My guess:
You are looking for a particular answer. The one that you would give. And until others are in the vicinity of that, they have failed to answer the question.
It’s just that, in the either/or world, there actually is the right answer. Unless, of course, given the surreal nature of the quantum world, there actually is no right answer. To anything. And that takes us back to the gap between the answers we give based on what we think we know and the answers one would give if one was privy to the ontological nature of everything.
I question you and others only to the extent that you/they argue that these mere mortals are able to tap into the real me tapping into the right thing to do.
Well, you can stop questioning me because I don’t believe in objective morals.
Then, as I noted on the fascism thread, we need to explore further the components of our respective philosophies – as they relate “for all practical purposes” to the values and the behaviors that we do take our existential/political leaps to.
In other words, how are you in or out of the hole that I’m in? You say…
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.
Then this, in fact, I am still not able to wrap my head around. Other than in imagining you just don’t give a shit about “I” being an existential contraption confronting values out of sync with yours in a world of conflicting goods. Your life has become what it is and as a result of that there are things you prefer and things you do not. You “struggle” to arrive at a solution able to sustain what “you” [here and now] deem to be the best of all possible worlds. That works for you.
Well, it doesn’t for me.
And more than “yearning” for an objective morality, “I” am curious most of all to discover if there might actually be one in a No God world. And since many intelligent atheists [humanists] seem convinced that there is, all I can do is to grapple with understanding their point of view.
Why? Because…
“I” am rather brutally fractured and fragmented out in the world of conflicting goods. How are others not?
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.
Again, the existential contraption that you call “I” here and now makes this assessment. Fuck the past, fuck the part where “I” recognize that had my life been very different, “I” might want very different things.
Sure, some can do this. I’m just not one of them.
Also, it would seem, you recognize that in a world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change, you may well tumble into a new set of experiences, relationships and ideas, such that next month or next year you may want very, very different things then you do now.
But: As long as you are able to say [here and now, there and then] “this is what I want”, that works for you.
Though, sure, I may still be a long, long way from truly understanding what you think you mean here about these relationships. On the other hand, my point suggest in turn that “I” may well be a long, long way from recognizing even my own self a month or a year from now.
“I” in the is/ought world seems far more clearly to be an existential contraption to someone like “me” than to someone like “you”.
And, again, I am searching less for “unity” here than for a frame of mind able to convice me that this is actually within the reach of philosophers in general and ethicists and political scientists in particular.
In a No God world.
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.
This I basically agree with. But only to the extent that I think I understand what you think you are trying to convey.
The objectivists are always constrained by their “good behavior”, “bad behavior” mentality. Their options revolve around either doing or not doing the “right thing”. Or else they can be defamed as hypocrites.
A moral nihilist, on the other hand, can rationalize any behaviors. It’s just that for someone like me the price that one pays here is that fractured and fragmented identity.
It comes from the fact that when we interact with others out in a particular world our wants and our needs come into conflict. And, when they do, others will often insist it is their own behaviors that reflect the right thing to do.
So, what else is there in these clashes except that both sides seek to demonstrate why and how their own behaviors ought to be the prescribed behaviors.
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.
Yet, again, this is all embedded abstractly in another general description of human interactions.
We need to focus in on an actual context in which objectivists, and subjectivists [yours and mine] attempt to convey what unfolds “in their head” as they choose one behavior rather than another. The objectivists seemingly would not be fractured and fragmented. But a subjectivist in the sense that “I” understand it would be pulled and tugged in conflicting directions. All he or she would have is the existential “I” predisposed to embrace one set of political prejudices rather than another.
Then [from my view] more of the same:
Really, I get this. This is basic is ought distinction. When you said ‘it has to come down to…’ I don’t know what that ‘has to’ or the ‘it’ mean. Please, never ever again explain the is ought distinction to me. Can you do me that minimal piece of respect`? I understand that.
Well, apparently you don’t “get it” in the manner in which “I” do. Otherwise the respect that we have for each other’s intelligence here would revolve around the fact that we do think about these relationships in the same way. Or, if not, fully respect the fact that the other may well be more in sync with “the whole truth” here. And I always acknowledge that this may be the case.
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.
These are just words defining and defending other words. They have to be taken out into the world where the objectivists and subjectivists attempt to describe their frames of mind as they engage an actual context in which conflicting goods are being confronted.
Take for example Trump’s immigration policy. There are liberal and conservative objectivists here who appear to argue as though there is in fact the right and the wrong thing to do. Whereas “I” am drawn and quartered by reasonable arguments from both side. “I” recognizing in turn that “I” am in fact an existential contraption here predisposed to certain political prejudices.
How about you? Someone asks your opinion. What do you tell him? From my frame of mind your frame of mind seems to revolve around just accepting the fact that the past predisposed you to embrace one rather than another value judgment and you will do whatever it is you think that “here and now” is [for all practical puropose] what is perceived to be in your own best interest.
I just don’t know what you are saying has to happen or be done`?
Well, what has to happen out in a world of actual human interactions is that one or another political contraption has to be devised for regulating human behaviors. I merely suggest that, for me, this revolves around the components of my own moral philosophy “here and now”.
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.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t make my point go away. Out in the world that we interact in socially, politically and economically, the problems are very, very, very real. What could possibly be more true objectively than that? Just follow the news for 24 hours.
It just comes down to how in a forum such as this we react to that. As an objectivist? As a moral nihilist? As whatever it is exactly that you are?
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.
Well, a year from now [here in America] the abortionists and the anti-abortionists may well be doing other things instead.
A clash is brewing between the objectivists on both sides and those like me who argue still for moderation, negotiation and compromise.
And, again, what I think here and now can never be assumed to be that which I will think six months or six years from now.
The fact is we both seem to argue for dealing with conflicting goods “pragmatically, using a wide variety of tools”. “You” are just somehow able to feel less fractured and fragmented then than “I” am.
The bottom line here may well be in how I react to this:
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.
More abstraction. I am still grappling to imagine what it might be like to be inside your head when you are actually eyeball to eyeball with a context in which someone openly challenges your behaviors. In other words, while you may both share your own “general description” of human interaction, one or the other of you is going to have to change your behaviors to keep the conflict from spinning out of control.
There’s either might makes right or moderation, negotiation and compromise. But one would need to have a description of this. An attempt to explain why one chose this rather that that given the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein as a crucial component in these decisions.
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.
From my frame of mind this “unity” is no less an existential contraption in a No God world. A world in which we both suggest that objective morality is not withine reach. Then “I” tumble down here into the enormous complexity of any particular individual’s frame of mind when trying to communicate “I” here to another. Your “I” seems to land on something considerably more solid than mine does. But will either of us ever really make the other understand what that might only possibly mean?
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.
What I am interested in is an argument able to nudge me up out of the hole. “I” think that morally and politically we interact in an essentially meaningless world that [re this thread] ends in oblivion for all of eternity.
I just don’t pretend that this is something other than a wild ass guess.
On the other hand, to the extent that I don’t endorse the “approaches” of others, is often seen by them as “proof” that I don’t really want to be yanked up out of it at all.
So, how then would either of us actually go about demonstrating it? And not just to the satisfaction of the other but to all men and women who wish to be thought of as rational human beings?
And what always makes topics like this “dead” is that ubiquitous gap between what any particular one of us thinks about these things here and now and all that any particular one of us would need to know about the ontological nature of “reality” and “existence” itself.
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.
If you are a moral nihilist then pragmatism would seem to be the only option. It just comes down to the manner in which “I” here [as dasein] has been configured over the years to steer more in the direction of either might makes right or democracy and the rule of law.
Though with respect to either one it is necessary to cue, among others, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. And Ludwig Wittgenstein?
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.
What “I” am here and now is a brutally fractured and fragmented pragmistist. And what “I” seek is an argument [in venues such as this] that nudges me closer to or farther away from objective morality on this side of the grave and immortality and salvation on the other side of it.