Objectivists?

That’s precisely my point of course. A particular abortion can either be demonstrated to have in fact occured or it cannot. Things get tricky here only when we factor in the possibility of a reality embedded in a Sim world or in some demonic cartesen dream. Or in solipsism of some sort.

Still, even the fact of an abortion may not be demonstrable. Jane may have become pregnant, told no one and induced the abortion herself. Thus even regarding the either/or world, a God must be invented. Only He is omniscient. Nothing escapes him. But then here we stumble into the conundrum that revolves around squaring an omniscient God with human autonomy.

Yes, if, “in the future” we come up with a way to eliminate all unwanted pregnancies, there would be no conflicting goods.

That still leaves your philosophical constructs “here and now” able to demonstrate how we might possibly get to there from here. In other words, aside from it all being crystal clear “in your head”.

But let me get this straight…

Are you arguing that with regard to the conflicting goods embedded in such things as gun control, the role of government, animal rights, sport hunting, conscription, human sexuality, just war etc., philosophers are not able to derive “absolute objective” moral “rulings”? That they are only able to construct arguments that make the conflicting goods themselves here go away?

Can you cite just one example of how this might actually be accomplished “in reality”?

And your problem [from my frame of mind] is that only when others come to embrace your own “knowledge base” will they be able to construct a sense of certainty about these things.

It’s a problem, from my point of view, because that is basically what all of the other objectivists assure us in turn. We suffer because we don’t think like they do. And they don’t suffer because, well, how they think is in sync with the most comforting, consoling manner in which one can think about a world bursting at the seams with the grim, grueling consequences of conflicting goods.

If they suffer at all it is because they just can’t seem to convince all of the other objectivists [let alone folks like me] to jettison their own transcending font [God, ideology, deontology etc,] and embrace the One True Path. In your case, “the progressive Middle-Way”.

Again, one can only imagine you standing before a woman who has been shunned or punished and explaining the import of “spilt milk” here. Or her family if she had been put to death.

Her problem of course is in being foolish enough not to have been born “in the future” where unwanted pregnancies simply won’t exist.

Exactly! And that is precisely what all of the folks who have constructed didactic intellectual contraptions like yours insist. Only they will insist it of you too. Yes, you’re on the right track that a deeper and wider database does in fact exist. You just haven’t figured yet that it is theirs not yours.

It is this psychological component that, above all else, they avoid confronting. I suspect that subconsciously they don’t even care if their own narrative is the right one. What is of far greater importance is that the right one does in fact exist.

Otherwise, my own dilemma beckons. And there is not much objectivists won’t do to avoid that. And I know this in having once been one of them myself.

An abortion can be determined objectively, i.e. objective knowledge.
The problem here is you are jumping into a fantasy world involving the topic of ‘abortion’ and get psychologically entangled with it.
Note such thoughts are not an immediate threat to your life. It is only in your mind.

If you can get disentangled from it emotionally and psychologically then your mental torment is resolved. How, I have suggested the generic Problem Solving Technique for life and the Eastern philosophies have been resolving such issue since thousands of years ago.

The most critical thing to do is to focus on objective knowledge and those that are most likely based on evidence.
Your above reaction is mere imagination and fantasies based on no facts.

The above is just like a very sensitive and jealous husband who imagine the wife is having an affair based merely on some misperceptions. Then the mind of jealous husband generate his imagination as so real that he going to a jealous rage and create all sort of psychological turmoil within his own psyche. Some have even killed their wife or the suspected-other-man based merely on misperceptions of an affair.

In your case, your misperception is messing your mind with dilemmas.
It would be more effective if you deal with the individual topics [God, abortion, freedom, etc.] before messing up with them. When you get to ‘God’ seriously you will understand ‘God’ is illusory and impossibility, so why fuss over it emotionally and pscyhologically?

This is why I state your relevant knowledge database to deal with this issue is too narrow and shallow.
Yes, it is only “in my head” otherwise where else?
The critical question is whether what is in my head is based on objective knowledge and a rational sound master plan that has a high degree of feasibility.
The limitation is I cannot explain my full master plan in a forum like this but my plan is not merely wishful thinking.

Your problem is you are not willing even to think ahead, increase the dept and width of your database to deal with the problem.

Nope.
I have stated many times, I know the very good philosophers will be able to establish ‘absolute objective moral laws’. But such laws are not applied deontologically and enforced like immutable God’s Laws within theistic religions. Note my proposal of a Framework and System of Morality and Ethics. For you to understand [not necessary agree] such an approach thoroughly it make take years. A short-cut will require faith to simply believe and learn from there.

To make conflicting goods go away, one need to start working on an effective master plan [dynamic] at present to be implemented progressively in the future. This master plan is not one that can be picked from the air, but lots of efforts and thinking need to be put into it to ensure it is a feasible to be implemented.

Let me repeat, I am not a philosohical objectivist per se.
My thesis to deal with the above is holistic with a knowledge database with great depth and width.

Frankly with such a narrow and shallow database in this case, I am not expecting you to understand [not necessary agree] my views [yes, “the progressive Middle-Way”] at all.

Your thinking here is ridiculous and very wrong such that you are mentally suffering for it.

There are many people in this world at present who are suffering psychologically in facing various dilemma, e.g. a spouse, relative, close friend, etc. facing a terminally illness, execution, raped, sent to prison, and whatever that is very disturbing. An abortion is an issue but cannot be as serious [unless some living person’s life is not threatened] as the ones above.

The most effective solution when facing psychological turbulence is to deal with one’s own internal turbulence first before dealing and/or worrying about the problem of another person.
This is why I propose the strategy of cultivating ‘equanimity’ to anchor and stabilize whatever psychological turbulence that arise within oneself.

If a person do not have a state of equanimity [preference] to deal with one’s own psychological turbulences, then s/he has to be counselled, do whatever is wise to do, if not, then take the appropriate medicine to deal with it.

So it not that she is not born in the future where unwanted pregnancies do not exist, but rather she was ignorant or not informed she could developed a state of reasonable equanimity years earlier. In addition if she had developed a very wide and deep knowledge database relevant to the issue she will not be so ignorant and suffer for it.

It is not difficult to do a ‘stocktake’ of your database and practices and compare to what is a reasonable essential knowledge database and practice necessary to deal with the issues discussed.

Roughly;

  1. Do you have a folder in your computer that you saved all your philosophical books, articles, writings, etc?
    If yes, how many ‘Folders’ and ‘Files’ do you have in there?
  2. How many physical books do you have on spirituality, religion, self-development, and philosophy?
    (It is presume you have read [or waiting to be read] them all, not just for show).

I have tons and loads of 1 and 2 (I will give you my figures if you want).
It is not about boasting but necessary to understand where oneself stand in relevance to deal with the problem on hand. Note most books with intellectual integrity will list the full bibliography of references in the back pages of the books and this is not boasting but an essential standard.

I have absolutely no idea how this relates to the point I raise here: The distinction between the either/or world which is true for all of us and our conflicting is/ought reactions [which propel our actual behaviors] to whatever facts can be established.

Same here. As though the issue of abortion [and the conflicting goods embedded in it] among those who practice Eastern philosophies, are not still present. As though the emphisis is not either placed on the so-called “natural right” of the baby to be born or the so-called “political right” of the woman to choose to take its life.

The Buddha himself would not be exempt from acknowledging this. On the other hand, a so-called omniscient and omnipotent God could clearly be seen as the final arbiter.

Here’s the tricky part for me in understanding your point of view:

No, what you are stating here [from my point of view] is only when another comes to accept your own “knowledge database” will they not be “too narrow and shallow”. That is precisely what makes you an objectivist [to me] insofar as the facts able to be established as true for all of us are shown to be applicable to one or another moral/political narrative/agenda.

And there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of objectivists out there all claiming that it is their own “knowledge data base” that establishes the whole truth.

No, the critical question [for me] is the extent which you construe the future as one in which conflicting goods are eliminated more or less than that should they still be around rational men and women can come to know how one behaves [necessarily] in the right or the wrong way.

In other words:

Instead, “in the future”…

On the other hand…

Back again to your Capital Letter intellectual contraption obviating God by subsumming absolute objective morality [for now] in your head.

All I am able to do is to suggest [to others] that while your explanation here is deemed adequate to you, it is no where near being adequate to me. In fact, it basically avoids my argument altogether.

Unless of course others here might be willing to point out how in fact it is perfectly adequate. I’m always willing to concede that I might either be misconstruing your point or that your point really is more reasonable than mine.

What I can conclude is your knowledge and practice database is too shallow and narrow relative to mine [average only] and what a reasonable person who is philosophizing is expected to possess.

Example [only to get to the point].
If like you having a college level Physics trying to convince Einstein is wrong in his theories on Physics are wrong.
or You are like a kindergarten trying to argue with a PhD, insisting you are not convinced by a PhD on mathematics that s/he is insufficient in his thesis.

This is why I keep suggesting you need to widen and deepen your database in relation to the issues we are discussing here.

The above query I raised is to estimate [roughly] on where you stand and to get a confirmation of my guess of my belief that your knowledge and practice database is too shallow and narrow for the discussions on hand.

I sense there is something very wrong here.
I keep telling you I am not a philosophical objectivist, but you seem to persist to label [by implication or otherwise without valid argument] me as an objectivist with a ‘contraptions’ - a straw man strategy - so that you can feel good about it.

What intrigues me most here is the extent to which you are self-conscious in shifting the discussion away from the interactions of flesh and blood human beings experiencing value judgments in conflict, to the sort of exchange that revolves basically around the analytic concerns of the “serious philosopher”.

Nailing it technically and then…and then what? Eventually that which is deemed to be logically and epistemologically sound thinking – either A or not A – has to be integrated into the subjective/subjunctive entanglements embedded in one or another politically correct narrative.

Instead, you seem far more comfortable with this…

Here, I am completely at a loss regarding what this has to do with the moral ambiguites I introduce into human interactions re the components of my own argument.

These components do not appear to be relevant/applicable to the seeming either/or truths embedded in mathematics or physics.

With them one actually can widen and deepen their database. And there are problems to be solved here in which you either do or do not succeed.

Unless of course I am still misconstruing your point. Which is certainly possible.

In the manner in which I convey the meaning of objectivist above, you are one. It’s just that you insist that technically there is but one meaning that all serious philosophers embrace. And to this I suggest that they bring this meaning out into the world of conflicting human behaviors.

And I don’t feel good at all regarding the implications of my own argument: that we live in an essentially absurd and meaningless world, one in which right and wrong and good and bad are largely existential contraptions evolving and devolving over time in a world of contingency, chance and change. And then the part about oblivion in a No God world.

What exactly should I feel good about here?

Seriously?

What either/or truths embedded in mathematics?

In the other thread, you basically said that we could not even tell Boris how to reduce fractions. Even mathematical “truths” can be overturned by political economy, identity and value judgements.

If Boris said that 2+2=5 then what?
We could not correct him … we had to negotiate … maybe agree that 2+2= 4 and 1/2.

Really. ](*,)

Again, using our understanding of mathematics and the laws of nature, we have sent astronauts to the Moon. The objective truths embedded in this accomplishment [manifestations of the either/or world] would seem to be applicable to all of us.

Only when the question shifts to “is sending astronauts to the Moon a good thing or a bad thing?”, do the components of my own argument come into play.

Then you misunderstood me. Fractions either can or cannot be reduced further. But reacting to the objective fact that Boris is unable to reduce a particular fraction down as far as it can go seems in part to be embedded in particular cultural narratives regarding the role of competition/cooperation.

Re Room 101, the powers that be can persuade/coerce some into believing any number of things that are not in fact true for all of us.

However, in English, words have been invented to define/describe addition. 2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples. Not 5 apples. On the other hand, what if you put all 4 apples into a blender. It’s still not 5 apples, but it’s more like 1 serving of…apple sause?

On the other other hand, if you have 4 apples and I have none, are you morally obligated to share them with me? Can that be calculated objectively in the same manner that it can demonstrated that you do in fact have 4 apples?

I think you want to have it both ways.

There is a straight forward ranking here:

  1. 2+2=4 and the fractions can be reduced just as Peggy said.

That takes priority over the dasein aspects.

Then one can move on to other aspects:

  1. We need to decide how to effectively teach students and teach Boris specifically.

You keep posting as if that ranking cannot be established and objectivists are doing something “improper” by saying it can be established. Then it becomes weird and 2+2=5.

The ranking can be established by using “the tools of philosophy”. So philosophy is not entirely impotent.

Exactly. Things are either true for all of us or they are not. It’s just that some folks believe things that are demonstrably false and they predicate their behaviors not on what actually is true or false but on what they believe “in their head” is true or false.

But what does that have to do with this:

Some cultures steer their youth more in one direction here than the other.

But, philosophically, which is the most “effective” direction?

In other words, I don’t argue that philosophy is impotent even in the is/ought world. I suggest only that there appear to be limitations imposed its “tools” when value judgments come into conflict.

Not exactly. Most of the time you don’t acknowledge objective facts.

When I point to the deaths, torture and imprisonment in Communist regimes, you act as if it’s not a legitimate fact that can be used to make decisions about Communism. You just go on with some dasein babble. Yet it’s an objective fact just as 2+2=4. Can I ignore the deaths? Can I ignore that 2+2=4? I know dasein …

Nothing. I didn’t use those quotes in my post. So why would I be talking about those particular quotes???

The deaths there are facts. Just as the deaths rooted in capitalism rooted in, among other things, colonialism and imperialism are facts.

But then both sides are clearly able to rationalize any means necessary to secure noble ends.

But how then do we establish as a fact that capitalism or Communism is the nobler end? How do we establish as a fact that ideally human interactions revolve around “I” more than “we”?

And that’s before we get to nihilists in both camps who merely use these noble ends in order to sustain what they perceive to be in their own best interests. Call them narcissists, call them sociopaths, call them whatever.

What doesn’t change is the capacity of folks like them to presume that in a No God world “I” is the center of the universe.

Presumably you still have some remnant of religion/God that enables you to sustain some remnant of comfort and consolation when confronting conflicting goods.

I do not.

Why not just leave it at that?

You can look at the “ends” of Communism and you will see a failure. Even the “workers”, who were supposed to be liberated, ended up poorly off.

I’m not letting capitalism off the hook. But at least there is greater scope for positive changes as demonstrated by action on child labor laws, pollution control and accountability for faulty and tainted products.

You’re really obsessed with that idea.

Hell, you’re more fixated on God than I am. I don’t expect a God or messiah to save the world or to save me. I don’t even expect a stack of stone tablets to tell me what to do.

But that’s the point some argue. The failure revolves not around the noble ends pursued by Communists, but around the faulty means chosen by those who went about it the wrong way. Which, for example, is why [way back then] I more or less abandoned Leninism for the political narrative of Leon Trotsky: Global revolution.

Before I then abandoned both as objectivist.

As for the fate of the workers re “the left”, I suggest that you first read this: amazon.com/Labors-Untold-St … 0916180018

I agree. And this in my view revolves around the fact [historically] that capitalism [as a political economy] is more in sync with “moderation, negotiation and compromise” — with democracy and the rule of law.

Exactly: a remnant of all that.

My fixation on God revolves around two things:

1] that with God, a transcending font would exist to yank me up out of the hole I’m in

2] that with God, not only would the “human condition” not be essentially meaningless and absurd, but there would be one or another rendition of immortality and salvation “out there” somewhere

It’s either that or the brute facticity of an existence [ending in oblivion] that in no way am I able to grasp either ontologically or teleologically.

I don’t need to read a book. I have lived it and so has my family. I was there is the food lines, lined up to get horse meat… Both sides of my family lost their businesses. My father had to pretend to be enthusiastic about the socialist revolution. There are so many horror stories. Czechoslovakia in 1989 was a wasteland.

You have this abstract idea of Communism.

It’s more responsive to the needs of individuals.

That’s great but maybe you can’t have that. So basically you have to work with what you have and make the best of it.
God didn’t give you an instruction manual for living. Moving on from there …

Just as any number of families around the globe would insist they don’t have to read a book about capitalism. They lived the brutal [and at times catastrophic] exploitation rooted in it.

They are smack dab in the middle of this: statisticbrain.com/world-po … tatistics/

You tell me: how many folks here are the vicims of Communism? And aren’t these folks individuals “in need”? Or perhaps the believers among us might run these stats by God.

On the other hand, there may not be a way in which to actually calculate how many more “horror stories” there are relating to one political economy rather than the other.

My point though is this: it was the actual events that you and your family experienced that shaped and molded your own particular political prejudices here.

In no way however does this demonstrate essentially, objectively – philosophically – that your own assessment reflects the optimal or the only manner in which rational/virtuous people are obligated to think about these things.

Unless of course I’m wrong. But how would that be demonstrated definitively?

Moving on? After that weak “rebuttal”?

No, instead, let’s pursue it more substantively.

Once again, you are denying that there any such things as facts.

You have turned everything into identity, value judgement and political economy.

And don’t bother quoting me your usual “distinction” because you don’t use it consistently. It appears to be nothing more than a rhetorical tool.

You move on from the starting position that “there is no God”. Deal with it.

Stop talking about a God that doesn’t exist for you. Stop wanting stuff from your non-existent God. Stop asking people about God. What’s the point? You’re just going to negate everything that they say.

Once again you mock the distinction I make between an either/or world bursting at the seams with facts demonstrably applicable to all of us, and our subjective/subjunctive reactions – conflicted reactions – to those facts, insofar as we have pursued our basic needs historically embedded in one or another political economy.

Really, why on earth would you propose something so patently untrue?

Same here. As I noted recently to zero sum on the JSS thread:

[b]Like most of us, I am reasonably certain the empirical world around me is in fact applicable to all of us. 24/7 as it were. In fact, the overwhelming preponderance of our interactions with others [here or elsewhere] appear to clearly revolve around demonstrable truths.

After all, it would seem that since the Big Bang [whatever that means] a staggering proportion of material interactions happened only as they ever could have. Immutably some suggest.

Where things get mysterious however is when matter evolved into brains evolved into a consciousness able to grapple with the “philosophical” implications of it all.

Then the part where minds react to all the either/or stuff only to bump into other minds who react quite differently. Then what is the truth? Let’s call this the is/ought world.[/b]

Yet [no doubt] you will continue to level this absurd charge against me down the road.

Not really sure what your point is here, but I would never argue that all exchanges here should start with the assumption that we live in a No God world.

How on earth could I possibly know that?!!!

Instead, that just takes folks like me back to the gap between what I think I know/believe about God “in my head” here and now, and all that would need to be known about Existence itself to be sure.

Of course God is one possible explanation. Maybe even your own rendition of Him.

But: All any of us here can do is try to persuade others that our own frame of mind about these things may well reflect the optimal assessment. But I sure as shit am not arguing that I am able to demonstrate that it’s mine. I only note the manner in which I have come existentially to think myself into believing that we live in an essentially absurd and meaningless world that ends in oblivion for my own particular “I”.

And then to ask others who do not believe this is applicable to them to at least make an attempt to demonstrate to folks like me why they don’t.

No, I think that the existence of God is of fundamental importance in exploring human interactions that come into conflict over value judgments.

And in all the ways that I have noted.

But thanks for the advice.

It amounts to this :

If you think that a functioning car is good then there is a way to build it. If you think that a functioning car is not good, then there are ways to build that non-functioning car.

If you think that 2+2=4 is a good answer, then 4 is the right answer. If you prefer that 2+2=5 then 5 is the right answer.

If you think truth is valuable, then you will pursue truth. If not then anything is “true” when you choose it to be true.

In other words, all facts, truth, knowledge is trumped by identity, value judgements and political economy. I see that as the natural consequence of your nihilistic philosophy. Truth and facts are essentially valueless or of equal value to falsehoods and lies. Their value comes from identity, value judgements and political economy. As I said before, a 1984 world.

It’s not that you are going say that there are no facts. But you might as well say it.

Or, re capitalism, you can note the manner in which folks like Marx and Engels imagined it coming into existence re the evolution of methods employed over the centuries by our species to provide us with means of producing basic necessities able to sustain our existence.

From their perspective, capitalism is replaced by socialism not because one or the other political economy is inherently more virtuous, but because historically/organically/“scientifically” one evolves from the other dialectically/materially.

You know, in theory. They don’t call them “left-Hegelians” for nothing.

Again, are you comparing mathematical truths with the alleged arguments/justifications embedded in the narratives of capitalists and socialists?

Note the particular context. What truths are you insisting are valuable? Are you or are you not then able to demonstrate that your moral narrative/political agenda is such that all rational/virtuous men and women are obligated to embody them in turn?

And, indeed, if Mary believes that abortion is the political right of all women, and John believes that life is the natural right of all unborn, then for them that is true. And, most importantly, in believing it is true, their behaviors will become embedded in that assumption. And it is actual behaviors that precipitate consequences for others, right?

Then what? Well, from my frame of mind, we become entangled here in conflicting goods rooted largely in dasein and “resolved” by those with the political power to legislate a particular set of behaviors relating to unwanted pregnancies.

Now, what’s your frame of mind here? Are you or are you not a moral objectivist when the discussion comes up?

This is your own absurd rendition of my own take on all this. And all I can do is to wonder why [time and again] you allow yourself to be reduced down to it.

Now, I have my suspicions based on my history with objectivists over the years. But, sure, I’m [still] willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. :wink:

Well, it’s an absurd world so it would be pretty strange if I was not absurd.

I mean, what do you expect?