But: Only when we bring these obtuse “general descriptions” out into a world in which flesh and blood human beings use the word “fun” in particular contexts for particular reasons can we explore the limitations of the tools that philosophers use in discussing it way, way up in what I deem to be the clouds of scholastic abstraction.
Thus:
Suppose Jack has “fun” torturing animals. His purpose could be to exorcise the pain inflicted on him by others, or it might be just to entertain himself.
How then do philosophers/ethicists pin this behavior down morally?
Again, I may well not be understanding your point. Let’s illustrate it using this example.
The point is that human interactions precipitate conflicts when wants and needs themselves come into conflict. How then is the thought put into the rules of behavior not an existential contraption rooted in particular historical, cultural and interpersonal contexts? Or the thought put into the choice not to have any rules at all?
All the time making the assumption that with regard to causality here, some measure of human autonomy exists?
My own understanding of it [in the is/ought world] revolves around this: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
How then is this not applicable to you when in the course of living your life a conflict erupts around the understanding what is “fun”?
I have a different comment this time around. I’m inclined to believe that free will exists to the extent that it’s only restrained by probability of outcome instead of “set-in-stone” determination. The “will” is a desire that is manufactured of what exists “now” as a feedback in influencing (but not determining) the outcome of what will exist in the future.
I think there is a will and I think it has certain freedoms since nothing is 100% determined. The will is an illusion to the extent that it’s a product of the stuff in this universe instead of being something abstractly and objectively real (objectively real is an oxymoron anyway).
Which justs takes me back to the gap between what you are inclined to believe about it here and now and your capacity to demonstrate that all other rational men and women are obligated to believe it in turn.
And while it is certainly “fun” to speculate about it, what is actually at stake here is the extent to which [b]anything[/b] that we think, feel and do will ever be other than that which we were [b]always going to[/b] think, feel and do.
And all we can do is to take our own “existential leap” to a frame of mind “here and now” rooted at least in part in dasein.
Or so it seems to me.
In other words, if you google “free will scholarly articles” you get this: google.com/search?ei=T6CeW6 … CtGOIbf6DY
And what does this reflect but the gap between what you think you know about it here and now and what just some of the thinking that others have put into it is. So, what are the odds that your assumptions/assessments about it above and below come closest to the “whole truth” about it?
What we deem to be “purposeful” reasons for doing what we do may well be but the illusion of purpose ontologically rooted in the purposelessness of matter unfolding only as it ever could have going back to…to what exactly?
Well, to, among other things, those “unknown unknowns” embedded in Rumsfeld’s Law.
Then [from my frame of mind] it’s back up into the stratosphere of abstraction:
If you truly feel there is no “right thing to do”, then what you do cannot be predicated on what is “right”. You just do what you do because that is what you do. Self reflection on the matter is taking an engineering view of the universe that everything must have a purpose.
And yet, over and again, I note that even this assumption is no less an existential contraption.
I think the existential contraption is in trying to understand anything: it’s the gnosia instead of the agnosia (conceptual vs the nonconceptual (faith)). Do you beat your heart by existential contraption? You have no concept (gnosia) how you beat your heart, but you just do it (agnosia). Likewise in living.
What on earth does this mean? Let’s focus in on a particular purpose that a particular individual might have in a particular context.
For example, my own purpose here at ILP is to find an argument that might persuade me that [b]with respect to the existential relationship between identity, conflicting goods and political power[/b] it can be demonstrated that being down in the hole that I am in is not a reasonable frame of mind. That there is a way up out of it. Now, in a wholly determined universe my purpose here is in itself no different from that beating heart. I think that I am acting with some degree of autonomy here but that may well be – essentially, mechanistically, materially, phenomenologically, ontologically etc. – an illusion.
But how can I then attempt to know this for sure when this attempt in and of itself may be no less determined by the immutable laws of matter.
How can I examine a reality here that “I” am inherently a part of? Just one more domino here and now toppling over onto you toppling over onto me.
With “purpose” only possible if teleologically there is a God.
There may well be the right thing to do.
What’s right is relative to a goal, which is arbitrary.
What goal in what context construed from what point of view? And “arbitrary” in what sense? Let’s flesh this out.
Instead [in my view] you continue to just assert things. Things like this:
If there is a god, it is continuous with this universe. Things that exist relative to us cannot exist outside this universe. Things outside this universe could not be things we could interact with or have knowledge of; if we could, those things would not be outside our universe.
A world of words. Truth revolving tautologically, circularly around the meaning that you give to words that make contact with nothing other than more words. You “posit” things:
I posit that if the universe were rewound and begun again, this conversation would have very little chance of being as it is.
Posit: assume as a fact; put forward as a basis of argument.
[my emphasis]