Or it is not binary or black and white as they used to say. IOW perhaps it is partial, flawed, etc. But what you wrote here and after did not answer my question.
Well, you can stop questioning me because I don’t believe in objective morals.
That is not a hole for me. I have been places I consider holes – when my father was dying and had no country to live in – you read that right – for example. But the lack of objective morals is not a hole for me.
I have explained a couple of times how I deal with conflicting desires (often framed by others and conflicting goods). I don’t want to repeat it again. I have no super solution, for myself or the world. I struggle using the variety of tools I have to make life the way I want it for myself and for others. This includes where possible also letting them live other ways and if I love them even helping them live in ways I would not want to.
I have no yearning to discover objective morals.
If I thought of myself so much in the third person like you do, I would be more fractured. I don’t question how should one live? I ask, how do I want to live and how can I help myself and those I can affect live the lives they want. If I focused on our question, it would put me outside myself.
I don’t know if those habits of yours are part of why you are fractured to the degree you are, but I know they would contribute to my being fractured.
I make no claims to full unity. But it seems to me you are not searching for unity – at least not in the practices you engage in here. It seems like you are seeking universal answers, even objective ones first and primarily. You are going to solve it all and frankly it looks like ALL AT ONCE. When that magic bullet argument finally comes or does not. Not answers for Iambiguous in particular. I am not saying this is wrong, obviously, and I am not sure it is causal, but as a reaction it does not seem to me your approach focuses on unity. Now perhaps you thnk if you had objective morals, you would then have unity. I doubt that in the extreme. But I can’t be sure.
Further I don’t think having objective morals, believing in them, leads to unity. And it certainly limits the tools most objectivists are willing to use. Limits the approaches.
People with objective morals, it seems to me, ALWAYS see parts of themselves as bad and in need of imprisonment. A split self is de rigeur.
Well, 1) there are the three approaches you often mention not just the one you focus on here as if it was the only one, then 2) there is the using their own beliefs against them approach 3) there is the use of current laws and guidelines. 4) there is avoidance, going around 5) there’s the use of propaganda - not that I am running a PR firm or anything, but exposing what people are doing can work, using symbolic language can work and so on 6) there is the pretending to present an objective view, though I think this is one of the least effective, and so when I read this ‘has to’ I don’t get it. You seem to be searching for the holy grail.
I use a variety of tools, probably including others I haven’t mentioned here. I find life a struggle, but I have no yearning for objective morals. I don’t see those with them or thinking they have them magically evading life’s struggles and they also seem to add them on – the internal moral judgment goes with the outer, at least in the genuine ones. There are psychopaths who pretend to be objectivists, many rising high in government and business, and these lack the internal downside of objective morals.
I don’t react to the lack of objective morals – that is ones I can grab and demonstrate- the way you do. I do not yearn for them. I think that is what you cannot accept. Since that is not a hole for me I must not be able to get it. Which is odd, since given your own beliefs about dasein, I might have different reactions to the same beliefs.
Most of what I have reacted to in you is the way you behave and how you respond to me and others. You also assume a lot, which I have gone into elsewhere, but the is ought distinction I get. I don’t think you can get that I get it AND do not want to approach things like you do or find myself in a hole because of it.
Fuck this is so abstract. How does this shit affect you tomorrow? What conflicting goods will you encounter tomorrow – and I do not mean some shit you read online and get worked up about. I am talking about real life, grounded. Not abortion issues, because you seem to be a man. I mean you. This hole you are in, so far seems to be so abstract and disconnected from your own life. Note: I am sure you run into real life conflicts around values, but so far I just see very abstract not connected to your life stuff. And this last paragraph seems so cut off from you. I don’t know if this plays into your fragmentation, but from where I sit, I am trying to solve the problems I face directly first, which includes also the problems of family and close friends. I do struggle in my way for society and people I do not know and nature, etc. But you focus on the abortion issue more than any other, for example. That ain’t you. And sure if you want the magic bullet objective moral system argument you need to solve that one, but if that’s where you start with conflicting goods, you are going to be in a hole because you do not have access to that magic bullet argument. I happen to think there isn’t one, so I am trying to hone other skills and get past the ways I block myself.
But I do not think there is the smallest chance I will end the abortion conflict. Maybe indirectly I might, somehow. I mean, that’s within the realm of possibility, but even if that were the case, it wouldn’t be any time soon.
You seem to think we are ‘serious philosophers’ and the pejorative epistemologists, but I find you off in the clouds trying to solve the worlds problems via text in a philosophy forum through getting objectivists to prove they can solve a problem, I don’t think you really think can be solved. Yes, I know you don’t rule out the possibility, but I don’t think you believe an objectivist is going to come here, find your thread, and give you the argument and makes abortionists and anti-abortionists dance in loving circles around maypoles.
I don’t think you will find unity via this route, but that is of course a guess. It seems necessarily fractured. Maybe that feels moral to you. Maybe you feel or think that it is immoral to not try to solve all the world’s problems in this very abstract way. I don’t know. I think I am a lot humbler about my ability to use text to change things.
Of course I run into these things. I deal with these situations pragmatically, using a wide variety of tools. I cannot win all these conflicts or always get a satisfactory outcome. I do not think that if I decide I have to demonstrate objective morals, I will somehow find my life easier or start saving the world. In fact I think it is less likely I will make things better for myself or those I love. As said, I will pretend on occasion to come from objective morals, but I think hitting objective morals by asserting others is one of the least effective methods. And in any case, I do it in a Machievellian way.
I think you are still chasing the holy grail of objective morals. I am not. I think you think the best strategies are to find the hardest problems, like the abortion issue, and stay fixed on an abstract level, rather than focusing on the actual conflicts you face and strategizing around those. I think you focus on processes that do not enhance unity in yourself, but rather abstract yourself and distance you from you. Of course I am going on what I see here.
And I can’t even be sure you are more fragmented them I am. Though that would be my guess.
I prioritize unity over being right. I mean that not as just observing that now, but I mean that I have engaged for decades in minimizing and trying to eliminate splits in myself. Worked at it. I am not saying this is good or what you should do, but since you asked, from what I can see, you are not interested much in processes that lead to unity. Now you may be going on the assumption that the only way to feel unified is to know objective morals. And to be able to weild the irresistable argument. You may think this is unlikely to exist, but since you cannot rule it out and it is the only hope, you pursue that Grail. FAir enough. I don’t think that even if you find that argument you will be unified. I think it is very unlikely that whatever those morals are you suddenly find YOU YOURSELF live up to them. But heck I could be wrong.
It seems like you are saying what you are doing is not working. At the same time when people suggest things to you as other approaches to fragmentation and the hole, you are not interested.
I actually think this is a dead topic. And the moment it is implied that there might be a way out of the hole or part of the way out that does not involve finding that magic bullet argument
you go on the attack, treat it as objectivist, a threat.
My observations, can’t be sure about them. If you don’t like them, fine.
I don’t know what you need. But when you talk about fragmentation, this is what comes up. Might be better not to raise the emotional psychological side of your experience, because it comes off like you are open to actually considering you might benefit from another approach - note: potentially in addition and NOT becoming an objectivist being a part of the package.
Oddly I would say you want to be an objectivist again, but this time with the perfect objectivism that no one can resist. A wanna be objectivist with provisos.
I am not a wanna be objectivist.
There is a lot I want, and life is not easy, I have no perfect solutions.
I am a pragmatist, but also a nihilist. It seemed when you presented what you see as the three options they were mutually exclusive, but they are not.
And presumably you are also a pragmatist. I mean, it seems like you are seeking to find something that will function perfectly. The magic argument.
It sometimes even feels like you are driven by an objective moral and judge others for not having the same holy grail seach. IOW a kind of trickle down Christianity. The cross you bear is finding the objective perfect argument and its set of objective morals.
So anyone who claims not to be an objectivist but does not mount up with Percival, is not a good knight.