How can you agree with this? …
… and (apparently) disagree with this ? …
When he is using different words to say the same thing??
I take Biggy’s meaning to be: a decisive demonstration of an objective argument–you know, an argument that finally convinces everybody, even the sociopath (or visa-versa with the sociopath convincing everybody).
This one I’ll stick to.
You need a decisive demonstration for someone who feels no empathy for anyone and is only concerned about himself?
If you need to decisively convince the sociopath then that means that your entire morality is founded on the beliefs of sociopaths.
Am I the only one who sees the problem with this?
I don’t, but that’s what Biggy’s looking for. I agree with him that it can’t be dished up. Doesn’t mean it’s the only thing I rely on.
I don’t get it.
Well, you’re asking for the morality to be approved by sociopaths. That’s giving them control over the contents of the morality.
Which brings up ‘negotiation’.
Surely, not all moral principles are negotiable? 
Ah, I see. Like I said, I’m trying to decipher Biggy’s criteria. I personally wouldn’t need my morality approved by the sociopath.
Depends. How important is it (morally speaking) to avoid the conflict and war that would ensue over not negotiating your principles?
I apologize. I had thought that you were one or another rendition of a…Christian? Perhaps I have you confused with someone else.
But let’s start fresh. Pertaining to conflicting human behaviors derived from conflicting value judgments you are not an advocate for a religious perspective?
Or [like me] that you once were but are not now?
Let’s pin this down, okay? The existence or non-existence of God is absolutely crucial to the points that I raise on this and on other threads.
And I am particularly confused because in the very next breath…
…you mention Him. 
Well, admittedly, I am still not entirely certain myself of the manner in which Gib differentiates Prong #1 from prong # 2. As near as I am able to understand it so far, #1 revolves around human consciousness itself [the nature of it] while #2 revolves more around its use value and its exchange value when the conscious minds of mere mortals come to collide out in a world of conflicting goods.
Note to others:
Please hazard a guess as to why he refuses [over and again] to address the actual distinction that I do make here.
As an engineering feat the mission is either accomplished or it is not. Dasein is not relevant in getting the math and the science right. And since the mission was approved by the powers that be the conflicting goods [while still existing] is not relevant to those who seek to accomplish the mission. They are after all wholly committed to it.
As a moral quandary, however, which side is able, in turn, to definitively establish that accomplishing this mission is the moral obligation of a rational human being?
Or, instead, that the moral obligation of a rational human being is to spend that money and to utilize that manpower on more pressing needs/priorities at home.
You can arrest the rapists and the murderers. You can punish them. You can reconfigure the upbringing of children so that [perhaps] there are fewer rapists and murderers. There are any number of practical solutions.
But that still leaves the philosophers [the ethicists] with the task of devising an argument that demonstrates why the sociopath is necessarily irrational in arguing that sans God, self-gratification is a reasonable moral font.
And I suspect there are considerably more babies killed through abortion than women raped and murdered by sociopaths.
And why is it necessarily wrong for those in the pro-life movement to see abortion itself as a sociopathic behavior?
And I am only pointing out that, in being confronted with conflicting goods [and the arguments of the sociopath] I am still entangled in this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
Though I am still enormously curious as to why/how it is not applicable to you when your own behaviors come into conflict with others.
I know, I know: You already addressed it. We are “stuck” here.
Note to others: Is that my “position”? Have I “turned off my brain”? Or is this really more about Phyllo [and all of the other objectivists here] arguing that if you don’t think exactly like “one of us” – “naturally” for example – than it is you who have “lost some aspect of your humanity”.
Reminds me of this :
[quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/]
(http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/)
“one or another rendition”
I have been talking to you for years and you still don’t know shit about me.
I’m just “one or another rendition” of a stereotypical objectivist. =D>
Thanks a lot. :-"
Except it’s more like being forced to choose between two sacred values–both of which are important to uphold; it’s like the troly scenario: which do you choose to save? Five people tied to a track or one person tied to a different track? The train is barreling down the track and it’s headed towards the five people, but you can throw a switch which will redirect the train onto the track with the one person. ← It’s not your fault. You didn’t ask to be put into the position of having to make this choice, but you are in that position and you do have to make the choice. Either way, you could be held responsible by a belligerent party itching to cast blame on you.
This is where the is/ought distinction hits home with a painful sting: “Ought” tells us how the world should be, the ideal state of things, where “is” tells us how the world really is. Ideally, we wouldn’t want anyone to die. Ideally, we would want to keep our principles without war breaking out between ourselves and those who disagree with our principles. But given the way the world actually is, we are often forced to choose between our principles, and it’s never a pleasant decision to make; it grates on our conscience. But we can nevertheless come to some kind of resolve over the “best” decision within the limit parameters that define the situation we find ourselves caught in.
I’m going to bow out of this thread now so that you and Mr Big can continue your discussion.
Sorry for the interruption.
No worries. Glad to see others participating.
Fortunately [or unfortunately] I rarely engage with people anymore. Other than virtually. And even that has largely become just another distraction embedded in my own rendition of waiting for godot.
Mostly what I do here is to look for arguments that might poke a few holes in mine. I wonder: Have I finally talked myself into a philosophy of life that I can no longer talk myself out of?
After all, in the past I once subscribed to any number of philosophies that I [with the help of others] managed to talk myself out of. But this one has admittedly stuck around the longest.
Yes, but some arguments are more clearly applicable to all of us than others. That is always the distinction that I look for.
The difficulty I have revolves more or less around this: How can one have a “theory of consciousness” without [eventually] connecting the dots between human consciousness itself and the behaviors chosen by individual minds out in a particular world bursting at the seams with conflicting value judgments? One way or the other “consciousness” is involved.
Until I am able to get a better grip on how you situate/integrate dasein, conflicting goods and political economy into your “subjectivist” perspective, I can only note again that I don’t see your point here as anything other than another way of embracing what I do: moderation, negotiation and compromise in a democratic political context.
But: whether one set of behaviors is “healthier” than another is true [from my point of view] only to the extent that particular people in a particular context [here and now] can agree that they are. Whatever “works” in other words. But that’s not the same as demonstrating that they are “in fact” healthier.
There are still no moral values that can be demonstrated to reflect an optimal frame of mind.
Unless of course I’m wrong and there are.
My dilemma reflects the following assumptions:
1] that my moral/political values are derived subjectively from the life that I lived. Thus, for example, I support a woman’s right to choose an abortion because the aggregation of all of my actual experiences that I had predisposed me existentially to take that particular political leap.
2] Concommitantly, it does not appear possible for philosophers or scientists to either discover or to invent a set of values/behaviors said to reflect the obligation of a rational human being to either support or not to support abortion. And both sides have arguments that the other side’s argument don’t make go away.
3] Finally, whatever I might personally believe about the morality of abortion, out in the world with others what counts is the extent to which I am able to enforce my own values if they do come into conflict with others.
And then to others, I ask: How is this not the same for you?
Since my interactions with others has now more or less ground to a halt, I’m less concerned about these things than I am curious as to how others react to my dilemma. And thus in exploring how it is not deemed to be a dilemma in their own life.
And, yes, [b][u]I[/u][/b] is as substantial to me as it is to others. At least in the either/or world. Only with respect to my identity as a factor in the accumulation of value judgments — in the is/ought world — does “I” manifest itself.
Again, less concerned than curious. Curious to find out if I ever will come upon an objectivist agenda that strikes me less as a psychological contraption and more as a philosophical argument that really does give me pause. A frame of mind that actually succeeds in challenging my assumptions above.
Rationalizing a behavior because you believe that in a godless universe any behavior can be rationalized is a frame of mind that many, many, many individuals literally act out from day to day. And, in particular, when, first and foremost, you strive above all else to satisfy your own wants and needs.
How then does the philosopher come up with an argument able to demonstrate that this sort of reasoning is necessarily wrong?
Any reason at all will do. Or no reason at all. You need God here or the sociopath’s frame of mind would seem to fit snuggly into this: “in the absense of God, all things are permitted”.
Isn’t that why we invent Gods and all of the other secular objectivist contraptions: to make that go away?
If only “in your head”?
Over and again I have noted that in my own opinion a moral and political objectivist is someone who believes there is in fact a right way and a wrong way in which to behave with respect to conflicting value judgments; and that unless you are “one of us” and behave in a way deemed to be “rational” or “ideal” or “natural”, you are behaving badly.
Necessarily so, as it were.
And I suspect that I might come to know you considerably better if you ever do get around to noting particular behaviors of yours that have come into conflict with others [over value judgments] and then noting in turn the manner in which both philosophy and religion were pertinent to the behaviors that you did choose.
I disagree with your self-perception. Whenever you’re faced with serious philosophy, you retreat to the argument that “you’re actually only arguing against the fundamentalists and objectivists who claim that they are certainly right”. You’re not looking for a philosophy of life; you’re looking for the religious certainty you lost.
Of course, this is only my perception.
Given the extent to which I construe these discussions as embedded inextricably – perhaps ineffably – in the complexity of human psychology, sure, there might be some truth to this.
On the other hand, what do the serious philosophers [or the moral objectivists] really have to say here regarding the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy as pertinent to understanding the existential dynamics embedded in actual conflicting behaviors derived from conflicting value judgments.
How, philosophically, is this…
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
…a frame of mind either more or less applicable to your own behaviors?
What does the word objective mean?
The word objective means that the truth-value of some given proposition is determined by reality (what really is) rather than by mind (what one thinks is.)
In this sense, I am not only an objectivist, I am a total objectivist. Total objectivism is the philosophical position according to which there is no category of propositions that is not objective. What this means is that every proposition, no matter of what kind, is either reflective of reality (true) or not (false.) This means that I am a moral objectivist as well.
What I am not is a passive objectivist.
Passive objectivists are people who do not want to make an effort to perceive reality. They do not want to expand, to step out of, their perceptual horizon, instead demanding that reality makes itself apparent to them, by becoming visible within their own narrow perceptual horizons. Indeed, these people believe that true perception is effortless and that whatever cannot be perceived in this effortless manner is quite simply not true. Or rather, not demonstrated to be true.
I am an active objectivist in the sense that I believe that in order to perceive reality, to know what is true and what is not true, one must make an active effort to expand one’s perceptual horizon.
From the point of view of active objectivism, the purpose of demonstration is to help other people perceive reality, not to justify oneself by trying to fit reality into the narrow perceptual horizon of passive objectivists.
I am writing this post because earlier I claimed that truth, or rather morality, comes from within rather than from without. This is not true. Truth does not come from within, it comes from without. What comes from within, in reality, is effort to perceive reality. And this is what I really wanted to say, but failed to.
The confidence that passive objectivists have in judging the truth-value of other people’s propositions is built on nothing other than these people’s continual failure to make what they see fit inside the passive objectivists’ narrow perceptual horizons.
Iambiguous is in a state of limbo (which is how he calls his nuclear shelter) quite simply because he does not want to get outside of it.
What are “existential dynamics”?