the largest politocal spaced in between, as partially occupying the the increasingly stretching variable Windows of opportunity, but their near sightedness is masking the desperate struggle to capture a multifarious bubbly system not confident enough to capture longer term goals.
That is a problem with conservative investment into new methodology of production, that was Soviet Russia’s problem of not meeting the 5 year goals, the game of catch up and close the circle was real and only half.way political.
The collusion is a necessary effort to close market economy, by whatever method available , to try to re-integrate the systemic holes inna universal sense.
Can two systems come together, and create.a new world order where the objective shoet and long term outlooks can pinpoint enough pockets of corresponding observable phenomenological sense, to become compatible with the sustained stability between east and west, while resldoubling the necessary proof within a very important zonal central authority the Eurozone? Into which the.gravity of.focus is shifting back, as.a.governor-gyroscope shifts.to , as a compass of reason reawakening the necessary hold , with added. urgency, within reasonable investiture within a measure both , of. Freudian economy and a Levin type topology.
These are not.deemed.to be.flashcards of an impressionist, but a.more exacting mix between a cubist and a pointillist.

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