The Reasonable Standard

Ed3 is the other guy that I could use as a standard.
The Ed3 Standard. Maybe I can use both.

Empirical standards of ethics is what Im after. That brings along with it a kind of materialism, but certainly no dialectic. It is only about positing vs that which is posited a priori, which doesn’t respond. One simply carries salt, there is no truth to the process, only value.

Or, as Satyr might insist, a “natural” standard.

True enough. Most people around the globe do eat meat and do engage in heterosexual relationships.

Is that then close enough to a “reasonable standard” for all rational and virtuous men and women?

Sure, if this is what you have managed to think yourself into believing. And, really, why take it further than that? Even in a venue like this you can make this claim and be done with all those who are not in sync with eating meat or heterosexual relationships.

My point though is that in a No God world there does not appear to be an argument that can be made able to demonstrate that this standard is one that all rational men and women are obligated to embody. That, if others refuse to except this standard, then they are necessarily wrong.

Also, that the manner in which individuals come to embrace one rather than another political prejudice here, is rooted, as well, in the actual constellation of existential variables [out in a particular world] that have come [so far] to constitute their lived life.

On the other hand, how are conflicting narratives here to be interpreted from the perspective of “value ontology”?

What on earth does that even mean here?

So start a thread about it.

Well, I’ve said it before albeit without a lot of elucidation, it’s basically just money, hos and clothes. I mean, money is basically what you have to have in order to exchange things in the world. The extent to which you can make exchanges of things at will is about as closely tied to your level of freedom as anything could ever be. So you’re gonna want to get some money. This can happen all sorts of ways. Maybe you inherit it, maybe you work hard for it and save it for a while. Maybe you make good investments, maybe you sort out a way to not need as much of it that you don’t have to find as much of it. You’re born, then some time passes, then you die. If time is money, which it is…then the more of your own time you can purchase back from the economy, then the more of your own time in the world you actually get to spend doing what you want to do instead of doing what others want you to do. There is almost nothing that I can think of that is as valuable as that.
Hos…this is pretty self explanatory. I can’t recall ever meeting that many people who don’t love to get blowjobs, bang bitches, and generally spend time around pretty girls, (except gay dudes and in that case they can just substitute other gay dudes in for hos). I never understood why so many people see women as some kind of insolvable dilemma. Just have some humility, don’t be a pussy, act accommodating to some extent. Don’t bitch about having to hold a door open, laugh when you think they’re telling a joke. Tell them they look nice when they look nice. Feed them good food. Go and do some things that they like to do like see an opera or hang out at a mall. Just act nice like you enjoy being around them and they will, generally be glad to spend time with you. Don’t try and get into their pants at every turn. Don’t get all needy and act butthurt or be possessive or expect them to conform to some role that you have in your mind for them. They are people. They like to be free. So let them be free and if you like bitches then just be nice, and you’ll have bitches around more often than not. They will, invariably, over some period of time get horny and want to bang you. So then you bang them and then don’t act all crazy and they’ll probably do it again. Sometimes more regularly, sometimes it’ll be sporadic…who knows? But if you’re nice to a lot of them then you can generally get laid often enough.
Clothes. This is just sort of a metaphor for things that you want. Like I want a car that’s fun to drive fast on curvy roads. So get one. Other people have them. You’re not an idiot. So it’s not impossible. So you can get one too. I like comfortable shoes, and to dress in such a way that I don’t have to worry about changing clothes if I want to go from one place to another. So get some nice shirts and find a good dry cleaner. Maybe I like to play the guitar, so I want to get a couple of guitars that sound really nice. So get them. People want stuff, and not having stuff you want sucks and a lot of people bitch and moan about it. So just get the shit already no one is going to get it for you. Like those kids who say, “How am I going to get a job without a car? And how can I get a car without a job?” It’s not fucking rocket science. Other people can do it, so they can do it too. It feels good to do the things you want to do and to get the things you want to get. So it’s worth working on that if you want to feel like you’re having a good life.

As far as ethics goes…who really owes anyone anything? If you haven’t stolen something, and you haven’t hurt anyone, and we’re all living under the same oppressive powers-that-be…then I don’t see anyone as having a firm duty to take care of anyone else. Especially since when you look closely, you can see that in the majority of cases when someone wants help, that the help they want could be had all on their own if they were to conduct themselves differently. Look, some people are paralyzed and some people have cancer, some people get hit by lightning and some people lose everything they have in a fire, or develop some terrible disease. Technically, it’s no one’s duty to take care of those things for them, but I think that if it were within my power I would do so…but it’s not.

Understanding that you can’t change the world is an important part of having a peaceful and contented view of reality. Striving and stressing to try and stop all the wars, feed all the babies and save all the whales and make sure that no one’s feelings are hurt is an exercise in futility. If you’re not living the way that you’d like to live, and if you suffer from some paradox that you can’t get over, or you’re without healthcare or money or hos or clothes…and you want nothing more than to make the world a better place…then look at it this way…you’re in no position to help anyone. You need to help yourself. Maybe you try and save someone and you just fuck them up more, maybe you try and get them to see things your way and you just create more confusion that leads to more general idiocy and thereby more suffering in the world. Maybe you lead 1000000 horses to water only to see that not a damned one of them is willing to drink. So then you’ve wasted your time and you haven’t helped anyone. At best, there’s a chance you might have created a net positive outcome.

BUT, if you focus on yourself then you’ve got a way better shot at there being one less shitty person who’s suffering in the world. You actually have really good odds at alleviating the suffering of one person. So do that instead. Make the world better one person at a time and you be the person. Get some healthcare, have an enjoyable life where you aren’t in a constant state of need. Eat good food. Insert your penis into young fresh vaginas. See an opera or two. Go to the park. If other people see your example and follow it, then you’ve done even more good. If they don’t, or if they try and fail, then you at least set an example for them so you did something there in addition to making the world better for the one person who you actually have a chance of doing so for.

Fixed Cross in response to

As I see it, life is ALL preparation. It is an ongoing process, an ongoing thing which continues changing and transforming itself.

I am not quite sure what you mean by the last line.
Enjoyment is how you measure goodness or value?
Are you saying that if there is no enjoyment or very little, there is no value to one’s life?

Virtually all of my threads in the philosophy forum revolve around suggesting that “any particular individual’s reasonable standard is rooted existentially in the life that he or she lives.”

Out in the is/ought world.

Out in particular worlds construed from particular points of view where a distinction is made between those who argue that eating meat is moral and those who argue that eating meat is immoral.

You then provide us with Mr. Reasonable’s standard. Fixed Cross provides us with Jacob’s standard.

I’m only probing the extent to which your standard or his standard is said to be the most reasonable standard of all.

How, using the tools of philosophy, can something like this be assessed in the most reasonably manner?

But then out in the world that we actually live in, different individuals engage in different preparations in order to enjoy the different things that they do.

And that’s fine until the things that some do collide headlong into the things that other’s do.

Call them, say, conflicting goods.

The distinction I make is between the preparations people are required to master in order to successfully do the things that they want to do and the preparations they are required to master in order to defend the things they do when others insist that they stop doing them.

Why some choose to eat meat while others do not is, in my view, embedded and embodied in an existential contraption. But if you do choose to eat meat you either are or are not proficient in preparing it.

Theres your real world ethics 101.
Im glad you spontaneously explicated it to normative indicators.

Yes. That’s what you’re talking about, in your threads, and in every thread that you hijack. No one else is talking about that. You’re spamming.

Iamdickuous, spell my name right you turd.

No, I didn’t share my standards, here, you turd-in-the-eyes. I am now sure you never read the posts you respond to.

This is about the Reasonable standard named after Mr Reasonable. Your idiotic refusal to take a perspective as a human being does not count as a standard. Cowardice and hypocrisy aren’t standards, turd-in-the-eyes.

Why FC, why?

[-X

Your fault for perpetuating that.
I was just moderating my comment for Carleases ease.

But, Why? Because the guy is a filthy liar. And filthy liars do more damage than the bubonic plague.

Oops I mean MagsJ.

If you cant see why, read the last 50, or hell, 250 posts Iambiguous posted in threads that I made.

You will understand the insifferable disgust this person causes.

Your need for ad-hominem is not my fault… perpetuated or otherwise.

Magsj, is the ad hom rule the only one we’re enforcing now? What about spamming threads? Derailing threads? Going off topic?

It just can’t be the case that every single thread on the entire fucking site has to revolve around this guy’s confusion about how moral and ethical decisions are made. If so then the entire rest of the group of people who posts here might as well just get up and leave. Why is it completely ignored that he follows people around and tries to force every conversation here to revolve around those 3 or 4 things that he’s been copying and pasting here for the last few years?

Are you even reading the threads or just responding when he clicks the button when someone calls him a name?

Is the content of your section or the order of it important to you at all? Or are you just here to make sure that no one gets called any names?

Aside from my film, music and mudane irony threads, I respond only to a teeny, tiny percentage of the threads/posts created here at ILP.

In other words, I respond by and large only to those threads that are oriented toward that which interest me the most philosophically: the extant relationship between identity, personal values and political power out in a particular world construed from a particular point of view. As that seems relevant regarding the question, “how ought one to live”?

As that might be considered in either a God or a No God world.

I deconstruct that relationship by exposing the extent to which, in my view, our subjective opinions in the is/ought world are largely existential contraptions. Political prejudices.

But some begin to ponder the implications of this given the extent to which that might also be applicable to them. And it bothers them. It troubles them. It upsets them.

Or, rather, that has been my experience over the years.

Next thing you know they are completely ignoring the actual content expressed in my posts; they start in instead on retorting, huffing and puffing, making me the issue.

Come on, Fixed Cross created this thread in order to embrace Smears philosophy: “Life is good and you need to be powerful to handle that.”

Okay, but what on earth does that mean? And what happens when, given any particular context, two or more people come into conflict regarding the actual behaviors that they choose?

Which shall it be?

1] might makes right?
2] right makes might?
3] moderation, negotiation and compromise?

Or any particular combination given a particular context?

My hunch is that my own assessment of “I” here is starting to sink in with some. The way it once sunk in when I first stumbled into it with John and Mary and Barrett’s “rival goods”.

The psychologically comforting and consoling foundation upon which their “self” had been laid over the years is starting to crack a bit. And boy have “I” been there!

You can sense this in the anger and the aggitation on display when they react to me now. Zoots Allure once pointed out this effect I have had on the objectivists over in the philosophy cafe forum.

Me? Well, aside from the occasional shitty mood, I almost never get all riled up in these exchanges. If for no other reason that I recognize my own frame of mind as in turn just another existential contraption. How can I get pissed off when others challenge me knowing that there is almost no way in hell that how I understand these relationships is in fact the way they actually are.

Just for the record, name-calling doesn’t bother me a bit. As a polemicist, I recognize its usefulness.

But I am always willing to dispense with it if someone prefers an exchange that focuses solely on an intelligent and civil exchange of ideas.

Smears reaction here is one that I have encountered any number of times in any number of forums. For many it is simply a given that who they think they are is who they ought to think they are because over the years they have come to understand that which they construe to be the “real me”. And that “real me” has come to collect any number of moral and political value judgments deemed to be anything but just “existential contraptions”.

When that is challenged, however, there is always the possibility of them tumbling down into the hole themselves.

After all, look what is at stake. And I know this because somehow I managed to pull the rug out from under my own religious and ideological foundations. And the consequences of being fractured and fragmented in this way are really, really grim.

But the only place to go to ponder an alternative narrative is a place like this.

So here I am.

Fortunately, at ILP you can always put folks that displease you on ignore. You can’t read what you can’t see, right?

Iamb, you’re not misunderstood. We all understand what you’re saying. It’s just that literally no one gives a fuck about it. No one has any desire to look at the world through the lens that you describe yourself as being stuck behind. We don’t see any utility in it. Philosophy is not about figuring out a way to intellectually cripple yourself and others, and it’s just you who seems to miss that point. For the most part, I think a lot of people here who have encountered you and seen the state of mind that you’re stuck in, sincerely feel sorry for you. No one wants to be mean to a retard. But sometimes a retard just annoys the shit out of everyone which is basically your primary role here. There is no justification that you can offer to satisfy any reasonable person about your incessant spamming of every conversation that’s had here. Whether you see it or not, your view of morality is incorrect. Refusing to accept that does not prove your position. Some people are smarter than others. They can give answers, explain reasoning, and demonstrate best-possible solutions in practical terms to philosophical problems that in theory are impossible to solve. The issue at hand here is that the one learning can only understand these things up until the point that their aptitude for understanding is maxed out. Yours is before the solution to your problem can be soaked in. You can’t learn your way into being smarter. That’s the problem. You’re wrong about something fundamental about the way that decisions are made and you’re not smart enough to understand why. So, stop embarrassing yourself and fuck off out of threads with your sad routine. If it matters to you at all how you are perceived, and if you can wrap your head around the possibility that you’ve been presented with the best possible solution to your problem numerous times by a multitude of people over the years, then you should take what’s left of your dignity and stop interjecting yourself into places where you’re not wanted with the same old copy and paste.

Has it occurred to you that people who aren’t crippled in the same way that you are just aren’t interested in whether there’s a philosophical justification for their moral choices? The question of whether there’s a god, or whether my actions align with an objective morality are about the most boring and uninteresting things that I can think of. Your dilemma assumes that every action occurs in a vacuum and that there is always a choice. It poses a question that assumes that the existence of god is relevant to anything at all. Your view of the world, and more so…of philosophy is so narrow that the “problems” that you pose are laughably simple and can be, and have been…right before your eyes, solved in numerous ways.

That answer is too low to the ground, that answer is too far up in the sky, that answer is one that I will ignore, that answer is too practical, that answer is too philosophical and so on ad infinitum. When cornered, it turns into…you’re a kid, those kids, you’re like (insert someone’s name that the respondent would deem to be a negative comparison).

You are the definition of an actual, technical, by the book idiot.