right, andy hit it. but we need not assume ‘that we do have some measure of free will allowing us to come to our very own autonomous conclusions’ in order for what he said to make sense. in the event that someone believes they have some measure of freewill, it merely means it is determined that they believe this. for such people an element of logic is missing in their reasoning; this is the explanation… that they lack the intelligence to understand it, or, in combination with this lack, a mixture of ‘defense mechanisms’ such as regression, splitting, and wishful thinking, might also be at play to produce what is experienced in the person who rejects determinism as the reasonable conclusion that freewill exists.
in general i’ve found that moralists tend to endorse freewill - not because of sensible or compelling arguments - but because it is a more comfortable belief. this could be the result of ‘reaction formation’; the thought that freewill doesn’t exist produces incredible anxiety, and this is to be avoided at all costs.
as a nihilist, what is strange to me as much as it is amusing, is that people need to believe what they want and do is ‘right’ in order to justify for themselves, doing it, as well as justify passing judgement on others. what i can’t figure out is why that notion - that moral notion of ‘conduct’ and ‘virtue’ that is defined by [insert favorite philosophy]- is necessary to rationalize what people want to do, and to what degree they approve of what others do.
there is nothing epistemologically solid about any meta-ethical theory that we’ve ever seen. at best there’s only a rough, intersubjective conventional agreement on what constitutes ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ conduct. some people never seem to transcend this annoying tedium and despite what they believe about themselves, remain more of what N classed as ‘herdlike’. which is to say - in the way you might put it - the sum total of ethical beliefs is nothing more than the result of an existential trajectory that represents a conglomerate of what one has learned and experienced. qualitatively the same, each person’s version, each person’s morality, has in common that one essential feature that is identical in every case. not what is virtuous (these concepts can be in conflict), but that there is virtue in the first place.
here, stirner’s egoism is the spade that cuts even N’s master-morality. master-morality being still another herd-like concept… what stirner would call a ‘spook’.
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i, personally, don’t believe there is any work to be done in ethics any longer. instead what is happening in the world is a series of re-translations of various ethical theories to adapt to a materialistically evolving civilization which is moving toward a more utilitarian scheme. by that i mean, a redistribution of property and wealth. formerly… i should say during the last three hundred years… the ‘status-quo’ had made of ethical theory an adaptation that was fitting for the advantages of the ruling/upper classes… and this interpretation was passively accepted by most of the intelligent world. today a grand re-evaluation is occurring involving the basic premises of classical ethical theories. in other words, the same philosophical/ideological foundations that supported the rise of the bourgeois is now being used to rationalize their abolition. a case of history arriving late, so to speak.
during this phasing-out, there will be a tremendous ruckus made by those who’s ‘existential trajectory’ has been situated under the influence of rightist ideology… and there is any number of reasons why a person might identify as a rightest… be it their own convenient economic advantage (at the expense of the working classes), or… they could even be part of the ‘backward’ working classes that has justified its unnecessary struggle through a series of uninformed ideas… these being the result of the hegemonic dominance of the ruling class ideology that infects the western mind. and that is one helluva package, btw. platonism, christianity, darwinism, a cocktail of gobbledygook that has been incorporated into the intellectual coup that seized the development of the western world hundreds of years ago.
anywho, what i’m saying is that we had to go through a few thousand years of philosophical hot-air before we could recognize it for what it was - hot-air - and then re-simplify what was never that complicated to begin with. a system conducive to a better distribution of wealth and a more equal distribution of labor requirement. the irony is, that’s something a ten year could understand… and yet here we had countless philosophers writing day and night only to produce a bunch of unintelligible nonsense in an effort to avoid this conclusion; this is all there is. this is all mankind can do. it gets no better than this. there are those who work… and there are those who do not. historical materialism is that dynamic that has been working to resolve this conflict… or bust. bust; eternal conflict between the productive and parasite economic classes.
(lol… and to think there could be such a thing as a ‘constitution’ or ‘law’ or a ‘code of ethics’ in a world where these two classes are intrinsically at odds with each other, eternal enemies. who’s the dipshit philosopher who thought that was possible?)