Making iambiguous's day

Well, you’re right that moral intuition (the way I’m defining it) is highly connected to emotion. I wouldn’t say it requires emotion, but it’s definitely there. For example, in the scenario above, the one where you find a child wounded in the ditch, I don’t think it has to stir a lot of emotion just to intuit that the right thing to do is to help the child. But if you were there, if it were really happening, you might feel inspired to help or guilty if you just walk on by (I consider inspiration and guilt the two main emotions that are tied to moral intuition). But I don’t think moral intuition is just the emotions we feel in that scenario, but a sense of knowing right and wrong which can trigger certain strong emotional reactions.

But I’d like to know what the “inner peace” of what you are calling the conscience is. It must have something to do with morality. Otherwise, why call it the conscience?

Inner peace means that whatever actions you’re performing, if you’re performing any at all, that they are within the limits of comfort.

In other words, it means that you’re comfortable with what you’re doing.

Inner peace is a necessary condition for good conscience but it is not a sufficient condition. This is because conscience refers to moral decisions whereas inner peace refers to actions of any kind. Thus, good conscience is not merely inner peace but inner peace in moral decisions.

Ah, then that would be like deciding to help the child in the ditch (at least for me). Bad conscience, I suppose, would be to endure the guilt from a decision to leave the child there. We could say then that good conscience is being inspired to do good, or feeling inspired that you have done good, and bad conscience would be to feel guilt.

Most of us no doubt have reached this point. For months [sometimes years] we make the attempt to explain to others how we think about things like human interactions that come into conflict over value judgments.

This particular thread also includes attempts to connect the dots between conflicting human behaviors [embedded in moral and political narratives/agendas] as this relates in turn to human consciousness itself.

Which inevitably will get around to the question of autonomy, volition, will.

Yet we all no doubt marvel at just how mangled our point can become in the minds of others. Still! Even after countless exchanges!!

Indeed, we can’t help but ponder what that tells us about, among other things, the limitations of human language, logic, reason.

I’m not asking others to demonstrate that their behaviors are the right ones. I’m asking them to discuss the manner in which they have come to defend their own behaviors. Behaviors that engender conflicts with others relating precisely to the manner in which they have come to understand the relationship [out in the world existentially] between identity, values and political power

In other words…

1] what particular goals do they have?
2] how did they come to acquire them given the actual trajectory of their own unique life?
3] how have they come to deal with conflicting goods?
4] how are all of these interactions related historically, culturally and experientially to the manner in which Karl Marx and others coined the expression “political economy”?

All I then ask is that, in probing these relationships “out in the world”, we focus the discussion on particular conflicts that we are all familiar with.

In other words, I focus the discussion not on what we want others to do, but on the extent to which this can actually be grasped [philosophically or otherwise] when in fact others want us to do something else instead.

No, I am proposing this: that to the extent it is possible [given the nature of internet exchanges], we connect the dots between our words and the worlds that we actually live in: insofar as the words attempt to describe the conflicts that we ourselves have with others.

My values [vis a vis others] are embedded in my dilemma above. So, how are the values of others [translated into behaviors] not?

They will either take their words there or they will not.

Chance, contingency and change . . . and yet, you are the most inflexible and repetitive person on this forum.

Actually, my distinction [as always] is between ascribing a particular definition and meaning to the words “objective/rational demonstration of the morally correct thing to do”, and coming up with an actual experience embedded in a particular existential context whereby empirically “out in the world of actual conflicted human behaviors” such a demonstration is wholly illustrated.

What is the methodology by which we can take those words out into the world and test them?

Here of course that can only be described with words. But the words are either able to be illustrated “out in the world” such that all rational men and women are obligated to share their definition and meaning or they are not.

After all, if the definition of abortion is “the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy, most often performed during the first 28 weeks of pregnancy,” one is either talking about an abortion or one is not.

Similarly regarding the definition of morality: “principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.”

One is either discussing the morality of abortion or one is not.

Indeed, how difficult is it to wholly illustrate that?

But then after we all agree on that, we reach the part where it is to be decided if the morality of this particular abortion encompasses/embodies a right behavior or a wrong behavior.

All I ask here is for an argument that would in fact be able to establish this in the same manner in which it can in fact be established that we are discussing the morality of this particular abortion.

I’m not saying the argument doesn’t exist, only that from my own frame of mind [here and now] such an argument is entangled in my dilemma.

Then: How are you not entangled in it yourself?

I’d buy you a prostitute, but I can’t even afford one myself. I can sense your sexual frustration from here.

Nope.

Well, unless of course I’m wrong.

Anyway [as always] thanks for the contribution, James.

Oh, and that reminds me… :banana-linedance:

From my frame of mind, an intellectual contraption relating to the components of my own argument – identity, value judgments and political power – is one in which actual behaviors such as this do not even make an appearance.

Instead, they are encompassed in conflicting reactions to human behaviors such as this by way of scholastic assessments — “general descriptions” of human interactions in one or another academic, didactic lecture. Think Satyr at KT and James S. Saint here. **

My point is that individual reactions to this sort of behavior will be embedded largely in the actual existential trajectory of any particular life. That, give a unique and particular sequence of experiences, relationships, sources of information/knowledge etc., one is predisposed to react one way rather than another. That, in other words, there does not appear to be an argument [philosophical or otherwise] that can in fact establish how all rational men and women are obligated to react.

And, in part, because there are arguments that can be made to rationalize such behavior from both sides. From many conflicting sides. Embedded [politically] in conflicting goods.

And [again] that’s before we get to the arguments posed by the sociopaths.

** Consider this “observation”:

You tell me: What on earth are we to make of this pertaining to our individual reactions to the methods used by the secret police above?

They either tortured and killed the man or they did not.

Now, what are philosophers [ethicists] to make of it if they did? Is there a deontological assessment here that all reasonable/rational folks are obligated to embrace?

Or does it instead depend on the particular context seen from particular [and conflicting] points of view. Political points of view. Or religious points of view. Or ideological points of view. Or points of view said to be most in sync with “nature”?

Again, there are those things that we claim to know or to believe are true “in our head” that are able to be demonstrated as in fact true objectively “for all of us”. Sure, there may well be contingency, chance and change embedded in these phenomena “over time” but the reprecussions of this are no less true for all of us.

We remain inflexible and repetitive regarding these truths because it is reasonable to do so.

But with respect to our prong #2 interactions those aren’t the things [the relationships, the consequences] that I focus on pertaining to my dilemma above.

Are they?

Let’s go there then and explore the extent to which it is not applicable to you when your own behaviors come into conflict with others.

What are we able to establish as in fact true for all of us and what, instead, becomes entangled in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

You choose the context.

You are inflexible and repetitive not because it’s reasonable to do so but quite simply because you have no respect for the consequences of your actions. You don’t want to admit to yourself that what you’re doing is unreasonable because then you would have to make a drastic change in your behavior something for which you simply have no patience at all. And this is evident in the manner you interact with people on this forum such as for example me.

You never respond on point. You evade and then make excuses for evasion.

Narcissists have no interest in measuring the performance of their actions. Instead, they simply act and then override the consequences of their actions by imagining they are doing well. You try to hide this and make yourself appear credible by adding an entirely valueless “I might be wrong”.

My point however is that different folks have different reactions to the consequences of any particular set of actions.

And then the objectivists come along and refuse to respect the reactions of anyone who does not share their own.

How is that not reasonable?

Again, let’s explore my own reaction to the question that revolves around the behavior we call abortion: “is aborting a human fetus rational…is it moral?”

My answer is embedded existentially in this:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

Which then precipitates [philosophically and otherwise] this frame of mind:

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.

In other words, I am inhibited from making any “drastic change” in my behavior because I have come to conclude that any change at all is merely embedded in an existential contraption rooted in dasein and conflicting goods.

And then I ask folks like you: How is this not applicable to your own behaviors?

Thus when you level this accusation at me:

That is precisely what I am inclined to think about you. And many other objectivists.

Narcissists [like many sociopaths] are interested only in behaving in a manner that it reinforces their own sense of self-gratification. Sometimes they will agree that there is a right and a wrong behavior, but they just don’t care. Other times they will insist that in the absence of God right and wrong can only be understood from the perspective of any particular mere mortal in any particular context viewing the world around them from the perspective of “what’s in it for me?”

Personally, I do try to live my own life embodying the perspective embedded in the Golden Rule: would I want others to do this to me?

I merely have no illusions but that this is just one more existential contraption rooted by and large in the particular sequence of experiences that have encompassed my life. So far.

Though even here I have no way of demonstrating to others that all reasonable men and women are obligated to think like this. So I am always acknowledging here that I may well be wrong.

Narcissism is about falsifying the evident in order to protect oneself from the unpleasant emotional reactions.

Narcissists have no emotional resilience – their nervous system is inflexible – so instead of slowing down their densely packed emotional reactions they are protecting themselves from them by telling themselves all sorts of lies.

The event that triggers unpleasant emotions, in other words, is discredited.

Like a fox that can’t reach the grapes. The observation of failure – that the fox couldn’t reach the grapes – triggers certain very unpleasant emotional reactions. The brain automatically starts making certain attempts to remedy the situation but because everything happens all at once it becomes counter-productive. Instead of slowing its emotions down, by having patience, the fox falsifies its past, i.e. it adds a layer of imagination on the path to memory, by telling itself that it never wanted to reach these grapes (because they are supposedly sour.) This means the fox didn’t fail, because its goal wasn’t to reach the grapes, but perhaps merely to try to reach them, and so the brain of the fox no longer reacts and the fox is happy.

Narcissism is self-gratifying in this particular sense.

Narcissists are quite simply reality falsifiers. They bury unwanted aspects of their past deep beneath dense layers of imagination in order to protect themselves from their own emotional reactions.

I am not evading anything. Quite the opposite, in fact. I am asking you to tell me what you want me to do so that I can do it. But you never respond to my questions. Instead, you just bombard me with words and declare a victory when you see me walk away. Cool stuff, bro.

This sounds like something a computer programmed by an analytic philosopher would spit out.

I think it’s time to…reboot? :wink:

Okay, let’s bring this down to earth. A particular narcissist out in a particular world interacting in a particular context in which a behavior he chose [fucking] resulted in impregnating a woman. She wants to abort it. He sees that as murdering his child. His child. What then constitutes emotional resilience here? What frame of mind can be demonstrated to be the embodiment of a lie?

Okay, maybe. But what does that really have to do with this:

Narcissists [like many sociopaths] are interested only in behaving in a manner that it reinforces their own sense of self-gratification. Sometimes they will agree that there is a right and a wrong behavior, but they just don’t care. Other times they will insist that in the absence of God right and wrong can only be understood from the perspective of any particular mere mortal in any particular context viewing the world around them from the perspective of “what’s in it for me?”

You choose the context and the behaviors in conflict [the “reality”] and we can explore your theories more…substantively.

That’s exactly how you sound to me. Minus the “analytic philosopher” part. You don’t sound like a philosopher or a thinker at all. More like a broken record repeating fancy terms that you have picked from some external source but without understanding them. Terms such as, I don’t know, “dasein”?

Whatever you don’t understand you judge as “too abstract” or “up in the clouds”. Very convenient. I have nothing against it. Have your fun.

In other words, you’re too stupid to understand what I am saying – indeed, you have no idea what narcissism is – and beside being stupid you’re also unwilling to admit you are, or might be, stupid, so let’s put the burden on the other, on me, to justify myself instead of simply asking “can you please explain yourself to me, I don’t understand what you’re saying”.

Little. Your understanding of narcissism is superficial. It’s stupid. According to your definition, even animals such as lions are narcissists. When in fact they aren’t.

Maybe, if you were humble and trustworthy in general. Which you aren’t. So I can only mock you.

A narcissist is someone who doesn’t take responsibility for his actions.

What does this means?
It means he does not accept the consequences of his actions. In other words, he does not measure the performance of his actions by comparing what he wanted to happen (desired outcome) with what in fact happened (actual outcome.) The purpose of such a measurement is to facilitate learning. Learning is the process of adaptation, which is to say, the process of adjustment of strength of connections between some set of actions and some set of outcomes. When you make a mistake, which is a dissonance between what you wanted to happen and what happened, you adjust the corresponding connection between the action you performed and the outcome that was produced by weakening its strength, which is to say, by decreasing its probability of success. Otherwise, you strengthen the connection.

Narcissists don’t measure the performance of their actions thus they don’t learn. They change but they don’t learn. They stagnate.

They think that they are always right. That their actions are perfect and thus beyond any kind of measurement.

Think of Christians and their prayers. They believe prayers are perfect, requiring no measurement to adjust how well they perform, which is to say, their probability of success.

Think of democrats and their voting rituals. They believe voting is perfect, requiring no measurement to adjust how well it performs, which is to say, its probability of success.

These are examples of narcissistic behavior. Not what you’re giving us. But this.

Self-gratification, in the context of narcissism, refers to the refusal to restrain actions that are clearly not giving desirable results. It does not simply mean pursuing self-interest.

Again: Let’s bring this down to earth. Let’s bring our respective “terms” out into the world. Let’s focus the discussion on a particular [and well known] prong #2 conflagration.

You can attempt to encompass your own rendition of Gib’s prong #1 assessment, and then integrate it into the existential reality of this particular set of conflicted human behaviors.

No, what I do is to ask those who think they understand something…something relating to human interactions revolving around the relationship between identity, moral/political narratives and power…and take what they think they understand out into a particular context that we might all be familiar with.

They either will or they won’t.

Huffing and puffing? Making me the argument?

Well, believe it or not, I’ve been there and done that with any number of objectivists over the years.

Now, from my point of view, I invariably end up making fools of them.

But not you, right?

[b]Note to others:

Given his understanding of narcissism and my own who might be more effective when confronting the narcissist “in reality”?[/b]

Hi Biggy,

I’ve been away from this thread for a while. Been busy. I now have some time.

You shouldn’t be asking that question. You know it leads to a dead end.

That’s why I’m saying to take a different route. Get back into objectivism… then trying moving back out of it through an entirely different route.

What it means is irrelevant. In regards to living in a deterministic universe, what we are able to come to grips with on the “is” side of the “is/ought” divide and what we are able to come to grips with on the “ought” side of the “is/ought” divide should make absolutely no difference to you. If on the “ought” side, you can only conclude that, in our moral convictions, we come up with existential fabrications due to the fact that, living in a deterministic universe, it could not have been any other way, then that exact reasoning can be carried over to the “is” side, and you should be concluding exactly the same thing. I’m say that, I’m afraid, your dilemma applies even to “is” questions.

Then we come back to the meaning of “choice”. As I said above, the ability to violate the laws of nature is not the only way to define “choice” or “freedom”. Most people, when they talk about acting “freely” are not supposing they can defy the laws of nature–they simply mean that when they have the experience of making a “choice” they’re actions unfold exactly in accordance with what they feel they are “choosing” to do. The difference between being free or being forced has nothing to do with whether or not things could have turned out differently, but where the forces that determine the outcome of our actions originate from–do they originate from within or without? Are we the force that determines our actions, or is it a force that comes from outside ourselves? For example, a purse snatcher sneaks up on a woman and tries to yank her purse from her hand. She resists. The purse snatcher is a force that works against the woman, who is herself a force acting in resistance. The former defies the woman’s will to keep her purse. If he succeeds, we say she was robbed against her will. But suppose the same woman earlier that day handed her purse over to her husband for safe keeping. It could be construed as more or less the same action: she relinquishes her purse from her possession to another man. But in one case, she does so against her will, in the other case, she does so according to her will.

Any way you cut it, however, they are all forces working in the fray of a deterministic universe, and one could still say things could not have been any other way.

Bringing this back to your dilemma, the only way you can get away with saying that you are “stuck” in your dilemma, always doubting the truth of objectivist-sounding arguments, is if you were actually trying to be persuaded by them, eager to be open to them, but some outside force (as if someone else had control over your mind) was preventing you.

You have a very primitive understanding of psychology, naturally, since you’re a very primitive person. Maybe you should stop doing it because, you know, in my very own personal opinion which may turn out to be OH MY GOD wrong one day in the future, you are terrible at it.

What I’m seeing is this: you come here, make some noise that noone can make any sense of, then you watch people’s reactions and then try to spot a pattern you want to spot e.g. that they are losing it. Very funny.

You know it all. But because you show how humble you are by adding IMO after every claim you make, well, it can be excused.

Applause.