Out of my entire post, this is all you have to respond with?
Ok then.
I am compelled here of a philosophically based objection, introduced for the n’th time.
A normative theory reduced to positivist quests to meaning of familiar yet apparently indistinct elements, should prove as indeterminate as it’s terms. Right?
I too was a PHD candidate, not hazarding a thesis this complex, yet I am unable to wrap my mind around the obvious necessity to answer this very basic problem with this dissertation. Can anyone bring some light to this?
Thanks.
Ecmandu: Slavery is easy: You can’t own a person.
Wyld: To respond to the rest of it: No, I can see that now we are capable of doing this but you still do not have any claim to a “right” (word used for convenience’s sake) to fly to the moon or a boat to cross the oceans.
My motivation is to explain the logical implications of my normative theory for lying. Yes, you could have a conflicting goods account, but we would need to justify those goods as good in the first place.
Jerkey: I am not entirely sure what you mean by that. Could you expand on that a bit?
Daniel,
The thesis of a normative theory in its corpus is purportedly an assumptive quest into the idea that a the theory could satisfy elements consistent with
a general equivocal framework upon which the specifics can be applied to.
So a normative theory is based on the assumption that such a theory is at least possible. Right?
It is not certain that it can define all the applicable elements within itt’s derivation because, some of them further explorations of what those elements may mean. This is the problem with a hypothetical normative thesis, there is uncertainty into meaning. And that is where we find ourselves now. Quibbling about what these elements mean, lying, etc. We seem to be stuck on this level.
Positivism suffers the same ontological fate, as per your reply to Wyild.
If we can get this far, and have mutual meaning ironed out, then we can proceed.
jerkey, I think he is trolling.
So basically, the solution to your ethics is that we have a world where lying isn’t necessary…
Just to step over the whole problem.
Ecmandu: No, my solution to the problem you posed is that slavery is an act of kidnapping and forced labour and is morally impermissible, so you have no obligation to help the master get his slave back, and indeed you have an obligation to lie insofar as not doing so would lead to the recapture of the slave.
On the other hand, generic slavery is a product of colonial ideas of submitting populations and races to genetic typing, where they were initially not kidnapped, but invaded and forced into submission.
All invasions of enemies and territorial equisitions are considered the enslavement of the conquered populations. Again, the meaning of slavery comes to the fire.
In the context of his general argument, though, I think it’s fair to say that no moral agents are violating his freedom.
Why does freedom need to be violated by “a moral agent” in order for freedom to be violated?
This gets to the problem with all this: conceptualizing freedom in this limited, narrow way is not helpful, and in fact is being done precisely to avoid the real issues and problems that a philosophy of morality ought to be addressing head-on. We are supposed to conclude that lying is morally insignificant whenever it doesn’t produce any restriction on the “bodily or mental freedom” or “property” of another person? What the fuck kind of definition of lying is that? It’s not just empty consequentialism, it isn’t even fucking philosophy. The entire meaning of “to lie” has been cut away.
What is lying? Lying is knowingly speaking an untruth. We can perhaps condition the “knowing” by adding that it is possible to lie without realizing it, to speak untruths that one does not know are untruths, but to call that lying would be questionable. Lying typically means that we say or present something in such a way that it will deceive, and we know it will deceive precisely because we are aware of the deception at the time the lie is spoken.
Do deceptions and a desire to deceive need to cause tangible harm, either in Daniel’s very narrow understanding of harm here, or in a larger understanding, to be considered morally problematic? Daniel doesn’t seem to care much for truth, given that he wants to normalize deception outside of any appeal to truth qua standard of measure. In philosophy we hold truth as a high value, and truthfulness and honesty, for indeed the capacity for honesty is just the capacity for mind, for the intellect itself, and without ruthless honesty and self-honesty nothing in philosophy would be possible. The subsequent value of deception and dishonesty lies in its capacity to expand and tempt truth (and our minds, which come from our having been truthful) to new frontiers and insights, to expand and push back against limits; basically we become self-critical when we discover the ability to deceive and to lie, but that does not mean deception and lying are to now replace truth as a standard of value.
I haven’t seen an analysis here of the capacity to deceive and to lie, nor of the nature of deception and lying; all I see here is an approach to abandoning philosophy wholesale: we are supposed to restrict the sphere of our philosophical concern to only those lies which end up causing some kind of measurable harm only with respect to a limited purview (“impedes upon bodily or mental freedom, or on property”). You are free to call that philosophy if you wish, but philosophy it is not.
The entire gist of this ‘theory’ can be summed up in a single sentence: things are bad when they case harm.
Yeah, no shit. A 5 year old could have come up with that ‘theory’. Or better yet, you could more openly plagiarize Nietzsche and just say outright that morality is a human invention with no real meaning or significance, except where “someone gets hurt”, or something.
For that matter you haven’t even defined harm, as far as I have seen. What is the relationship between harm and pain, or between harm and loss, or between harm and deception, or between harm and untruth, or between harm and stagnation, or between harm and unhappiness? Utilitarianism isn’t a fucking philosophy, it is the desire to avoid philosophizing.
This is all revealing very well the dangers of the analytic/typical academic approach to philosophizing. If you want to start doing real work, go through the following procedures:
A) Define freedom
B) Define truth
C) Define honesty
D) Define lying (include showing many different contexts and situations in which lies are told for a variety of different reasons, and to a variety of different results)
Make sure your definitions are as sufficient and as necessary as possible. Then,
E) Define philosophy in terms of A, B, C and D above
In each of your above definitions, you will have three parts: 1) the structure (ontological) of the thing to be defined, 2) the sufficient reason and causality (ontogeny) of the thing to be defined (why and how does it exist?), and 3) how the thing to be defined connects (epistemology) to that which it is not, including to philosophy at large, to the individual self (you and me, or anyone else), and to other areas of theory and discipline.
Once you finish with (E) you will have a philosophical platform and substance in terms of which you can now go back to posit lying to see how it all connects, what lying means or does not mean. You will also now be able to work on F) Define morality. Your project will naturally unfold from here.
Wyld, that is not remotely a fair summation or characterization of my theory or my position on lying… as I think I have made clear in every previous post.
Well, because the thread is discussing normative/moral theories. That’s the context in which freedom is being discussed, no? Physical laws are a different concern.
Would be great to see you explain how freedom and “physical laws” can be so completely separated.
I think he’s simply saying that immoral agents can violate freedom as well.
You mean this post,
?
No, that doesn’t make clear your position in light of the objections that I raised.
You seem to be in the habit of stating things without explaining them. I’ve noticed that in academic philosophy there is a tendency to think that labeling an idea is the same as explaining it… not so.
Yep.
Saying that freedom can only be violated by “free agents” (saying that freedom can only be violated by something else that is also free) is not only not answering the question at hand, but is an absurd categorical conflation.
Well, wyld, I misspoke then, because for that formulation freedom can not only be violated by immoral agents, but also amoral agents.
I agree with this expansion of what I wrote