back to the beginning: morality

Einstein’s Morality
Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics.

Really, for many, isn’t this possibility the most disturbing aspect of believing that all anyone thinks, feels, says or does is exempt from moral judgment other than as judgments that are no less compelled by the laws of matter.

Yet here we are unable to demonstrate conclusively that this is not the case. Or, rather, I am not able to demonstrate this to myself.

On the other hand, I have to admit that someone that I am totally oblivious regarding has in fact demonstrated that human beings either do or do not have free will. All I can do is to act on what I think is true here and now.

Just like you, right?

Of course my own frame of mind here is all that more convoluted still. Even if I take my leap to autonomy, that autonomy is but the embodiment of dasein and conflicting goods. I am free to react to the behaviors of others, but my reaction appears to be but an existential contraption unable to conclude one way or the other which behaviors are moral or immoral.

Up to and including me typing these words and you reading them? How inexorable are the laws of matter?

Back again to this. The part that makes absolutely no sense to me given my own understanding of determinism. The part where it could never have made sense to me.

How is the part about “focusing” here not in turn merely another inherent, necessary manifestation of what can only be? Einstein “took” only what he was compelled to take. The “wake up call” is, in turn, either compelled or not.

As for the “myriad of factors”, how vague will any of our understandings of them be going back to an understanding of existence itself?

bro. all that fracturing and fragmenting happens because you are over-analyzing everything. leave that silly shit to the philosophers and just pick something that pleases you. and don’t ask ‘why’ or if it’s ‘the right thing to do’. do like me, man. i’m irreproachably absolutely positively indubitably certain that i don’t like capitalists. like i don’t even examine why anymore. that was ten years ago. whether this is a good or bad thing and whether i am compelled by the laws of nature to do this, couldn’t be more irrelevant to me. you gotta follow your nose, biggs. like when you look at the world and recognize that there are stock piles of food going bad while millions of people are starving, or that there are more empty, unused houses then there are homeless people in this country, you know something ain’t right. you don’t need a transcendental critique of pure reason to figure this shit out, homes.

First, of course, this conclusion, in and of itself is, to me, just another manifestation of dasein. You came to it in much the same manner I came to mine: existentially.

Otherwise, one might argue that, actually, using the tools of philosophy or science, one is able to arrive at the one truly rational frame of mind.

But even this conclusion is [to me] just another existential contraption.

And the bottom line [mine] is that in your day to day interactions with others, you are embedded in capitalism up to your eyeballs. Historically, culturally and experientially. It’s everywhere in this country. Sure, you can take your own subjective leap to “irreproachably absolutely positively indubitably [being] certain that i don’t like capitalists”, but that doesn’t make my point go away.

And the other bottom line [mine] is that had your life been very, very different, there’s no saying beyond all doubt that you would not in fact have become a capitalist yourself. And, in turn, in my view, there is no way that you can be absolutely certain in a world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change, that new experiences, new relationships and access to new information and knowledge, won’t propel you to change your mind down the road.

That is until someone actually is able to establish beyond all doubt the most rational manner in one is obligated to think about capitalism.

You either grasp this as I do or you don’t. But how, in not being me, could you? I’m fractured and fragmented in regard to capitalism because, given the points I make in my signature threads, it still seems reasonable to be. Here and now. Just as, when I was a radical Marxist-Leninist – an objectivist – it seemed reasonable to revolt against it.

But the one thing I am definitely not arguing is that my own assessment here [either as an intellectual contraption or taken out into the world of human interactions] reflects the manner in which others are themselves obligated to think about it.

well i wasn’t really presenting a formal ‘conclusion’ because i wasn’t advancing an argument. but i did make a few indicative statements of fact so i’ll let you have this one.

define ‘truly rational frame of mind’. remember that even complete knowledge - say, understanding epistemology in its fullest sense and arriving at an indisputable conclusion about the nature of knowledge - doesn’t get past the naturalistic fallacy and provide any existential guidance for what one ought to do to be rational. philosophy and science may work together to get to the bottom of this, but neither can tell you what you should do. i imagine you don’t just mean by ‘rational’ being able to practice good inductive reasoning. you mean something more along the lines of moral judgement and having/holding values. no amount of epistemology can help us here.

but i wouldn’t be ‘me’ then, but another me. so i couldn’t say ‘i could have been otherwise’, only ‘i might not have been, and something else would have been instead.’ we often make the mistake of assuming what is logically possible can also be actually possible. but in a perfectly determined universe, nothing could be other than how it is. so, we can imagine ‘logically’ an alternate possible course of events which led to me becoming a capitalist, but this couldn’t actually happen in this particular universe. this shit gets complicated though with many-universe theory so let’s not go there. it’s interesting stuff, yes, but i can’t find any use in it. that is to say, if i discovered it were true, i still wouldn’t do anything differently.

yeah no i got it… but i avoid this problem in the first place. as there is no ‘right’ way for events to occur in this universe, there is no ‘better or worse’ way in the grandest of sense. there are different ways, and our inclinations toward wanting what we do are not founded on some ‘rationale’ (for reasons mentioned above). justification… in terms of producing lines of reasoning to defend some final conclusion… cannot ever reach a terminus. this is just an aspect of language itself. at some point the advanced thinker will realize that there is no ‘philosophy of right’ responsible for what has, now, become habit in him, and that his preferences, now, are purely a matter of aesthetics. so not only would i be unable to defend, rationally, my insistence that capitalism must die, but i also don’t rely on doing so to be sure it disgusts me. neat, eh? like i said; it’s my nose, man. i can sense its putridity and recoil at the smell of it. don’t ax me how i know because i’m no philosopher, but i know, bro. i know.

Again, my point here revolves around the assumption that, given this exchange itself, you and I have some measure of autonomy in defining anything at all. Also, that in whatever conclusion we arrive at in regard to the correct definition, that has to be measured against the correct definition given the complete understanding of existence itself.

Then the part where we exclude sim worlds, dream worlds, matrix reality etc.

That aside, I make a distinction between the either/or world and the is/ought world. The world of mathematics, science, engineering, geology, biology, chemistry, physics etc., seem predicated on that which, from the perspective of the human species, seems as close as we have gotten so far to a “truly rational frame of mind”.

In other words…

Yes, that is basically the gist of the arguments I make in my signature threads. Only I don’t – can’t? – exclude my own argument from my own argument. In many respects it is no less an existential contraption rooted in dasein.

Here, in my view, this sort of assessment needs to be brought out into the world of actual conflicting human behaviors. Such that the points raised are more or less intertwined in a description of any particular ongoing behaviors. That way we see how far the words can go or can’t go when it comes to actually resolving the conflict. My point is that once you reach the part where “I” is as fractured and fragmented as mine is, there is no resolution. There are only leaps of faiths to particular political prejudices precariously embodied by “I” in world awash in contingency, chance and change.

You are able to “avoid this problem” by [seemingly] coming to a different set of assumptions regarding “I” here. Also, I never exclude the possibility that there are right and wrong ways to behave. Either given the existence of God or philosophically/scientifically actual deontological obligations.

All I can point out is that “here and now”, as an infinitesimally tiny speck of existence in the staggering vastness of “all there is”, “I” don’t believe that there are.

Einstein’s Morality
Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics.

Here we go again, he thought. He being me of course. Is this what folks like peacegirl are aiming to communicate to me? My point then being that we distinguish them only as we were ever able to distinguish them. Given that the human brain is just another necessary component of the laws of nature.

Is anyone at all actually foolish enough to believe in “absolute free will”? This would seem to entail one comprising the only entity in the universe. You and nothing else that could possibly impact on what you think, feel, say and do. On the other hand, in a wholly determined universe as some [compelled or not] posit it, feeling a loss of freedom is just another inherent manifestation of the psychological illusion of freedom.

As though “I” over time and the immediate “I” are somehow two different entities in a universe where “I” is of, by and for nature inside and out. From the cradle to the grave. And then all the way back to star stuff.

An Amoral Manifesto
A special extended column from our (erstwhile) Moral Moments columnist Joel Marks.

Of course we all know that “for all practical purposes” no human community has ever existed in which there were no “rules of behavior”. Behaviors that are either prescribed/rewarded or proscribed/punished.

It merely revolves around one or another rendition and combination of might makes right, right makes might, or moderation, negotiation and compromise. The fact that, historically, philosophy has come into existence hasn’t made that part go away. Philosophers have merely given us new ways to think about it.

After all, unless you choose to abandon all contact with others and live entirely on your own, there are always going to be situations in which, in pursuing your wants and your needs, conflicts will occur.

Instead, the question for both philosophers and non-philosophers alike revolves more around the extent to which right and wrong behavior can be grounded in a font such that the community can turn to it when these conflicts do occur.

Either a religious or a secular font.

Consequently, to propose an amoral manifesto is not unlike proposing any one of the hundreds of moral manifestos that are out there. It still has to be embedded in particular contexts understood by different people in different ways.

Einstein’s Morality
Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics.

This would seem to be an inherently tricky balance. No one is more modest than I am in regard to my own moral values. I believe what I do only because I have convinced myself that what I do believe is the embodiment of dasein out in a particular world understood [here and now] in a particular way. Beyond that my confidence collapses. And yet clearly in any given human community what could be more important than that which is established as behaviors to be rewarded and behaviors to be punished.

It’s a predicament that I argue is beyond the reach of philosophers and their tools. Or, rather, that none have convinced me of their own prescriptions and proscriptions.

Exactly. How could the is/ought world of one particular species of life on one particular planet not be subsumed necessarily in the “deep mysteries of the universe”? Making moral and political objectivism [to me] all the more problematic. Where does human “reason” fit into the explanation of/for the universe itself?

There’s that word again: intuition. And what is it really but something we invented to “encompass” all of the many aspects of what it means to be human. There’s the biological I, the thinking I, the feeling I, the psychological I, the ethnic I, the social I, the political I, the economic I. All imploded down to some “visceral” sense of what it means to embody a “self”.

And, to date, who hasn’t failed to pin it down with respect to reacting to a particular context in which human behaviors come into conflict over ethical values? Other than [of course] the objectivists. Hundreds and hundreds of them all clamoring to embrace their own hopelessly contradictory rendition of “one of us.”

[size=85]Ah, Dasein: the phenomenological closure of Being to mankind, by which Heidegger positioned his fundamental critique of Western thought in terms of a bifurcation of truth (to cite my favored secondary literature on the subject, from the pen of Balthasar) into the ontological a la. Thomistic metaphysics/the Absolute of German Transcendental Idealism and the ontic,- the later constituting man’s existentia or lived-reality, that is, the basic fact of Existence. For Heidegger, the Western tradition had, from its inception, subsumed the ontic to the ontological: that is destruktion; that is the Heideggerian critique. However, the brilliant answer arrived at by Heidegger to this self-manufactured problematics and monumentally inflated straw-man extended to the entire Life of the Mind, at least on the part of the West, was to conduct a reverse operation in subsuming the ontological and all hope of abstract ontology to the ontic, thereby creating a “phenomenological closure to Being” that, besides framing the consciousness of man in terms of a ‘horizon of meaning’ or orientation- a “thrown-ness” into Being, prevented any transcendental Absolute from being used as the basis of an ethos and gave us an equally impermeable and yet vague philosophic Angst, into which all hope of a real ethos (as opposed to the merely cursory ethos of Heidegger’s mysticism or poetics of the Good) and moral project was swallowed up. You must forgive me for not going along with any of that.

" Because out in the world we live in there can be no such thing as true “gender equality” if we forced women to give birth against their wishes."

You forgot one small detail in your line of thinking. That being the fact that the goal of our legal system (the European quasi-states differ in this respect, to be sure) is not gender equality, Iambiguous. We do not respect the group- any group, as the primary ethical or legal category, but that of the individual. Granting women the right to vote for example was more about recognizing the individuality of women and deepening the concept of the Individual in general than catering to any nebulous group-identity. It is the natural rights of individuals that we codify in law, since only an individual can take responsibility for their actions and exercise agency, whereas it would be unjust to demand that an individual take responsibility for the deeds or misdeeds of a group they are part of, or to demand that a group must take responsibility for the actions of one of its members, be the group in question gender, race, class, etc. Preserving the sphere of natural rights at the level of the Individual is the only way to ensure the long-term stability of a free society. The moment you begin introducing legislation that caters to the interests of the group over and at the expense of individuals, is the moment you introduce potentially irreparable damage to the underlying moral and political fabric: damage that will breed civil unrest eventually,- just as our populace is now experiencing in the recent catastrophic fracturing of the demos into an endless contest of identity politics, after having been leveled in continuous misjudgments of exactly this nature. [/size]

With all this in mind, your defense of the woman’s “right” to kill her own child due to a need to establish gender equality really just amounts to forcing the unborn child to take responsibility for his mother’s impregnation- by dying, which is illogical and therefor unjust.

Don’t do it, Biggs. Just… let it go, man. Let it go.

Let it go? Well I for one, am just getting started; so:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBo_pLrwAX0[/youtube]

[size=85]Ah, Dasein: the phenomenological closure of Being to mankind, by which Heidegger positioned his fundamental critique of Western thought in terms of a bifurcation of truth (to cite my favored secondary literature on the subject, from the pen of Balthasar) into the ontological a la. Thomistic metaphysics/the Absolute of German Transcendental Idealism and the ontic,- the later constituting man’s existentia or lived-reality, that is, the basic fact of Existence. For Heidegger, the Western tradition had, from its inception, subsumed the ontic to the ontological: that is destruktion; that is the Heideggerian critique. However, the brilliant answer arrived at by Heidegger to this self-manufactured problematics and monumentally inflated straw-man extended to the entire Life of the Mind, at least on the part of the West, was to conduct a reverse operation in subsuming the ontological and all hope of abstract ontology to the ontic, thereby creating a “phenomenological closure to Being” that, besides framing the consciousness of man in terms of a ‘horizon of meaning’ or orientation- a “thrown-ness” into Being, prevented any transcendental Absolute from being used as the basis of an ethos and gave us an equally impermeable and yet vague philosophic Angst, into which all hope of a real ethos (as opposed to the merely cursory ethos of Heidegger’s mysticism or poetics of the Good) and moral project was swallowed up. You must forgive me for not going along with any of that.

" Because out in the world we live in there can be no such thing as true “gender equality” if we forced women to give birth against their wishes."

You forgot one small detail in your line of thinking. That being the fact that the goal of our legal system (the European quasi-states differ in this respect, to be sure) is not gender equality, Iambiguous. We do not respect the group- any group, as the primary ethical or legal category, but that of the individual. Granting women the right to vote for example was more about recognizing the individuality of women and deepening the concept of the Individual in general than catering to any nebulous group-identity. It is the natural rights of individuals that we codify in law, since only an individual can take responsibility for their actions and exercise agency, whereas it would be unjust to demand that an individual take responsibility for the deeds or misdeeds of a group they are part of, or to demand that a group must take responsibility for the actions of one of its members, be the group in question gender, race, class, etc. Preserving the sphere of natural rights at the level of the Individual is the only way to ensure the long-term stability of a free society. The moment you begin introducing legislation that caters to the interests of the group over and at the expense of individuals, is the moment you introduce potentially irreparable damage to the underlying moral and political fabric: damage that will breed civil unrest eventually,- just as our populace is now experiencing in the recent catastrophic fracturing of the demos into an endless contest of identity politics, after having been leveled in continuous misjudgments of exactly this nature. [/size]

With all this in mind, your defense of the woman’s “right” to kill her own child due to a need to establish gender equality really just amounts to forcing the unborn child to take responsibility for his mother’s impregnation- by dying, which is illogical and therefor unjust.

“Abortion then is a human tragedy in my view precisely because, like so many other moral conflagrations, it necessarily involves a conflict of legitimate rights.”

Our rights reflect what the Socratic-Platonic thesis speaks of as the “Unity of Intelligibles”, just as God’s virtues are all perfectly harmonious and interchangeable, in keeping with Ramon Llull’s ars magna. In the terminology of symbolic logic, such metaphysical abstracts are commutative in their functionality. Truth is the aesthetic unity of the Intelligible; Beauty is the Intelligible unity of Truth. That is not meant to be mrely a poetic line, and I will explain exactly what that means. It means that ours rights cannot contradict one another, just as our Ideas cannot: as argumentation proceeds only after our having defined a set of axioms and definitions, so the sole issue for whose solution the entirety of our politikeia was conceived arises in the fact that, with as careful a geometry as they may have practiced, the branches of our Government were not successfully invested by our Founders with that same level of harmony as is invested to the soul, nor could they be: a harmony grounded, as is the moral project of the West, on a metaphysical capacity which humans alone, out of the total stock of nature, possess. It saddens me to read things like this, which you quote: "Christianity attempted to recuperate the suffering of history by projecting a divine plan that assigns it a reason in the here and now and a recompense later … " Really, that’s what you got out of the Abrahamic texts?

We can take physical reality and isolate elements within it based on whatever arbitrary parameters we wish (a process I call heuresis) in order to extract from it: patterns. There is a potentially infinite number of these patterns, and more to the point: we can then take a few of those patterns and repeat the process- abstracting data from this new set of elements on a secondary level of analysis, using an entirely different set of parameters. And then we can repeat this process again, in this way generating still more wide-ranging and broader patterns, and by a continuous derivation of the ‘alien third’ against whose Universe the stammered dyad of our sequential logic is abrupted, that is,- by means of a new set of parameters for further levels of reflection, we reach the concept of the “ontos” (meant to suggest the errant bifurcation of the ontic and ontological) as an application of Pierce’s triadic universe of symbolic logic and the Bataillean auton of transcendental reflection to what I call the process of Reification, that is,- the Negative as preserved in the face of the leveling synthesis of Hegelian totalization: the philosophical Negativity involved in the Platonic vocal plurality or aporia of Truth. That aporia, that silence,- that Negation firmly beyond all capitulation, deliverance, or subsumption, represents a kind of metaphysical capacity for transcendental self-reflection and recursive scaling, constitutive of the homoficans or daemon through which anthropos or the human-being is grounded in that which is not human, the poesis constitutive of his vital element or Becoming and ultimately, that power through which the reshaping of Nature in the image of God is accomplished,- the animating principle of our moral instinct: ethos; ethos anthropos daemon, following Heraclitus. The idea at the center of the Republic, as well as Plato more broadly considered, ie. the anabasis or act of ascending to reunite with our soul,- the doctrine of anamnesis and the escape from the Cave of Shadows toward Gnosis,- to become one of the bearers of light,- is a mythic narrative meant to provide a model for organizing these different levels of recursive, embedded abstraction, approaching their transcendental object ad infinitum like the infinite series of PI- for it is a difficult thing to manage and to get through them, endless as they are. This ascent is an ascent toward the Good. Toward true selfhood, and toward Beauty,- things which, to go back to the notion of intelligible unity, are at this height of Thought all one and the same thing.

" The day before yesterday the Founding Fathers kept black slaves."

And you keep brown ones, to make your iphone and clothes and food. But that is irrelevant. I would just ask if the writer have preferred Jefferson to free all his slaves, shove them out the door and wait for all the elderly ones to starve to death after being unable to find any work, or the young to starve as well, after failing to secure work due to a lack of any technical skills? Old slaves, or those without any skills, cannot find work: therefor they cannot eat, therefor starve. If you are going to free slaves, then you need more than revolutionary optimism, you actually need a well thought out plan and some kind of peremptory social infrastructure to aid in easing the mass transition of a large number of them into free society. No, better still: I would ask the writer what she would do if she was Jefferson at the time? How would she have gone about freeing the slaves without inadvertently causing them as much suffering due to political negligence as they had experienced due simply to the malevolence of other men.

Un-oh, another Serious Philosopher!

In other words, with me, you’re off to a bad start.

From my frame of mind [and admittedly that’s all it is] an intellectual contraption on steroids! A gigantic general description that just begs for a particular context in which to assess the extent to which the definition you give to these words placed in this order is what all reasonable people are expected to be in sync with.

When is the last time a man was confronted with an unwanted pregnancy? A pregnancy that could play havoc with his life? A job or a promotion on the line, turmoil in family, censure from pro-life friends or colleagues, important plans that need to be shelved.

You’re talking about the community or the nation as a whole. I’m talking about an actual individual who becomes pregnant and does not want to be. Perhaps because of a defective contraception, perhaps as a result of rape or incest. All human interaction involves trade offs between “I” and “we”. And, in regard to abortion, there are clearly conflicting moral narratives and legal agendas all up and down the political spectrum. Why should everyone accept your own political prejudices as the optimal or the only rational point of view? What are you, the last of the philosopher-kings?

Again, a series of assumptions embedded largely in a world of words that make no reference to any specific sets of circumstances in which, once again, we are confronted with arguments passionately embraced by those from the extreme left all the way to the extreme right. And all points in between.

Consider: abortion.procon.org/

My point being that, given different sets of assumptions, both sides are able to make reasonable arguments in support of either the “natural right” of the baby to live or the “political right” of women to choose.

And then the argument I make in regard to individual value judgments here being embedded existentially in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein. In particular, the points I raise on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

My defense is merely the embodiment of my own political prejudices [here and now] derived from the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529

I do not argue that those who are opposed to abortion have a less reasonable point of view. Instead, “I” construe my self here as fractured and fragmented, tugged ambivalently in both directions; as, for all practical purposes, down in a “hole”.

This one:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

I’m sorry my friend but he – she? – needs to be taught a lesson.

Either that or I do.

“When is the last time a man was confronted with an unwanted pregnancy? A pregnancy that could play havoc with his life?”

And when was the last time a woman was confronted with being that unwanted pregnancy, somehow survives her own mother’s attempt to murder her, and then finally questions her about it in adulthood?

Besides, the funny thing is, men are confronted with unwanted pregnancies that can play havoc with their life all the time, it is just that we have no say in the conversation about letting that pregnancy continue or not, despite it carrying half our DNA.

" Un-oh, another Serious Philosopher! In other words, with me, you’re off to a bad start."

No; nobody hates philosophers more than I do. The existence of another challenges my bid for absorbing the mortis imago, in Ovidian language, into the image of my own morto imaginis and Self-hood; for silencing death, world, and god, in the image of my own EIDEIA.

“Again, a series of assumptions embedded largely in a world of words that make no reference to any specific sets of circumstances in which, once again, we are confronted with arguments passionately embraced by those from the extreme left all the way to the extreme right. And all points in between.”

Just as I explained in the paragraph about heuresis: yes. Well first of all, they aren’t assumptions they’re axioms and definitions: self-evident truths, as our spiritual Fathers would say, assuming you belong, too, to the US; and second, the whole point is to develop a theoretical framework without any reference to any one particular circumstance. Through the abstract moral principle, heightened and abstracted from all particularity: we judge the particular, in such a way as to draw out latent associations between events that would otherwise remain occulted, forever hidden from our sight. This is the point of philosophy, that is,- to conceive extreme cases, or abstract principles, that would allow us to test and find previously inaccessible patterns between apparently unrelated things in the world of our experience. Hence, to something else you said,

“A gigantic general description that just begs for a particular context in which to assess the extent to which the definition you give to these words placed in this order is what all reasonable people are expected to be in sync with.”

I would add that: I do not attempt to keep people in sync with it; just the opposite. I want to disconcert them by using these higher-level abstractions to create absurd, or what would be absurd scenarios at the level of the concrete, which would help to induce a change in perspective for a person, and facilitate their questioning various particulars they thought they knew quite well. My point is to provide a “new set of parameters” to borrow my own expression from the post, through which to force latent associations at the level of the disparate particular into consciousness. For at the highest level of abstraction, on which the famed Socratic equation of Virtue=Beauty=Truth is derived, there are no latent associations, and all is bound up equally by the depths, in which “everything is law”, to cite the poet of the Duino Elegies, Rilke.

“You’re talking about the community or the nation as a whole.”

No, I am talking about the abstract ethical and legal category of the Individual and the nation as a whole, whose members can all be equally conformed to that abstract category.

“I’m talking about an actual individual who becomes pregnant and does not want to be. Perhaps because of a defective contraception, perhaps as a result of rape or incest.”

We can’t legitimize murder for the sake of such extenuating factors; I don’t support the death penalty either. I spoke of the significance of responsibility as applied to that abstract category of the individual, which- although all interaction is an interplay of I and We, is nonetheless granted legal and moral primacy in our Constitution. If the woman cannot take responsibility for the pregnancy out of her own volition in becoming pregnant due to a rape, she still has the potential to accept responsibility that, for whatever reason: a life now depends on her. That trumps any impulse to demand that the fetus takes responsibility for having been so conceived.

Bro wtf. That’s exactly why I hate philosophers too! Every time I’m fixin to absorb my mortis imago, some fucking philosopher gets right in the way.

The mortis imago, [the image of Death] through which the whole veil of Nature is permeated and torn: not your. That the expression is declined in such a way as to accept either a subjective or objective clause, is a bit of a grammatical clue as to it actually being Ovid’s take on the equally noteworthy expression from out of the Aeneid,- the Virgilian ‘lacrimae rerum’, which so many have attempted to translate but none have truly managed. In Latin, the subjective-objective case can both be implied simultaneously through the genitive, but in English either one or the other must be explicitly granted. Aeneas was contemplating the great heroes of Troy while gazing upon a mural at the temple of Juno, the full recitation being: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

Yeah I knew that. I was just testin you. Makin sure you knew your shit.

Yup. Not only are we absolutely certain this guy Aeneas existed, but we also know for certain where he was on the night of June 2nd, what mural he was looking at, and exactly what he was thinking.

Yeah man I was talking about the poem. The Aeneid. Written by Virgil… This guy named Aeneas is pretty important in it. He’s the son of the goddess Aphrodite, I don’t think the Aeneid is meant to be a historically accurate representation of anything. And the thing I just said, like. That’s from said poem… ?