Morality is fake and doesn’t exist

Magnus, you’re example is inapt. That’s more of a threat than a statement of fact. Nonetheless, rules do not exist experientially, empirically. Novels don’t exist, but my copy of Farewell to Arms does. That’s the wacky world of the nominalist.

To your last point, to expect near universal practice is no measure of the realness of a moral system. Because moral systems aren’t real to begin with… no, never mind. Someone is just bitching about someone they are morally judging. Humans keep doing that, over and over. It’s just what we do. Philosophers attempt to find some external basis for it.

That’s a description of reality which can either be true or false. Either the police will arrest you when you kill someone or it won’t.

We use symbols to describe reality. The symbols themselves aren’t reality, i.e. they are not what they are symbolizing, but they are nonetheless symbolizing something and that something either exists or it does not.

Yeah but this doesn’t work very well for moral imperatives. It is to say, “If you sin, you will go to Hell, unless of course I am mistaken.”

Your second point is trivial. For it is a certainty that anything we symbolize either exist or it does not. The Big Question is of which is which.

If morality exists outside of human construct, then what is it? A law? Like gravity? Well gravity has immediate consequences, but immorality does not. If morality existed in the form of a “law” then immorality would not be possible.

If the light breaks the speed limit, does it get a ticket and have to appear in court? What would be the punishment? And how would punishment rectify the broken situation? Maybe instead of light learning its lesson, it would outrun the cops next time.

God cannot go back in time to reverse immorality and, if he did, it would mean immorality never happened and there is nothing to complain about. God punishing the immorality does not fix the immorality. Morality is a human construct.

For sure man.

Why is this thread called “Morality is fake and doesn’t exist” when it’s moralising about how you should moralise?

A moral imperative expresses a preference for certain kind of behavior. The preference it expresses either exists in reality or it does not.

Well, moral statements are symbols and preferences or ways of behaving are the symbolized.

Because you’re apparently a dipshit retard who makes shallow claims based on absolutely nothing.

Funny twist of words you use, I am “moralizing about how you should moralize”, when in fact that is literally the exact opposite, the exact opposite, of what I am doing with this thread.

Humans didn’t just wake up one day to find a full-blown language to use. It grew from single expressions, some not verbal. Likewise with morality. Everyone has a sense of being wronged or being helped without immediate gain going to the helper. That’s what morally is - it’s a ledger book of behavioral transactions, undertaken with a long view.

Philosophers and politicians eventually fucked this up by introducing gods or by reifying reason. Like language, morality is always evolving, an evolution that is self-limiting to an extent, but which will always be helped or hindered by someone, the way usage manuals and dictionaries, poets and scientists help or hinder language change.

Languages do not exist, but they’re not supposed to. Individuals express themselves and in a very sloppy and incomplete way, language is the codification of these expressions. Individual expressions are not dependent on language - it’s the other way 'round. Of course, you need arbiters. Human society has never been short of those.

Arbiters very much do exist.

“a ledger book of behavioral transactions, undertaken with a long view”

^ That is part of it, absolutely. But this also points to why I am saying that morality is fake, and does not exist. “Morality” is meant as a concept, as used in philosophy and in regular meaning by regular non-philosophers, to mean far more than just this. We can do the whole Nietzschean reduction thing if we want, try to isolate some basic aspects of what is called morality, but doing that is exactly why I am saying morality does not exist, because it is not treated as this sort of thing which we are treating it as here.

Once you strip away the veneer and reification and emotional reactivity and false piety and all of that shit, you get to the place where you and I are at, Faust-- just looking at what is there, objectively. What we are doing with this thing “morality” is not at all what is meant by the concept of morality. So you can call the two by the same name if you want, but either way I appreciate you coming to this thread and offering your ideas, since they are further demonstrating my point for me.

Except for when you say things like “rules do not exist” or “languages do not exist”. Stop saying stupid things like that. Obviously rules and languages exist. But I suppose you can offer your definition of what “exists” means, since you are the one claiming these things which we can understand and explain, use and define and discuss somehow do not, in fact, exist for us to do those things with them.

Sort of hard to understand, explain, define, use, and discuss something that doesn’t exist. :confused:

So go ahead and explain yourself, on this. We can then move through that sticking point and begin the more fun sort of work of the topic here.

Well, college football is made too much of by some. That’s just gong to happen among humans.

I thought I mentioned that I am a nominalist. When you begin by claiming that rules literally exist, then you have to come up with some way of destroying those that you do not like. It’s much easier to destroy that which empirically exists (we may be able to destroy the entire planet some day, after all) than to change the acceptance of some moral rules. And destroying some moral rules is far from permanent. You can melt a bad penny, though.

Philosophers have forever been concerned with making the unreal realer than the real, precisely because the unreal is much more difficult to assail.

What does “literally exist” mean as opposed to “exist”?

Why is this the case?

So we have vague, undefined use of terms exist, literally exist, and real; then we have a reference to how it is easier to destroy a physical object than to change an idea (I do not concede this is always the case, sometimes it is far easier to change an idea than to destroy a physical object)

Really, I thought there would be more.

Why not just admit you are a materialist, and that you only consider “physical stuff” to be “real”? Would seem more consistent of you.

I think he’s right. That’s what you’re doing in this thread. You’re telling other people how to live their lives. And you do so by using hyperbolic language.

“If you do no subscribe to my values, you do not even exist!”

You’re also highly reactive emotionally. But that does not stop you from accusing others, who are far less reactive, of being reactive.

Firstly, U, I am not trying to hide that I am a materialist. I’m also a Gemini, a registered Republican and right-handed, except for when I deal cards. I’m not trying to hide anything.

All manner of stuff “exists” in some way, at least according to the English language.

You destroy moral rules that you don’t like if you re doing moral philosophizing. As a philosopher you do that.

As for there being more, there is more in what I have already said than you seem to be discerning.

As for changing ideas - assuming you are a straight male (but it’s easy to make the required corrections) - your wife or girlfriend discovers what for all the world looks like a “love bite”. Which is more likely to fade first - the mark or her suspicions?

This is a perfect moment to introduce a basic tenant of Tectonic Philosophy: it is a very low and inaccurate standard of “existence” to claim, directly or indirectly, that only “dur, like, physical stuffs” exists. Something exists if it exists, it is real if it is real, the entire concept of existence/reality is tautological. And the word “truth” is simply another word for that. Truth simply means whatever exists, whatever is real, whatever is the case and includes the how/why of that being the case.

Truth is simply the concept of all concepts, as someone once said. Don’t read that through Wittgenstein by the way.

So what are physical objects? Stuff that resists with force when you encounter it, something made out of atoms with a nice outer edge full of negative elections which repel the negative electrons at the edge of your hand, for example. Because of this power of resistance and mass (substance), it takes some energy to encounter and move physical things. But this is just one standard, and there is no reason to suspect that “moving physical things by exerting force by pushing two different groupings of electron clouds together” has much to do with Ontology.

Obviously rules exist. So do languages. So do ideas. So do chairs. So do photons, and numbers, and emotions, and and and and. Keep going, whatever you like. If you can name it, then it exists, at least as an idea about which you can make an utterance. Just because you cannot define a rule or a language in terms of how you can define a physical object as a bunch of atoms or whatever, does not mean that things like rules and objects do not exist; nor is it very helpful mudding the waters with introduction of undefined additional terms like “literally exists”. Things which exist, exist. That is all. This is not complicated.

An absolute lie on your part. I never did that.

So you are a liar, nice to know. I will delete the rest of your reply here and not bother reading anything from you in the future.

The forum must be deceiving us.